They don’t need to. The US is doing all the work for them.

While the US was bombing school children, one one of the first things Iran did was strike US radar and early-warning systems. Now they have hit at the US’ equipment for facilitating long-range bombing and aerial supply movement. These were highly strategic and intelligent strikes that instantly pulled the rug out from under the US military.

Iran has been preparing for this moment for decades and they have a huge geological advantage as well. The loss of US life and equipment is going to be enormous. No shit Russia is helping Iran while Iran works to destroy one of Russia’s biggest foes.

Yeah, sorry. I don’t buy into the fear-mongering about Iran. It’s not Iran’s military and nuclear capacity that concerns me, it’s America’s. The USA is the one that is undertaking pointless illegal wars, partaking in and/or enabling genocide in multiple countries, repeatedly threatening its (former) allies with war and annexation, illegally kidnapping nation leaders, and throwing people in concentration camps including foreign nationals and tourists.

It should not surprise a single person that any country is taking steps to protect their sovereignty and territory from hyper-aggressive American imperialism. Especially a country like Iran that has genocidal Israel not far from their doors.

These will be destroyed in microseconds, and rightfully so.

Toilet stalls are one of the most frequently vandalised things.

Only 205? I would’ve thought we’d be in the thousands by now.

The issue I’ve had with the “Just shop somewhere else. Don’t use Amazon” is that it’s very US-specific response. Amazon has absolutely dominated the online shopping space in Canada for years because they are one of the few companies that dealt with the biggest reason why shopping online in Canada has been difficult: Shipping. $20-$40+ domestic shipping fees are normal in Canada for most other retailers which means you could be paying double the cost of your order (or more) just on shipping alone, so as soon as Amazon came in and offered free coast-to-coast shipping they had basically won the market instantly. There were teething issues, of course, and their earlier shipping contractors were horrendous but they did smooth most of that out.

Nowadays they still have very little competition that can beat them on shipping, but there are more and more options popping up. There are some Canadian online stores that offer free shipping or free if over a certain reasonable amount. The COVID pandemic really pushed a lot of local retailers to set up affordable online ordering and delivery systems for local customers, so that has also become an option. Aliexpress has also greatly improved their free shipping process to Canada and considering most of what Amazon sells is just rebranded Aliexpress stuff, it’s a great way of getting the same items for cheaper if you’re ok waiting a few extra days. So most of my online purchases these days have been a mixture of Canadian retailers and Aliexpress.

Israel will never accept a ceasefire. They will never accept peace. They will never accept anything other than complete genocide and annihilation of the Palestinian people and their homes.

To even entertain the idea that Israel would accept and respect a ceasefire is an insult to the Palestinian people.

Sometimes I use my phone so little that I only need to charge it every 2-3 days. Nearly everything that it does my PC can do better and not try to lock me in to a dozen different monthly weekly subscriptions.

It is wild to me that Brave still maintains such a highly regarded position amongst privacy “enthusiasts” and websites. The godawful news about the browser, its company, and the CEO has been constant since the day it was first announced and it’s clear as water that the browser is not private nor even remotely ethical. Far as I am concerned, it should have faded from the public conscious back when they were injecting their crypto referrals to skim money without you knowing. Or all the times the CEO opened his mouth and revealed that he is a supreme piece of shit.

And even if it was private, just the fact that it’s yet another Chromium browser is a total non-starter for me. I am so sick and tired of the ocean of alternative browsers that directly or indirectly support Google’s browser monopoly, often while proclaiming they are a great Chrome alternative.

What the fuck

thanks!

Thanks!

I’m lightly active in the headphone enthusiast space. Even in the more light-hearted circles there is still an elevated amount of placebo bullshit and stubborn belief in things that verifiably make zero difference.

It’s rather fascinating in a way. I’ve been in and out of various hobbies over the course of my life but there is just something about audio that attracts an atmosphere of wilful ignorance and bad actors that prey on it.

Just his handlers.

Base model Macbook Airs are very hard to beat for price:performance, especially now the new base model has 16gb of RAM. I’ve been to numerous local computer shops and felt and tried numerous Windows laptops that were around the same price and they all felt like flimsy plastic trash.

The Mac Mini is also very good for its price and size. My dad is considering a base model Mini to replace his Windows office computer which is on 10 and reached EOL and he doesn’t want 11.

No way in hell I’d pay its nearly $100CAD asking price.

It unironically is, and it’s not entirely the fault of the users either. The average person doesn’t know what FOSS means, what instances are, or what a federated service is and many platforms do a poor job of explaining what those things are and why they are superior.

Additionally, people need to understand that FOSS is not a selling point to the average user and that throwing that term around will go in one ear and out the other. As far as they are concerned their apps are already free because they don’t have to pay a transactional monetary value for them and “open source” is beyond meaningless to them and they couldn’t care less.

E-waste.

Goddamn Dell of all companies is the only one that seems to get it. I’m shocked.

Welcome to the world outside of your own ass, Dell. The air is fresher out here.

3D artist here. I am active on numerous art websites, including DeviantArt and Cara.

I joined Cara quite a bit later than everyone else so I can’t give too much commentary on it yet, but I will say that it is very much not dead. It certainly has an active and growing community, but it is still a niche site so don’t go in there expecting it to be the next Twitter in terms of userbase size.

DeviantArt, on the other hand, is quite a bit more unfortunate. It actually has a rather sizeable community still but the heartbreaking part is watching the owners systematically sabotage it. Nearly everything they’ve done in the past several years has been catered towards driving AI use/growth while letting every other part of the site fester and rot. I don’t share my DA profile with clients or family members because if they click off my profile there is an extremely high chance they will be hit by a wall of untagged fetish porn and AI slop that will never be tagged despite the ToS requiring such.

Just a few months ago DA removed their official app from mobile app stores for some reason and it became very clear that that was how many users engaged with the platform. Myself and many other artists on DA noticed a very sudden and very large downturn in user engagement and views. They also made some back-end algorithm changes that made this even worse but they have never confirmed that and I doubt they ever will. Membership subs basically exist just to give you extra AI prompt credits and cloud storage space and maybe better selling rates assuming you actually sell anything. The other features, like boosts, have been broken for months now.

Platforms come and go over the years but DA should go down in history as the one that turned to their core userbase, the very people that built them and funded them for so many years - and punched them right in the goddamn face.