The US Undersecretary of State, Christopher Landau, says "appropriate action" will be taken against "foreigners who glorify violence".
In a post on X, Landau says he has been "disgusted" to see comments on social media "praising, rationalising or making light" of the killing of Charlie Kirk and those who "glorify violence and hatred" are "not welcome visitors" to the country.
He says he has directed consular officials to "undertake appropriate action" and tells his followers "to bring such comments by foreigners to my attention so that the State Department can protect the American people".
In a response to a tweet, Landau then says he will direct consular officials to monitor the comments to his post.
The originalists would probably say it only applies to white slaveowners who own property. Or some other random bullshit that doesn't logically lead to their foregone conclusion.
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
Brazil braced Friday for possible new U.S. sanctions linked to former President Jair Bolsonaro’s conviction on coup charges, after the administration of President Donald Trump warned it would respond “accordingly.”
Brazil’s Foreign Ministry called Rubio’s comments an inappropriate threat that would not intimidate the government, adding that the country’s judiciary is independent and that Bolsonaro was granted due process.
“Threats like the one made today by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in a statement that attacks Brazilian authority and ignores the facts and compelling evidence in the case files, will not intimidate our democracy,” Brazil’s foreign office said on X.
Bolsonaro was convicted Thursday by a Supreme Court panel of an attempted coup aimed at keeping him in power following his October 2022 election defeat to Lula. Trump said he was “very unhappy” with the conviction.
I would argue that this is exactly how the US government has worked in the past, the difference was they knew how to keep their fucking mouths shut about it.
For instance the Iran Contra scandal, Cuba for the last 70 years, how many governments have we overthrown because they did something some American didn’t like?
The funny thing is that, every other time, it was about ensuring money flowed to 'murica and import prices kept dirt cheap (Brazil has suffered more than once from 'murican control of commodity markets like coffee and sugar). This time, the orange maniac is bombing 'murican economy because "haha fuck y'all"
Exactly, like I can’t imagine Brazil has need of us for trade, meaning we don’t send them shit, and the things they have we probably aren’t getting from many other places
Brazil imports a LOT of shit from USA and doesn't charge tariffs - USA has a superavit of ~410 billion dollars from the last 15 years of trade with Brazil- which means a good portion of our economy is effectively colonized by uncle Sam. I hope most of those things can be replaced with European or Chinese equivalents.
Meanwhile, the biggest losers on the green-yellow side are coffee (Brazil is responsible for roughly 30% of all the coffee USA imports) and orange juice (~64% of all OJ)
A glass of orange juice (OJ) is a staple of the American breakfast table, with the average U.S. consumer drinking about 9 liters per year — compared to just 0.4 liters in Brazil. Remarkably, over
While I would agree, prior to 2024, most of us kinda figured someone who was guilty of multiple felonies and was proven to be a crook , a scam artist and a pedophile would be enough marks against him to prevent his election... but here we are.
By granting Donald Trump immunity for a wide range of criminal conduct committed while in office, the Supreme Court has set a dangerous precedent that presidents are above the law.
Following the Jan 6 Insurrection, as well as their confirmed collaboration with Russia, Biden would have been well within his legal rights and responsibilities to declare Trump and his henchmen to be National Security Threats, and arrested within minutes of his Inauguration.
And while they were being extensively interrogated at Guantanamo Bay regarding their nefarious dealings, the MAGA Nazis would have lost their minds, and tried to get violent, giving Biden the excuse to ruthlessly crush them.
And then the Stolen Documents scheme would have come to light, and we would finally understand how deep their treason went, giving the Biden administration the authority to finally end MAGA once and for all, declare it a treasonous terrorist hate group, and prohibit it's existence. In addition, the Conservative Propaganda Machine would be dismantled, starting with the prohibition of Fox News.
But they did none of that, and instead of having a legacy as a strong president who saved America from MAGA, Biden will forever be the weak president who surrendered America to MAGA. The deaths that will occur in taking America back from MAGA, are all on Biden.
What a fool he, and his entire administration, was.
I think they completely fucked up by going after the rioters. In my opinion, every one of them has an ironclad defense. Imagine for a second that, instead of living in a fox News fantasy world where up is down and the sky is orange, they just lived under a rock for 4 years and lean right:
The president they voted for told them the election was stolen. They're just pions. He has access to intel that they do not. Who are they to question his claim? He's the fuckin president! The left must be stealing the election!
In the fantasy where that is true, storming the capitol kind of is the correct move. They cut off the wrong end of the snake.
EVERYBODY in America heard the same nonsense from him for years, and yet somehow most managed to avoid belief. Even among those that chose to believe, most didn't go to the Capitol to commit treason.
The Jan 6 Insurrectionists were the worst behaved, out of the dumbest people in America. That isn't a defense, it's why they should be locked up. They don't respond to reason.
It sure does shine a light on a very, very dysfunctional and broken shell of a democracy in North America. A shameful embarrassment for the whole world to see.
Hi guys! I've been here and there in the fediverse since a quite few years...always liked pleroma and mastodon, but always have a very bad luck. Every instance I went , every instance closed... Any good advice to choose an instance? I'm kinda tired of being exporting and exporting ad infinitum
If you are willing to have professional support and also support the underlying projects: Communick offers accounts only for paying-members. $29/year gives you an account on Mastodon, Lemmy, Funkwhale and Matrix, and we pledge to give 20% of the profits to the fediverse projects that we offer.
The group behind it or others similar. When you are on a small self hosted instance. You are at the mercy of a hobby admins time and skill. Which is no dig at them. Sometimes it just becomes too much.
I have had a number of Mastodon accounts since 2017 with the groups Mastodon servers. They run themselves as a serious organization. Providing services of a quality absolutely worth paying for. All with donations.
The HTTP response times are sometimes a little rough, but the team has managed to keep up a large part of the fediverse for the past few years. It's impressive, and I'm happy that I ended up chosing lemmy.world after migrating from lemmy.ml.
I think the safest thing would be self-hosting your own solo GoToSocial instance. With SLURP you could import your entire Mastodon archive… and if you’re not proficient, coding-wise, you could install GoToSocial via YunoHost.org, which is so easy to follow, a total newbie could do it (speaking from experience). The only requirement would be a basic VPS (say, about 5 Euros a month). If you could give up 1-2 coffees a month, it’s not that big of an expense. I personally love my GtS account, as I get to personalize it, setting character limits, uploading my own custom emojis, etc.
Thanks! I personally use a VPS because I don’t have a stable connection at home. If you could spare 4 or 5 Euros a month, I would definitely recommend self-hosting
Earlier this week, India signed a historic investment pact with Israel.
The deal, known as the Bilateral Investment Agreement (BIA), is meant to bolster investor confidence and provide smoother business transactions between the two countries.
At the signing ceremony in Delhi on 8 September, Israel's Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said the pact would "open new doors for both Israeli and Indian investors, strengthen Israeli exports, and provide businesses on both sides with certainty and tools to develop in the world's fastest-growing markets".
"India is a growing economic power, and cooperation is a tremendous opportunity for Israel."
Earlier this week, India signed a historic investment pact with Israel.
The deal, known as the Bilateral Investment Agreement (BIA), is meant to bolster investor confidence and provide smoother business transactions between the two countries.
At the signing ceremony in Delhi on 8 September, Israel's Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said the pact would "open new doors for both Israeli and Indian investors, strengthen Israeli exports, and provide businesses on both sides with certainty and tools to develop in the world's fastest-growing markets".
"India is a growing economic power, and cooperation is a tremendous opportunity for Israel."
With new investment pact, India moves to bind its economy to Israel
Azad Essa 14 September 2025 09:12 BST
Earlier this week, India signed a historic investment pact with Israel.
The deal, known as the Bilateral Investment Agreement (BIA), is meant to bolster investor confidence and provide smoother business transactions between the two countries.
At the signing ceremony in Delhi on 8 September, Israel's Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said the pact would "open new doors for both Israeli and Indian investors, strengthen Israeli exports, and provide businesses on both sides with certainty and tools to develop in the world's fastest-growing markets".
"India is a growing economic power, and cooperation is a tremendous opportunity for Israel."
100 percent chance modi is running pegasus and like nso type spyware.
That was likely part of the deal, for expanded or continuing surveillance powers.
Pegasus and the like were likely the flame virus tweaked and repurposed, that infected iranian centrifuges and computers some 20 years back. Described as the most malicious virus to date back then, it listened and watched and logged and shared everything on iranian computers secretly even when off, and ruined centrifuges by mis tweaking their spin rates.
I’ve been using a flip phone as my daily driver for a while now. The smartphone is still around, but it mostly sits in a drawer until bureaucracy or banking apps force me to use it.
For me, the benefits are clear: less distraction, more focus, better sleep. But I know for many people it’s not so easy. Essential apps, social pressure, work requirements… these are real blockers.
I’d like to start a discussion (almost like an informal poll):
If you thought about switching, what’s the single biggest thing that holds you back?
Is it banking? Messaging? Maps? Something else?
I’m genuinely curious because if we can identify the main pain points, maybe it’s possible to work on solutions or even start a small project around it.
So: what would need to change for you to actually give a flip phone a try?
Mama was right: Smartphones are frying our brains. App locks, screentime reminders, digital detoxes: we’ve tried them all. Nothing sticks because honestly? We’r
There really isn’t anything I couldn’t replace my phone with a tablet that stays in the house for, and it has been a growing thought to switch back to a dumb phone.
I just did. If you get any text messages about your upcoming penis surgery tomorrow, know it's legit! (Are they removing one, or adding one? Doesn't matter, I'm sure they'll figure it out...)
There's a terminology issue here, feature phones run apps, flip phones and true dumb phones shouldn't run apps or have any data connections. But it seems more common now to draw the line at Smartphone and anything else is "dumb" even if it's basically just a 2008 smartphone.
Stuff I use the phone for in rough order of importance: - maps and GPS - messaging (signal) - emulators and other quality games (none of that candy crush slop) - ebook reading - Wikipedia / quick research - Lemmy
I could drop lemmy from mobile because it's just a time waster and news source.
Wikipedia is important because too often people are interminably arguing something that can be settled with a 30 second search. Like, you don't need to spend 5 minutes arguing about the population of NJ just look it up.
Games are nice. I don't want to go back to carrying around a second device for games like it's 2001. I could bring a steam deck everywhere but that doesn't fit in my pocket.
I don't have any notifications turned on except like direct messages, so I don't find it much of a distraction.
i have only ever had basic phones, dating back to my first nokia ~ 25 years ago. i don't have the need or desire to have an android or iphone. one time. just once, ever--i enabled cellular data on my phone so i could look something up--the current weather forecast (in the kai weather 'app') because it started to look like i might get stranded out in a bad storm and i forgot to check the forecast before i left.
Literally just having a hotspot built in is keeping me on android. The lappy goes where I go, and that means as long as I have internet access I'm as connected as I could ever want to be.
Basically everyone has wifi, usually available after. I might just go out and get an unlocked dumbphone this week honestly.
Edit: yes I know about the mp02, its on the wishlist. I haven't had a job in over a year so I won't be getting it yet.
I personally dont think you need to switch to a dumb phone to get those benefits, smartphones themselves arent what's causing issues its what you're using. You want less distraction just stop using those apps or turn off push notifications.
Þere are oþer reasons to want a dumber phone. I miss charging my phone once a week, vs 1-2 times per day. I have a bendy-screen flip phone now, but before þese became available, it was hard to get a reasonably sized phone; þe trend was (and still is) phablets. I miss having þe expectation þat my phone would last for years, and not need upgrading because þe screen broke, or because þe OS stopped being updated, or because OS upgrades got more and more bloated and made þe phone slower and unusable over time. I miss þe time before an upgrade would completely fuck established muscle memory patterns because some dumb-shit decided to completely rearrange gestures - requiring an internet search to uncover þe byzantine, cryptic configuration combination to restore þe old behavior.
It's much more þan distractions.
OTOH, I need Jami to communicate wiþ my peer group, because SMS is insecure and incredibly basic. Navigation in your hand is incredibly useful, even þough it's been shown to ruin users' geospatial skills. And smarter address books are better þan old dumb-phone name+phone number address books.
But if I could get a decent, small e-ink phone, wiþ good battery, Jami, an address book, and hell, just a simple browseable map (even w/o navigation), I'd be golden. Jami is þe sticking point, because it introduces a dependency on Android, and þat's where þe fuckery starts.
Yeah, alongside that. Phones also have focus mode, digital wellbeing to limit usage of distracting apps. You can even turn on super power saving mode to limit phone use further and use it for basic functions like phones, messages, web browsing, etc.
I started on a privacy journey because I didn't like that I'm being tracked (by basically everybody) and feel that the technology that I pay for should be service to me, not me as a service to it (and its related parties).
Anyways, along the way I did a few things. Namely, I turned off mail notifications (this was an inadvertent feature since my mail service couldn't send notifications without google services that I removed). I also removed my sim and use data only via a hotspot, to which I don't always have on. These sound like crazy things, and admittedly they aren't for everyone, but the resulting mental shifts are exactly to this point.
Just because I have a device that let's me be available to anybody in any place at any time, doesn't mean I should be, or even need to be, available unless I want to be.
Now I protect my time, and the mental clarity that comes with it. I never was a doom scroller, but even now that concept is even more reduced. The phone is my tool, and I use when needed.
Right, absolutely. I use almost no apps for anything, I just use my phone’s browser for the web sites I want, and have a specific few non-privacy-invasive apps for other things (Voyager for here, Signal for messaging, password manager, etc) and have zero reason I would ever want to give up that functionality to do what, make CALLS? I don’t do that shit. Text message? Nah.
My parents and all their friends used to use PTT with their Nextel phones. It was a super handy feature. I wonder why it fell out of style. Seemed more convenient and less tedious than a phone call for short communications.
There are both open source and commercial apps that do PTT over internet. It turns phones into radio, it even has the capability to have central radio operation rooms for companies and such. It's all automated.
I can't get these people to use Signal instead of SMS.
But nothing internet dependent will turn a phone into a radio. We are in places where even 4G doesn't reach sometimes and if there was a Motorola repeater onsite it'd be great. I've got our company trying it out and the SL300 has been a game changer for our communication on site.
My first cell phone was a flip phone, and I'm not gonna lie, I've considered revisiting my teenage days again and getting one. But I feel like, right now, my smartphone use is very light.
I avoid Meta apps, I don't play mobile games, my biggest vice was reddit which has now become a shithole of bots and censorship so I don't go on there anymore. I read the news on here, chat a little on Discord, check my birdfeeder and that's pretty much it besides occasional use of google maps as needed.
On top of that, this phone is from 2018 so its battery life these days is not great. I think that helps too.
Maybe for those hesitating to get a dumb phone, perhaps start with an older smartphone to whittle your time down?
As someone who always had some kind of PDA (CASIO digital diary, Palm, Compaq iPaq) and switched onto the smartphone bandwagon pretty early (SonyEricsson P800/P910i, Qtek 9000, various Androids and various iPhones) ... I don't think I could enjoy the experience with a dumb phone. I love modern technology too much.
I once had a colleague that religiously only used a Nokia 3210 (the newer 3G/4G model). Which meant 160 character messages only. No emojis, no photos (as MMS were expensive). He was also the kind of person to use paper maps when driving - incl. stopping to look for alternative routes if some road was blocked or jammed. That's definitely not for me.
