Removed by mod

Removed by mod

Removed by mod

I don’t disagree but don’t let perfection get in the way of good enough. SMS and standard email etc are all unencrypted. WhatsApp is encrypted end to end. You may not trust meta, or like them. But that’s millions time better than SMS or email.

Getting your parents on WhatsApp is a huge awesome step. Getting them to telegram or Signal or whatever else is a minor step comparatively.

I’m currently in a former USSR country on holiday and everything is WhatsApp and Telegram. Delivery drivers to government services.

Japan is still on floppy disks attached to carrier pigeons.

China is WhatsApp for every non Chinese even with the ban. Wechat for everything else but you need a Chinese mobile.

Korea surprisingly is using WhatsApp more than even prepandemic. Almost all my Korean friends are now WhatsApp versus like 1 just 5 years ago. Telegram is also popping up there.

But point taken. A few bubbles of differences but WhatsApp really does rule supreme.

Pretty much the entire world, except the US and Canada, is WhatsApp based. Every job chat, every message you send, it’s all WhatsApp. Heck to pay for parking or to get immigration visa services from the government, it’s mostly WhatsApp. And yes you can send stickers.

Sometimes Lemmy loses perspective that the way 300ish million people do something is not that relevant to the other 7500 million.

My choices are generally not popular with an American audience. There’s a lot of propaganda in the world, everyone does it, but the US is the best at it so it can be very difficult to see things outside those borders.

I live all over the world, still do. But I spent over 20 years in the US primarily. I lived in low crime, affluent areas. But the low crime is still absurdly high crime, but is normalized. I won’t share all my story but being victimized for my possessions was annoying, but not the end of the world. That’s what insurance is for. My breaking point was the second time I was almost murdered by the police for being the wrong colour in my own neighbourhood. I’m talking guns pointed at me for no reason and lots more I don’t discuss.

My primary residence is now in the Middle East. Almost immediately, most people make a confused face and the first questions are usually “why” followed by “aren’t you worried about…” and then a laundry list of manufactured issues that don’t actually exist, or exist equally where they live.

The bottom line is that my front door is unlocked and stays unlocked. When I go the park, beach, mall, restaurant, wherever I can reserve a spot by dropping my wallet or cell phone and walking away without worry. I have all the modern conveniences of the USA and more. I use an app on my phone and a fuel truck comes to me to fill up my car. Leave your keys on the windshield like everyone else and they will fill you up as you’re elsewhere. Use the app and get laundry services washed, dried, and folded with pickup from your house and drop off with tip for the cost of a cup of coffee. No tipping culture of 50%, a dollar or two is plenty. I can buy a meal in a restaurant that feeds 4 people for about $5 with apps, entrees, dessert, and tip. I can also buy a stupid gold steak for $2000. The choice is mine.

Public transport works. Food from every part of the world is minutes away. A woman can walk by themselves at 3am with no fear.

I’m currently on a holiday to a different country a few hours away. My door is still unlocked.

When I talk to Americans that have made the move they almost all say the same thing. It takes a few weeks for the constant fear and guard to start to drop. It takes about 2 years before you start to live without that burden.

Every time I am in the US it is just worse and worse. Crime, political discourse, and just general everyday anger between people in every interaction. Walking down a sidewalk or road rage or unfriendly staff, just general anger. When you’re around it constantly, you never really notice it. You only notice the extreme outbursts. But when you go somewhere that’s finally peaceful, you then become aware of the constant noise and the huge outbursts.

Only other thing I’ll mention as this is way too long already, is that the excuse of “I can’t just pack up and move” is just an easy excuse. You absolutely can. It isn’t easy. It can be isolating if you’re going by yourself. But you can. One of my grandparents fled from war with nothing but a single suitcase for 3 children and the 2 adults. Lost everything they had to get a better life and start fresh. Another grandparent immigrated with a whole ship worth of crap. My parents immigrated yet again with moving trucks. I immigrated by air and a couple suitcases filled with everything in the world I hold important.

It takes more money and privilege to immigrate with your possessions. But that’s a luxury upgrade. It isn’t a requirement.

