> - Rents would go down because deportation of illegals will reduce demand
This was indeed extremely naive. There are not enough people in the US illegally to be a significant factor in housing demand. I'd suggest no longer getting information from whatever source lead you to believe this.
> I wonder if there isn't a market for budget Androids in this range.
I think there is: https://smallandroidphone.com/ This was started up by the people behind Pebble (including its re-launch this year). I actually emailed them a while back asking for a status update. They told me there are literally no high quality screens of an appropriate size available to OEMs. They would have to design & spin up their own display hardware, which is where things change from "expensive" to "infeasible." If there was an existing, high quality 4.5~5" screen, I think it'd be an easy slam dunk. But there apparently is not...
Too bad. I just hold out hope Apple will try the Mini again before my 13 dies.
> This happens all the time cut a $1 here and it costs $4 over there
The thing that makes these policies work, of course, is the $1 is cut from a billionaire's taxes, and the $4 is paid by the rest of us. Voters seem to like this policy, for reasons that are beyond me.
"Austerity" lays the political groundwork for tax cuts for the rich. Austerity never affects military or police budgets though, we're happy to increase the debt to finance those.
> Tried to browse a while with NoScript addon. But barely any page loads, so you need to whitelist almost every page you visit, which defeats the purpose.
Nah, this is just straight up false. Many pages work fine with NoScript blocking all scripts. For those that don't, you usually only have to allowlist the root domain, but you can still leave the other 32 domains they are importing blocked. It's actually surprisingly common for blocking JS to result in a better experience than leaving it enabled (eg no popups, no videos, getting rid of fade-ins and other stupid animations).
I won't argue if you think that is too much work, and I definitely wouldn't recommend it for a non-technical user, but it's not nearly as bad as you described.
I wasn't clear, but this is about my experience. Maybe you are in a different bubble. But I'm not able to book a hotel, browse GitHub, file my taxes, make a bank transfer or even look up the menu of a restaurant.
The only exceptions for me are HN and a handful of news websites.
I know, but I think a corporation that controls my phone, email, searches, travel, purchases, photo gallery and a few other things could manage a more educated guess.
> Why should well behaving people be punished for the actions of those who aren't?
I don't think it's a punishment so much as a public health measure. Like restricting who can buy tobacco and alcohol and where they can be consumed, or car pollution regulations.
If that's how low your bar is for where government should interfere with people's daily lives under the guise of public health, we might as well also ask for restrictions on how much food people are allowed to buy, and mandatory daily exercise.
Yeah, definitely agree there's a ton of room for disagreement on the topic.
Where I'm coming from is, I think social media is one of, if not the top most, destructive forces in society today. It provides a huge megaphone for people who benefit from spreading misinformation and actively encourages conspiratorial thinking. The attention- and ad-based business model rewards the worst kind of communication, and we can see how quickly it has been abused to destroy our society. Being one of the worst inventions in human history is not a "low bar."
I don't know what the fix is, but I know that the current situation is very much not working. I'd like it if we tried some kind of regulation to reign in this poison we are all collectively consuming. Again, something similar to how we regulate other harmful substances like alcohol and tobacco. We don't need to outright ban it, but we need to do something.
I agree with your intention, I'm just not a fan of arbitrary measures like a one-day ban.
I'd rather see targeted actions, say, bans or severe restrictions on recommendation systems/algorithmic feeds. Limit how far they're allowed to reach from your personal network of follows, limit the percentage of posts that can be algorithmicly driven, controls on the balance of popular posts vs relevant posts, ban infinite scrolling feeds, limit how strongly sites may neuter their search systems, maybe require warnings after certain levels of continuous usage.
If the goal is to directly and forcibly limit usage, a "credit" system would be preferable, you have some weekly time allocation for large-scale social media usage (forums were technically social media, but were far healthier than platforms like reddit, facebook, X), and you can use that allocation however you want. Your allocation can grow kr shrink based on your specific circumstances (career, history of healthy use of social media, social circumstances like living far from family, medical circumstances).
Curious to hear more about this. I don't mind thickness so much. How small are they? If I can get a decent phone with a <= 5" screen, I'd be ecstatic.
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