simfree

What would be considered ruined Leaf EV batteries that have significant range loss (20% to 50% degradation, for a car that went around 60 miles with a full battery) are being used to cover peak load right now in California and have been used to do so for years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqlOlqK_ot8

2nd life use cases for cheap, mass produced batteries like this are more common than you think.

Oh, you get to choose between AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile, and you can jump between the three networks at whim with US Mobile.

Travelling to a remote area? Jump to AT&T. Similarly, want mmWave coverage at a stadium? Jump to T-Mobile. All without changing your cell plan!

Take a look at US Mobile's plans, their Customer Sevucd is responsive and you will pay significantly less for two unlimited lines and their roaming won't randomly brick on ya like Fi has been doing to their customer.

Deathstar is AT&T fyi

Yo, what is going on with Fi support? They keep hanging up on customers: https://www.reddit.com/r/GoogleFi/comments/1dw77i3/replaceme...

Being dependent on Google as a partner especially on a platform they are actively disinvesting from is a very risky idea. There is no domestic roaming, no network diversity, and their agreement with T-Mobile is worse than most of the other MVNOs.

27Mbps isn't even broadband, when the native carrier's network can deliver 400Mbps and their resellers are hovering around 200Mbps to 400Mbps yet a Pixel 8 on Fi is stuck with stuttery, slow data due to having a very low QCI on the LTE/5G network, only Google is to blame.

Fi's international roaming appears to be a cut down version of T-Mobile's roaming agreements, and they have been more aggressive in bricking lines roaming internationally as of late: https://www.reddit.com/r/GoogleFi/comments/1e2juxu/internati...

Allen and Two Temps (deathstar) is no joy to work with, but I'd hesitate to jump in with what is clearly a legacy offering by Google. The pricing is not good, they are not adding new features to the platform, and it is not a corporate priority.

You are much better off using a vendor that is actively and solely focused on delivering the best wireless experience. Don't accept some companies forgotten overpriced afterthought as your carrier, they will happily hang up on you when a real issue arises just like they did to the redditor above.

That T-Mobile is out here slapping spam mitigation blocks on phone numbers who received SHAFT content from numbers on T-Mobile's network is pretty ridiculous, but silently blocking and providing no appeal or escalation path is just how we let companies operate these days.

Your call logs, texts and data usage pattern, DNS queries and such are hard to protect from the underlying carrier on a wireless network.

Using an MVNO that is a separate entity from the underlying network (ideally with multi-network access) is a reasonable way to disintermediate your data from the carrier and throw a wrench in the works for SIM swappers who might crack one of the big three carriers postpaid provisioning and activation systems.

US Mobile, Ting and others are invested in maintaining separate billing infrastructure from their activation and provisioning infrastructure. I would avoid low quality carriers like Project Fi, MetroPCS and Mint Mobile where they are big carrier owned or have gone entirely to one network, but offer very deprioritized data access (eg: Tower delivers 400Mbps, but Fi users get 27Mbps despite the same carrier aggregation band combo in use) and no domestic roaming.

Spam mitigation and management is a huge bugaboo in wireless networks today.

The big three wireless carriers in the USA today formed a cartel called The Campaign Registry that seeks out TINs/EINs and the SSNs of the owners of Sole Proprietorships and LLCs as part of a lengthy approval process to be allowed to send texts.

It's a great extra judicial rent seeking machine that bans any SHAFT content (sex hate alcohol, tobacco, firearms and anything tangentially related) along with hefty fines for anyone that they feel has crossed said boundaries.

Letting the morality police run amok on our Telecom networks here in the USA is happening, and they also want all the data they can get along with bribes from businesses.

Ajit Pai created the opening for this mess, and the current FCC has done nothing to clean this up (though given recent SCOTUS rulings, who knows if they ever had the authority...)

This data is valuable primarily for spam mitigation and perhaps customer profiling.

Expect every SMS and MMS sent or received to be part of a spam mitigation and profiling program where it's stored indefinitely.

Apple not encrypting RCS is likely due to similar factors, where they have seen existing spam problems on RCS that are much harder to root out when you have end-to-end encryption.

I still remember the day that AT&T came out and discounted all Fire phones to 99 cents on a zero-term contract for postpaid customers.

The phone had only been out for a few weeks at the point, the sales and return numbers must have been awful.

AT&T tried really hard to push that product like they did with the Nokia Lumias, but with specs worse than a Samsung Galaxy S3, a crummy app store, ancient Android, and going head to head against the Galaxy S4 with a 1366 by potato screen it was a fools errand to launch that product.

Shipping a 1366 by potato screen phone with an outdated version of Android, and an app store that was missing most apps.

AT&T could only push that pile of crap so far, they really did have their sales teams push it hard though. Very hard to convince a customer to get a Fire phone rather than a Galaxy S4, or even an S3.

Amazon can never keep people long enough to actually ship a video game.

No one involved trusts Amazon to actually employ them 2 years from now, thus Amazonians have an extremely short-term mindset.

It's not like they can't look across the lake to Bellevue and see Nintendo, Microsoft, Valve and others delivering consistently. The Amazon culture is just too toxic to allow this to actually grow into a popular product.

