DAalseth

emoeller said:

I and my family have owned Toyota vehicles for decades  (still drive a 2011 Prius and 2002 Tacoma PU), but I'll never purchase another one because of their long standing obstinance to include Apole CarPlay (they now offer it in most models).   This is a huge mistake for GM - but then again I have never purchased a GM car or truck.  I have a Tesla Cybertruck slot (expect delivery in early 2024) - but if Elon doesn't get on board with CarPlay I'll probably opt out.

I have a 2005 Prius and may never buy another car because the bloody thing will never wear out, LOL

mainyehc said:

DAalseth said:

A thousand dollars a month? I really hope that most if not all organizations decide it’s not worth it and drop their accounts. I mean I’d be pissed to find out that my Senator, Congressman, or agency was dropping twelve bills a year to keep a Twitter account. There’s better things to put tax money toward. 

Public officials should just show Phony Stark the finger and move to Mastodon altogether. Heck, the US Government should create its own instance for all its agencies, duh.

That’s the best idea. They have their own web sites, they should have their own place to post government news and information. The same people who follow them on the commercial sites would follow them on the ,gov site. 

What about cases? The case on my iPhone covers the buttons to protect them. This means that I can’t touch them any more. Are case makers going to have to leave openings where the buttons are? 

lkrupp said:

So millennials are finding out how the world really works, that no job is secure, that all this talk about how companies value employees is bullshit. You didn’t want to come back to work at the office but wanted to remain cozy working at home with your pet cat on your lap. It’s the BOTTOM LINE, baby, the bottom line. Get used to it, You’ll be switching jobs every few years for the rest of your lives with no security, no perks, no free lunches and lattes. Think joining a union will make it all better? Hardy har har. The SCOTUS is likely to shitcan your hopes of getting your student loan debt laid on the backs of taxpayers. $400 billion? Think again. 

The world will continue to need electricians, plumbers, brick masons, welders, carpenters, big equipment operators for the foreseeable future, not so much programmers, data entry workers, marketing types, even certain engineering fields as AI will see to that. It’ll be awhile until Boston Dynamics comes up with a robot that can wire and plumb a new home.

End rant from a 73 year old curmudgeon.

There’s a lot from our generation that grew up thinking that perks and lifetime employment was the way things that worked. But greed, and the bottom line, and corporations rights, killed that off. I agree that the current SCOTUS is all about States Rights and Corporate Rights so a lot of the needed changes will likely be blocked. But I’m not optimistic about people going into trades either. They need loans for those schools too and then leave with debt hanging around their necks. 

Funny thing, up till a year ago I worked for a company that made robots. The systems were for inspections, and repairs of things that used to require a trained technician/hazardous materials person to do. Currently the other two fields that I work with, writing and art, are in a panic because AI generated material is moving in. Sure the stuff is odd and you can tell, now, but it’s getting better, and a lot of companies will say that it’s cheaper and “good enough”. CGI has decimated the model building business for everything from architecture, to use in sales and courts. Computer systems/AI is creeping in, and in a decade there will be no market for voiceover work. First it will be in audio-books, but soon it will go from the script for cartoons, and anime. Closed Captioning workers have almost completely been replaced with AI transcriptions. Yeah they get a fair amount wrong, but they are “cheap and good enough”. There’s a lot of fields that AI and robots are moving into and putting people out of work. At the robotics company they could have employed a dozes trained machinists. When I left they had three, who mostly tweaked the CNC lathes and mills, and then sat around watching the machine do all the work. Sure the quality was second to none, but I kept thinking about all the machinists that were not finding jobs, and if they did it was for half or a quarter of what they would have gotten twenty years ago. 

This isn’t just a Millennial thing. It’s hitting everyone, and it’s going to hit more. 

The general rule of thumb in Astronomy is an optical telescope is limited to 50x per inch of aperture. (Not counting adaptive optics etc., which is not a factor here). The lens on this thing is what, a quarter inch? (Being generous). That means that any optical zoom over 12 is not going to do anything but fuzz. It’s like those department store telescopes that promise 300-400 power out of a one inch lens. Not gonna happen. You can pile on the lenses, but it won’t do you any good. 

So Samsung decided to sweeten the image with file photos, and claim absurd magnification numbers.

They put the scum in Samscum.