There’s an argument to be made that this is a reasonable price, and that much cheaper phones should be treated with high suspicion.

Oops, obvisouly, was thinking about the Muslim world and getting terms mixed. Fixed.

I think the advantage is that it reads partly as a FAQ, partly as a place to read whatever commentary on the situation people seem to agree with. It’s a place where people can discuss and ask questions more generally. Other threads tend to be more about specific breaking news and developments, maybe missing the bigger picture.

All fascists need a good enemy, obliviate one and you have to move on to the next. The only end game to this bullshit is total apocalypse. Which of course is what the evangelical Christian supporters of Israel has been cheering for all along.

Iran has been a headache for a long time. Much like in America and Israel, violent religious fundamentalists took control over society and installed a reign of terror.

This has of course been bad for the Iranians, but America of course could not care less about that. However, Iran has been a major concern for Israel, as they are an unreliable an aggressive neighbour. Again, don’t let the irony get lost on you. The threat of Iran maybe managing to develop nukes has been a particularly salient issue, and perhaps one of the driving forces behind Israel getting its own nukes decades ago.

In short, Israel just cannot feel safe with the current rule in Iran. Or so the Israeli far right has insisted for decades, anyways. Keeping this fear high on the agenda has been key to winning elections and to get in place the far right genocidal lunatics currently in the Israeli government. Along with the fear of Palestinians of course.

The US is of course loyal allies of Israel as their one true friend in a region full of oil. The Saudis are of course also good friends whenever they are not actively attacking America and killing civilians or journalists, but they are not quite as good at lobbying. So American interests and Israeli interests are pretty much the same, and the Iranian regime has been the face of evil for decades. Conveniently they are also super evil, so it’s easy to make propaganda.

Recently the Iranian regime has murdered a bunch of civilians who protest the regime. The US and Israel wouldn’t usually care about dead civilians in the middle east - they certainly wouldn’t oppose it at least - but right now it provides a convenient excuse to bomb the fuck out of Iran. Trump needs this because he needs support before the upcoming election- a successful impeachment might allow the opposition to grow teeth, and if they do he could end up locked away for life.

Netanyahu is in even deeper ship than Trump, with corruption charges at home and crimes against humanity abroad. Now that his genocide in Palestine is getting old he needs something new to keep him in power.

Iran responds to attack by sending missiles towards American military bases in the area. American military bases are located in the surrounding countries, which is why you see newspaper headlines making out as if Iran is launching a war on every country in the regioun. They’re not, they’re just trying to strike back against America and Israel. Just like the Americans and Israelis they suck at hitting military targets and often end up hitting civilian ones instead.

I could really only see one thing when contemplating mr. Bunny’s fashion choices.

Needless to say I approve.

Instagram and Linkedin was the latest last autumn I guess. Would have deleted them sooner had I actually used them, but I don’t think I had signed in to either for years. Spotify before that (though Swedish), replaced with Qobuz.

The current battle is to get my partner to cancel her American streaming subscriptions. Don’t want to be too extremist about it, but yet…

There’s a blog post on contactless payments in /e/OS here, which talks about options without Google Pay. It’s written by the guy who started /e/OS, so it should be a decent source.

My guess would be that Google Wallet is so embedded in Google dependencies that you’d pretty much be back at stock Android by the time you get it working. But I have no personal experience, sorry.

Yeah, this is true. They just seem to have a specific beef against Fairphone and /e/OS because it’s presented as a privacy alternative (due to no big tech tracking), and the Graphene team believes they are the only ones with the security features to ensure true privacy (because of their… hardened malloc?).

They (Graphene) have very strong ideas about security, and argue that Google Pixel devices are the only ones that can truly be unhackable enough because of some feature of hardware design. I have read it a bunch of times and I still don’t understand, but I’m sure there’s a valid point there somewhere. It has nothing to do with security as in safety, but relates to some sort of local hacking that requires access to the device I believe.

Really nothing to worry about unless you have very specific needs, in my opinion. But there are some people who feel very strongly about it, though without ever being able to clearly express their precise concerns in a coherent way.

The Graphene team has also been very outspoken about how much they dislike Fairphone for this very reason.

