Problem is, CA is doing their own version of wacky insanity. Newsom is nuts. The Land of Liberals hates homeless, is losing empathy in a different direction, it's really weird.

Secede.

It's cool that most American jobs tend to have a mediocre pay raise that barely keeps up with inflation. Couple that with increasing accelerated cost of everything multiple times (most recent big jumps, Pandemic, end-of-pandemic-fake-price-hike-for-alleged-still-supply-chain-disruptions-moneygrab, runaway inflation from Mango Mussolini 1.0, now all the stuff from Mango 2.0, insurance rate jumps due to climate change) and even a tiny 6% pay raise is still a pay cut (if one is lucky to even see a pay rase.)

RAM speed is going to be negligibly different in daily use, and on-die RAM will compensate for that slightly slower clock on the ARM computer. Intel's hyperthreading is much less a performance advantage than it used to be. Intel chips suck anymore though, full stop, and generate heat like mofos. I wouldn't be surprised if this computer uses that generation of Intel chips that randomly dies, gen13 I think?

Worse, that Beelink will be using Intel embedded graphics which is basically the worst on the planet - I'd take Qualcomm Adreno before Intel embedded.

It's also listed on Amazon as frequently returned. Not worth $869. Could get an Asus (née Intel) NUC that would serve much better, I think there are at least some AMD variants now.

The Beelink might make a dandy headless server if one got lucky though, if GPU isn't needed for AI/ML or other GPU-based acceleration/calculations.

Beelink also wins points for having actual hard drive and RAM slots as well. Still probably not worth the money versus anything else.

Really can't wait for some computer companies that aren't Apple to start pumping out ARM mini PCs and laptops with decent chips.

FWIW, and not trying to be an apologist as I find their pricing insane, they at least seem to be using good SSDs. I've found over the last 10 years that SSD life can vary wildly. Just some light-access databases destroyed some consumer-grade SSDs and hybrid drives' SSD portions. A couple in less than a year.

Have a dev mac that I absolutely constantly murder the SSD on daily over the last 3 or so years. I'm talking gigabytes of data written daily 5 days a week. Available spare sectors is still 100%, and percentage "used" (which granted, is a vendor-specific life metric) is 5%.

That being said, I'll still be hating on them for soldering the SSD to the motherboard. That is the real crime.

CLEAN COAL thank you very much. (/s)

We are idiots.

You give them too much credit. More like, type to an LLM:

"Hey ai, here is an mbox file full of e-mail from people. Find all the names and make a table of names and email addresses." uploads file

"Hey muskrat, we got the list of people to deport!"

Mango Mussolini's dream team is using "AI" to do all their decisions and data processing, and they're too fucking dumb (and don't give a shit) to realize that it constantly makes mistakes and can't be trusted for shit. Their jobs are "easier" because of it, the outcomes don't affect them anyway since they live in an alternate reality bubble, and they can claim they're "doing something" while really just having taxpayers pay them to golf.

Also fuck self check outs.

Oh man, seriously, I figured they'd at least get "smarter" or better or...anything in the last 24 years of stores running away with self-checkout. They've become functionally worse. I was with someone buying some food at a Kroger store one day and they now have ML cameras everywhere watching what you do. We were efficiently firemen's-carrying the food items, so first person grabs item, scans it, hands to second person, second person bags it.

Stupid machine thought we were trying to pocket stuff even though all hands were in plain view from multiple angles. Person had to come over, hit a button, make it review slowed down video footage, and then it allowed us the luxury of scanning and paying for our groceries ourselves.

In general, middle fingers to all of them. If you're going to replace human checkout with automated checkout, the onus is on you to deal with "shrinkage"/shoplifting. The customer's experience should be as buttery-smooth and painless as possible if you're going to make them work for you. Otherwise, you're going to piss them off and make them want to shoplift.

Stopped shopping at Kroger. (As well as Target obv.)

So, like the usual double-speak rhetoric from this party, just gotta invert what he says:

Elmo Muskrat pays for protestors, and is sad that his paid protestors aren't as effective as real ones.

You're talking about different chemicals as a comparison not a 1:1. I'll concede that some dyes may indeed exist only from chemical derivation. However, many do not. We've already put more thought into this than RFJ Jr. has, btw. (Not all dyes referenced below are foodsafe, to be clear, just a quick comparison chart.)

Random table of dyes that can be derived both ways:

You had the brevity to say what I tried to say in a news article-level word barf. Kudos.

Oh, flood them with everything. Find a way to firehose noise at them constantly. It would honestly be the best thing anyone could do. I was just adding to @[email protected] 's post, that we all sharing memes for internal humor is pointless. Mango Mussolini only sees something if it's on FOX or CNN, written on the underside of a Big Mac, or some poor sexually abused intern has to hand him a note. Muskrat doesn't see messages carved onto his cars, he just sees his stock dropping and how he's too impotent to love his children.

