I imagine this so Israel can continue attacking Iran and the US can distance themselves from the political fallout, while still reaping the ‘benefit’ of Iran’s military capabilities being damaged.

Gotta wonder when Russia and China will decide to be more open in this new cold war and hand larger weapons to Iran.

Today, you learned that not everyone on the Internet is from the USA or Canada.

Ive not heard of this - were you on the standard Google OS? I wonder if that makes any difference.

I’ve been on custom ROM (CalyxOS) for most of the phone’s life.

And their streets are narrow, especially in the French quarter of Hanoi and other older areas. The vehicles in use currently are often very small to make it easier to navigate the narrow roads (and street/laneway parking) and like you mention - the scooters, which are like 90% of vehicle traffic.

Before anyone rushes to replace their phones my Pixel 5 is nearly 5 years old, still on original battery (would be on at least 1200 cycles) and is presently sitting at 92% and claiming 1 day 11hrs remaining. Off the charger since 9:45 this morning and used for streaming music to my car while I was driving earlier. It still easily holds over 24 hours charge in my usage, so if I forget to charge it at night it’s usually around 40% in the morning and I can plug it in sometime in the morning to top up. Perfectly useable after almost 5 years, and this is pretty normal for Pixels in my experience.

Love the new EU measurement standards but per other people’s comments above they do not seem to mandate strict third-party testing, but rather rely on manufacturers submitting their results and adhering to the set test standards. This has not worked out well in the past, it should be mandatory third-party.

Cannot wait to see the return of user-replaceable batteries (thank you again, EU).

Its a large organization. There’s Al Jazeera, and then there’s its Al Jazeera English subdivision which operates with widely different team. The latter has a reputation for high quality journalism and has won multiple awards for it - the former exhibits more bias in its reporting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_awards_awarded_to_Al_Jazeera_English

I would say the BBC is no more trusted and should not be any more trusted than AJ English. Each have biases and each are capable of very high quality investigative journalism.

Guess I have to spell it out.

Communism: ownership of the means of production by the people.

Capitalism: ownership of the means of production by private entities.

Your definition was vague enough to fit both, which was funny because you gave it while patronizingly stating how easy it was to define. Doubling down by patronizingly reciting what the word ‘definition’ means is one way to go I guess.

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You messed that up too - whose ownership? ‘Ownership of the means of production’ could just as easily fit the definition of communism.

Didn’t confuse them with anyone, they put out a quarterly report as all publicly-traded companies do, and they’re on track to do over $2 billion in profit this year ($17b revenue).

What I didn’t go into depths to describe is that the vast majority of their money goes to big labels and several big artists they have less-favourable (to Spotify) contracts with, because those big labels and artists know they can pressure Spotify to get a bigger slice.

So, they continue to give most artists, especially small/new artists next to nothing, exploiting them.

Nothing I said is innacurate IMO.

Quarterly earnings and projections for 2025: https://musically.com/2025/04/29/spotify-q1-2025-financial-results-reveal-it-now-has-268m-paid-subscribers/ (And as you said they already turned a profit last year, which was over a billion).

How about just boycott it because it’s terrible for artists? It pays four tenths of a tenth of a cent per stream ($0.004), while raking in billions of profit each year.

Spotify’s whole business model is exploitation.

Listen to music on whatever service, then if you like the artists music - buy the album, or the track / single. Sure, you may support fewer artists this way, but each artist gets paid literally 2500 times as much (album averages 9.99).

I’d love one and have checked back each year after their first model, but they still don’t sell to Australia - and I’m not going to buy something I can’t get direct parts and services for, and would need to go through third parties for.

If their model is a successful business I honestly thought they would have expanded beyond shipping/supporting only Europe by now, its been a decade since their first model. Maybe they’re still not a very big player / modest success?

The services of your local library. Sign up and use them, and get your friends & family on too because the more regular users and the more people aware of their services, the harder they are for politicians to take away or slash the budget of.

Common services offered:

• Kanopy, hoopla (free TV shows and movies, similar to Netflix)
• Local/national newspapers digital versions
• PressReader for various (usually subscription-only) magazines
• ebooks and audiobooks via OverDrive/Libby, BorrowBox, hoopla, etc.
• Educational resources like language learning apps

I know exactly the community you mean but I haven’t interacted with it much beyond occasional visits and upvotes. It’s sad to hear that perspective of Lemmy, because it does get rose-tinted as a bit of a leftist utopia and this is the first time I’ve seen the ugliness. I really appreciate it being shared.

Kids in my daughters class did a project about ‘an issue that is important to you’. They could pick anything.

Most of the kids talked about interesting and positive fields like environmental protection/space exploitation or some sport they love to participate in. Three of the boys chose to talk about ‘men’s rights’, and according to the teacher who I spoke to about it afterwards they were echoing Andrew Tate shit.

They were 10 years old at the time.

None of their parents are divorced either, so theres no ‘woe story’ from dad in the background to put any framing around this.

However, their parents are all conservative and all let their kids access Youtube with no oversight. So social media and lax/indifferent parenting are very much grooming the next generation into hateful misogynists like Tate.

I haven’t seen any radical female content creators personally, and there certainly doesn’t seem to be a large industry of them forming. If there is they’re very well hidden and poorly advertised.

But if that happens I’d absolutely be for talking people away from listening to them.

I’d say AI search summaries are somewhat useful for me 30% of the time. And I click through to the sources to confirm its summaries anyway, because they’re often oversimplified.

Often though, they’re goddamn useless.

Same on all fronts. Not commenting on YouTube has been a good thing I’d say 90% of the time, it’s a terrible place to try to have a discussion with their comment format.

Using Reddit even for occasional information is becoming a pain in the arse now with a lot of stuff locked behind login or behind other hurdles like CAPTCHA / AI challenges. They don’t like us ‘dine and dash’ visitors it seems.

I’m banging on about it? You highlighted it from my list and came up with the false narrative that I am somehow OK with womens-only clubs, something I’ve never claimed (that’s a strawman FYI).

You’re not interested to learn, nor to have an honest debate. Good luck with that attitude, you’ll need it.