Aggressive capitalism coupled with user ignorance is the main issue. The advice still remains don’t install all this shit, but people growing uo with smartphones have bought in to this idea that it’s reasonable for Google to spy on your every move, so why not every other app?

So many users have no idea how their devices work - even an inkling - now what apps do, how to keep devices secure and private, and what happens with their data. Business has taken advantage of that - people want things to “just work” so business use that as a way to abuse users and make every app a trojan horse for data mining.

Even Google, Apple etc privacy settings are bullshit - they’re just figleafs of psuedo privacy that enable them as the platform makers to dictate the terms.

I switched away from Windows to Linux on PC, and I use FOSS alternatives on my Android device (even considering replacing android with FOSS system - difficult with some work essential apps unfortunately). But even if you stay on windows/android there are plenty of things users can do to protect themselves - they just don’t know how or worse can’t be bothered by the whole issue.

So is this adjusted for inflation? The word is not mentioned once in the article.

Using inflation calculators I get the following (used https://www.calculator.net/inflation-calculator.html and https://www.officialdata.org/us/inflation/; getting similar results)

• 1990s - $124,800 ($298,200 today)
• 2000s - $165,300 ($299,800 today)
• 2010s - $219,000 ($313,600 today)
• 2020s - $327,100 ($394,700 today)
• Now - $420,800

Looking at FRED economic data (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS), it looks like thats where they got their figures. As far as I can tell is it not inflation adjusted. They have picked the Q4 results for each year as base for the 1 Jan.

When adjusted for inflation, the increase in value since the 1990s is much less AND the increase was biggest between 2010-2020.

Also on their own figures in the article; between 2020 and now the median price is up 28% without inflation adjustment, and 7% with. Compared to 1990 the median price corrected for inflation is up 40%, but the biggest jump is 2010-2020; it began 2020 32% above the 1990 price.

The point? House prices are up, but inflation has been uneven over that period, with a big spike recently - the dramatic figures in the article may not reflect the real story. According to the calculators from 2020 to 2024 the total inflation rate is 21.54%; equivalent to 4.7% a year. Inflation accounts for much more of the perceived price rise than the actual real value rise.

The problem with inflation is people only think about today’s inflation rate. Current US inflation is 3.5% but that is on top of last years inflation, and the year before that etc. So dramatic articles like this are really of dubious value.

EDIT: The article links to “analysis” by another website ResiClib. They do not seem to have looked at inflation at all either.

Yes and no.

Apple used to be something of a design innovator which the rest of the market would follow. It has this reputation for creating product categories that didn’t exist. That’s not quite true and is rewriting history, what it was good at was design.

What it did was take a product and design a high quality cutting edge of that and make bank. It started with Mp3 players - there were many of them before the iPod but the iPod did very well because it was a good design with some nice features. Then it made the iPod Touch - which again wasn’t the first but was by far the best and really a mini ipad.

The iPhone wasn’t the first touch screen phone, but it was a huge leap in usability and power and they did extremely well out of that. The ipad wasn’t the first tablet but again it was a huge leap in usability and design and they did very well. The imac and later mac books were attractive designs rather than innovative.

Now there isn’t really any areas left for them to work that strategy on. The Mp3 player, the phone, the ipad - they were obvious product categories that existed but were far away from what they could be.

VR is the remaining obvious tech frontier - but the difference is the technology isn’t quite there yet. It’s obvious what the ultimate VR device should be - a light weight, high fidelity unit that immersed you. Other manufacturers are either making PC tethered devices with high fidelity or mobile devices with low fidelity,as the tech isn’t quite economical or right for the sweet spot.

Apple Vision Pro is a gamble on trying to secure that sweet spot. It’s not intended to do well currently, it’s intended to build up the manufacturing supply chain which should bring down the cost over time. Vision 2 or 3 will what they’re hoping takes off. It’s a new spin on their old strategy.

Most of what Apple does now though is just release fresh spins of its current products. They don’t innovate but it’s hard to when there isn’t much left to improve on those product categories. All they can do is make the devices more powerful and lighter, and compete with companies who have now learned all the tricks and offer similar products for cheaper.

Vision may or may not win the VR wars. Otherwise there isn’t really much else for Apple to go in consumer electronics. Now it is focused on “services” - selling apps, selling media - and organically growing it’s user base. Big leaps in consumer electronics probably won’t come until there is a big innovation in battery technology - that’s the holy grail of tech at the moment.

True, but this is likely to be helping fund the reconstruction/repair work. So it’s kinda benefits everyone if it’s saving money from the public purse.