The only way this could work for me would be to have some small PDA that can connect to the phone to use the Internet. And I appreciate that both devices have been merged into smartphones at some point.
It's weird reading the responses. Our society has pushed smartphones down our throats that people can't imagine living without one. They name things they "need" when in reality it's all convenience in some form or another. All the while the true purpose of these devices is to listen, serve ads and feed on our insecurities, fears and anger.
"our society has pushed smart phones down our throats"
smartphones evolved from older methods of just getting through the day. taking notes, listening to music, calandars, date books, libraries, files, methods of communication.
you make the assumption that everyone is a slave to their device just because it's a smart device.
some of us were alive before smart phones existed. and we'd prefer not to go back in tech. and would instead prefer the devices we have now.
I second this. No one forced me. Even when work tried to force me to use smartphone 2FA it was easy enough to say "I'm not putting any f-ing micrsoft crap on my phone", they found a workaround - magically they could just use the basic telephone network to do the 2FA.
I chose to get one because it's more convenient than having phone, walkman, camera, book, torch , map, compass etc. I still carry many of those things from time to time when I want them, or when I want extra resilience. But I's choose the phone most times because it is a cheap, lightweight, small, convenient alternative that makes so many things just a bit easier.
Bloody hell just faffing around with walkman batteries and recording compilation tapes was annoying enough.
It's also very easy to just leave your phone behind and use the alternatives, they pretty much all still exist in some form. I mean that happens to me regularly whenever I lose my phone of when I forget to charge it or (partly) when I'm just out of range of the celluar network. I don't remember either dying or having any police jump on me and force me to buy a new one or charge it up immediately.
I dint do calls often at all, so a flip/dumb phone doesn't appeal to me much. However, i have been very tempted to upgrade my existing smart watch to one with LTE connectivity and skip the smart phone completely.
The Apple watch, for instance, with LTE can do maps/directions, calls, texts, etc., without needing a smartphone near by. It would be much less to carry, less distractions, and way more convenient.
The big thing it can't currently do, however, is MFA for my job. It can do Authy and many others, but the one we require doesn't work, I've tried many times, so I'm stuck carrying a smartphone around if I want to remain employed.
I’m mostly using my phone as an all in one multimedia device I can fit in my pocket.
I don’t see the flip phone as a good replacement for this kind of use. It wasn’t back in those days either. We used dedicated MP3 players or portable radio for music listening for example.
you couldn't pay me to go backwards in time, sorry!
see I was around before the age of the smartphone. growing up, I thought my cassette Walkman was the most revolutionary thing ever. and when PDAs were new, I would dreaammm about everything being on one electronic device.
smart phones have given me a freedom that younger me never had.
i no longer need to carry a notebook/memobook around, because I have powerful software on my phone that not only let's me note-take, but index and SEARCH my own notes. from my pocket.
i don't need to carry the 3 novels im reading at the moment because they're on the ereader app in my pocket.
contacts, games, all my news sources, photos, videos, all my media.
to me, this is still revolutionary tech and it has only improved my life
i think we are seeing a rise now of adults who were raised as iPad kids who never had to carry all their shit around the way us older individuals have. so they naturally would want to get away from it because they've known no different and they never had to live another way before that point.
its an understandable mentality from that one standpoint. but no, I will never give up my smart phone. i understand the reasons for those that do, but some of us don't really want to go backwards.
Camera is probably the first obstacle. I've got a kid, and I really want to have good documentation of her growing up. If there were a dumbphone with a legit camera, that'd be a big deal for me.
After that, probably maps is the next most important thing that I want an actual smart phone for. I remember getting my first smart phone, and probably the main thing I was excited about was always being able to navigate directly to where I wanted to go.
I highly recommend just getting a real camera. The pictures I took with my camera 11 years ago are still better quality than an iPhone can manage today. Modern cameras are far far better.
this guy, with the "real" camera and the phone camera, but the phone camera is the one I've most consistently got on me, because I can't lug a whole additional piece of hardware around in a camera bag, meanwhile the phone camera pictures are grainy and shitty, and I'd just as soon have a Pixel in my pocket at all times that can take fairly good pictures at all times.
Realistically, cameras can be put into two categories - they either effortlessly fit in your pocket, or don't, and any that don't tend to get left home unless you intend to specifically go take photos. Doesn't really matter how much bigger it is at that point. And if you have a high end smartphone, you probably can't get a camera that fits in your pocket that would be significantly better.
As the saying goes, the best camera is the one you have with you.
maybe you can reasonably throw into a handbag. but it quickly became a logistical nightmare, with how you're essentially stuck with cheap/kit lens (to make it small enough) and humidity is also a deal breaker.
also, would you want to abuse a not-cheap APS-C camera that way? I wouldn't lol
Pretty much nothing i use my phone for can be done on a flip phone. Smartphone is no distraction for me - I just use it when I need it to do something for me.
maps - occasionally GPS. mp3 player mp4s watching on long train / bus rides or when camping. large sd card (500gb) memrise/ language learning app. occasionally guitar tuner occasionally internet is useful for checking events, buying tickets, checking for hotels and stuff. occasionally checking emails. occasionally playing mindustry (when i want my battery to die).
I don't carry a laptop most of the time that i'd need for most of that stuff above. TBH - I can't use many other apps anyway because I don't want GPS or microG installed - so I'm mostly just f-droid apps.
Edit - i'd also prefer something like simpleX to SMS, but I don't actually know anyone else who uses it - so not an issue really. I just have to SMS.
No decent (local) music player, no DSP, no music streaming with newpipe, decent video player to watch series in bed, screen too small to read books, no e2ee messaging, no web browser, useless camera, operating system without security updates.
I honestly couldn't care less about calls and SMS, I only use that like few times a year.
I use my iPhone for a ton of different things. I pretty much never use it to make calls and hate talking on the phone (which is what flip phones are optimized for).
No way. Life is way better with smart phones. Tap to pay, maps, always having a camera, always having my notes, working as a mobile hotspot, controlling my home security system. 25 other things.
This stuff used to be so much harder. I’m not going back.
I will freely admit there are some dangerous addictive and invasive aspects to it also. I’m ruthless about what apps I will grant permissions to. And I don’t browse the App Store getting tempted by their promises.
I think the appeal of our phones not having to be a computer and not needing all the same rigor and paranoia and extra steps of a computer was really exciting. But it hasn’t turned out to be true. So now I treat it like a computer and approach everything with that level of skepticism. And also treat it like the gateway to capitalism that it is and I am skeptical of anything that’s trying to take my data or money. I think with the right attitude it’s a net positive device in my life
Speaking as someone who never has carried a smartphone, there are a bunch of tradeoffs. I do my banking in person, for instance, and that can be mildly inconvenient. I don't take a lot of photographs (when I do, I use an old-style single-purpose camera). "Portable media" is a CD player, and I carry a paperback book if I think I might have to wait somewhere for more than ten minutes or so. And so on. Just continuing to live the same way as I did a quarter-century ago.
I expect, however, that it's a lot easier not to miss what you never had in the first place.
All of that, plus the benefits of having a good pocket camera to carry around - spontaneous photography is my thing and having a good camera phone solves that equation nicely.
And before anyone says "get a real camera", I have real cameras and there's no way they can be carried in my pocket the same way a smartphone does lol. That and the smaller they get, the further image quality worsens to the point where you might just use a (good camera) phone instead.
I grew up with dumb phones, and you couldn't pay me enough to go back to using them - they suck!
Doesn't really make much sense for me to switch to a flip phone unless it was specifically built for privacy/security. SMS and regular voice calls are insecure, it likely could connect to fake cell towers uninhibited, it likely doesn't have hardware switches to disconnect various features e.g. modem, microphone, or camera.
I’ve lived through the cell phone invention, to flip phones, to smartphones. They were terrible back then and I doubt that’s changed now.
Now, I do understand the reason why you moved back to one. For me, I just got aggressive about notifications and turned off most of them. I stopped social media tied to friends and family and am selective about what I’m on and for how long. Takes more personal willpower (or whatever) but you do get used to it in the long run and feel better.
Not at all. It's really hard to live without the practical features of a smartphone, like web browsing and maps. What I need is privacy, not to throw it all away for a dumbphone.
I believe a lot of the benefits you claim dumbphones provide are all caused by abandoning social media. There's nothing wrong with technology, it's just social media. You don't need to use a dumbphone just to escape social media.
Same. My "smartphone" usage is about 10% phone, 10% SMS service, 10% camera, 5% flashlight, 10% GPS + Map tool, 15% e-mail, and 40% web browser... I carried a pretty capable flip phone from 2006-2013, the things I liked best about it were its longevity and its long battery life (up to a week on standby, 3-4 days even with normal usage.) However, even upgraded with GPS capability, the small screen would have made for a poor map experience, and e-mail and web browser were just out of its practical reach.
Stop browsing social media, maybe install Tor if you want that level of privacy - Smartphones can do that...
I simply wouldn't. A dumbphone does mostly the things I don't use a phone for.
And I don't mean fortnite and tickytocks, I've grown up through (most) of the history of mobile phones, I started with my mothers old Nokia 2110 back in like... 1998? I remember how awesome it was to finally have a phone, then to be able to get the bus schedules with the painfully slow WAP connection so I didn't have to call home, then to have navigation, replace the mp3 player, camera, and eventually even mostly my laptop.
I want to have a datapad with access to all the devices and information in my pocket at all times. If I need it to do something, I know there's an app for it probably. It's awesome.
I'd really prefer that the datapad wouldn't then leech all of my information in return, though. Oh, and bring back physical keyboards. I'd give my left nut for an HTC Desire Z with 2025 hardware.
Yes, I had to delete lemmy, reddit, twitter, mastodon, all games etc.
But I see 0 harm in: - 2FA authenticator apps (google authenticator, app for government ID, bank, ...) - DHL (unlocks packing station / parcel distributing machine here) - calendar (with voice assistant) - Pixel, iPhone, Samsung and some others are a fantastic camera! 10 years ago, it'd be a great deal just for that one feature. I used to pay USD/EUR 250 - 500 for a hobby-level camera that was worse - read my mobile CO2 sensor - not crucial, but occasionally show someone something in a video call - send injured animal photo / video right to the wildlife rescue station for advice (~ 2x per year) - plain old mp3 player - some might read eBooks, which is a good use of it, but I still prefer a hardcopy
So yes, on my 2nd smartphone only (first in 2021), but I find that it's worth it these days.
Enshittification intensifies, but a Linux phone might become very viable in a few years, especially when LLM adapters become easier to use. Self-hosted alternatives to google/apple photos are already very advanced.
The benefits of having a full-featured computer in my pocket are just too many for me to ditch it permanently if I have a choice. While it's certainly able to distract me if I let it, I don't think I've ever had it disrupt my sleep (aside from late night phone calls).
I think it's better for most (and potentially easier) to keep to the smartphone and just better control the applications that are on it and the notifications that they raise to make sure it isn't overly distracting you. This may require disabling certain pre-installed apps (e.g. Facebook is one I always disable and just interact with via browser when I want to). Another pattern to follow is adding barriers to the things that distract you most so it takes a little more effort to interact with your distractions. Hank Green's Focus Friend app that got popular recently is an example of that -- placing an emotional barrier on getting distracted when you need to focus.
But ultimately, we all need to do what's best for ourselves. Everyone's suceptibility to distraction is different and if a dumbphone is what works best for you, then by all means, go with that for as long as it's useful.
My "smart" phone is rarely used as a telephone. It's set to silent, all notifications turned off, blocks unknown numbers, transcribes voicemail and spends most of the day as a window to the world.
I'm not sure what, if anything, a "dumb" phone would add to my life, except more interruption, more administration to keep contacts up to date, and yet another device to charge and maintain.
presumably having a dumb phone that only does calls and maybe texts can help you stay in contact / reachable but without the possible distractions of the phone itself.
Headphone jack. I just can't say this enough, despite the fact I have apple's wireless earbuds (of some clique name) in my pocket at this very second. Headphone jack.
Don't ask for it for yourself. Ask for it for the d-bag sharing music of some guy grunting over a drum track on the bus. We need to save him from the damage to his reputation when his friends remind him they knew he listened to such trash later when he needs to deny it.
Does it actually happen? How so? I never had any bank or anything else force me to use a phone, so I am having hard time imagining that. So I am genuinely curious about this portion of your message.
2 factor authentication via app/texting I'd imagine.
An authenticator app is better than basically anything but a physical token / key generator, but the apps are more universally supported. No one is probably going to spoof your phone number to get into your accounts.... But doesn't hurt to me more secure about it anyway.
I am using a YubiKey for those (with a desktop authenticator app). Oddly enough, I do that because I do not trust Android/iPhone to stay secure. I actually trust them even less than a plain old SMS-based auth.
I tried a lot of things to keep my phone/screen usage down.l, including a dump phone. One day I got this brilliant idea to shut my phone off. That was way more efficient than any of the tricks I tried. When I need it for something I turn it on. I've since removed most fun apps from the thing.
I still have one game that I play, Lemmy, RSS and web browsers. Apart from those it's mostly a bureaucracy machine with messaging, email, banking, MFA, work stuff, maps, lots of apps for managing tickets (it's actually ridiculous), life trackers for some board games. Music, audiobooks and podcasts.
The smart phone is a convenient device that makes my life easier. I don't whis to handicap myself when I can just turn the phone off instead. I also like to leave the phone at home if for instance I'm going to a party at a well known location.
A flip phone/dumbphone would sort of be mutually exclusive with my use case. I use my smartphone nearly exclusively as a lightweight mobile computer for web browsing, SSHing into my server, and messaging over internet (not SMS). I rarely use the "phone" features of my phone, i.e. phone calls and SMS. So I'd be losing out over the features I do use, in favour of features I don't use.
If you're being distracted by your phone and a dumbphone works for you, good on you. I think most people are like me and use their phones as a small mobile computer rather than a phone though, in which case distractions are best handled with one of the many apps/browser add-ons/etc that block websites or apps.
I thought about switching, but instead I uninstalled social media apps and started using it more like an e-reader/MP3 player/messenger. It's worked pretty well! Been reading a ton in the last year. I may be addicted to fanfiction now though.
Google maps navigation, web browsing, YouTube, music streaming, WhatsApp, email, social media apps for entertainment, news apps, notes app, to do app, public transit app, ebook and audiobook apps, utility apps, good camera, good screen, good speakers.
If I consider all this there is just no way to go back to the old school flip phones or the candy bar phones with the T9 keypad for me, best thing I can do is hide all the apps I don't want to be distracted by, put app locks on the addictive ones and just be mindful of the time I spend on my phone and figure out other ways to spend my time like dedicated ebook readers or paper books and other activities
I think so too, there are so many useful tools on a phone, nobody has to use social media and apps that have a bad influence instead of just being practical and useful.
I have a minimalistic home screen with essential apps and all else is in folders for ex.
what would need to change for you to actually give a flip phone a try?
For me to start using my phone as the main way of my computing needs and entertainment needs. Which I don't. I only use it to send messages and read when my laptop is not in my hands. So I essentially have a not-so-smartphone, not-so-dumbphone.
