They have been for years. I had a 2016 Sony that definitely wasn’t a good value on paper. I accepted that because it was small.

I notice the page does have Google Analytics, which is the only thing that did get blocked.

There’s an ad on it, which gets past my adblocker since it’s a simple hardcoded link and logo.

I’m certainly not going to defend the guy who stole from me, but I’m a little less eager to see the cops put someone in jail than I was then. Losing his job probably ruined his whole month at least.

It was stressful. I was pretty young and pretty broke.

A gas station attendant didn’t return it when I made a purchase, and I was distracted so I didn’t notice. He then put gas in his own car at his own gas station using it. I came back the next day with a cop, and he confessed. The cop called his boss and he got fired. I got a report to give to the bank.

At the time, I was a little annoyed the cop didn’t arrest him, but he was probably as broke as I was and significantly dumber to commit such a stupid crime.

I’ve actually experienced it. I discovered it was missing after the thief had used it, and the bank refunded the full amount, plus the overdraft fee I incurred by making a purchase using the card number after the thief had drained the account.

if something happens and your card gets stolen your screwed out of that money with debit usually

In the USA, if you report the card missing within two days of discovering that it is missing, your liability is limited to $50.

https://consumer.ftc.gov/node/78373

I would include statistics. So much everyday information is presented using statistics, often in ways that are misleading or deceptive. A bit better understanding would make people harder to trick.

It depends on what phone you have. Some phones have bootloaders you can’t unlock, and you can’t do much at all with that. If you can unlock the bootloader, your options are determined by which third-party Android builds support your hardware.

LineageOS is a popular option with pretty broad device support; GrapheneOS is a privacy/security focused option that only runs on Pixels.

I imagine they announced the most extreme form of it they were considering and had several fallback plans depending on how much backlash there was.

I’ll expand this question to my entire social circle.

I haven’t found that anybody cares about my email provider. It doesn’t affect them because email is federated. Nobody has ever asked me why I’m mailing them from a domain I own rather than a service provider they’ve heard of.

Where I do run into a lot of resistance is trying to get people to use Signal. Some people seem to find the concept of having multiple messaging apps objectionable, which has never made any sense to me as long as they have basic computer skills. On occasion, I’m on the other side of that conversation when I’m unwilling to use Facebook Messenger for reasons that should be obvious to anyone in this community.

I don’t think you’re being taken advantage of financially. I imagine you’ve spent less money than any option for three weeks of sleeping accommodations in Switzerland aside from living with your parents, for example.

I do think there’s a significant chance there’s a mismatch in expectations though. If you intend this to be short-term, it would be cruel to let her think something else. As others have mentioned, there’s a risk she’s trying to get pregnant to incentivize you to stay or financially support her; you don’t know her well enough to say she wouldn’t do that.

As long as you have both of those concerns addressed, it sounds like a good time for all involved.

You will get rid of that phone long before the battery dies.

Why? There was a time where smartphone tech was improving fast enough that there was a large benefit to a new phone every 2-3 years, but that time is in the past for most use cases.

School seems like a good use case for a powerbank since most people carry backpacks to school.

The advantage is that I can occasionally charge it to 80% or 100% if the situation demands it.

The amount of time the battery spends at higher voltage definitely affects its capacity over time. There’s plenty of research on Li-ion battery service life characteristics done with greater scientific rigor than is possible with batteries installed in phones.

It can take longer than the few months these tests required to see the effect. A phone that’s usually stored at 60% will eventually show a big capacity advantage over one that’s stored at 100%. That’s probably mostly true at 80% as well.

For some anecdata, my Pixel 4a has spent most of the past five years limited to 60%. It reports 1152 cycles and 91% capacity.

PCs have a BIOS/UEFI that provides hardware discovery and abstraction to the OS, while phones lack that and need the OS to know what hardware to expect.

20 years ago when the predecessors to modern smartphone hardware were being designed, there probably would have been meaningful costs to adding that kind of flexibility. There probably wouldn’t today, but there’s also no motivation for phone makers to do it.

I like the ungrounded North American electrical outlet and plug design (NEMA 1-15). It has no safety features, but it’s very compact, and very easy for device manufacturers to create folding plugs for USB power supplies and the like.

I prefer the US spelling of these words. The U doesn’t do anything phonetically and was not present in the Latin from which many of the words derive.

That’s not criminal anywhere to my knowledge, but very creepy for an adult to say to a 13 year old.