Lol. There’s always someone who thinks they’re omniscient. Truly amazing that you’ve filled up at every single gas station in CA.

Edit: There are over 13,000 stations in California and you’ve been to each and every one. Please tell us more.

Worse in California.

I’ve been to multiple stations that have speakers on the pump and start blaring ads as soon as a credit card is inserted. Most of them have had “Mute” buttons on the pump, but the last one I went to did not and there was no way to silence the screaming advertisement. Will never go back.

Getting places using a paper map.

In keeping with Musk’s Swasticar theme, the new Model S will be the called the SS.

Good faith is meaningless when dealing with clear, repeated violations. By this point the courts are well aware of the abuses going on and these Trump goons are being held to a much lower standard than anyone else. “Good faith” has become nothing but a delay tactic that lets these assholes get away with violence, illegal deportations and terror for months without consequences. If we had a functional judicial system, rulings would rarely be ignored because of there would be immediate and severe consequences to those doing so no matter who those people were.

Can you imagine how differently this would play out if it were you or I, or even a private security firm ignoring clear court orders? We’d be slapped with fines and jail time almost immediately instead of being handled with kit gloves.

Finally judicial consequences that will stop ICE from ignoring court orders! U.S. District Judge Patrick Schiltz will give Todd Lyons a very stern look and may even scold him!

U.S. courts have become a bad joke. Administration officials will start obeying the law only after one of them spends a few weeks in jail after ignoring court orders. With our court system and cowardly judges they’ll never start obeying the law.

You got a year? Ubuntu must be improving! I’d typically get 2-4 months and then have to spend hours troubleshooting to get something working again. I can’t remember the last time that happened to one of my Mint installations.

Bought a Pixel 10. After the last few days I’d only give it a C- review. Google uses their customers as beta testers and leaves all kinds of ridiculous bugs for their customers to deal with. The hardware is nice overall, but Android 16 needs lots of work. This is probably the reason so many Google employees refuse to use Android and buy Iphones.

The bugs Google has knowingly released include a broken volume control that requires the screen to be unlocked and the application be open for some applications, sleep schedules not working reliably, “helpful” nags ignoring the sleep schedule and waking me up in the middle of the night. Last night it was their “Find Hub” (renamed from “Find my Device” for some reason) waking me at 1:30AM to let me know I should set it up. A week ago it was my phone warning me at 3AM that Location was turned off and Accident Detection would not work. There have been more and right now I’m wishing I bought an Iphone. Google doesn’t deserve our business.

I bought a OP 9Pro just before Oppo decimated the company. They moved from Oxygen OS to a poorly camouflaged version of Oppo Color OS and stripped out some of the features that made Oneplus what it was. Oppo also almost completely stopped fixing bugs, even some really serious ones that had been long documented. I recently bought a new phone and didn’t even consider Oneplus Oppo.

It seems to me that the only reason Oppo would do this is to preserve the revenue they get from selling customer data that should remain private. Otherwise why would Oppo care what OS people run on their hardware?

Transferring funds to an account in another country is no longer difficult. With pension funds direct deposited to a U.S. bank, a wire transfer can be initiated from most any PC in the world. Many banks even allow automatic, scheduled transfers. This is something I do fairly often (without a pension being involved) and isn’t hard at all.

Your SS and and pension aren’t tied to your physical location. They will continue to be paid no matter where you live.

You aren’t alone having stability problems with Ubuntu. As much as I like the OS, my Ubuntu installs always broke and required troubleshooting at some point. Right now I only have Ubuntu installed on a bootable USB ssd that I use for backups and other disk operations, but even on that the desktop crashes regularly.

I eventually got tired exploring different distos and switched back to Mint. It’s been running with regular updates and upgrades on my desktop PC for 5 years and 3 on my laptop. I’ve had very few problems. Debian has been just as stable on my server.

I’m no security expert and my biggest concern with self-hosting is making a configuration error in the OS or some app, or missing a critical update that allows someone access to my personal data. In order to reduce the attack surface and management requirements my network can only be accessed through Wireguard. The random open WG ports do not respond to unauthenticated packets, so someone would have to have access to my configurations to be able to get past my firewall, at least in the absence of some yet unknown vulnerability. Of course that won’t prevent mistakes being made on PCs (especially Windows) but it’s one less thing to worry about.

Wireguard clients on our PCs and phones make connecting and accessing media and files a breeze. There are no third parties involved so enshittification by some company’s security breach or sudden monthly fee isn’t going to happen.

I have a Bosgame mini-PC that is completely inaudible unless you get close to it. Power draw is <15 watts under light load meaning that even with the high electricity rates where I live it costs less than $3.50 a month to operate. I’ve avoided hard drives because I don’t want to listen to them whine, so no comment there. Two simultaneous 1080p Jellyfin streams increase CPU utilization by less than a percent and it still is under 5% with a couple of other Docker containers running.

Good luck setting everything up to your liking.

The Amazon CEO is terrified of angering the Toddler-in-Chief. Tariffs have already drastically raised prices for Americans. Here’s an Amazon example - this tool is 55% more expensive in the US than in Canada. Tariffs are 47.5% so apparently there’s an an additional fee tacked on, perhaps a tariff handling fee?

Surprise! Trump’s tariffs and more are being paid only by Americans. And we have to pay sales taxes on the Trump tariffs taxes.

Each time I’ve lost someone the intensity of the dreams and grief began to taper off at around the 6 month mark. Things got better after that.

So sorry you lost your mom.

Let’s give credit where credit is due - This is what the GOP wants. They have complete ownership of ICE’s terrorist activities and applaud what is being done.

Republicans could reign this in in a couple of days if ICE didn’t have their blessing. The same is true if our corporate/billionaire media began referring to what’s happening as GOP, rather than ICE activity.

The Nazis used IBM, the GOP uses Palantir.

FIFY: Jeff Bezos said the quiet part out loud - hopes that you’ll give up you won’t be able to afford a PC and will be forced to rent one from the cloud

Bezos would sell oxygen subscriptions if he could.

An older friend of mine had early onset Alzheimer’s. Her sister repeatedly asked her for loans knowing full well my friend couldn’t remember giving her that money after a few days. The sister drained my friend’s retirement account of $110k before we got involved and put a stop to it, and she left my friend with a huge IRS tax bill.

Other friends quickly learned that involving their families in their lives was a very bad idea because there was no situation they couldn’t make worse. They grew up without any family support at all despite having living parents and siblings. Figuring everything out by themselves definitely made their lives much harder.

By contrast some of my neighbors and other friends have wonderful families. They see their family members constantly and really enjoy the time they spend together. Best of all they do everything they can to support each other and it makes all of their lives better.

You’re right, it’s like winning the lottery.

I posted about a long known Microsoft practice with a link to one of dozens of 3rd party articles about that practice. You objected to the very idea Microsoft would do something like this, and without doing the slightest bit of research (or apparently even clicking the link) responded, “Now it’s just Microsoft bad! Trust me bro!”

You fucking “cool it with the attitude.”

BTW - I’d have no problem providing links for something difficult to research, but this isn’t much more difficult than asking Google the time. You are evidentially capable of typing, so “for the love of all that is holy” open a new tab and ask Google yourself.