My understanding is that flip phones only do calls and sms ? So I never call or text.. Only thing I use is an XMPP client, web browser, youtube music (until I replace that with selfhosted) and would use maps (but right now I broke the GPS on my phone so not that ...)
So I don't think I could use a flip phone, mostly because none of these applications except maybe music work on a flip phone ? Webbrowser needs a full sized screen...
Web browser. SMS and calling are completely useless. I need a phone so I can access the internet outside. I dont want a dumb 20 year old phone I want a modern phone without the pointless bullshit.
My ideal phone would have a small screen, replaceable battery, shit camera, shit speakers, 5G, two USB C slots and be able to run android apps and be cheap
Same minus Android apps, like late old Nokia ones. Nokia stuff was perfect. Also UX is always treated today as if those tasks were impossible to combine with a good UX, and thus modern typical UX is just how you can do it.
Except late Nokia before MS acquisition disproves that by its existence. Its UX was better than any of that shit, with all the necessary things possible to do.
Maybe not a dumb phone but I would love to use a phone with an e-ink screen. I know there are some projects about this or some Chinese phones but I haven't met an e-ink phone that I can install a custom ROM yet.
That would solve most of the issues others have brought up. It's probably fast enough for navigation and definitely fast enough for banking, MFA, RCS/Signal, etc..
Try the HiSense A9 Pro. I don't have one personally but from what I have seen and read, it can run Lineage OS quite well (actually better than it's own Android OS). I am considering it eventually but haven't made the move yet. Currently on Moto Razr 2024 which I am using with mostly FOSS apps and no social media whatsoever. I used to have a Pixel 9 Pro running Graphene OS which I truly enjoyed but it died on me and the warranty was not applicable due to me having installed that unsupported OS... So yeah, shit happens and I got myself this Razr for good price urgently since I was travelling when it happened.
Thanks for the suggestion, seems actually nice with all the ability to install a custom ROM. Sadly, it's not practical for me to get it from abroad because of our government's horrendous regulations about buying anything from outside of the country unless you are a trader. Even if I manage to buy it without any problems, there is also IMEI unlock fee which is almost the same price with this phone. My best bet would be, get this phone via a friend who comes from abroad and change the IMEI to my old phone. So, not soon but maybe some day.
1) navigation while traveling - don't need it much, if at all at home, but I travel often enough for work that losing that capability would be painful.
2) MFA - authenticator apps are the most convenient way to do MFA. SMS/email are terrible options for this and should only be used if there is absolutely no other option.
3) Access to the internet while away from home, both while traveling and while out and about
4) Music playback in the car
5) Communication - most of my friends don't use SMS/voice to talk, instead preferring Discord or Signal
Basically everything else I do on my phone could be done from a more proper computer with minimal inconvenience.
All I really need is calls, sms, a solid browser and some more robost messaging apps like signal and matrix/element - I'm a prime candidate for PostmarketOS if we ever get a stable piece of hardware. I have an old oneplus 6 that I've played with it on, its so close. If a flip phone could master that today, sure
I do use tap to pay, but meh I dont think I would miss it and android auto in my car could easily just be a bluetooth audio connection
I hadn't even thought of it from this angle. That's a hard stop for me right there.
Any flip phone you can basically hook up to bitpim or a cellebrite or whatever and copy its entire contents in a matter of seconds. There's no challenge. There's no security whatsoever.
Once upon a time, I set up my phone so I didn't need to look at it: it was basically e-ink and audiobooks.
Then I started adding games and learning apps back (I don't remember why), and now I feel like I'm not going back until e-ink reaches parity with smartphones (refresh rate, cell coverage, near-current OS).
well, I work in IT. So I am required to use apps like Teams for mobile and DUO 2FA in order to authenticate my laptop sessions.
Now, could I use only SMS/email 2FA? Technically yes. And I could just have Teams on my work laptop and have that nearby all the time, but it would be extremely inconvenient. Navigation would also be a big problem. Due to the nature of my job, I frequently have to visit a large number of different sites around my area. Having to open my laptop each time I need to go somewhere, open up a map site like OSM or Google maps to get the directions, print them off or write them down, then follow them manually hoping that I don't encounter random slowdowns or closures in an area I am not familiar with is basically a non-starter for me.
As for personal use, navigation rears its ugly head again. I often will be traveling with friends or family and we decide on a whim to change our destination for dinner or hangouts after based on times, appetites, budgets, closures, etc. Having a map app on my phone makes that easy to do. It would be impossible to do that without it, unless I had a near exhaustive knowledge of my whole city and surrounding suburbs.
Honestly navigation is the #1 thing. Random other stuff comes up, like my mobile password manager Bitwarden, or my various apps like my City's bus/metro app, and my city's parking app. Both of which again, I could make do without, but it would be extremely tough and inconvenient.
I've decided that the happy medium for me is to use as much FOSS phone tech as possible. That way at least the tracking and data harvesting is minimized and I am generally not supporting megacorps.
I use GrapheneOS, with mostly FOSS apps. The proprietary apps I do use are isolated with GOS's special sauce. I use Magic Earth for my navigation, which while not open source, the data sets they use are, and they are not google, and based in the EU, so far better privacy than Google's trash.
I wish I could switch to a flip phone, I've seriously considered it many times over the last several years. But for my lifestyle, it's just not feasible. The best balance for me is to compute ethically on my mobile. I have thought about going for the weekend with just a dumb phone, that might be possible, but I'll have to see.
I have exactly one game and exactly one 2fa app that I would meaningfully miss out on switching to a dumb pbone, outside of those two things I would genuinely consider it.
I don't use a smartphone enough to worry about it. If I am using my phone, most of the time it's either Anki, Google Maps, or, like you mention, banking/government stuff.
Texting via SMS (or whatever it is these days) isn't really a thing in Japan, either, which makes things more difficult especially as I despise talking on the phone. If, for example, I'm at the supermarket and wife remembers something she needs, getting that message is good
The one reason I have a nice, relatively new phone is that I want a fairly large, OLED screen for reading after dark. Yeah, I use it for a bunch of other stuff, but I wouldn't really miss any of those. The only thing I really need is the ability to make it look like text is floating in the dark over my head in bed.
I might switch to a flip phone if it had gps and maps.
That's simply the killer app for smart phones, at this point it's a necessary part of my life. Without it I need a separate device just for that, and that device is actually less useful.
Edit: now that I'm reading other responses I have to agree, secure messaging and 2fa are really important too.
I could live without everything else, but to be honest, I don't use much else. A few games, Lemmy, music apps, audiobook apps. Of those, Lemmy is the app most likely to leave me feeling upset, or like I want to doomscroll.
I think limiting the apps I use is the biggest thing I can do to not make the phone a negative influence for me. But to be clear, if that starts happening, Lemmy is the first to go, I already don't use any other social media.
I think it definitely depends on the persons needs. I use my phone for maps when I am going somewhere I am unfamiliar with. I use it for pod casts and audio books all the time. I use it for checking my bank account. Could I use something else to do these? Sure, but do I have access to all of the secondary devices to accomplish all of the above, not always. So yeah, the smart phone did become the catch all for a ton of daily processes, and I don’t have to carry 10 devices anymore.
Eh, I see no reason to switch to a dumb phone, because I don't think I'm that bad with my current phone. My main User profile on GrapheneOS is pretty minimal when it comes to apps, it's mostly messaging, banking, navigation, workout and music (I should probably move Lemmy and Pixelfed to a different profile, but they both have pretty little potential for scrolling for too long since the new content is naturally limited). The only game on this profile is the one I'm developing as a hobby project lol
All the annoying Apps (Secondary Email, Amazon, Aliexpress, Linkedin, Smartlife, Grocery store coupon apps etc) are banished to a secondary profile that has no permission to run in the background or send any notifications.
nothing would stop me and honestly if I could find a decent and new one similar to my old Sprint/Nokia phone from like 2001 I'd use it. I can't stand smart phones, I never liked them.
I would not give up the smartphone for a dumb phone, primarily for the superior security and privacy smartphones provide that dumb phones just do not have technology for.
This conversation has a tone of settling for inferior technology to do the work a well-designed smartphone experience should.
The smartphone can be made pretty "dumb" - the user experience has more to do with the software (apps) added to it than the hardware (the smartphone) itself.
Aside from the apps the platform bundles, I only have Signal (for text and voice), email, a browser, calendar, a note taking app and a FOSS music player. I have disabled all sound and visual notifications and removed all apps off the main screen.
Of late, I've moved the SIM-card onto a secondary phone that resides in my bag, which is only switched-on for navigation or if I need WiFi in a snap.
It has not always been this way for me and I am sure my setup will continue to evolve as my needs change.
I know exactly what I need my phone for: music, maps, banking, messaging, books and sometimes traveling. Anything else I have is a distraction that I'm addicted to have.
You know what keeps me from binning it? The FOMO, and not being able to hold conversations with friends and coworkers because I'm would not be tuned to the latest trends and happenings, and that sucks.
Dumb phone to take with you for calls / text messages and a non Sim card smartphone that would have apps on it but be hotspot over using the dumb phones data. Basically wifi only
That way if I were just doing errands on the weekend, just take the dumb phone. And then take the smartphone for onsite job trips and whatnot.
Smartphone would be degoogled. Remember, 2fa authentication doesn't need mobile data to work, its time based
I prefer smaller smart phones. I like having the mobile computer with me, but I want my pocket space back. I did look at jellyphone, but seems like service is spotty and i travel between countries. Stuck with the smaller pixels for now as the least offensive option while providing good compatibility for apps and travel.
Honestly, for me, it's the one-two-three punch of easy notes taken anywhere + podcasts + camera.
notes : before smartphones I carried a notebook in my pocket. And sometimes I still do; writing longhand is still pleasant for me, and being able to sketch and doodle with my notes is still clunky with a touchscreen, amazingly. But the experience of losing my notebook, or not having the right one with me when I need it, is disproportionately frustrating to me.
podcasts : this is one of the few ways my ADHD brain truly focuses. Listening to a podcast while walking, biking, running, driving, doing dishes, cleaning a room, mowing the lawn, etc. is almost foolproof in getting me to pay attention to the content. I have to be in the right mood to read, and videos are background noise to me after having the Discovery Channel or Scifi Channel on 24/7 in my apartment in college. Before smartphones I had a trusty RCA Lyra that went everywhere with me; and while the form factor and experience were fantastic, I now have a backlog of over 800 podcast episodes that would not fit on that device's 512MB internal storage. (Also, I just got a pair of noise canceling earbuds, and I have to admit I really like them)
camera : I've chosen my last four smartphones based on the camera quality. I've got kids, and being able to take adorable pictures of them at the drop of a hat is very useful to me. I don't need all the computational nonsense, but I do need it to be good enough and ever-present. Before smartphones, I would occasionally bring a digital camera around with me, but I can't afford one that would give me the quality I want, and it wouldn't fit in my pocket anyway.
Messaging, fitness tracking, and work stuff is also easier, though not in a way that I don't think I could backfill with other things if needed.
Nostalgia aside, the experience of these big three use cases is indisputably better with a smartphone than it was in 2005. Could I live without them? Yes! Absolutely. But I'd prefer not to, and since I shook my social media addiction I don't really feel the need to.
Well I had the displeasure of having to use a candybar style phone my mother was using cause it was 'easier' for her.
Ages to write a message
Very difficult to navigate through very similar SMSs (automated ones like electronic prescriptions) and pick the correct one based on date. Or even get an accurate broader picture of how many SMSs you received and when.
Did not setup email but I believe it would also be horrendous
But in my case, I disagree with the base premise of this post. The biggest anxiety and distraction caused by my phone is via phone calls. Asynchronous communications like sms and email are much better for me.
Whatsapp. That's the only fucking reason I'm not using a dumbphone. In Brazil, everyone uses it. Need to talk to a company? Whatsapp. Friends and family? Wpp. Book a medical checkup? Wpp.
There's also the problem of cell phone fees being abusive when calling/messaging people from a different company.
Pretty much because my smartphone is basically my digital Swiss army knife. Like even if I got a separate digital camera and MP3 Player, I also use it for navigation and to communicate with my parents and friends over signal, and like hell I am gonna give up signal. Add to that it's also my portable wifi hotspot when I'm out, my train tickets, and how I pay for things when I'm sans-purse, I don't know if I can give up my smartphone.
Would it be good for me to get off social media and to stop doomscrolling the news? Yes, but I can do that by going out and touching grass.
The main blocker is MFA. I can technically work around Google Authenticator (I use Aegis currently) because I can run it on my laptop, but I also need Okta verify (work VPN), Symantec VIP (bank), and the Steam app.
And some other very nice to haves:
Signal messenger
SSH client
Libby app
Organic Maps
I can find workaround for the rest.
That said, wouldn't it just be easier to uninstall the apps that cause distractions?
I haven't. I looked into it, and that's quite the drama. I like the name of CoMaps better, so I'll check it out. I see shared commits, but they seem to go to Organic Maps first and then I guess get cherry-picked onto CoMaps?
Precisely. I'd be more likely to switch to one of those pocket "hot spot" devices. Just a thing in my pocket that gives devices I control internet access and maybe has a shitty web interface I can log into for basic SMS when absolutely necessary. No microphone, no camera, no GPS, no access to my actual computing environment. Only 2 downsides are maintaining battery charge in multiple devices and the fact that those hotspots are generally hot garbage, and so unreliable.
Maybe, a flip phone if one existed that was 1) a full-time good quality internet hotspot (i.e., good battery), and 2) lacked a GPS and camera, and hardware disconnected the microphone when closed. Now that I think about it, that would be a fantastic device... if it existed.
I'm not a toddler so don't need help with "distractions" so nothing. That's like reverting computers to windows 95 just because modern operating systems can run Steam.
I don't even know where to begin. And I am not even going to bother, I am to old to keep explaining this shit. Don't even know why I replied as long as its clear you're giving mad neckbeard vibes
There are many reasons including neurodivergence that someone could benefit from external limitations. Infantalizing poor impulse control is ableist and condescending.
Nah I said nothing about disability. This notion that healthy adults need mental herding is very pervasive and has absolutely captured the pop tech culture.
This notion that healthy adults need mental herding is very pervasive
Need is a strong word, but it is very true that the environment you put people in will influence their behavior. Grocery stores filled with attractively packaged highly processed foods will drive more highly processed food consumption than if you had to show proof of age ID and sign a disclosure before being allowed into the back room to buy those same foods in plain brown wrapper containers blazoned with all the health warnings that apply to them.
Handheld screen tech delivers dopamine release as powerful as most recreational drugs / experiences. People are definitely "herded" by how that tech is delivered, default settings that most of them never take the time to learn how to change, other settings that annoyingly constantly reset themselves to undesired PAY ATTENTION TO ME configurations, etc.
So, yeah, mindfulness of how your devices are shaping your behavior is a "higher level of awareness" that we as a society should be collectively trying to attain.
I haven’t thought about switching mainly because I listen to music, books from the library and podcasts on it. I don’t want to go back to carrying 2 devices. But I mostly use my phone to look stuff up, check email, and music/books etc. I don’t really use social media on it.
It’s solving device addiction with another device. Sure it will be very interesting to investigate phone models to pick from. Indeed we are good at tricking ourselves. Creating “windows” with no phone at all works better for me.
