Banking, messages, email, calendars, discord, messenger, maps, browser, Voyager (Lemmy), YouTube, music, shattered pixel dungeon, Wikipedia, notes, swipe keyboard, duolingo, WhatsApp, desmos, reminders, camera, photos, home automation….

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).

Sandy is just so sweet. Makes me happy every time I see her!

I don’t apologize for or excuse anyone, I merely explain. Most people around here seem to prefer to hurl insults rather than understand the world around them. I block them.

Do you have an example of a particular billionaire you’d like to discuss?

My example would be Google. Founded in 1998, IPO in 2004. That’s essentially when Sergey Brin became a billionaire.

We can all point to bad things Google has done over the years but I’m having a hard time finding any of them that occurred before 2004. Who are the millions of people that Sergey Brin exploited between 1998 and 2004?

Note that Google had only 2500 employees in 2004 and almost all of them became millionaires on the day of the IPO.

Dragon hoard doesn’t really describe what it’s like.

It’s more like going in to work every day, like everybody else at the office, sitting in meetings all day, and then watching the stock price shoot up until one day your net worth crosses 1,000,000,000.

It’s like getting a high score in a video game. There’s no mountain of cash in some warehouse. It’s just a number on a screen.

It’s not just a French Revolution style scenario they have to worry about. Look at what has happened to some Russian billionaires. Not so fun enjoying the playboy lifestyle when you’re afraid to drink tea or get anywhere near an open window.

Not every billionaire wants to be a technofeudalist or an oligarch. I bet a bunch of Russian billionaires don’t like the situation they’re in but are afraid to leave.

Sorry dude, but cars are technology too, not just self driving cars. Every death due to cars is a technology death. You can’t escape the reality of tradeoffs.

What do you mean science backs it up? Science is finding massive social problems with technology all the time. Social media and its negative impacts on mental health (especially for teen and preteen girls), for example. Microplastics everywhere, for another. Climate change anyone?

Sure, though the UK has a much larger proportion of those old houses than the US.

Many Americans have huge garages, some with room to park 2 or even 3 vehicles with plenty of space to walk around them. But even single garages are large enough to park cars.

I used Arch for about 7 years. I still have it installed on an old PC but I haven’t used it recently. Every time I told pacman to update everything it felt like an adventure. Never knew if I was going to reboot to a working desktop or to a console printing cryptic error messages that take a while to Google on my phone before I get things back up and running. I wouldn’t wish that experience on my worst enemy’s grandma!

It all comes down to the maintainers of Arch putting all of the responsibility for breakage (especially due to old configuration files) 100% on the user. That’s not a system any normal person should use, that’s a system for Linux hobbyists. A LTS distribution where “don’t break the user’s install no matter what” is the rule is absolutely the only system I’d ever trust for grandma.

It’s fine if you want to assume all responsibility for updating grandma’s system and fixing breakage every time. I don’t have any interest in doing that. If I’m at grandma’s house I want to spend time talking to her, not fixing her computer.

But that means she’s not getting security updates and since she’s grandma she really needs them. On the other hand, if you’re automatically upgrading her Arch install then there will be breakage she is hopeless to fix.

So what advantage does Arch offer grandma over a traditional release LTS distribution which will be nice and stable, not breaking or changing unexpectedly on her but still remaining current with security patches?

I think most of the replies to my remark thought I was questioning Linux for grandma overall. I wasn’t. Just Arch. I don’t think grandma needs rolling releases.

You jest but would you really install Arch on your grandmother’s PC?

You’re making an assertion without evidence. What’s there to understand about an unsupported (and likely false) assertion?

Sure they would. Interest is based on economic growth, not lifespan.

If you could live 25000 years you wouldn’t need to earn a billion by working. You could invest a single dollar at 1% interest and it would only take 2083 years to grow to over a billion dollars.

Ideally anyway. Government interference can always screw it up and create barriers to competition.

Where I live (Ontario, Canada) on-peak electricity prices have pretty much exactly kept pace with inflation over the past 20 years, so in effect electricity costs have not gone up.

Off-peak prices have crept up more than that but solar power doesn’t help with off-peak generation at all. Wind turbines do produce more at night but we’ve had government subsidies to encourage building wind power capacity and those subsidies result in higher wholesale prices for that power (actually above the off-peak prices consumers pay).