Yet another demonstration that the primary meaning of “smart” has come to be “unbelievably stupid.”

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That the “smart meters are dangerously radiactive” garbage was spread by people who wanted to cover up the fact that they’re a massive invasion of privacy, by making everyone opposed to them look crazy, is my kind of conspiracy theory.

Your faith in the safety of allowing your car and your phone the opportunity to share data with each other is touching, but until I see the source code I will remain unconvinced that it isn’t a bad idea.

They are looking to buy new, and need Android Auto and CarPlay

I was active on an automotive forum around the time when that sort of thing started to be seen as a “need” by car salesmen and some of their more enthusiastic customers. The big new thing was “infotainment” and it seemed like the whole industry was insisting we’d all soon see how essential this stuff was. I was disdainful of the idea then, and have only become more so. Cars should have an AM/FM radio receiver, and aside from lights and a horn that’s all they need for communications.

That’s not the answer you’re looking for, but it seems reasonably on-topic here. If you must get a new car, the easiest route to having it not spy on you as much as it can all the time is to make sure it doesn’t have a SIM card (or remove the one it does have) and never connect your phone to it in any way except perhaps via a 3.5mm audio jack.

RCS is Google’s attempt to replace SMS with a protocol they can control.

Put one in the kitchen and the power of platonic solids will keep your knives sharp for longer.

It’s beautiful. Many of the comments here demonstrate that Lemmy still needs to learn how to not feed the trolls, and I wonder if it’s something similar that’s needed in real life politics.

When it comes to location tracking and many other things, data retention and use policies are just a useful distraction from the real problem which is that they’re able to collect the data at all.

“If you want peace, be prepared for war.” — various warmongers through the ages

12% over four years? Damn. Somehow I had the impression that there’d been a significant increase.

Netflix revenue is up by roughly 60% in the same four years.

When you phrase it that way, it becomes all the more obvious that it’s not really about the porn.

It’s too bad you couldn’t find a link to somewhere other than x.com. Just going by the headline though, this could lead to great new career opportunities for Irish black market contraband meme dealers.

chart doesn’t seem to show up on lemmy. Not sure what I did wrong there, but it’s the first time I tried an image in a comment. I guess this way works better.

Meanwhile if you’re curious how reddit has been doing, just look at this chart

The part that struck me as nonsensical was “the more there’s demand the most there’s supply(and cheaper prices).” It remains unclear what you meant to say, but perhaps you were thinking of some kind of economy of scale effect, where a larger market leads to more efficient production? That seems largely inapplicable here, though.

Anyway, that there’s “too much regulations” is one overly simplistic answer given by certain politicians around here, just as “too much immigration” is the overly simplistic cause often given for our housing market problems. There’s at least a little bit of truth in each if you look hard enough, but really it’s a pretty complicated situation with no easy answers that requires more sophisticated analysis than seems possible to bring anywhere near visibility in contemporary sound-bite- and clickbait-based politics.

Despite that, given all the various longstanding and intractable ways in which our systems of housing, housing investment, and urban development are currently fucked up, rapid population growth certainly does make that problem worse too. It may not be the root cause of the problem, but it’s another push in the wrong direction for a situation that’s been bad for as long as most of us can remember.

Other things being equal, an increase in demand leads to an increase in the equilibrium price. Google “demand shock” for more relevant info. To the extent that it is governed by the usual laws of supply and demand (which is to a notably limited extent), housing is a market that is slow to adapt and will take quite some time to adjust to a sudden change in the demand curve.

That is not how supply and demand work, even in theory.

Lately it is beginning to appear that among the many problems caused by this alarmingly rapid population growth is that it fuels anti-immigrant sentiment. We’ll be paying the price for decades to come.

It seems unlikely that a 51% attack will do anything worse than the ~30000% attackers we currently deal with.