Why would I want a device that I never use? I only make phone calls roughly 3 times per week. I message multiple times a day, but flip phones had shitty interfaces for typing. The vast majority of my phone use is web search, camera, navigation, and messaging. Flip phones could get better cameras than they used to have. Their screens were too small to do great at web searching. Navigation might work, I guess. Although I used to love my Treo and Pre for the full physical keyboard, I prefer swype typing now to tapping or physical keys.
Having a software authentication that can hold multiple keys for MFA. I’d love to switch to a dumb phone but that’s pretty much a requirement and I’ve never found a device for MFA that is as convenient for MFA
I was gonna buy one of those Lite phones, but it was expensive so I just deleted time-wasting apps and now my smartphone respects my time. Hardest part was getting people to just text me instead of various social media messenger apps. In the end, I deleted my accounts and now everyone from school thinks I'm dead, but those close to me can reach me easily. Sometimes I still binge YouTube via Firefox on my phone though, so I installed "Unhook" which blocks recommended videos, so I can only see what I search for.
I guess just remember that your smartphone can be dumb too. And still a lot more convenient than a flip phone.
I've been using a flip phone as my actual phone for a while now. I just find the tactility of being able to flip open the phone to answer, and flip shut the phone to hang up, is so much more satisfying that swiping on a screen. I do have my smartphone because I need WhatsApp and MFA for work related reasons, but I have no desire to be accessible 24/7, so if I'm out and about you can fuck off until I get back.
My smartphone isn't a phone with "extra" features to me. My smartphone is a portable personal computer with extra sensors, a GPS receiver, and wireless internet, which also happens to have a phone app. I don't want to carry an extra "dumb" phone. I would prefer my smart watch to be the communication and identity hub for me and my devices: holding the SIM card, acting as a wifi hotspot, routing calls and internet to my handheld brick or laptop, etc. Instead of acting like a third party add-on, it would be a mostly distraction free core. Let me use a smartphone, laptop, steam deck, cobbled together cyber deck, or whatever else have you as my local screen, storage cache, and/or proper desktop. Then I can put the screens down or leave them behind without feeling cut off or potentially stranded in a world that practically requires it to navigate with any ease. I want a smart watch that enables me to leave the house without car keys, driver's license, and credit cards; essentially with nothing but my watchphone. I want to be a cyberpunk Dick Tracy. What I want, with the freedoms and open standards I want, with the privacy I want, without being locked into a single monopoly walled garden, is probably a pipe dream. I want what is probably the next evolution of the "year of the Linux desktop". But a kid can dream.
My job. I have to answer emails in the field, I need GPS to get to job sites (they don't sell ADC map books at 7-11 anymore). I need to take pictures and respond to texts. I don't need these things but as a business owner I'd rather have the one smart box in my pocket than have to carry around the individual tools for reasons. Also, I carry a flip phone. It just happens to be an extremely smart flip phone (Razr)
Oh, and ParkMobile. I can pay for parking nationwide with my phone. And Audiobooks. and... well shit, I guess it doesn't end really. Sudoku while I poo for example.
Oh, oh, and also... why would I want to get rid of my smart phone? You meantion getting sleep. I don't use my phone in bed. Bed is for sleeping and sexy times. I don't do social media (unless you include this which is really just the modern version of channel surfing with chat attachment.) Maybe it's my age. I didn't grow up with screens like kids these days so to me it's just another tool. I'm responding to this on my PC not my phone.
Mainly my music. I’ve long thought about a dumb phone to avoid gps tracking everywhere as well as the spyware built in and the needless looking at it all the time. But music and podcasts need to come with me wherever I go. So I’d be carrying something akin to a smart phone around anyway. Doesn’t really side step the problem effectively.
Anytime your phone reaches out to towers it's being tracked. Hell, HAM radio operators can be tracked with gprs just by micing up. It's part of the reason I still have my license. The other is having a backup if I go somewhere with no phone reception. I don't have an ear for code but I can pump out SOS or scream mayday on all the frequencies (and yeah, of course it's a flashed handset, I will pay fines if it means mine or others lives are saved)
i don't want my phone to be dumb, I want it to be open source, front to back! The issue of smartphones isn't that its "too smart", instead we should talk about why the control of our phones aren't within our grasp, but on the palm of corpos and govs.
you want to use your smartphone while keeping it simple? Install less apps and disable ALL telemetry (this is where being open source comes in).
Aside from the Rotary Un-Phone, there are pretty much no dumb phones anymore. Those that market themselves as dumb are just reskinned full-fat platforms.
Even almost all flip phones are smart phones with a dumb skin, as they run either Android or KaiOS.
The main reason why I would switch is for device security - a true dumb phone OS that operates purely out of the ROM and has no ability to install anything that could survive a reboot.
And for something that primitive, it would be a flip phone on par with the Motorola StarTac. Simple black-on-green screen, low-res display, with a calendar and address book as the only non-phone, non-SMS functionality.
Well, I can buy a GPS map device. Cash payments are not much of a problem until the Govt. starts adding that extra tax on cash withdrawal from ATMs. I will need to wait for companies to grow a brain and stop using WhatsApp for work.
Buying train tickets, buying concert tickets, checking schedules for work or school or train times, communicating with people over something that isn't SMS or calls, taking nice photos on the go, listening to music.
Of course many of these would be solvable with a different device (handheld camera, mp3 player) or by buying tickets and checking schedules in advance, but the trade off isn't worth it for me
I would buy a feature phone today, preferably something eink, if it was painless to switch my SIM between it and my smart phone. Having to take the SIM out of one, put it in the other, then turn on the phone is not painless and they do not design the little draws to support thousands of open/closes against the contacts to read the SIM.
There are times I want the smart phone to have the SIM because I will want or need the extra functionality and if you just make the feature phone do everything then its just morphed into a smart phone with extra steps. I want the feature phone to be basic as I can get away with.
That said, I really want google wallet or similar that I can share between the two phones for my passes and tickets, audio streaming support, and maps. Something like a Hisense A9 would fit the bill but the temptation to add more apps than the basics would be too great, plus I still need a way to switch SIMs between the phones.
I cannot replace my smart phone, rather than supplement, with any feature phone because I use it for such a wide range of things. I can ssh from it to my home devices, I can manage my bank accounts, it tracks my health, it provides video and audio streaming on and offline, I can read and write documents/spreadsheets, plus anything you can do via a web browser.
I’m currently in Asia and – in this country at least – you are basically required to have a smart phone to do anything. Credit cards don’t exist. And they use QR payments for most things. So that implies a camera and a banking app (for your bank). Many places don’t accept cash anymore (!) - I don’t really get how they can do that because not everyone has a smart phone (poor people (obviously) & tourists (not even allowed to get bank accounts here) come immediately to mind — of which there are millions of both). I think so far it’s not a big deal because these people just spend their money elsewhere, but I worry this will become entrenched.
Anyway, I tried “dumb phoning” my iPhone and there’s just way too many things I rely on daily that require a smart phone: paying by QR code, banking, international banking, translating, navigation, ride booking, accommodation booking, messaging on iMessage, Line, Messenger (almost everyone in this country uses the last 2). When travelling in a foreign country, these things aren’t really optional. If I can’t pay for a bus ticket or food, I could be really screwed.
Now you might say some of things in my list are doable without apps; like accommodation booking… sure. But even if you find a place old skool style, how do you contact them? Most don’t have web pages, they use Facebook pages. And the contact info is usually a Line or Messenger id. Even if somehow you managed to find a phone number, they are unlikely to speak English. I’m old enough to remember travelling before the internet and honestly it was great and worked well, but that was because everyone was on the same footing. We’ve lost that and I actually think it’s much more difficult now.
I’ve gotten rid of most social media (except fediverse) which has helped my screen time a lot, but I think going back to a feature phone is, unfortunately, impossible here. I do hope that they see how economically unfair requiring a smart phone is though and at least pass some laws that require shops to take cash payments (last I heard these laws did exist in the West).
“Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die," Elon Musk told the large crowds at Saturday's “Unite the Kingdom” rally.
More than 100,000 people descended on Britain’s capital on Saturday for one of the country’s largest far-right rallies in decades.
The “Unite the Kingdom” rally was organized by Tommy Robinson, a convicted fraudster with a violent criminal record, and attended by billionaire Elon Musk via video link. Amid a sea of flag-waving and soccer-style chanting from large crowds that exceeded expectations, violent clashes with police led to dozens of arrests.
It came amid a surge of nationalism in the U.K., with a far-right party topping the polls, and the murder of American conservative activist Charlie Kirk — an assassination Robinson used to mobilize support in the run-up to the event.
Tens of thousands of people are expected to descend on Britain’s capital on Saturday for the largest far-right rally in decades, organized by anti-immigration activist Tommy Robinson.
here in the states younger patrons coming in the shop have said they related to him and are in mourning
fucking nuts just yesterday a younger couple came in and was the first thing mentioned and was like what about his views on keeping women in their place or his other extreme owner class ideals and woman with him stayed very quiet and busied herself with petting the shop cat
nothing but praise for the guy came from them or any other of most of the younger patrons and even the older crowd seems to be for him but the media is toxic and controlled as is all narratives even with education
United States was never the United States for all of us here but feels like getting worse but want to keep being hopeful just challenging
Right wingers in Europe are becoming more and more radicalised. I can see it everywhere but EU has itself to blame due to its failed immigration policy particularly from Africa and middle East.
Actually, opinions are the foundation of democracy and therefore must be respected always. You might not agree with someone's opinion but I'm not here to convince you otherwise. You are clearly here because your extremist voice and flagrant disrespect of anyone you disagree with stands in your own personal development. People like you are the reason the right wingers become more extreme. Proof of the matter is obvious everywhere in Europe. Politicians don't respect the wishes of the people who elected them. The EU has had an immigration problem for at least a decade , they are now electing extremist and populist politicians out of desperation that their voice isn't heard. Populist parties rise to power out of general unhappiness of the electorate, not the other way around.
You might not like them, hell I certainly don't but you cant change the society in a few years, it takes decades, even hundreds of years. Feel free to drown yourself in the sorrows of your utopia when right wing nutters are being elected all around Europe.
Opinions are the foundation of all ideologies. Hitler's opinions on undesirables for example.
The reason right wingers become more extreme is because of allowing their opinion on violence go unchecked lets them begin to actually start practicing it. Even the Charlie Kirk killer was a Trumpist who thought Kirk was too much to the left.
The issue in humanity has always been that the left has always only fought back once things become dire. They've only ever functioned as a check to a society's collapse rather than a deterrent to it's downward decline. If the left actually adhered to the paradox of intolerance, then society and humankind would progress much faster, because those who are a factual detriment to society - the greedy, the power hungry, the psychopathic - wouldn't be allowed to gain power, either permanently or through meaningful consequences.
The issue is the left is inherently peaceful to a fault. They don't actually go out and start punching let alone killing until it's too late and they've literally been forced into it.
It's also why rarely does violence actually permanently fix things - because those willing to do it usually want power rather than justice, and even if that is the case, it does not remain permanent policy.
But then, being reactionary rather than preventative to threats has always been the greatest fault of humanity, but especially the left. Not being aggressive with aggressors early on, not dealing with climate change until it's kinda too late, etc.
And democracy is an ideology that we are supposed to follow. That ideology comes mostly in the form of representative democracy where you elect someone that is supposed to represent your group.
You don't know if Tyler Robinson is left or right , that is all media speculation at this stage. As someone that lived behind the iron curtain, the concept that left is inherently peaceful is complete nonsense. Neither left or right is inherently violent or peaceful. Violence of the far left and far right is always a result of someone who thinks their ideology is superior, disregards all moral grounds, and forces their will and/or dogma on somebody else. Leninist-Marxist, PLO, Earth Liberation Front, too many examples to list. I do agree that the left is generally less violent today.
As someone who lived behind the iron curtain, you may not realize this, but people lie.
Something or someone calling itself leftist does not mean it is. The USSR pretending to have been socialist is about as authentic as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea being a democracy.
Earth Liberation Front is about the most violent actual leftists example you listed, and even they pale in comparison to what the right wing does, and is again an appropriate response mechanism for permanently altering the climate of the entire planet in a devastating way for the fictional concept of money we have collectively decided to value. If anything, again proving my point of too little too late when you consider the consequences, and considering they formed back when there was acid rain literally happenings due to pollution.
The right is inherently violent because it's an ideology of power and authority, not union and equality. Belief in power and authority is inherently violent, because subjection of humans goes against the inherent will of personhood, and will inevitably lead to conflict. The pursuit of power is also inherently violent, because it requires therefore forceful subjection. That's why all authoritarian governments are right wing.
I can think of only one example in recent human history that broke that mold - only one dictator that, as far as I know, sought power solely for the purpose of improving their country and the lives of people while eliminating corruption, that being Lee Kwan Yu. They were the closet I've seen to an actual violent leftist ideology, and their governmental system remains an outlier in that it's a democratic competitive authoritarian system.
Thanks for proving all my points. In one paragraph you justify left wing violence as long as the cause is honourable, and in another paragraph, you claim the eastern block socialists as not really left wing.
I've got some news for you. They were as left wing and as forceful as they come. You didn't own property , everything was state owned, society was very progressive (abortions were legal - ex USSR , socialised medicine, free schooling all the way to getting a job, gender equality, LGBT rights were a lot further than in the west).
Conservatism/right-wing is not inherently violent, that's fodder. Some societies are more conservative than others. There are even right wing libertarians. It becomes evil when it seeks to impose its will over minorities or majorities, and in effect invalidate their voice. There are many examples of this from the left and the right (more right for sure).
Everything being state owned isn't leftist, at all. That's straight up authoritarian. Putin has almost everything owned by the state too - are you seriously going to call him a leftists??? Sprinkling in some civil rights so the state machine runs better does not a leftist state make. And actual libertarianism is solidly center neutral. Right wing libertarianism is an oxymoron.
But, there's no point in discussing the situation further with someone who still has past traumas from an authoritarian regime.
State ownership of means of production is the very definition of state socialism, thus removing power from the capitalists, which is strictly an implementation of the leftist ideology. I have no trauma, I just don't live in a lala land. I'm sure you spend a great amount of time thinking about what society could be, instead of accepting what it is and dealing with it. Libertarianism, centrist? Oh please. Its very foundation is rooted in anarchist concepts, distinctively left wing ideology.
I agree there is no point discussing things any further. Just keep dreaming of your utopia, eventually you will grow up.
State ownership of means of production is the very definition of state socialism
Except there's also state capitalism. The bloc may have been started with the intention of state socialism (doubtful, since we're talking about Stalin here), but it was definitely run as a state capitalist system, as most authoritarian governments do - including modern Russia.
Libertarianism, centrist? Oh please. Its very foundation is rooted in anarchist concepts
Just because something is rooted in concepts that might be left (or right) wing, doesn't mean the thing itself is at the same level (much like Stalinism).
This is not a chicken and egg problem. Extremists are a result of society's ailments, not the other way around. . I'll give you a few examples from the 20th century.
Hitler - became leader of Germany because of the impact WW1 had on German society
Al Queda/ISIS - got into position of power due to the suppression of moderate leaders by authoritarian regimes ie. Taliban.