Especially when you exit talent on constant hamster wheel that they run. It really is a great way to light money on fire though!

Water transport of goods is still a thriving business. Crops from farmers in the Columbia River Basin (Oregon, Washington, Idaho) get loaded as far inland as Coeur d'Alene, Idaho.

Dealing with BNSF and Union Pacific Railways is much more costly and complicated for your freight than getting a barge to transport it out to the Pacific Ocean.

This is also why the farmers here are so opposed to dam removal. There are lots of small silted up hydroelectric dams that serve no other purpose today besides making the upstream waterway navigable by boat, which you need if your trying to dodge the high price of trucking or train transport of your crop.

Either your living somewhere that is very hot for a good chunk of the year and has a rapidly increasing cost of living, or your stuck in the rustbelt.

Most of these cities aren't renown for their access to mountains or large state and national parks, making it much harder to enjoy the outdoors lifestyle that so many Patagonia customers participate in.

The DIY edition is much more reasonable, starting at $799 for a Framework 13 AMD.

Buying RAM elsewbere for half the cost and bringing your SSD from your prior system can allow you stay below $1000.

A good credit union will bring loans to the board of trustees and often approve them when no Bank will.

For most individuals, building a relationship with a local credit union is an asset in and of itself.

What do you think of the wave of companies trying to cash in on inexpensive labor from countries in Africa?

My experience working as a vendor to a company that hired Zimworks out of Zimbabwe was rather underwhelming. Pastoral care was all they offered for healthcare to the local Zimbabwean employees, and the time shift the local employees endured seemed to wear heavily on them.

The guards aren't properly mounted (or perhaps lack sufficient rigidity & mounting points) if they are rattling and rubbing.

It's worth it to invest in good guards to keep the mud off your bike!

The only RCS clients that are in use support axlotol ratchet encryption. Apple could literally take the MIT licensed implementation that Matrix wrote and got audited and slap that into their RCS implementation if they cared to support this interoperable feature.

TL;DR: Our medical billing practices in the USA are fraud.

Medical practices bill an insanely high amount with zero upfront disclosure while demanding every bit of personal information (employers past and present, educational history, SSN, all possible insurers, etc) and are often caught billing people they failed to serve (left after waiting hours) or refused to serve.

The medical insurers aren't any better is the real kicker!

Functional municipal governments handle garbage collection, building recreation centers with pools, cleaning up green spaces when people dump tires, mowing overgrown sidewalks and controlling vermin.

I've personally had my city pick up tires from a green space (also recorded the company that dumped 'em), cut overgrown yards and sidewalks, and they consistently collect my trash.

Why would someone with a functional local government ever entertain the straightjacket that an HOA enforces on its residents? It's not their business what color I paint my house, where I put my basketball hoop, or what size and style hedge I grow around my front yard.

Telegram does not support group message encryption, and encryption is off by default for direct messages.

At no point has Telegram been a leader in End to End encryption. If you like the thought of the United Arab Emirates having access to all your unencrypted messages though, it's a great option!

https://www.reddit.com/r/PrivacyGuides/comments/wi3ln6/compl...

MMS is part of standard cellphone plans and supports group messaging. Most people can't tell when they are sending a SMS or MMS, it just works.

That your carrier had such abusive SMS & MMS rates that it pushed people to Over The Top apps is concerning, and raises notable digital sovereignty and Telecom regulation questions about where your local telecom regulator failed.

Or you could just run Debian and not have to make an online account at all.

Opting out is possible, and the barriers to doing so have dropped massively as hardware vendors have brought full support to Linux and software vendors like Steam have built out native support.

Meanwhile Microsoft keeps shoving ads in Windows in new and interesting places while Apple forces your computer to report back to them every time you open an app (which sometimes bricks causing a litany of issues).

Being told not to physically intervene in a dangerous situation and then being fired when you disobey company policy is unsurprising.

Filling out a form to request another team review an account is entirely different. No one is physically interacting, and the company clearly has a sanctioned happy path for this request.

Google knowingly made their search results shittier and shittier for years in pursuit of improved KPIs, to the point that alternative search engines are better, and so are LLMs that occasionally hallucinate or outright crash.

Come to Seattle, meet the white collar employees they burn through at an alarming rate. The way Amazon operates is a meat grinder, even for most of their white collar workforce the churn is significantly higher than other tech companies in the region.

Microsoft, Google, Nintendo, Facebook, F5 and other local firms don't quite have the Hired to Fired pipeline that occurs within 12 to 24 months for the average Amazonian. At each stage it seems Amazon is lighting money on fire...

You have steadfastly spread the good word in spite of undue negativity directed towards the Matrix ecosystem.

Thank you for your hard work on making Matrix better for everyone and explaining why in depth!

You make the world a better place!

This is pretty rich coming from the founder of Telegram, which doesn't have any End to End encryption by default, nor are group chats encrypted in any way.

Client devices have many routes of compromise available, it's very possible that the data exfilaration is occuring there rather than server side.

You'd think the backers of Matrix (largely European Governments) or the privacy focused userbase of XMPP would go beyond forklifting in the same double rachet library that Signal and ilk use, but apparently they all think it's the best available option.