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Even that requires a tailored suit, not an off the rack one. I just can't see the dichotomy the author mentions. Suits are clothes and they can be modern or not just like anything else. The differences are that older clothes were generally made to last longer, and that suits can be tailor made. But suits can be also cheap and low quality, they can be ill fitting, and here it doesn't matter if they're old or modern.

As for comfort, look at clothes you'd wear for relaxing on the couch or for extended periods like a long flight. A suit can be comfortable for a suit but otherwise they're mainly a matter of looks rather than comfort.

No, but the current leadership would show weakness for backing out and get shanked at the showers by the future leadership.

No as much lax as lacking resources to deal with widespread violations. They probably focus on the most egregious cases.

The branding and communication themselves are cringy for me. They're "Dots", cute and cuddly, your friends. They're yellow and fluffy. Always have your back. They even guess what you need and do proactive work in the background. You name them like a pet.

Will your Dots ever screw you? Delete your files? Hack a system by mistake? Dots doing this? You are in control [wink].

In all fairness, the US by itself is fighting someone else's war on the other side of the world, in a region that's generally not super friendly to them.

Russia is fighting its own battle at its own border against an enemy which receives some support from NATO countries.

US leadership fights to not lose face, Russian leadership loses a lot more than face if they back off.

It was a figure of speech. I'm told with evidence.

That's exactly why Gaza took it far worse than anything Russia can do in Ukraine. Gaza is like shooting fish in a barrel and Israel fishes with dynamite and white phosphorus in that barrel. The Gaza war is about sterilizing that land of all its people, who I'm told aren't even considered people by their enemy. Even Russia didn't go that far.

The destruction in Ukraine is mostly focused on the front line. Gaza was treated as a front line almost in its entirety, with almost no place to hide.

Don't ignore survivorship bias.

> Wirecutter is a cash cow for the Times

Wikipedia says the Wirecutter implemented a metered paywall a few years ago as additional source of financing. With the weight of the Times behind them they branched into other areas like podcasts and partnerships with countless other sites. This fits well into what I said in my earlier comment. Running this kind of business is hard and someone with deeper pockets will find an interest in it.

Just a few years after founding and shortly before selling to the Times for 1 year's worth of revenue, Wirecutter trialed a deal with Amazon for sponsored posts, along with exploring other revenue streams [2] like kickbacks.

> if you can keep people's trust

Trustworthiness and money don't always go hand in hand. Facebook is a cash cow and keeps people's trust as they keep coming back. Would you call it a trusted source of information? I remember the pendulum swinging against Wirecutter shortly after the sale. And plenty of reports since [1][2].

Rtings is the authoritative source for reviewing anything with a screen and they struggled financially, having to implement a subscription model.

And at the end of the day, taking Wirecutter as an indisputably trustworthy authority in consumer reviews, anyone else on the market has to compete with them with 2 possible options when reviews go head to head: agree and just be an echo, or contradict and go against the indisputably trustworthy authority. Talk about being between a rock and a hard place.

Maybe I'm, too cynical but the rug has been pulled from under me too many times to count by things that started out trustworthy than found the need or just the allure of money. With the internet only becoming more trustworthy over these past years I'm sure I have no reason to worry, right?

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/08/wirec...

[2] https://www.xdesk.com/wirecutter-standing-desk-review-pay-to...

I was editing my comment but I can go into detail about what I mean here.

I understand how they operate (it's in the middle of their main page) but that actually makes it more difficult for them. The site commits to test thousands of products each year and they don't do sponsored content, free samples, or ads.

They're walking on a beaten path, see Rtings [0] (even the methodology and visual style, which is a good thing). Everyone eventually needs to look for alternative revenue streams to support themselves especially when the competition is fierce and doesn't always play fair. Affiliate link revenue via Amazon.com is not a reliable long term financing strategy for a review website which has to constantly purchase new stuff and pay qualified reviewers.

Most people search the local market for the product and buy the best deal. It doesn't need to be Amazon.com and in many cases, it can't.

[0] https://www.rtings.com/company/revamping-our-membership-prog...