IRA - the discrimination of Irish Catholics by the British-protestant colonialist.
Khmer Rouge - got into power due to Vietnam war bombing of Cambodia.
Kokutai - the perceived betrayal by the west after WW1 (yes Japan fought against Germany in WW1), lead to the rise of extremist ideologies which supplanted Japan's desire to fight against the West.
Sure, but the ailment of our time is not immigrants. It's wealth inequality, it's 1% enriching themselves at the expense of everyone else, it's unchecked self-destructive capitalism.
Rich people are the problem, not immigrants. And it's lie and propaganda that drove people to believe otherwise.
That is true about the state of capitalism today. However, you choose not to see the relationship between the inherent nature of human tribalism, which is as old as humanity itself, and seeing a large influx of aliens in your tribe, as part of that same tribal nature. If you want to change the human nature, you will require a long time, if it's at all possible. The left, just like the right, gets caught up in the cycle of "we have power, we can do everything we want, and we want do it now" when these deep societal changes require very long time to be implemented peacefully, perhaps the length of a life time.
got into position of power due to the suppression of moderate leaders by authoritarian regimes ie. Taliban
The Taliban came long after Al-Qaida and had very similar ideology. They were organised and funded by the Pakistani security service, the IIS. The original Taliban groups were Pakistani seminary students harassing the less backward elements of Pakistani society. The movement was later spread to Afghanistan. And the Taliban were allied with Al-Qaida, never attempted to suppress them. Some other Middle Eastern governments tried to suppress them (Saddam's Iraq, successfully; Egypt's corrupt military junta, far less so). The Taliban hosted Al-Qaida fighters and training camps, and elements of the Pakistani military provided Bin Laden with safe haven on a military base.
Al-Qaida started as a Wahhabi-based xenophobic movement to purge Saudi Arabia of Western influence. The Wahhabi movement itself was a fanatical Sunni movement founded over 200 years ago with the intent to exterminate non-Sunni Muslims and non-Muslims. The Saudi and Qatari royal families are Wahhabi. The former from a more virulent faction than the latter.
Anyway, that's just one of your bullet points dismantled. In general, the idea that every group of extremists was somehow inevitably caused by some kind of social upheaval or injustice is simplistic and has no predictive value.
Sorry the inclusion of Taliban was a mistake, was typing too quickly. What I meant to say was the Afghan Marxist government .
Studying the history of al-Qaeda is a key to understanding the ideology and even the mentality of the movement as a whole. It began in Afghanistan in 1979 in response to the introduction of Soviet troops into the country, which caused an influx of foreign fighters from all over the Islamic world. > (Vasiliev & Zherlitsyna, 2023)
Why did the Soviets invade Afghanistan?
In April 1978 Afghanistan’s centrist government, headed by Pres. Mohammad Daud Khan, was overthrown by left-wing military officers led by Nur Mohammad Taraki. Power was thereafter shared by two Marxist-Leninist political groups, the People’s (Khalq) Party and the Banner (Parcham) Party—which had earlier emerged from a single organization, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan—and had reunited in an uneasy coalition shortly before the coup. The new government, which had little popular support, forged close ties with the Soviet Union, launched ruthless purges of all domestic opposition, and began extensive land and social reforms that were bitterly resented by the devoutly Muslim and largely anti-communist population. > (Encyclopaedia Britannica , 2025)
The aim of the Soviet operation was to prop up their new but faltering client state
Furthermore, while not every extremist group formed because of society ailments it is** a well known factor recognised by scholars*.
There is robust evidence that radicalisation is a social process and that identity is a key factor in why individuals become involved in violent movements. In conflicts involving violent extremism (as opposed to terrorism directed against the West), socio-economic discrimination and marginalisation do help to explain why extremist groups are able to recruit support in large numbers (Allan, Glazzard, et Al. 2015)
Right wingers in Europe are becoming more and more radicalised
I'm not sure about more radicalised, but they're more evidently centrally organised, well-funded, emboldened and numerous. Like a plague of fucking locusts. There's serious money coming in from other countries to fan these flames. Don't pretend this is a spontaneous expression of anything, it's a fucking rent-a-crowd. I've seen the ones in my city in England. They were all bussed in.
EU has itself to blame due to its failed immigration policy particularly from Africa and middle East.
You make it sound as if those hooligans are voicing legitimate grievances. That's no more the case than saying the same about Krstallnacht. The arseholes in London were marching in favour of burning women and children in refugee hostels.
It’s a mistake to underestimate the intelligence of fascists just because they subscribe to fundamentally dumb ideas. There are a lot of smart and sinister people serving those ideals.
Project 2025 isn’t the work of unintelligent people, the success of the extreme right isn’t a ”happy” coincidence resulting from ineptitude, and so forth.
They say knowingly dumb things because only idiots will take them seriously. It weeds out the skeptics while pissing off the intelligent, who often get dismissive, which lets them continue growing their party.
It’s like the Nigerian Prince scams, where bad spelling and grammar weeds out the people who wouldn’t fall for it anyway, but with the added bonus of pissing off opponents in the process.
I'd bet a few of those actually do want to exclude people from the other UK nations. Not as many as are flying the flags, I grant you, but nonetheless. Colonialist mindset still runs deep in some of the English.
I'm astounded that in a gathering of fascists two people holding English and Irish flags can stand in the same vicinity of each other and not start throwing punches.
What you have to understand about these people is that they already feel they are down on their luck and are to weak to do anything about it.
The best they can hope for to feel better about themselves is that other people are even worse off, which is why they are so full of hate and want immigrants to be punished.
Live for humanity, that's the opposite of all this drama. They profit from your life and use you for their fights. They don't let you have real faith in yourself or humanity because they need you to have faith in them and so they can continue to use you.
Become fearless, have faith in self and genuine humanity, and become able to see through all this.
It's time to detach from these 1st world social lifestyles that are marketed towards us to make us easier to control.
Basically everyone living in capitalism without regulation has been slowly and systemically crushed over time and the capitalists (and other parties interested in destabilization) have done a good job at convincing them that it’s not in fact the capitalists but rather immigrants, minorities, women, etc etc That are at fault
People want validations and to believe what they are doing is the right thing. When one side calls them evil, far-right, and racists, naturally they will flock to the other side who are telling them they are heroes who are protecting the country from immigrants.
You can watch street interviews of the protesters and you'll see what I mean.
I am really, really happy that Britain left the EU.
Sorry to any sane Brits, but the "ever more nuttier" European country not having any voting power in the EU, much less a veto, is a great thing.
Mind you, lots of countries over here might end up like that, but Britain seems to be a decade ahead of the rest in that specific kind of shit show and it and the US might very well serve as a warning for the locals on this side of the Channel not to go down that route (just like the example of Brexit itself crushed any ideas about Leave Referendums in the rest of the EU).
I mean it's pretty easy when you think about it. Like if the "far right" idea is a virus, the English language is it's vector of infection, making it easier for ideas or memes to cross pollinate cultural between the US and UK. Some of the other EU countries have their own main language after all other than English so such spread is slower.
In his eyes, the greatest symbiotic parasite Men has ever known isn't microbial, it's linguistics. Words are what keeps civilization, our world alive. Save the world not by taking Men's lives but by taking their tongue.
A wise philosopher once said, "it is no nation that we inhabit. Nay! Our native tongue is our true fatherland!"
And yet the Republic Of Ireland isn't at all aligned with Britain in this.
Not that I disagree with you, more that I think that there's more than just that.
I lived in a couple of places in Europe, Southern, Northern and also over a decade in Britain.
IMHO, Britain has is very own cultural twists that make a certain kind of posh authoritarianism much more likely there: an incredibly entrenched dynastic elite (Britain has, I believe, the lowest social mobility in Europe) with a ton of structures to make sure it will always be so (the "public" schools -> Oxbridge -> daddy's friend's company "internship" path that makes sure the scions of the elites remain in that class, the Judiciary being almost entirelly in the hands of "public" school graduates even though they're only 11% of population which gets reflected in quite different legal outcomes depending on one's class, the The "Honors" System, the Lords with its inherited positions, and more).
This elite has its own sub-culture (even including its own accent) which amongst other things is big on fakeness and very anti-empathy (I've personally known a handful of people from that section of society) and meanwhile the other end of society is also quirky as fuck, in a different way (amongst other things more violent and prejudiced than in other countries I lived in, hence things like the Hooliganism phenomenon).
Then there are weird cultural postures than transverse society such as how people's approach to their position in the social ladder is to focus on keeping those below them where the are, rather than try and climb it themselves, plus there is a general tendency to worry too much (IMHO) about keeping up appearences (to "look right" rather than "be good") though it's worse the higher up the social ladder one is (working class are the most genuine, middle class tend to be pretty fake, upper class live their entire lives behind a façade - hence the whole "posh" thing).
Mind you, in my experience this mostly applies to the English and those from other nations are less like that, especially the Scotts.
(I fully support the idea of an Independent Scotland in the EU)
Anyways, my point is that Britain has it's own set of wierd quirks, which mixed with the shit imported from the US (IMHO, Brits seem to in the last couple of decades somehow have combined the worst of both cultures rather than the best) yields this "Rocketship to Posh Fascism" effect.
We are so fucked. There is no escaping this global rush of extremism.
I am originally from the states, but was lucky enough to move to Australia 11 years ago.
I thought I escaped the growing right wing crazy, and watched from afar as Trump was elected the first time, and my country descended into fascism.
Then here in Australia there was a white supremacist rally. Then another.
Then in my city there was a "March for Australia" organised by known white supremacists, but claiming not to be racist.
"They just don't want all this immigration".
Their website also said they wanted remigration.
Remigration is an originally European far-right proposal for ethnic cleansing via the mass deportation of non-white immigrants and their descendants, sometimes including those born in Europe, to their place of racial ancestry.
Sounds pretty racist to me.
This march was planned for the final day of the state multicultural festival. Its planned start and end point was the park where the festival was being held.
My family and I decided we would go. I haven't been to a protest since I was a teenager, but I felt it was our duty to show that not everyone agrees with this.
The day before the march our best friend said their friends were afraid to go out to lunch with them that day, because their parents were verbally assaulted in a grocery store on Friday for being immigrants.
They later said people came to their parents house and were beating on the door and yelling about them being immigrants.
My husband stood there in his suit, I stood in my pretty dress with flowers, our daughters held signs that said things like "so bad even the introverts are here".
The March was not peaceful and was definitely racist. We started off to the side, sitting with flags my daughters and I made with hundreds of countries on them, and eventually we were swarmed as the crowd veered to come right past us.
They screamed obscenities at us, pushed into me, pushed my husband, tried to rip the sign from his hands. They ripped down the flags we made. Blew an air horn in our faces.
Many claimed they were not racist but my husband got called a f-ing Jew multiple times??? Maybe it was the beard and the hat, I don't know.
Seemed pretty racist to me.
Eventually police came and stood in front of us while we packed our things and left. We would do it again, in a heartbeat.
Before the rowdy crowd came looking for trouble we had immigrants come up and thank us, hug us, and we want them to know that not everyone agrees with this march.
Not wanting immigration is not what this march was about. This march was about fear and racism.
I urge all of you, show up, make signs, show that not everyone agrees.
I'll see you there then. This has been going on for long enough. They're so full of crap, they don't even realise that this land was never ceded from the traditional owners who have walked this part of the earth for over 60k years.
At some point climate change is going to cause more migrants than any 'developed' nation can support. Net migtration into the UK is currently coming in at around 700k a year. This is London a decade for a country that is pretty close to as population dense as the area around New York - I think they call it the tri-state area. Imagine nearly a New York a decade into the tri-state area. That is what the UK is currently doing and has been doing for decades now.
With the best will in the world it simply isn't sustainable. The UK is not food secure and is not energy secure now. Are we supposed to rely on a belligerently corporatist EU for food, and then Russia, for energy? (edit - I haven't looked at our current energy situation, I am not interested in media stories about UK energy. I have looked into it enough to know a lot of it is bollocks.) It actually isn't possible now for the UK to have the immigration we have.
The door is going to be closed and at least many millions of the poorest globally, who haven't caused climate change, are going to lose their lives unnecessarily. I don't like it at all, but this IS going to happen. So when do we close the door? The poorest in the UK are already having food taken out of their mouths, and that working poor is growing due to many decades of neo-liberal capitalist policy. Same dynamic as the US expressing itself in a slightly different way.
I spent the second decade of this century is a small city of about 250k people that experienced about 30k immigration in the last two decades. It is a poor city anyway, with cheap available housing due to previous government decisions forcing many of the people born there to leave. They dumped a load of people into communities that cannot support them. It is not racist to say that this isn't doable. When 'liberal' media people say it is racist to complain the people I grew up with (who I don't particularly like, but will defend from outsiders) will just say 'well fuck you, if I'm racist I['ll vote for the racist party'.
I don't like any of this. I am just describing the reality. You either face up to reality or you will see fascism as a result.
Perhaps we are talking about two slightly different things. I was describing the situation in the UK and across 'developed' nations (i.e. the rise of fascism) that is leading to the same public sentiment you experienced. We had a neo-nazi march in the UK over the weekend too. You are describing what happened to you. I am explaining why,.
Maybe you were the downvoter. You can't downvote away reality. It is foolish to try.
The mass immigration has been by far the strongest reason that right wing politics became so popular. Dont delude yourself. The left fucked up. It's not right to force half the country to tolerate mass immigration just because you think you are smarter then them. That is the shit that ruined democracy. Most democratic things are not about what is right or wrong. If another citizen doesn't want to have a million Indians or muslims living in his hometown thats none of your business. It is his right to have a state that represents him so long as he isn't advocating to take away anyone's rights. You are lucky the Republicans are incredibly corrupt and stupid and are doing all the other things that the right hates, like censorship, taking away freedom, stuff like this. Your pathetic state is so desperate to micromanage everyone's lives and monitor them that they just cannot help themselves to not ruin their own position again. The racism is strong, but half of the reason people voted for the right is because they perceived the left as being the side of censorship and mass surveillance and fascism, but they are getting a wakeup call now. Lucky for you their politicians are incredibly stupid and also many people who are actually right wing do have some decent values and character and will reject the Republican politics completely for this bullshit they are trying to pull. Don't ever sell out your fellow citizens to the state and corporations again. We do not need them telling us what we can watch and read, and what we can vote on, we don't need them or you policing our speech. We are free people just like you, not subjects and not slaves. If the leftists can actually learn to take responsibility for their shitty tactics they might actually get power again. The day they stop trying to ignore half the country is the day they will start getting popularity again. After the 2016 election with Hilary it's pretty obvious how extremely corrupt they were, but now people are seeing how much more corrupt the right is. We got lucky this time but if the left doesn't wise up they are going to lose everything for a few decades until right wing politics become lame again.
I see DarkAri has deleted their comment, but I think it's important that everyone can see what was written.
This is the kind of unhinged nonsense we are up against. Accusations and ramblings that aren't even relevant to my comment.
