Everyone shits on Discover and Amex though, two companies that tried to break in. Discover gave up the fight and got bought by Capital one after 40 years of growing from the Sears in store credit card.
For alternatives to break the duopoly, people need to actually use them.
My blueray player broke, and my tv stopped showing me to use certain apps and I can’t figure out why. But a used PS4 cost me $85 and solved all my problems. And they left a copy of Minecraft in it, so I even have a game to play.
Counterpoint: my software allows you to access your banking needs. I’m financially on the hook if fraud occurs. Fraud occurs because your favorite “slap the monkey” game also installs a keylogger and network monitor. So I don’t allow my software to work if you have that installed.
I think you’re right that companies should not be able to tell you what software you can run, but users also can’t be trusted to keep their devices safe.
A lot of network, banking, and telephony protocols historically rely on trusting that there are no bad actors in the chain. Technology has added more links to the chain increasing the opportunities for bad actors to tap into it.
It’s a situation that needs better fixes. Maybe we just need to hand the current internet over to the bots and start a new one with security and privacy built in from the ground up.
Fingers crossed this is a patent intended to prevent others from ever stooping to such evil, but it’s not like Sony has been clean when it comes to this kind of shit.
An economy is strong not because there are many dollars of value in it, it is strong because many dollars of value move within it. The movement is the key thing people miss. The fact that there is $100 worth of food in a system means nothing if it never moves from the grocery store to a home, to a hungry person. The rich don’t get rich by moving value, they get rich by hoarding it, weakening the economy. A rich person buying all the food and only giving crumbs to the few workers they need would break the system. When food or fuel were scarce during recent history did we allow single rich families to buy it all? In order to keep the system functioning it was rationed. Why is capital any different?
Mario kart is the first thing mentioned after the Wii itself.
I’m sure it’s not unique to getting old as there could be other causes, but for me it’s been that my grip strength wanes and I drop things pretty regularly now. I used to fence and sword spar and I had gotten used to barely holding things so I wouldn’t break them. Now if I’m not thinking about it, things just kind of fall out of my hands. Very weird thing to realize.
I did that for my mobile hotspot. No one got it :(
It looks like a partially disassembled head band from some cheap gaming headphones. Image searches won’t find it because the metal shouldn’t be visible in the actual product.
You just don’t get 11 dimensional particle physics. I was actually into it up until that point. As soon as they pulled that shit, I would have quit but wanted to finish for our book club discussion.
Childhood happiness was centered around Christmas, or maybe a family trip to a place like Disneyland. I was generally happy as a kid, except for the times dealing with school bullies. Nothing in my childhood compared to the absolute giddiness of seeing my wife in her wedding dress for that first look, nor the pure joy of realizing for the first time just how much I love my children.
This is how they had to dress. Even the cashiers and cooks had to be business casual. And they had to buy the uniforms out of their wages.
Today they wouldn’t be able to afford to, but that’s what stagnant minimum wage and soaring corporate profits has gotten us.
The book Enders Game. I was will bullied in grade school. As was Ender. The overall theme is that it’s effectively impossible to maintain a defensive posture indefinitely. Be that always ready for dealing with bullies at school or home, to dealing with an alien threat becoming nearly impossible in three dimensions.
Ender comes up with the philosophy that you have to win, but not just win that fight/battle, you have to win so decisively that there won’t just be another fight later. While this turns out to be effective, it also results in genocide.
This resulted in a restrained version of the philosophy in me. When diplomacy fails, fight for your life, but know when you’ve won, know when you’ve prevented the next fight(s). And most importantly, know when to stop.