> For product reviews, I've been using GearLab (https://www.techgearlab.com/) for years with pretty reliable results. I have no affiliation with them.

Why would you assume any website is immune to this problem of bots and fake or paid reviews? Bots are so cheap now and smart enough to pass as realistic humans.

Even with good intentions, money runs out eventually (they say no ads and no sponsored content) and someone with deep pockets will exploit this.

Eventually everyone will just have to implement the foolproof solution of putting in the rules that saying that their website has a problem is "a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills" and be done with it.

> Weber told me it considered open-sourcing the technology for someone else to keep it alive, but decided against it, citing the fact June’s IP is part of its Weber Connect platform.

Ah, so they can't allow others to support it because they already have a platform where they explicitly chose not to support it. It's like someone saying they considered calling 911 to save a gunshot victim but decided against it since the bullet came from their gun. What a way to try to look like you care about your customers.

99% of smart kitchen appliances end up costing 4 times as much just for the "smartness" which in reality isn't only their weak point, it's also the cheapest part of the whole ensemble. Your washing machine or fridge double in price because the manufacturer slapped on an ESP32 and a vibe coded insecure cloud backend. Even devices that could last decades end up betrayed by the dependency on that super-expensive crap you though is a selling feature.

If you need to, buy cheap IoT, the kind that you can work with locally (HA, HomeKit, etc.) with no internet access, the kind you set and forget and when it stops working you can genuinely treat them as consumables. Don't pay thousands for something that will be quickly dragged down by their marquee feature.

The “for profit” isn’t even the entire story. The scale of the theft is unprecedented. It’s the combination between stealing everything and only for their profit that makes this impossible to defend.

Other stores are a different topic or concern for Google. They want to retain control over anything that runs on the Android platform. Google thus ensures everyone must comply with rules that benefit Google. Anything that Google doesn’t like for whatever reason gets booted or screwed with.

Having the “valuable” apps like Maps only in their store is just another way to cement that authority.

You don’t get Maps “for free”, you pay with your data (your searches, your preferences, etc.). For Google maps is the bait to reel you in, you are the product they sell to their real customers: businesses. Google can shape your preferences by showing you what their paying customers want you to see.

I thought it’s self evident that products like Gmail, Search, Maps and others aren’t free because Google is aiming to do charity but because your personal data allows them to build a digital model of you and charge other businesses for access to that knowledge.

Around me I can’t think of a bank that allows any remote operation without a TAN only available on iOS or Android. That’s the root of a lot of future problems, not the least of which being that the bank charges you more for in person operations.

Now you can cram some seriously powerful hardware inside your keyboard (to go back to a form factor really popular some decades ago), or even a larger mouse with enough skill and determination. Stick PCs and tiny PCs made everything so accessible because they're already in a super compact form factor, ready to be crammed into any enclosure with minimal modding.

Hard to be impressed with small builds today considering what a flagship phone is capable of in that tiny package.

The unknown model here [1] looks a lot like the Nokia E6 to the point it might be a prototype. The date on the screen suggests it's from ~8 months before the E6's launch. AFAIK only the mic hole is places slightly off from the E6.

[1] https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi/index.html?node=A0383

Back then this was quite a bit of effort and engineering (especially the bootloader auto detection) to achieve and probably got a lot of wowed faces. Today nobody would bat an eye, you can cram anywhere a tiny PC or even stick PC, and maybe have a single USB-C cable sticking out.

I'd consider power generation (solar, wind, nuclear) as strategically important and accept that it may need subsidies long term. If this allows the country a degree of independence from external shocks, it would be worth it.

> Notice the no response, they know what they’re doing and they don’t care.

I was with you in principle until this part. You gave them ~30 minutes before claiming "no answer".

> just expensive and inconvenient

You mean something is theoretically possible, but in practice only works at small scale and is otherwise effectively impossible. You only have so many resources for all those big topics.

And after you spent all the world's resources on the "perfect", formally bug-free software, you get hacked via social engineering or malicious insider.

That doesn't save you from failure, just automates it :D.