The mass immigration has been by far the strongest reason that right wing politics became so popular. Dont delude yourself. The left fucked up. It's not right to force half the country to tolerate mass immigration just because you think you are smarter then them. That is the shit that ruined democracy. Most democratic things are not about what is right or wrong. If another citizen doesn't want to have a million Indians or muslims living in his hometown thats none of your business. It is his right to have a state that represents him so long as he isn't advocating to take away anyone's rights. You are lucky the Republicans are incredibly corrupt and stupid and are doing all the other things that the right hates,like censorship, taking away freedom, stuff like this. Your pathetic state is so desperate to micromanage everyone's lives and monitor them that they just cannot help themselves to not ruin their own position again. The racism is strong, but half of the reason people voted for the right is because they perceived the left as being the side of censorship and mass surveillance and fascism, but they are getting a wakeup call now. Lucky for you their politicians are incredibly stupid and also many people who are actually right wing do have some decent values and character and will reject the Republican politics completely for this bullshit they are trying to pull. Don't ever sell out your fellow citizens to the state and corporations again. We do not need them telling us what we can watch and read, and what we can vote on, we don't need them or you policing our speech. We are free people just like you, not subjects and not slaves. If the leftists can actually learn to take responsibility for their shitty tactics they might actually get power again. The day they stop trying to ignore half the country is the day they will start getting popularity again. After the 2016 election with Hilary it's pretty obvious how extremely corrupt they were, but now people are seeing how much more corrupt the right is. We got lucky this time but if the left doesn't wise up they are going to lose everything for a few decades until right wing politics become lame again.
they were even doing it this past weekend here in Toronto, Canada. People marching and holding up posters of Kirk. was insane.
Funny thing was seeing a bunch of POC among them and I'm thinking "you moronic motherfuckers, if the cops weren't here they'd turn on you without a moments hesitation."
Which translates to “even though I hate most people who look like you, I am surprised to find that you have a redeeming quality”
I’m mixed race and I usually get asked which side I more like. Or a mind boggled “What ARE you?” - if I answer “Canadian” it makes them have to squirm around and say “no, not in that way”
As an American, my message to my friends in Europe is, to paraphrase Musk: “Whether you choose Trumpian right wing thuggery and nationalism, it is coming to you. You either fight back or you die.”
In a statement in the House of Commons on Thursday, Foreign Office minister Stephen Doughty said the decision came in the wake of the publication this week of emails Mandelson sent to Epstein in the 2000s, in which he gave his support to the disgraced financier even when he was facing jail for sex offenses.
Doughty said the emails showed that the “depth and extent” of Mandelson’s relationship with Epstein was “materially different” from what was known when he was appointed ambassador to Washington last year after the Labour Party’s election victory.
On Wednesday, The Sun newspaper published emails that it said showed Mandelson telling Epstein to "fight for early release" shortly before Epstein was sentenced to 18 months in prison.
Mandelson had corruption problems back in the Blair/Brown days too. He's a slimy middleman who thought it his job to keep Labour aligned with corporate interests. It was unfortunate that Starmer thought it a good idea to give him a job.
Hopefully this time he'll fuck off and keep his head down.
As an American, I look forward to when Americans fire Mr Trump after publication of supportive "shared secrets" to Jeffrey Epstein and illegal placement of Ghislane Maxwell into a country club prison
Right-wing lawmakers pushed for a tribute to the U.S. conservative influencer who was shot dead.
European Parliament President Roberta Metsola on Thursday rejected a bid by right-wing factions to hold a minute of silence for slain U.S. conservative influencer Charlie Kirk.
The initiative was first proposed by Charlie Weimers, an MEP from the right-wing European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), as a symbolic measure “to declare that our right to freedom of speech cannot be extinguished,” according to an email chain with dozens of MEPs that was seen by POLITICO.
I went ahead and did the calculation; I think I'm getting about 4 weeks (extrapolating from the last year, 20k dead kids -> 2 weeks of silence. Doubled for the two years.).
Lower than I expected. I'm guessing I haven't internalized that gaza is still a fairly small area, thus with a small population? Or was the first year substantially more deadly than the last (which really would surprise me)?
Yes, but imagine a solemn minute for each named individual that lasts 5 weeks non-stop. \ Not counting mutilated, orphaned, and (basically all of them, so 700k-ish) homeless. And with zero prospect of it ever getting better until they are alive.
I went with this figure, but same diff:
In August 2025, UNICEF estimated that more than 50,000 children had been killed or injured in Gaza.
The reason for the high number of children deaths even assuming indiscriminate killing (ie not targeting specifically children, which at least proven for snipers, isn't the case): Gaza/Palestinians are being severely oppressed for decades (since 48, or 67 more directly), they have artificially limited water access, electricity, medicine, etc so they die young & in Gaza like 40% of the population are children.
Gaza Strip has a ×2.6 higher density of population than New York City (5,967.5/km2 vs 2,309.2/km2), but less than a quarter of population. \ Bcs oppression.
The Gaza Strip is 41 kilometres (25 miles) long, from 6 to 12 km (3.7 to 7.5 mi) wide, and has a total area of 365 km2 (141 sq mi). As of 2010, the Strip's population mostly comprised Palestinians and refugees. It has a high proportion of youth, with 43.5% being children 14 or younger and 50% under age of 18. Sunni Islam is almost ubiquitous, with a Palestinian Christian minority. Gaza has an annual population growth rate of 1.99% (2023 est.), the 39th-highest in the world. Gaza's unemployment rate is among the highest in the world, with an overall unemployment rate of 46% and a youth unemployment rate of 70%. Despite this, the area's 97% literacy rate is higher than that of nearby Egypt, while youth literacy is 88%. Gaza has throughout the years been seen as a source of Palestinian nationalism and resistance.
Til - despite all the hardship they have higher literacy than USA with 86% (normal countries are ofc 98+).
Trump039s India envoy pick Sergio Gor said the US wanted India to open its market to exports of American oil and petroleum products It suggests that Trump means business and only business
India will never buy American oil because American producers cannot meet the costs of Russian oil. It costs too much to lift oil here and too much to ship that far, and Russian crude is still at a discount overall due to sanctions.
Russian crude is effectively free for India as only a few countries really want to deal with US sanctions over it and Russia has to keep the oil flowing or their derricks in the permafrost will freeze over.
US has to meet effectively free, which probably isn't happening - even Ukraine's whittling down of Russia's refining capability doesn't stop the trade to India as they're fine with crude.
Panama’s seasonal upwelling collapsed in 2025, linked to reduced winds. The event signals risks for fisheries and climate-sensitive ocean processes.
The annual phenomenon of upwelling in the Gulf of Panama failed to occur in 2025 for the first time on record. A team of scientists from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) linked the disruption to weakened trade winds.
The finding underscores how changes in climate can directly affect essential ocean processes and the coastal populations that depend on them.
Damn, making it suck even worse to be a fish. even if you're not dredged up from a fishing net or choke on plastic you now can die from starving because the nutrients that have been coming up from the deep for millenia aren't any more.
Against the background of relations between Russia and the West and the expiration of the START III (February 2026), issues of strategic stability are becoming more urgent. Although France and the United Kingdom are not parties to the treaty, they are actively modernizing their nuclear arsenals.
In July 2024, Paris and London agreed to establish a joint nuclear management group, strengthening coordination. Russia has stated that it will take into account the potential of these countries when assessing threats and negotiating strategic stability. The Russian Federation insists on the inclusion of London and Paris in the negotiation process.
Britain plans to spend 15 billion pounds on modernization. However, the Russian side points to the real risks of radiation incidents at the Clyde base in Scotland.
The world is entering a new nuclear race: all nuclear powers are modernizing their arsenals. The United States and Russia are discussing new arrangements, including the involvement of China. Experts note that although Britain and France are modernizing, they do not have a large-scale build-up.
In recent years, the arms control system has seriously weakened — the INF Treaty and the DON Treaty have been severed, which makes dialogue in an expanded format especially important to prevent escalation.
That man just found out that your secure communication channel is as secure as the weakest node.
That's also why, if you want to deGoogle your life, you've already lost if any of the people you email has a Gmail account: however careful you are not to provide Google any data yourself, the data is leaked to Google by the other party.
Well, Whatsapp and Facebook are their own honeypots. There's heaps to say about why nobody should use them for any reasons.
But in this case, the man was found out because his accomplice had compromising messages on his cellphone. Be they Whatsapp message, SMS messages, emails... doesn't matter here. It's not a story of how communication channels operated by Big Data are not really secure and only designed to lure you in for your data, but a story of how one person's carelessness did another person in.
The Hostages and Missing Families Forum: Bring Them Home Now wrote on social media that Israel's strike on Qatar last week shows "every time a deal approaches, Netanyahu sabotages it".
The group's comments come after Israel carried out a strike on senior Hamas leaders in the Qatari capital of Doha, which Hamas said killed five of it members and a Qatari security official.
On Saturday, Netanyahu said getting rid of Hamas leaders in Qatar "would rid the main obstacle" to releasing the hostages and ending the war.
He also accused Hamas of blocking all ceasefire attempts in order to drag out the war in Gaza.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio travelled to Israel on Saturday and is due to meet with Netanyahu as Israel faces global condemnation for the attack.
However, families of the hostages described the Israeli PM's response as "the latest excuse for failing to bring home" their loved ones.
"The targeted operation in Qatar proved beyond any doubt that there is one obstacle to returning the 48 hostages and ending the war: Prime Minister Netanyahu," they said.
"The time has come to end the excuses designed to buy time so he can cling to power."
The group added that Netanyahu's "stalling" had cost "the lives of 42 hostages and threatens the lives of additional hostages who are barely surviving".
Before his departure, Rubio said US President Donald Trump was not happy with the strike on Qatar, but stressed that the US-Israeli relationship was "very strong"
The country now has more than 1,000 waste-incinerating power stations, representing more than half the world’s waste power capacity, according to the Global Waste-to-Energy Research and Technology Council.
That’s a good question, but, would the waste then be properly disposed of? It may not be incredibly efficient right now, but less trash is less trash, right?
The ships sending us Chinese goods have to return to China anyway. That’s why everyone was sending China their plastic to be “recycled”. Might as well just incinerate it.
What great news, the trash is just gone once you burn it and nobody has to think about that statement any further. One thing real quick: we don't need clean air for anything, do we?
It is possible to burn waste and manage the pollution in at least somewhat safe manner. Finland and Sweden do it reasonably well with high temperature furnaces and filtering the exhaust gases either with mechanical filter or trough water. That also (at least as far as I know) requires that you sort out the waste and don't burn stuff like electronics, metals and some other crap which can be effectively recycled and manage whatever remains properly.
So, it's possible, but I have absolutely no idea if China does that properly.
There are live pollution maps of the world if you need an idea if China does that properly but I‘ll have to warn you that you‘ll most likely be disappointed and somewhat terrified.
I meant that I don't know if these trash incinerators are managed properly. I'm well aware that in general there's a crapload of unmanaged pollution and a ton of other problems around, but like every other country China is slowly improving their stuff so it's not impossible that new plants would be up to modern standards.
Leaders of Europe's top carmakers gathered in Brussels seeking eased emission standards on new cars. Germany's auto industry lobby has said rigid emissions regulation "jeopardizes competitiveness."
They are already wildly uncompetitive on account of having flubbed the EV transition, China already beat them solidly on all accounts. Why should they be given anything they ask for?
I live here and that's pretty much the case. Mind you, this is the first I hear that we've agreed to this and I daresay there will be some vigorous discussion among us Sandgropers.
JERUSALEM (AP) — When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered this week’s attempted assassination of Hamas leaders in Qatar, he took a major gamble in his campaign to pound the group into submission.
With signs growing that the mission failed, that gamble appears to have backfired.
Netanyahu had hoped to kill Hamas’ senior exiled leaders to get closer toward his vision of “total victory” against the militant group that attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and pressure it into surrendering after nearly two years of war in the Gaza Strip.
Instead, Hamas claims its leaders survived, and Netanyahu’s global standing, already badly damaged by the scenes of destruction and humanitarian disaster in Gaza, took another hit.
The airstrike Tuesday has enraged Qatar, an influential U.S. ally that has been a key mediator throughout the war, and drawn heavy criticism across the Arab world. It also has strained relations with the White House and thrown hopes of reaching a ceasefire into disarray, potentially endangering the 20 hostages still believed to be alive in Gaza.
Imagine sending the president of an allied nation a decked out 747 as a nine figure bribe, only for the president to greenlight airstrikes that killed some of your most senior diplomats.
You think Bibi trusts Trump enough to tell him about an op like this beforehand? I think Trump's relatively friendly relationship with Al Thani is exactly the reason he didn't find out in time to warn Qatar. The plan was to kill Hamas' negotiators and then present it as a fait accompli.
I could've bought myself into a myth of Israel being encircled by enemies if not for it attacking everyone at will, getting no response. US, Europe raised a bully and only some select countries refuse to enable it. I'm yet to decide if I'm on board with a complete erasure of Israel as a state, but I don't see any solution possible before it becomes deeply pacified and demilitarized.
The next time someone tells you the youth aren’t engaged enough in politics, just point them to Nepal.
According to multiple reports, the youth of the South Asian nation managed to oust the existing government following an attempted ban of major social media platforms and took to Discord to hold an impromptu convention to elect an interim prime minister.
The organizing appears to have worked. On Friday, the military accepted the recommendation of the protest group and named Karki the interim prime minister. Karki, who accepted the role, is expected to pick a new cabinet and eventually hold elections. According to the Times, that is expected to happen within the next six months or so.
Smaller countries are easier to get new governments in. The bigger it is the harder it is to oust a leader, let alone get better leadership in after.
I think these south asians are on to something with their methods of protesting here, idk if I can say this on here but targeting the homes of lawmakers garnered by corrupt means, and government buildings, seems to be a good strategy.
Sri lanka, indonesia, and nepal all did this recently and I think I am missing some even.
smaller countries have an easier time getting better government because in smaller countries, things are closer by, and it's easier to just walk up to your prime minister's house and set it on fire if he misbehaves. in the US, which is a thousand kilometers across, you can't just walk there.
I'm actually in favor of bringing political responsibility back to the local level. That means, communities largely organize themselves, with only few interactions with the federal government.
Tbh Indonesia is not a small country, it has the 4th largest population and the archipelago is as wide as US. However the demonstrations there took place in almost all major cities.
The federal government has become the monster it was checked and balanced not to.
We celebrate the feds ursurping authority because slavery, and then civil rights, but the feds are only authorized domestically to regulate interstate commerce, and forbidden from placing restrictions on movement of goods and people in the country.
We would have support across the country forcing the feds to back off getting into everybody's business.
Here we are with feds bringing military troops into cities to occupy the hoods the country has made, a clear violation of their authority. This is just getting warmed up, we should pass a constitutional smmendment forbidding the feds from income taxes beyond soc. sec., medicare, medicaid, etc really.
It could pass by referendums in 30 dome states, would just need a handful more.
It sounds extreme but is the only way to stop the executive branch long term.
It's absolutely possible to have a strong federal government without getting into the shit show we have today. The problem is when federal authority gets distilled into a handful of people and detached from popular representation or recall.
"Getting the feds to back off" has been the laughable fig leaf that the right has used to dismantle the normal operation of our government for 200+ years. Now you're buying into balkanization when they've enacted their coup?
We don't need more limits on the only structure that can mitigate/navigate climate collapse; the only thread that historically has opposed the oppression of the deep south; the only speedbump that could even moderately oppose the hegemony of the ultra wealthy.