The meme has to actually be in their face all the time. Inescapable. Billboards, sky writing, blimps, snail mail, post-it notes on their car, a Tetris of Teslas on an interchange that spells out TWAT that then catches on fire, a subscription to Anus of the Month club with newsletters, whatever. It has to be something that makes them realize they can't hide from being a shitty person anywhere. That's what their brains do to justify being evil, hide. They have their quiet happy place thanks to rich privilege. Take that away, make them feel the same discomfort the entire planet feels because they're assholes, they'll get scared like they already should be.

It's more difficult now, really, as we can't be some 1950s movie where bags of mail are delivered to Congress showing pissed-offed-ness. There are too many filters in place. You gotta figure out how to send them WEA messages on every phone in DC using the cellular networks, you gotta get road signs around where they ride hacked to say terrible things, you gotta get their Uber Eats order to somehow have a bowl of soup that spells out "you are a shadow of a human being" in soup letters when they pull the lid off. (Might be a stretch, that last one.)

(This is a bad reference but it's the best I can think of in the moment.) Think of the spirit of what 4chan always was (mixed topic, right?) 20 years ago, it was claimed to be a far left site while just being random, now it's claimed a far right site, but it was always just a far weird site, chaos, bedlam. When Balloon Boy was live TV with allegedly a kid trapped in a balloon that turned out to be fake, 4chan ordered a pizza to the house of the weird criminal parents. Pizza delivery seen on live TV across America. A harmless prank that actually was also food and made as much sense as the whole scam balloon thing.

TL;DR: The point is, make them SEE and FEEL they aren't as invulnerable as they think they are. No violence has to happen. The discomfort alone is all they need. It's insanely simple. Remember Muskrat and the already public information jet tracking he freaked out over? So simple.

Also, for the ones that support reset after 10 wrong passcodes, enable that shit. SIM PIN too (mostly for various other reasons.)

Trade school too. Trades are necessary, can pay very well, and for whatever reason are stigmatized in the US, so there is a high demand.

Doing something tangible is also so much more rewarding than dying overweight at a desk typing the same code over and over ad infinitum.

They're so tone-deaf and under-educated, they have no clue that the things they say are not only lacking in humor, but lacking in any connection to reality, humanity, and they don't even understand the concept of empathy.

That administration and their remaining followers have no value for life of any kind.

We can't forget that.

The fun thing about "natural" vs "artificial" dyes is pretty nothingburger in reality. The manufacturers of chemical dyes, scents, etc. just generate the chemical by whatever means. If it's a "natural" flavor/scent/color it is derived from something like a beetle or a flower. If it's "artificial" it is derived via a chemical process. The end product is the same.

Reminds me of some years back when Starbucks answered the cry of, "but we don't want artificial flavors/colors in our coffee!" so they started using a red dye for one of their drinks that was derived from crushed up beetle shells. People then freaked out, "I don't want to drink beetle shells!!!!!!"

TL;DR: The end product is the same, whether it be natural or artificial. The real concern, is if the product should really be consumed at all.

The Big Brains like RFK Jr. likely lack the mental capacity to understand such concepts, so all the dyes will become "natural" and stick around, and just increase the number of purée'd parakeets. Basically, another shitty cup game.

The concept of an influencer should, ideally, be made illegal. I'm convinced the primary reason they are popular, is people are too lazy to want to have to read news/information of whatever topic and assemble it into something resembling their own opinion. They'd much rather have some other person read, parse, watch the goings-on and then deliver it as the influencer's opinion. That way, people can subscribe to people that have similar opinions as themselves, and not be spooked by information that is "scary" or challenges their worldview.

It is like influencer was the next progression after social media echo chambers came into existence. A role inserted between old/traditional methods of information delivery, that parses it and delivers it in a format appealing to a particular audience. A role that has never had any certification or vetting process. Just some dude with a microphone in his mom's bathroom.

So many people (in America at least) legitimately want to get into this as a "career" too, which is disturbing. Rather than doing real work of any kind to benefit society. If everyone is an influencer, who's maintaining the codebase that makes their streams possible? Designing the hardware the software runs on? The power plants that run the datacenters? etc.

That being said, traditional media definitely hasn't adapted well to the changing methods of information delivery, so maybe this is our 21st century media transition happening organically, and standards will eventually follow, hopefully.

I just realized how odd it would be to see people walking around in brandless clothes. As odd as when someone removes all the badges from their car.

The advertising has been so prevalent for so long that it has been normalized. Fascinating.

America does have a greater than zero percentage of spineless bootlickers, more interested in upvotes and likes than their own freedom, unfortunately.