In uncivilized countries like the USA I’ve had many things stolen from my porch, from my car, even an entire car.

I now choose to spend most of my time where I can leave my valuables unwatched in public and my house door unlocked. Living in fear and around crime, adds so much stress, anxiety, and general angst to your everyday life. Life is too short to live in a terrible place

Dude, Dubai is more progressive than most of the USA or UK. Don’t believe the media.

I live all over the world, but also have residency there as a registered atheist. Nicest people you’ll ever meet.

It’s 90% expats. And a huge Indian population. If you want to live like in India, you can. If you want to live like in the UK, you can. You have freedom of choice far superior to any other country in the world.

These are not really Indian issues but poor people issues. Social mobility is a tough thing. If you’re born poor, you stay poor in most places. If your born rich you can stay rich or become poor. If you’re middle class you’ll probably end up poor unless you are relatively lucky with the way inflation and capitalism works.

If you want to “escape India” for better chances, just get to Dubai and start over. You’ll earn more and can start planning for later.

I love how you’re being down voted for facts lol. Also as an FYI, Americans know nothing about the oil embargoes on Japan and how Indonesia and the Philippines played into japan’s needs. The US choke holded Japan and they had like a year left before everybody would freeze and starve. So Pearl Harbour it was, and they got lucky the US just happened to park all the ships there, they weren’t planning on it. But that news isn’t taught to Americans. They truly believe it was an unprovoked attack out of the blue.

More than half the world is in support of Russia, mostly because they do not support the USA proxy war or NATO. If by “the whole world” you mean NATO, then not even that considering the support isn’t unanimous. The remainder is indifferent, don’t really care one way or the other.

The US has the same rules, and are a driving force for this. They will enforce the rules the same as they do now for 10k payments. If you want clean money in a bank or if you want to travel with the money, or if you’re just randomly stopped and have the money on you, you will be forced to prove its provenance or it will be seized.

This is already how it works in the EU, UK, Canada, and of course the USA.

The cash itself isn’t the problem, it’s getting that cash into a “clean” system where it can be used to buy anything that isn’t cash. And with everything being non-cash on purpose because of these Nazi laws, you essentially have worthless paper you can’t do anything with.

You cannot stop the collection. It ALWAYS collects. It may not transmit, even if connected. For example the black box in many cars is really an assortment of ECUs that contain fine grained historical data. It does eventually roll over and get replaced but the data is there.

For example there are public cases you can find where the police, not even needing a warrant, were allowed to dump this data off of a rental vehicle that a suspect, not convicted just suspected, was thought to have been in. Of course the copaganda story showed that they the used this data which was mostly location by gps and speed by the wheel sensors and gps to get a track of everywhere that vehicle had been in the last 6 months. Every person who rented it and drove it somewhere had their privacy violated. But I guess that’s normal now.

The infotainment systems are the biggest jerks for data storage as they’re just mini generic computers today with lots of storage.

To stop wireless transmission you can remove the sim card from the modem. Many vehicles won’t work or even start if the modem is disconnected (unplugged or unfused). A Nissan for example will drain its 12v battery overnight trying to find the modem if it is unplugged. But if the sim is bad or disabled, it will try and fail to communicate, then retry later which won’t kill the battery.

You lose a lot of convenience and the data is still there. So the answer is basically you can’t drive a new vehicle without it violating your privacy with collection. You can only make the wireless transmission more private or disabled. I suppose you could buy a scanner yourself and before you leave the vehicle, factory wipe all ECUs. But even then you’ll need to enable them for emissions testing and such if that’s in your area.

Keep your hot bean soup, I will drink my boiled landscape baggings.

Wow I thought I was the only idiot that bought it. Once they started charging for the smart features, it got unbatteried and became just a fancy box.

I’d make that deal with the Sharks. Sea bass today, sea urchins tommorow.

The GPU on my laptop is also upgradeable. And when I want to upgrade it, it’ll be time for a new CPU too.

As it is now, very few GPUs in a laptop that can pull almost 200W and have 16GB of RAM. Mine is slower than the newest generations for speed but its quicker for long processing and large memory. When a 24GB GPU based on the 5x architecture comes out, I’ll be ready with a new CPU too.