The US constitution was designed to entrench the power of the white landowner class, and that has remained true in spite of the consistent creep of federal authority. It's just not possible to mount any opposition to the massive weight of their capital in any other way.
So no, don't restrict the Fed's authority to do any of that. Just give us the tools to get real, fair representation and hold our representatives accountable. Every other needed reform and restructuring could be done with no problem once we have that.
Just give us the tools to get real, fair representation
that won't solve the problem. people just have very different views of how the path should continue forwards. you're not going to unite that. if you represent fairly, you might end up with a federal government that is 50% democrat and 50% republican, but that just means that everybody only gets half of what they want.
That is such a black&white way of thinking, so FPTP of you, as a non-🇺🇸: proportional representation ensures that by partisan bill are the defacto, law starts to hing on convincing other parties. Sure there will be exclusionary stances but it often comes with people voting for a different party that’s similar to yours
No, i don't think you get what i meant, let me explain again:
If the democratic areas want taxes to be at 50% for the rich and the republicans want them to be at 0%, then a middle way would be to set them at 25%. But this way, everyone is discontent.
A better system would be to set them to 50% in the democrat areas and to 0% in the republican areas. For which you would have to have two distinct legal regions.
edit: tax rate was a bad example. i should have chosen something else.
We tried protesting politicians houses in the UK a couple years ago. And even though the PM and his family wasn't there, and all they did was hang up a banner, the narrative was about how they were intimidating him with violent threats against his family and was widely condemed.
Idk the term limits will help or hurt here. Being limited our lawmakers would sell out all the harder to set themselves up in their last term. It makes sense for executive positions because they can cement themselves in power.
I believe the answer is to organize and find and groom our own candidates that can win. Ones that will acknowledge and address the actual sources of our problems, which would be massively popular with voters you better believe it.
In your second paragraph you touch on why term limits work. It makes sure that the candidates are more closely connected to the people they represent. An incumbent will lose their connection, the longer they are in office.
Our lawmakers are near all sociopathic nhilists that believe in nothing outside of self interest. The only check on their behavior is re election, remove that they will be worse their last term.
Lawmakers that have been in there forever and Corruption and misrepresentation of their constituents may seem correlated but it is not a causation.
It is not lawmakers being in there forever that has caused our lawmakers to suck. It is a very purposeful half-century long campaign by big business, from 1972 in the business Round Table that made a plan to corrupt and ultimately kill the Republic.
The system certainly needs a table flip at this point.
How about something like the following.
Each person only ever gets a single term. They earn a salary while in office. When the next election comes around, you get to elect their replacement, but you also get to vote on if the person in office, should earn a pension for the rest of their life. They need 50% to earn the pension.
Unironically yes. We should still have a regional compact or something but clearly things are not working. People have wildly different visions of how the country should be run and this stupid power struggle isn’t helping anyone.
So, like a union... Of American states... The problem is that we've already got that, but people don't participate in those local governments. They show up once every 4 years to vote for president, and get mad when that doesn't magically fix everything.
No, no it wouldn't. The issues are systemic, not the result of the federal government's existence. Did Britain become less corrupt after leaving the EU? No, because Britain's problems are systemic to their own politics.
It might make the fight more local, but that's already the case. You can already campaign for change in your state, but people don't do that. The average American doesn't know their local representatives, and don't engage in local poltics. You have to change that attitude, and convince people in the concept of a civil society, in which they are actively participating members.
None of this relates to what I was saying. The UK already had its own sovereign government, otherwise it wouldn’t have been able to leave so easily.
I’m just saying the feds didn’t have so much power people wouldn’t pay so much attention to them and would pay more attention to their local stuff. Which would be good for democracy.
I’d like to see government focused on the neighborhood level whenever possible. Only move up to the next one if there is an unsolvable issue.
This is not the only change that’s needed so it won’t fix everything on its own but it would allow people to make much more effective decisions about their own lives instead of people in Kansas deciding things about local DC law enforcement like we do now. That’s bonkers.
The organizing appears to have worked. On Friday, the military accepted the recommendation of the protest group and named Karki the interim prime minister.
If only this is how it could go down in the US. Sigh…
I wonder what the US military would do if the current administration's head was cut off quickly enough so no significant orders went out to the military from them. Marshal law then eventually an election?
Under current law, you would need to kill 22 people before replacements can be appointed. Possibly less if some of them are not constitutionally eligible to be president; but if it ever got to that point, I suspect we would ignore that provision.
Pulling this off is made even more difficult by both the heightened security given to everyone in the line of succession; and the fact that under our continuity of government plans, those people are deliberately never all in the same place at the same time.
Anything that could accomplish a full decapitation strike would likely require marshall law anyway, and would likely make the conditions for an election difficult.
The No Kings protests demonstrated, if literally nothing else, that record-breaking groups of people across the country can remain mostly peaceful with extremely high underlying emotions churning.
This administration will be the downfall of the system and people will barely have to lift a finger. When the US economy inevitably crashes, people's comfort will be in jeopardy - mass bloodshed will not restore that. This isn't the 1800s, we literally are too numerous and our systems are too fragile to support and sustain a massive, drawn-out civil war.
Does anyone who follows Nepali politics know if this is going to turn into a color revolution? Are western powers successfully using this as a pretense to get a right-wing government in?
Everything is peaceful now we are heading for election after month. Military do good job to control violence. Many things happen which we don't want to happen in protest. We are trying to do best to run the nation but old politicians trying to mess things again. They are making sure this protest fails and they can rule again. Many things happening.
On one hand, fuck social media. The recommender AIs that run it are only supposed to optimise engagement, thus optimising ad revenue. But they are far more powerful than that. They can influence public opinion as a whole. Totally out-of-band from the sovereignty of any nation. It is foolish to think that Google, Youtube, Facebook, Netflix, and Twitter aren't abusing this power. Every responsible nation that wants to defend its sovereignty against recommender AIs must ban social media immediately, along with every other source of such recommendations.
On the other hand, everything else that happened in Nepal. I'm just glad the actual decisions happened on Discord, the least terrible of the platforms. At least Discord doesn't have these sinister recommender AIs.
She have send many corrupt people jail before. These corrupt leader try to suspend her from chief judge post but can't do it . I am happy seeing her as our PM. I will vite for her if she run for coming election.
I go back to it every day to check whether it's still there because it feels so surreal that i think it's somehow just a dream and i'm going to wake up every moment now and the news story will have disappeared.
I never met him myself, but I know a few people who have done way back. Site crew in Bristol mostly. Rip useless Paul who had one of his rats on the side of his trailer.
Our current government is the labour party, the one of the big two that is supposed to be more left leaning. They haven't been left leaning in twenty years, they crept to centrist and now the creep to the right continues. They're not dissimilar from the democrats in America. Internationally, there seems to be a general move towards the right and we are certainly following it. Demonstrations and activism don't seem to help. Shit is fucked, basically.
The UK government as effectively ignored all protests since the poll tax riots. The choice seems either start acting like the French or just sit down and shut up.
Yeah, and I've been on some actions that have kicked off, back in the day, fighting the lines of riot police. It was fun but achieved fuck all. Yeah we need many more people involved in aggressive protests. I don't know if that will help either, but at least we need to mobilise a broader section of the population.
CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Personnel from a U.S. warship boarded a Venezuelan tuna boat with nine fishermen while it was sailing in Venezuelan waters, Venezuela’s foreign minister said on Saturday, underlining strained relations with the United States.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Tensions between the two nations escalated after U.S. President Donald Trump in August ordered the deployment of warships in the Caribbean, off the coast of the South American country, citing the fight against Latin American drug cartels.
While reading a statement on Saturday, Foreign Minister Yván Gil told journalists the Venezuelan tuna boat was “illegally and hostilely boarded by a United States Navy destroyer” and 18 armed personnel who remained on the vessel for eight hours, preventing communication and the fishermen’s normal activities. They were then released under escort by the Venezuelan navy.
If anybody is wondering, Tracer.ai is legit and operating at the instruction of Microsoft.
They’re an AI brand protection service which has been systematically harming Microsoft’s brand for a while. An example - getting YouTube videos about Minecraft removed, which has hindered Minecraft’s visibility online (which is a huge part of Xbox revenue). reddit.com/r/PhoenixSC/comment…
I do not understand why they want to remove minecraft videos.
Minecraft videos have been a huge part of it's growth... and it's impossible to imagine a scenario where these videos are harming MS or their brand. They already make money off of viewers buying the game... this is stupid
I do not understand why they want to remove minecraft videos.
For the same reason they went after the admin of the wrong instance asking them to delete the fake microsoft account - it's a dumb algorithm doing a shit job. That this is a separate company that is being paid while doing such a shitty job says a lot about microsoft
Police investigators in Russia’s Kaliningrad region on Monday discovered the decapitated body of the CEO of a local fertilizer company.
The chief executive, Alexei Sinitsyn, is believed to have died by suicide, according to a law enforcement source cited by the Vedomosti business newspaper.
Investigators told state news agencies that Sinitsyn’s body was found with an attached towing cable under a bridge outside the city of Kaliningrad. They said they were establishing the circumstances of his death.
Sinitsyn, 43, was the CEO of K-Potash Service, which has been developing the Nivensky-1 potassium-magnesium deposit in Kaliningrad since 2014. The ambitious project was originally planned to be launched in 2021, but has since been pushed back to 2032.
Decapitation is one of the potential outcomes of an improperly orchestrated hanging, though that's more for a capital punishment. Usually people hang themselves with a short rope and choke themselves out.
It might be less common in the UK (eg I know you guys still keep the lay/lie distinction commonly but it's pretty muddled in the US these days), but you can find usage notes in US-based dictionaries:
the past and past participle hung, as well as hanged, is standard. Hanged is most appropriate for official executions
he was to be hanged, cut down whilst still alive … and his bowels torn out —Louis Allen
but hung is also used.
gave orders that she should be hung —Peter Quennell
Hung is more appropriate for less formal hangings.
Murder was in fact a fairly uncommon event in Ankh-Morpork, but there were a lot of suicides. Walking in the night-time alleyways of The Shades was suicide. Asking for a short in a dwarf bar was suicide. Saying 'Got rocks in your head?' to a troll was suicide. You could commit suicide very easily, if you weren't careful.
Russia is basically hardcore Anhk-Morpork, but with an even less subtle dictator.
He must've been so determined to kill himself judging by the extensive antemortem bruising, broken bones, ruptured vertebrae, missing fingernails, fluid in his lungs, blowtorch marks, acid burns, [...]. At least we know why because he filled in this copy of the standard Russian oligarch suicide form letter.
It is. If you ever want to hang yourself, don’t jump into it unless you want to spray blood everywhere. It is a genuine consideration when ctbing, since many people don’t want to scar their family or other people.
Kinda is. Back in the good ol' days (/s) when hanging was a typical punishment, the hangman had to know his stuff. Too short a rope and the hangee would dangle, choking / suffocating for minutes. Too much rope and the whole body would yoink off. Gotta get it just right to just instantly break the neck.
I don't think breaking the neck is necessarily instant death, though. the breathing muscles are paralyzed but the heart should continue to beat independently. the hypothalamus (iirc) senses CO2 buildup so you could feel choking. in contrast, decapitation exsanguinates the brain pretty rapidly. a bit more gruesome, admittedly.
You're right. It's most likely only more "humane" for the witnesses and easier on the perpetrators.
Not only do they not witness a decapitation in a truly botched case, but they also don't witness shaking of the legs and similar movements in case of a "short drop".
Taiwan is projected to lose a working-age population of about 6.67 million people in two waves of retirement in the coming years, as the nation confronts accelerating demographic decline and a shortage of younger workers to take their place, the Ministry of the Interior said.
I get the sense they are sticking it more to entitled guys and potential mothers-in-law than the government! Just going off one friend's opinions there, though.
OK, I am not surprised, but that's not well known and kind of a taboo subject so not official, they were 'guidelines' and the policies were 'encouragement'. Canada did similar nasty abusive sterilization in its colonial enterprise until the '70s, but hardly anyone knows.
[from Cuba In Context - weekly newsletter of the Belly Of The Beast news/video collective]
From basketball to table tennis to girls' softball, Cuban teams have been blocked from competing in international tournaments on U.S. soil.
This week, journalists Dariel Pradas and Reed Lindsay take a look at the de facto travel ban on Cuban athletes that could include the World Baseball Classic and even the Olympics.
Also: * Former Trump officials make millions lobbying administration * Expedia dodges lawsuit over Cuba bookings * Trump keeps WWI law against Cuba in place * DoJ busts Florida smuggling ring
[from Cuba In Context - weekly newsletter of the Belly Of The Beast news/video collective]
From basketball to table tennis to girls' softball, Cuban teams have been blocked from competing in international tournaments on U.S. soil.
This week, journalists Dariel Pradas and Reed Lindsay take a look at the de facto travel ban on Cuban athletes that could include the World Baseball Classic and even the Olympics.
Also: * Former Trump officials make millions lobbying administration * Expedia dodges lawsuit over Cuba bookings * Trump keeps WWI law against Cuba in place * DoJ busts Florida smuggling ring
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has risen to a record high of nearly 100,000, its government has announced.
Setting a new record for the 55th year in a row, the number of centenarians in Japan was 99,763 as of September, the health ministry said on Friday. Of that total, women accounted for an overwhelming 88%.
Yes. Universal healthcare is highly correlated with life expectancy even when controlling for a shitload of other variables. This is like the host studied thing on the planet and the science is not controversial.
According to the new preprint, clerical errors, pension fraud, and a lack of birth certificates explain blue zones and their above-average numbers of centenarians.
Tech boss was addressing the ‘unite the kingdom’ protest organised by Tommy Robinson via video link
Elon Musk has called for a “dissolution of parliament” and a “change of government” in the UK while addressing the crowd attending the “unite the kingdom” rally, organised by the far-right activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, known as Tommy Robinson.
The X owner, who dialled in via a video link and spoke to Robinson while thousands of attenders watched along, also railed against the “woke mind virus” and told the crowd that “violence is coming” and that “you either fight back or you die”.
Speaking at the rally, he said: “I really think that there’s got to be a change of government in Britain. You can’t – we don’t have another four years, or whenever the next election is, it’s too long. Something’s got to be done. There’s got to be a dissolution of parliament and a new vote held.”
I think the 'we' is referring to fascists, not British citizens.
And alarmingly, that's not even a joke. There's a clear cult of personality thing being whipped up, and I legit don't see what he's got in common with the baying mob other than racism, fascism, and a taste for violence.
Why would so many people be convinced to bus up and down the country spewing hate at migrant hotels, raising flags everywhere like we've fallen to USA levels of idiocy, at the behest of a man who doesn't share their: country, nationality, culture, religion, class, upbringing, life path / experience, financial or social position or priorities, or literally anything other than... well, I can't think of anything other than fascism, unhappiness, and probably the petulant anger of someone who can't figure out why nobody likes or respects them.
And I don't think many of them are consciously aware of the unhappiness or thwarted desire to be a valuable member of society, so fascism it is.
A Napoleon complex, as I understand it, is when a high achiever feels insecure due to a reasonably insignificant, but noticeable, flaw, and gets so bitter and defensive about it that it draws attention from their achievements to the flaw and their bitterness.