I use OpenSuSE Tumbleweed. Up to date packages but with relatively good stability due to how they’re tested. Rolling release distros are always more risky, but for gaming you probably do want up to date packages to ensure graphics drivers and bleeding edge versions of Proton, Vulkan and even Wine work as expected. I think that’s most true for newer games and those where you may need to use Proton Experimental. Its also a good broad distro for other uses, rather than solely focused on one element like gaming.

Steam Deck is based on Arch; it’s not quite rolling release but they do relatively frequent updates to their version of Linux so a rolling release distro is probably going to be closer to it than most annual release and certainly LTS released linuxes.

Nobara is also a good distro to consider. It’s made by the guy who game up with Proton-GE and is gaming focused. It’s also rolling released and optimised more for gaming including the kernel. I use it on a living room PC for the past 5-6 months and like it so far.

That’s fair, although personally I would still recommend KDE. KDE is only superficially windows like - it’s highly customisable so you can switch the GUI up. The windows GUI is also successful for a reason so it’s good to have it as one option - you don’t have to sacrifice a basically good GUI when you leave windows. (Microsoft constantly seems to want to tinker with it but then has to reintroduce the basics as that’s what people like - such as the latest nonsense with Windows 11). But with KDE you can also recreate other GUIs with relative ease (even most of Gnome).

Personally I find GNOME too rigid and inflexible - it has a clear design philosophy which is good, but if you’re not on board with that philosophy then it can be frustrating to use as they’re so focused on that design philosophy. It’s a take it or leave it DE in many ways, while KDE (and many other DEs) offers more choice and flexibility.

I switched to Tumbleweed from Mint a few months ago (having toyed with many distros over the years, and recently Nobara and Manjaro).

I like Tumbleweed - it’s a good mix of up to date packages, system stability (so far, I accept rolling release is inherently always going to be risky) and a good ecosystem. I find it very user friendly thanks to Yast, but with lots of freedom for power use.

I also like that it’s a an offshoot of a European Linux company rather than a big tech company like IBM. I’m not a fan of the direction redhat has taken and the impact some of its priorities seem to have on Fedora. I’m sure SuSE impacts a lot on OpenSuSE but of the big enterprise Linux ecosystems I currently prefer it over Ubuntu and Redhat.

Zionism has always been highly controversial. It is a political movement but it’s proponents try and paint it as a central and indelible part of Jewish identity - trying to make it seem as if to attack zionism is to attack Judaism. This is of course utter bullshit.

It’s a common tactic of the zionist movement to try and equate anti-zionism with being anti-semetic. But zionism is a nationalist political ideology, not an ethnic identity.

It is not anti-semetic to attack zionism, just as it is not unamerican to attack the Republican Party.

I think your library is a good example of what’s going on and the key is probably what you’re buying. You have lots of games but I bet many of those are smaller games from indie studios; even if you’re not playing those games the studios are benefiting from you low price impulse purchases.

I’m guessing you’re not impulse buying £60 and £75 games from big studios and leaving them unplayed. And I doubt you’d even buy those games if they’re not scoring well; certainly not at full price anyway.

That is the story of the games industry right now - smaller studios are doing well, some very well when they produce very good games, while the big Publishing houses are producing overpriced games, which are poorly quality controlled or even just fundamentally bad.

Can you saturate a market when a £5 impulse buy on a discounted indie game or a discounted AAA game with good review scores from 3+ years ago is about the same as a coffee? Whose going to buy a £70 poorly reviewed new release when you could have bought 100 good games on discount. Even if you don’t play them all, it’s just too good a proposition.

I’m not sure how I feel about this news story.

On the one side, it’s good to make sure people are aware of the limitations of secure email providers. However on the other the article almost reads as of this should be a surprise to people?

I use Proton mail and pay for my account. I don’t pay for anonyminity - I pay for privacy. They are two very different things.

The article talks about Opsec (operational security) and they’re right - if you need anonyminity then don’t use your personal apple email as a recovery address. That is a flaw in the user approach and expectations that unencrypted data held by Proton is also “secure”. Your basic details and your IP address are going to be recorded and available to law enforcement. Use a VPN or Tor to access the service and use another untraceable email for recovery, and pay via crypto if you want true anonymity. And even then there are other methods of anonymous or untraceable secure email that may be better than Proton mail (such as self hosted).

But for most users like myself, if you’re not looking for anonyminity then Proton is fine as is. My email address is my name and I use it to keep my emails secure and not snooped on by Google etc.

Proton advertises itself as private, secure and encrypted. It does not claim to offer anonymity.