I use /e/OS on my Fairphone 5. It’s not a Graphene alternative as it’s not a hardened OS, it’s just Android without Google. Good enough for me, I’m not afraid of secret agents stealing my phone to extract data or whatever, I just don’t want American big tech anywhere near my phone.

Yeah, the machine learning functionality is missing in Nextcloud as far as I’m aware, and I remember it being pretty cool when it rolled out in Google photos (though that’s also why I deleted all my stuff from there - I wear a tin foil hat). Personally I’m waiting for a good open source photo management software to handle it locally (I remember seeing Shotwell was working on face recognition), but that’s hardly a solution at all.

I used Google photos just to have my pictures and videos automatically uploaded from my phone when I took them and to the cloud, with the added perk that they could be viewed and shared online if I felt like it. I’m not sure if there’s anything more to it?

If not, I recomend Nextcloud managed by some hosting provider. Hetzner is German and probably the cheapest option out there. I use Murena from France, as I’m fine paying a little more because they develop my phone OS. It’s still a lot cheaper for me than my Dropbox subscription was, and I couldn’t be happier with how Nextcloud works.

The fact that it’s the same apps and functionality between different providers also makes it easier to switch down the road if necessary, whereas other providers might try to lock you into their app ecosystems in order to make you stick with them even as they increase prices or make their services worse.

I keep my ski pass in the left front pocket of my jacket, never had any issues. Most people I know do the same. The ski passes have pretty good range.

Based on experience in French and Swiss alps, in case it’s regional.

Sure - I had a snowboarding jacket as an all purpose one for a few years, and it was great. So I think it’s more about finding a good jacket that you could see yourself wearing in many situations.

And yeah, it makes sense that the snow could melt and all that, sounds extremely uncomfortable. In either case I’d want a waterproof jacket for sure. :)

I always ski in my hiking jacket, which I also tend to use on rainy days throughout the year. It’s wind and water proof (I’d think wind is more important than water as I wouldn’t ski in rain, but you mention getting wet so what do I know), and has zippers under the armpits so I can cool down a bit if necessary. It is extremely thin and lightweight. The brand is Bergans (of Norway, middle end), but there are plenty of good options. Underneath I just layer up with wool until I’m comfortable.

Not really a specific jacket recommendation, more a general advice to get a good jacket you can use for other activities as well. For a beginner there’s no reason to have a jacket dedicated specifically to skiing.

I also ski in winter hiking pants. The problem with those is that they don’t go over the shoes in alpine skiing, which would have been more ideal. I can’t say it bothers me much though.

If you don’t care about the price Remarkable Pro move could be worth considering. Comes with a pen and let’s you doodle and take notes, colour screen, and the usual ebook stuff. But you can for sure find way cheaper options out there if all you want to do is to read books.

That’s the network effect though, no fun being alone in a social network.

Mastodon in particular has this problem, as it is built so much around emphasizing genuine human interactions and being a true social network, rather than just a social media broadcasting information. If your network is not there you have little reason to be there either.

Commercial social media increasingly replace connections with engagement, which makes it easier for them to attract new users who don’t have their friends and family there. TikTok has taken it to the extreme it seems, judging by my very outside understanding.

What makes me hopeful is that it is to a large degree a problem of first movers, and Mastodon did manage to get past the initial hurdle of just being a tiny group of FOSS freaks. The first million users are the hardest million when fighting network effects, and the Fediverse has made it that far.

I misunderstood and thought you talked about a newer product than the original OLPC, which I was unaware had a transflective display. That’s cool, I’d love to see it in practice. The device is pretty ancient by now though, and as you said hard to come by.

E-ink generally refers to electronic paper displays, which is different from (and much more expensive than) transflective LCDs. So I was confused by the prospect of OLPC having it, especially as the technology barely existed for consumer hardware back when these laptops were made.

My favourite anecdote about the OLPC was how the antennas enabled farmers to communicate locally, and basically unionizing against exploitative practices by the assholes who were buying their crops. It was a really cool project.

Do you have a source? According to Wikipedia OLPC shut down in 2014. I found some old reporting about a spin-off, but couldn’t make sense of it.