Their hardware is just poor. They can charge whatever they like, I’m fortunate enough to not look at prices for that type of kit. Objectively, their hardware sucks compared to many other brands, especially at the same price point.

Their OS sucks for 90% of my use cases. If your “work” involves you just using a browser then yes you can use a big phone to get your work done. Slap an arm in a big case with a keyboard as a “pc” or a big screened arm for a tablet, or a small screen for a phone. But if you do anything where you use a computer, you need an x86 architecture and you need certain hardware capabilities. Over the time, they have all been lacking in performance even at the highest tier, and the price has been high end. Overall makes zero sense. The locked down *nix systems hide everything useful to make it pretty. Isn’t compatible with real software. And isn’t backwards compatible. I can install windows and my software from the mid 90s or 2000s or today and it just f’cking works. That’s why Windows is king. Bloated absolutely. But it just works.

That doesn’t make me hate the company. That just makes me sad for the uninformed people that get fooled into spending their hard earned money on sub optimal pieces of kit.

What makes me hate them is this game of “we just invented this new feature from 10 years ago!” and then all their fan bois go apeshit over it like they just stepped into the future. And they’re too stupid to know they’re being lied to and manipulated for profits. But they are also vocal and arrogant about their stupidity and ignorance, so I don’t like them either.

My phone has more RAM, more storage, better screen, better camera, faster charging by an order of magnitude (120W wired, 50W wireless…), more radio transceivers for global connectivity, better battery life, and honestly looks better. There is not a single thing I prefer about an iPhone and there is not a single qualitative metric an iPhone beats my phone on.

My laptop has more RAM, more storage, better screen, better camera, faster and more charging, more ports, upgradability, and is a BEAST that will eat even mid range desktop computers. There is no equivalent Apple product. Not even close. And when you factor in the best and beefiest new macs can’t even run my software, it’s not even an option. Now my battery life sucks and it looks like a zombie movie prop, but it is actually functional. I can run a simulation or a LLM/ML algo that stresses the CPU at 100%, the Quadro RTX5000 at 100%, and gobbles up 120GB of system RAM plus the 16GB of VRAM writing TBs of data to the 5 internal M2 drives. And I can do so indefinitely with the temps peaking to 100C and limiting to about 300W of power draw. It blasts air out of 3 sides that I could probably cook an egg in. But it doesn’t thermal limit after 5 mins of web browsing like the Macbooks or the Airs. It’s a beast that is made to beast and it does. Apple can’t even compete in the class.

For a tablet, I don’t have a need. My phone gives me a giant screen and my tiny auxiliary laptop does everything I need. My aux laptop is beefier than most, but it would be slower than a top of the line mac doing basic tablet things of web browsing. If I did need a tablet I’d just get a Xiaomi Pad. But in general I feel that the entire tablet market is a solution looking for a problem that only exists because Apple and fan bois are idiots again. I’ve been taking notes on TabletPCs for 20 years now. Seriously, Windows XP had a tablet mode. As did every one after. My laptops have touch input. My laptops in university the screen swiveled and then laid flat on the keyboard with a stylus to write on the screen. All of those fancy new Apple pen features? I had them in 2005. Pressure sensitive, gyro enabled for brush strokes/widths. Eraser on the other end. It was capacitive and needed a proprietary pen which was evil to say then. Now that’s Apple motto and they stole the idea and people are believing it’s new.

If they release a good product, I’ll try it. I’m not brand loyal. If they keep releasing shit, I’m going to keep calling them out.

When you get to baggage claim, if you then stand directly at the carousel blocking everyone’s view for more than 10 seconds, trap door opens and a system of pneumatic tubes forcibly jettisons you to the furthest point away in the airport for you to walk back.

Stand back, wait for your luggage to appear, then approach and get your bag and step back to the perimeter.

To get my VC funding in 2024, id also pitch that it “has AI” which is just facial recognition and if you get jettisoned twice in the same year, the third time goes into a shark pit or scorpion pit.