This was a satirical poster; the phrasing is deliberate and it was posted on the underground as a protest against the conservatives.

How is that a “power user”? That’s just a poor way to use the browser. It’s basically just 7400 bookmarks in one long list; you can’t even group/nestle book marks on Firefox.

A power user would use something called “bookmarks” to organise that better.

It’s basically GNOME specific version of GTK4. There are various issues that arise from that but one of the main ones is that it is not themeable at all at present. The GNOME adiwaita theme is built into the library and is the only theme.

It is supposedly going to have a themeing system but it will still break with existing GTK themes.

As the Mint blog alludes to, it also embeds fundamental UI choices that may make sense for GNOME but may be jarring or out of place in other desktops such as Cinnamon, or XFCE. They cite the example that GNOME could unilaterally remove the minimise button from the apps because it’s not something that exists in GNOME.

There is a concern that it effectively breaks the existing app ecosystem and will deviate further and further from the established GTK norms. To be fair is kinda what it’s supposed to do - I think it’s it’s supposed to be a better replacement that allows GNOME to forge it’s own path.

Edit: worth noting that the Mint blog post says they could make their own theme within their own version of the library but it could only fit with one GTK fheme. So it can be customise in a limited distro level way but still can’t follow the basic themeing across the desktop if you chose anything else (at present).

A microcosm of what is wrong with American health care. A private company decides its going to open services to make money, the services undoubtedly disrupt the local services that existed, the private company isn’t making enough money so closes the services.

And what happens in the communities left behind? They lose the new services and they also lost the other services that closed down because that couldn’t compete with Walmart. Those other services aren’t going to come back because the initial outlay on setting up such services is so high.

Capitalism doesn’t work when it comes to essential services. In fact capitalism makes the problem far worse.

The other possibility here is that Statcounter is trash.

People are taking its findings as if they’re gospel yet it is a very crude way of measuring how many users there are for an OS. It basically just measures how many users of each OS it sees each month - it is very difficult to consistently correct that data month to month, or match the same data to the same user each month. Lots of people use ad blockers and other privacy tools in their browsers which could easily break the sort of tracking Statcounter relies on.

Essentially, flucations in their data may just reflect the poor accuracy of their data rather than actual swings of 1%.

The issue was that Chinese EVs are ahead of Western EVs due to aggressive subsidy and investment by the Chinese government to get ahead. So the market has been distorted which is what was “scary” according to the quite in the article that spawned the headline.

Having said that, I’m not sure I believe that Chinese EVs will be better quality. They may be cheaper and they may even have technically advanced but from experience of other Chinese products, quality is not a word I’d associate with them.

Nope, a car company with no car design team won’t be making new models.

Tesla shows what’s wrong with capitalism - companies bloat on speculation driven in this case by a show man. Tesla is a house of cards - it squandered it’s first-move advantage, the competition are now building better EVs, and it’s self-drive technology is a lemon because Elon decided to remove all the essential sensors in his solution to reduce cost.

Meanwhile his competitors are getting licenses to self drive and Tesla have jackshit. Robo-taxis are coming but they won’t have the Tesla logo on them.

Tesla is a massively overvalued stock and has been for a long time. When they announced their recent dire sales, the share price actually rebounded because the clown Mush spouted his usual nonsense about the real value in the company - self drive and robo-taxis - but it’s been widely reported for some time that the companies tech is a dud because Musk decided to remove all the expensive components that actually make the technology work. They lost their first-move advantage; their competitors have caught up and surpassed them both on EVs and self-drive tech.

The guy is a joke, the company is a joke.

Makes sense from a business point of view. Why sell to create a new competitor with the same technology and an impregnable market base in the USA?

Better to force US competition to start from scratch.

Either TikTok will win in court and overturn the law (possible), be sold (unlikely) or shut down (likely). I can’t see TikTok being sold being allowed by China, and even selling part of the business just creates a new global competitor to extend out of the US.

Multiple competitors will appear in the meantime hoping to get the displaced activity. TikTok is hugely profitable and a dominant replacement in the US would make a lot of money. This will be seen as an opportunity to make a lot of money for the winner.

I can see Meta trying to make a TikTok like clone, Google trying to leverage YouTube shorts, and Elon Musk trying to revive Vine at Twitter, plus lots of startups (mostly. American but possibly from other nations) vying to win the audience.

Ironically the more interesting battle may be outside the US - TikTok versus whatever US app comes along.

The deadline is after the US election - this could also all be political grandstanding and the politicians expectation might be that the law won’t stand up in court anyway.