There’s loads of people who prefer iPhone and would sideload if allowed but it’s not a deal-breaker. I prefer iOS and Apple hardware but refuse to buy one without sideloading.

My S24 Ultra is arriving tomorrow, but I’ll likely be buying the iPhone 16 if it comes with sideloading.

So Apple is gaining a customer, I’ve been eyeing the MacBooks too ever since the M1 came out so might end up pulling the trigger on one of those as well.

It’s definitely an acquired taste, I assume that if you get hooked on it, you start to associate the taste with getting stimulated which makes it seem pleasant.

Having said that, I don’t drink coffee (tastes awful unless it’s drowned in milk and sugar at which point what’s the point), but the smell is heavenly, and I like coffee flavour in cakes/desserts.

And I say this having tasted some of the best espresso known to man - my closest friend is obsessed and has equipment worth thousands, and we’ve sampled great coffee places including in Italy.

So then… continue using exclusively Apple’s store then?

If you consider Apple to be the gold standard for security, you have just keep going as you are.

I don’t see how giving other people the freedom to choose infringes on your security.

Remember these are people who know what it’s like to go through apartheid and ethnic cleansing.

South Africa today is largely governed by the people who fought and won against apartheid, so it’s understandable that they feel a level of solidarity with the people of Palestine.

(in this context I’m choosing to gloss over the real and present issues with the ANC, because they are not relevant to Israel’s genocide)

Probably to continue getting ‘Gulf Region’-rich off the back of the oil it found in an area that is internationally recognised as their territory.

Even Venezuela recognised it as part of Guyana’s EEZ until very recently.

After Maduro mismanaged one of the most resource rich countries into basically a failed state, he’s now trying to cling to power the tried and true way: stoking a pointless war with its neighbour.

Best case he’s trying to rally support for a 2025 election, or use the threat of as an excuse to say the election. Worst case he’s gonna do a Putin and actually start a war. Not a bad time for it either, whilst the world is already distracted with Ukraine and and Gaza.

Here’s a decent video summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQ7fTSirNDs

I don’t know, your #2 reason doesn’t seem to stand up to reality.

I don’t know where you are, but where I am (UK) you can go on any high street (in most towns there will be an area where most shops are, think strip mall in the US) and you will find at least a couple shops that fix and sell electronics - primarily smartphones, but also vacuum cleaners, TVs, computers, games consoles.

Pretty much all of them are locally-run and are, I assume, profitable in spite of every electronics manufacturer trying to run them out of business.

I say I assume because they wouldn’t be everywhere if they weren’t.

I’ve had phones fixed by them, they offer warranties, reasonable prices, only had an issue once and it was put right after a tiny bit of back and forth.

I think by “we can’t afford it” you mean “capitalism hasn’t yet found a way to centralise the profits and run the small business owners out of business”.

2&3 completely agree

On 1 though, I agree IF every other game embraced the modding community as much as Bathesda games do. GTA is the only other game I heavily mod, and in comparison it’s such a pain in the ass, the game engine is not designed to support it so you get weird bugs, just overall a worst experience.

So I think it’s fair to rate the base game highly for its support of mods. They’ve decided that providing a great experience for mods is a high priority for them. Maybe they can make the base game better if they don’t have to make it compatible with whatever modders want to throw at it.

Oh you mean debatable because it’s one of the cleanest, cheapest, and safest sources of electricity we have?

Which allows France a degree of energy independence which has helped it not suffer the same amount of pain other countries have now that they’re having to kick the cheap Russian gas addiction?

And through huge cross-border interconnects it allows France to sell electricity to neighbouring countries at a huge profit?

Nuclear is not always the answer, but as France has shown, as long as you invest in reliable infrastructure and don’t put it in earthquake/tsunami-prone areas, it can be a huge positive for your country.

And you don’t have to rely on antagonistic petrostates for to power your homes with gas, or on strip-mining huge swathes of land by equally-antagonistic China for rare-earth metals for your wind turbines/solar panels/battery storage.

I assume that you’re talking about the Dacia Spring which got 1 star (though the Renault Zoe got 0 stars recently and a few others did too in the past).

So whilst you’re not wrong that these cars currently hold the lowest ratings of cars tested with the new post-2020 procedure, I’m sure a lot of older cars would fare far worse.

And it’s fundamentally flawed to subject a tiny 970kg EV city car to the same tests as a 2-3 ton towering SUV. Besides the vastly different use cases, bigger and heavier vehicles will have an inherent advantage in most of the tests - hint none of them are adjusted for the weight of the vehicle.

I’m not saying this is somehow wrong, they’re simulating crashing into an average car or a stationary immovable object, just we’re automatically discounting small vehicles which have a genuinely valid reason to exist.

The new NCAP ratings only makes sense if we’re saying affordable, small, light cars don’t need to exist. Like everything automotive nowadays, it’s designed to gently nudge us towards big lumbering swollen hatchbacks as the holy grail of the car industry.

Ah I see, now that you’ve been proven wrong you’re pretending you asked a different question.

You admit that Tesla advertises a “Full Self-Driving Capability” feature, which is basically what the person you said “source or stfu” to.

Whether or not the feature was used in this instance is not what we’re discussing here.

We can have this discussion if you’re feeling like you’re up for it in good-faith, I think both are true that people are overall terrible at the activity of driving so more driver aids are overall better, but also current driver aids are very limited and drivers are not necessarily great at understanding and working within those limits.

They’re not the only ones, but Tesla is really the worst offender at overstating their cars’ capabilities and setting people up for failure - like in this case.

Where I live you can right now go to Tesla’s website and buy a car with “Full Self-Driving Capability” with a small print that includes the disclaimer that it doesn’t make the vehicle autonomous, for whatever that’s worth…

It’s mad!

I bought a laptop, from Amazon, something I do at most every 2-3 years.

For months since Amazon has been spamming me with laptop offers. I don’t see what the best case scenario here is, I return the one I bought and get a new one?

Holy cow, is that a thing?!

Some stuff in the US is pretty cool and money is nice and all, but then I have friends in senior positions within big tech who have only 12 days of paid time off which is real shitty.

At least they can work remotely for a few days so they get a couple of decent holidays, but that just means they can never fully disconnect.

And they can just use the healthcare system here when they’re back, which is nice for them but I’m sure not everyone has that luxury.

You mean that every American citizen is automatically issued a photocard ID free of charge after they reach a certain age?

Because that’s how it works in most of Europe for example. Some countries mandate that you must carry it at all times in case the police requires you to identify yourself. You use this card to vote, and you can also travel freely within the EU with it (loads of people don’t even own a passport for this reason).

Having followed SpaceX for a very long time, I think that Elon kinda figured early on how to get engineers excited for a lofty goal and give them sufficient room to fail and innovate, whilst squeezing every drop of work out of them.

So he was a good hype man for things he broadly understood and he was willing to put loads of money into making it successful.

But following a long tradition of people who are actually excellent in a narrow field, he convinced himself that he can translate this into imposing weird and frankly really stupid philosophy onto the world. The Bloombergs and the Carsons of the world have already failed at this, happily it looks like he will too. Not that he’ll learn anything from it, just hope he goes away and stops trying.