This is an underestimated part of operating IT infrastructure at home. Something a lot of homelab builders miss. They have a homelab that mixes in the same environment and same equipment the role of delivering standard services for the house and family, with the role of experimenting and toying around.

Everyone who builds this should really have "homeprod" and "homelab". And when the experiments and tests inevitably lead to an outage, the movie streaming or photo storage or home control parts don't die with it.

I'm running Linux on a UGREEN NAS without a problem from the OS perspective. On AOOSTAR even Windows 11 ran fine after digging for appropriate drivers.

Where most of these machines suffer is the default UEFI config and the cooling. The UGREEN luckily gives the option to dig into the advanced UEFI settings (they just left the entire setup open in "engineering" mode so every option the firmware gives is there to tweak) and optimize what the manufacturer defaults, change the power saving options, turbo and power limits, etc. This makes a huge difference.

But the CPU cooling is still sub-par and there's no off the shelf replacement. Most of these smaller Chinese NAS brands I tried have this issue, they take very decent hardware and slap on them the crappiest accessories like cooling. You get a hobbled CPU, always pegged at low clocks because the temperature spiked to 99C. Sometimes the disk cooling isn't too well conceived either and the disks bake at 45C idle but these can usually be compensated if you're willing to take the noise.

Other way around.

These days the inheritance will include mostly junk. Old, worn out, low quality items, clothes, furniture, appliances, etc. Nobody says no to the one thing they need but can't afford, they say no to having yet another item they have no need for and its only value could be sentimental but otherwise it's a burden, one other thing among many to store somewhere, or throw out/donate/sell.

Do you need and can afford to keep somewhere another 6 creaky chairs, a big worn out dining table, bags of old clothes that don't fit anyone, outdated and broken electronics that probably don't work anymore, and so on? Even memories like pictures and videos are sometimes too much. They used to be a couple of photo albums, half with people you wouldn't even recognize, now there are TB of digital ones.

> She figures that they’ve spent at least fifty thousand dollars in rental fees so far—more than they could get from selling the furniture.

That probably doesn't even consider inflation, $1 in 2006 was worth $1.60 in today's money. People are really bad at long term financial planning but also get really attached to objects with some sentimental value. So this is a market where it's even easier to exploit that poor financial education.

> US President Donald Trump earlier called the idea "laughable" and threatened "very serious tariffs" on Europe if he considered it a "hostile act".

There's a lawsuit [1] on the way related to the Epstein files so this Canada-EU topic gives Trump the perfect opportunity to divert the attention.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/09/lawsuit-trump-do...

I have the paid OD, and think I know what I'm doing, and still got burned on occasions, luckily with little consequence due to other mechanisms in place. But when I really didn't want to deal with OD's crap, I went all nuclear on it. Uninstall. When MS insisted to reinstall it, I replaced the executable and went for file system permissions. I twisted them so hard that even MS couldn't (or at least didn't try to) overwrite my fake OD executable.

I stopped running Windows wherever I can not because the tools or OS are that bad but because a machine should come with sane defaults but should respect my wishes if I want to go against those defaults. When it starts to override me, it's not my machine anymore and whoever "owns" it (MS in this case) can shove it.

On power tools, appliances, etc. the safety features are at the user's latitude to bypass. They are usually a hint (don't microwave your dog), not a hard barrier ("I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that"). A spinning blade is covered by a grill you can trivially remove without permission from anyone.

I agree that the defaults should be secure, but you can't force security on people without creating parallel issues which are maybe worse. Centralizing this power in a single point can have orders of magnitude bigger blast radius than a security failure on an app.

At some point users have to take responsibility and be accountable for their actions. We can't just infantilize them forever as if a magical hand will always be over them protecting and having their best interest in mind. And we certainly shouldn't punish every user for the sake of some of them.

The worst part is that Google gets the benefit of putting itself as the central point of control over the ecosystem based on a promise to keep users safe, but without any of the liability from failing to keep that promise. When the app store is chock full of malware I'm really starting to suspect that their goal is actually only the control. And all those people defending it with "but people don't know better, they need a hand to guide them" were equally misled. What do you think?