Eg, man rises to the top of his country, conquers others, spreads and empire that, for all its flaws, revolutionised global concepts and uptake of democracy, human rights etc. English critics mainly focus whether he's a few inches shorter than average.
Whereas Elon: did not do any of that, and the 'minor flaws' are his remarkable personal anti-magnetism.
It's absolutely unbelievable that the richest man in the world still can't get any friends, let alone partners, who can stick around longer than a year or so. He was brought up with the finest education money could buy and every opportunity, and has not managed to invent, discover, or excel at anything other than buying things.
Not only has he not conquered a multitude of countries or spread anything other than anger and personal dissatisfaction, he couldn't even rise to the top of his own country.
And, not being funny, his own country was not the stiffest competition in the field of 'really respectable, well liked, competent people'. White South Africans do not dominate the league tables of Cool Chill Folk Who Fairly Earned Their Worldwide Respect, and all he had to do was keep buying companies and collecting money and not being such a raging wanker as to be a threat to multiple countries' national security. That is such an achingly low bar, and I truly do not believe anyone except Musk could have failed to clear it.
TLDR: Napoleon ruled his country and many others, leaving a new global standard for law, human rights, freedom, and democracy (which is even more impressive considering he was a kinda imperialist knob).
Musk's talents are being astronomically rich, and against all odds, setting a new global standard for 'that white South African pro-apartheid guy who turned out to be unusually racist and anti-meritocracy'. How bad do you have to be before billions of people would recognise you from that description? The man was born on a golden throne and has managed to make a name as the most distasteful turd in the open sewer miles away.
Did he misplace his bullet-absorbing children in a ketamine haze and ran off to be a cunt somewhere safer while the violence he helped foment runs its course at home?
Doesn't anyone ever make the connection that BILLIONAIRES SHOULDN'T EXIST
I don't mean kill the person or assassinate them .... just separate them from their money. The idea of someone owning and controlling so much money and wealth is only detrimental to the rest of humanity.
Get rid of excessive wealth and you will solve 99.9% of the world's problems. It won't create a utopia but it would be a hell of a lot better world than what we have now.
I love you, fellow champion of rational thought. Their money only exists by mutual consent. Their ownership of things only exists by mutual consent. We can revoke our consent. They have built many systems, of government, of policing, around us and around them to protect their money and ownership, but at the end of the day, even these systems are powered by people and only exist by mutual consent. Their defenses require us to be willing to fight each other, that is why they work so hard to keep us willing to fight each other. If we stop fighting each other for long enough, we might just realize they are simply frightened, selfish human individuals just like any of the rest of us. They may be billionaires, but they are not gods, we just cower before them and their systems as if they were.
We can change this, if we work together, instead of against each other.
All power comes from the people. All constructs of law and money are effectively paperwork, just inventions by humans because they were considered useful at the time of implementation.
Just like paper has no real power and depends only on the one who interprets it, the same is true for the law and even for money. It's all based on our collective will to recognize and acknowledge these concepts.
Any way, the paperwork we've done (including the books we've written) is the actual American dream. The american dream isn't to buy a house or sth, but to do so in a certain state of mind. I.e. you want to adhere to a great system that makes sense somehow, and be a part of it. That's why we need to develop new systems, new paperwork, that inspires the people, like a dream, they want to be part of it. That is the key to making a system last.
I recall a late-night, alcohol-fueled conversation I once had with a friend who's an anthropoligist, where we were discussing how pre-industrial societies are often ruled by myths to an extreme extent. She said "western societies have plenty of myths, too, even if you leave out religion."
We live in this huge collective, collaborative and willing self-delusion that, to be fair, was close enough to reality and worked pretty well for many of us for a surprisingly long time. I think there are too many cracks appearing in the illusion now though and thanks to the efforts of the hyper-ultra-wealthy the cognitive dissonance between what the illusion is telling us and what reality is showing us is becoming impossible to ignore.
Killing them won't do any good, if you kill one, another one takes their place. You gotta tax them, because that affects them all equally, so it's not just "pop one, another appears" game.
Removing individual billionaires is a static solution (possibly still needed). But we also need to correct the dynamics that causes new ones to emerge. That's where taxation policy comes into play.
Great point and one I always refer to as well ... money and wealth only exist because we all believe it to have value and purpose.
It's a modern day religion that only exists because we all put our faith and belief in it all.
And just like every ancient faith and belief .... if one day enough of us or all of us stop believing in it, all that wealth and power just evaporates and means nothing.
Yeah, it'll be interested to see what society's like when the belief in the magic of money goes the way of the belief that a king's touch can cure scrofula.
Calling for the government to resign and elections isn't exactly treason. Dissolution of the government is a perfectly ordinary part of democracy in the UK
Foreign oligarch meddling in internal affairs and calling for violence is IMO a good enough reason for a permanent ban.
He is not a citizen of the UK, is he? How would you even apply treason in such a case.
I don't know about the UK, but in several countries that I've lived in the government can most definitely kick out non citizens that call for violence and aim to undermine the democratic order.
Exactly, and do it in the most humiliating way possible.
Records an pre-deportation interview video asking him the meaning of what he said and clarifications around his understanding of the UK democratic system.
This man needs to have his wealth confiscated for global security. Send him to the nuthouse and throw away the key or maybe we’ll get lucky and he will get kirked by another more extreme Nazi
An interesting point - I checked, and as far as I can tell, non-citizens can be charged with treason in the U.K, so long as they are considered under the jurisdiction of the U.K - "alien residents" for example are covered, and probably temporary visitors to the country as well. It would likely be up to judicial interpretation whether attempting the coup virtually would qualify, but I'd assume it might.
The serious take would be that this comment is too mild to qualify for treason, but one could always hope.
Too mild when said by Musk. Now imagine if a queer colored disabled Muslim immigrant said the same thing. They could definitely make these very words count as treason but fear repercussions and bad international press when Musk is the target. You know even his ex, Trump, would come back running to save him from the evil colonialists.
Somebody needs to arrest that fuckhead and stick him in the deepest hole they have, take all his money, and properties to teach him to keep his grubby paws out of politics
He did the same thing in Germany. There's many articles from a while back when he had a super awkward interview with some AfD politician where they discussed how Hitler was actually a communist. Yeah, not kidding. This here however seems a bit more dramatic, maybe Muski has learned something from that first experience.
Stochastic terrorist Nazi and murderous ketamine junkie suffering from the broke mind virus advocating physical violence is creating his own self-fulfilling prophecy.
Yeah, violence is coming you fuckmook, because you make it necessary.
The UK is a dumpster fire. The UK is literally mini-US, it's all neoliberals hard-working "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" guys. (And by "guys" i don't just mean biological men, this is not a gender issue.)
Oh that's a great idea. You see how the U.S. government is crumbling and pedophiles are being protected by the people doing it to strip away any chance of justice. And people are being assassinated at oddly convenient time to help the pedophiles and their investment banker friends.
Listen to Elon. The guy who is literally instigating a second civil war for the the U.S. You too can achieve the American dream.
Double btw they want to take away our passports for questioning war policies of another country. That's kinda goofy huh 😜 theintercept.com/2025/09/13/ma…
[Verse 1]
I come from scientists and atheists and white men who kill God
They make technology high quality, complex, physiological
Experiments and sacrilege in the name of public good
They taught me everything, just like a daddy should
[Verse 2]
And you were beautiful and vulnerable and power and success
God damn, I fell for you, your flamethrowers, your tunnels, and your tech
I studied code because I wanted to do something great like you
And the real tragedy is half of it was true
[Bridge 1]
But we’ve been fuckin’ mean, we’re elitist, we’re as flawed as any church
And this faux-rad West coast dogma has a higher fuckin’ net worth
I bit the apple ’cause I trusted you
It tastes like Thomas Malthus
Your proposal is immodest and insane
And I hope someday Selmers rides her fuckin’ train
[Chorus]
I loved you, I loved you, I loved you, it’s true
I wanted to be you and do what you do
I lived here, I loved here, I thought it was true
I feel so stupid, and so used
I feel so used
[Verse 3]
I was your baby, your firstborn, the hot girl in your comp-sci class
And I was Darwin’s prep school dream bred born and raised to kick your ass
I fell for circuit boards, rocket ships, pictures of the stars
If you could only be what you pretend you are
[Verse 4]
When I said take me to the moon I never meant take me alone
I thought if mankind toured the sky it meant that all of us could go
But I don’t want to see the stars if they’re just one more piece of land
For us to colonize, for us to turn to sand
[Bridge 2]
‘Cause we’re so fuckin’ mean, we’re so elitist, we’re as fucked as any church
And this bullshit West coast dogma has a higher fuckin’ net worth
I bit the apple ’cause I loved you, and why would you lie?
And then I realized that you’re just as naïve as I am
Oh, you’re so traumatized it makes me want to cry
[Chorus]
You dumb *removed*
I loved you, I loved you, I loved you, it’s true
I wanted to be you and do what you do
I lived here, I loved here, I bought it, it’s true
I’m so embarrassed, I feel abused
[Verse 5]
Well I don’t want to eat the rich, I’d have to eat my heroes first
And my tuition’s paid by blood, I might deserve your fate or worse
But I don’t need your god damn money, I don’t need jack shit from you
So when I speak, you bet your life my words are true
[Verse 6]
Let me level with you man, as someone guilty of the game
I took the help, I took the cash, I would’ve taken your last name
So if any girl on Earth should get to make a call about this, it should be me
And as I see it, you’re a dick
[Bridge 3]
So fuck your tunnels, fuck your cars, fuck your rockets, fuck your cars again
You promised you’d be Tesla, but you’re just another Edison
‘Cause Tesla broke a patent, all you ever broke were hearts
I can’t believe you tore humanity apart
With the very same machines that could have been our brand new start
[Chorus]
And the worst part is
I loved you, I loved you, I loved you, it’s true
And sometimes I feel like I still fuckin’ do
I lived here, I loved here, I bought it, it’s true
I’m so embarrassed, I feel abused
I feel so used
I feel so used
Take me to the moon
‘Cause I feel so used
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When billionaire Bill Ackman suggested on Twitter that Eric Adams could “place a large [Polymarket] bet on Andrew Cuomo and then announce [his] withdrawal” from the New York City mayoral race, he described something that feels profoundly illegal. A politician profiting from non-public knowledge of their own withdrawal from an election surely crosses some line — insider trading? Market manipulation? Election interference? Illegal gambling? Ackman ended his tweet: “There is no insider trading on Polymarket” — not because it doesn’t happen, but because it won’t be charged. He’s right: the Securities and Exchange Commission’s insider trading rules don’t apply here. But that leaves the question: what rules, if any, do?
As Ackman says, prediction markets fall outside the SEC’s jurisdiction,a living in a different regulatory world than stock markets where executives get prosecuted for trading on non-public earnings or tipping off friends about upcoming mergers. Unlike crypto’s ongoing turf wars between regulators, prediction markets have a clear home: the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which oversees futures, swaps, and other derivatives trading. A farmer worried about a poor wheat harvest can buy futures contracts that rise in value if wheat prices increase, helping to offset the money lost from selling less grain. An airline can buy oil-based futures contracts to offset the risk of jet fuel costs rising, effectively letting them budget fuel at today’s prices even if market rates climb before delivery. Some derivatives markets more closely resemble prediction markets, dealing in events rather than commodities — for instance, ski resorts can hedge against poor snowfall by trading weather-based contracts.
While farmers hedging wheat prices serves a clear economic purpose, prediction markets operate in murkier territory. When people trade on sports games or celebrity relationships, are they engaging in legitimate derivatives trading deserving the same regulatory treatment? Or are platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket essentially gambling sites operating under the veneer of financial markets? And with participants potentially losing big money to better-informed insiders, who’s ensuring these markets stay fair? What happens when prediction markets collide with other issues — from market manipulation to gambling addiction to election integrity?
Prediction markets once lived on the academic fringe. Now they’re trading billions on politics, sports, and celebrity gossip — under rules never designed for retail gamblers.
More than 200 contractors who worked on evaluating and improving Google’s AI products have been laid off without warning in at least two rounds of layoffs last month. The move comes amid an ongoing fight over pay and working conditions, according to workers who spoke to WIRED.
In the past few years, Google has outsourced its AI rating work—which includes evaluating, editing, or rewriting the Gemini chatbot’s response to make it sound more human and “intelligent”—to thousands of contractors employed by Hitachi-owned GlobalLogic and other outsourcing companies. Most raters working at GlobalLogic are based in the US and deal with English-language content. Just as content moderators help purge and classify content on social media, these workers use their expertise, skill, and judgment to teach chatbots and other AI products, including Google’s search summaries feature called AI Overviews—the right responses on a wide range of subjects. Workers allege that the latest cuts come amid attempts to quash their protests over issues including pay and job insecurity.
These workers, who often are hired because of their specialist knowledge, had to have either a master’s or a PhD to join the super rater program, and typically include writers, teachers, and people from creative fields.
Rep. Sarah McBride [D], the only openly trans member of Congress, voted in support of "Honoring the Legacy" of Charlie Kirk
"scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds" isn't some saying born out of ignorance or a failure to understand nuance, it is painfully accurate. when McBride won her election i lost a friendship after scoffing over her victory because of her Zionism and commitment to Israel. apparently, as a non-binary trans person, i should simply shut up and count her win as a trans goal reached.
today i am vindicated. didn't take long, did it? not even a full year in office and she has shown her true colors. she is incapable of protecting us from Christian authoritarianism because she is a willing participant in its takeover. Charle Kirk spent the last few years demonizing people like her and myself, dehumanizing LGBT Americans, and encouraging the spread of theocratic interpretation of our laws and allegiance to Trump. the rise in younger sycophants and MAGA loyalists can be directly attributed to Charlie Kirk's popularity and closeness to the Trump administration. Kirk was not a mere mouthpiece or figurehead; he wasn't some YouTuber or online guy popular with the kiddos. he was a massive political organizer, and the amount of lies Kirk spread about trans people was immoral, irresponsible, violent, deadly, and deserving of reaction.
Kirk blamed transgender Americans for everything from inflation to moral decay. while appearing on a radio show he wrapped up a comment involving queer people with the following: “someone should’ve just took care of it the way we used to take care of things in the 1950s and '60s." Kirk also referred to Leviticus 18 as "God's perfect law" when attempting to point out how another Christian was cherry-picking which passages of the Bible to follow (Leviticus 18 calls for stoning gay people to death if you read it as such which Kirk does). and here, transgender Rep. McBride [D], is voting to honor this man; a man who would have her killed through violent stochastic actors operating within the MAGA cult and general conservative fascists at large.
the fear and outrage Charlie Kirk was directly responsible for has done incalculable damage nationwide. McBride is offering the genocide of her own minority group if it keeps her protected and in power. she cannot be trusted and should be shunned by all. she is cowardly and will not help you. i have to leave my state because of the validity people like her are giving transphobic bigots like Kirk.
CHESS thin-film materials nearly double refrigeration efficiency compared to traditional methods. Scalable and versatile, they promise applications from household cooling to space exploration.
eclipse
in reply to acargitz • • •Doesn't the US have a constitutional amendment for this (maybe even the first one)?
I'd think the "originalists" would be all for this.
phutatorius
in reply to eclipse • • •