there’s anti union as in “we think they’re a nuisance but we are tolerating them” and anti union as in “we are going to do everything in our power, legally and otherwise to make sure a union does not form or actively work to break the union that is in existence now”, companies like amazon and walmart and starbucks. if costco is anti union they are definitely not the second from what I’ve seen.

costco being anti union is news to me. especially since they are very loudly not dropping their dei program.

the smart ones are. the cultists are wrapping themselves in nationalism patriotism. the rest are just terminally unaware and don’t vote.

it’s not government tyranny unless a democrat is president. duh,

i’m glad that there is an(other) program for audible. i like this one better. it automatically converts to a file format i prefer and downloads my books immediately, which is convenient for preorders. besides that, i personally would like to not use the audible app for playback; this is just a personal preference though. i have an audiobook app that works just as well. if anything this would just be me eliminating an app from my devices than anything else.

even though I do not trust self driving cars at this point in time, i would much rather trust literally every other manufacturer’s version of self driving tech except tesler.

and good luck getting those regs passed with this congress and this administration. it’s likely never going to happen unless the auto industry demands them.

are animated lights cool? debatable. in my opinion, kinda.

are animated lights practical? no. I actually think they’re more of a distraction. I need several use cases of where animated lights other than at car start up play an actual useful role in operating the vehicle.

car companies are going away from the practical and into the cool factor and I don’t think it’s a good thing. those huge car fins on caddys looked cool but provided absolutely no practical functionality (I even believe that studies showed it made them less safe. disclosure: I’m pulling this out of my rear end but I think it’s true).

oh I agree. the thing is elon has explicitly said that he doesn’t want a bunch of knobs in his cars and they should only have a central control screen to run everything. even the backup shift device is a touch sensor somewhere around the rear view iirc (never driven one nor do I want to). I essence, an entire continent is telling one company explicitly that your cars are not the safest on the road no matter what you claim. that’s going to be a massive hit on the company’s reputation and value and it couldn’t happen to a more deserving induhvidual.

sounds like europe is really sending a very loud, deafining FUCK YOU to elon and tesla.

and I am absolutely here for it.

if I still downloaded directly to my local drive, I’d use utorrent BUT only the 2.2.1 version. it’s been at least 4 years since I’ve done that due to a lack of having a functional laptop so I’ve been out of downloading stuff that way for years, but even then I knew that modern utorrent was bad. I actually stopped using any new version once bittorrent bought it.

especially if you don’t have an iphone. I have seen so many accessories and apps that were made for use on iphones which would also be useful for android devices as well. my transplant clinic has a patient portal that has an app for iphones but nothing for android so you have to use their website.

the offline gps app that I use and absolutely love I initially pirated for my iphone 3, then for my samsung galaxy vibrant and then actually bought and bought extras. I love this app.

then a few years ago they offered more features that I found useful but put them behind a subscription instead of buying them as a premium option as before and I don’t like that. I still get to keep the options I bought, but any future add-ons forces me to subscribe and I’m not doing that.

honestly it might push me to see if it’s possible to to pirate an app I already paid for to get any new features I may find useful.

anyone with a tenth of a percentage of business sense could tell you a business that produces nothing but eyeballs to advertisers will be a massive failure if said business does anything to piss the owners of said eyeballs off.

and experts are confused why traded-on-the-markets social media companies are in freefall.

never used it in any practical function. i tested it to see if it was realistic and i found it extremely wanting. as in, it sounded nothing like the prompts i gave it.

the absolutely galling and frightening part is that the tech companies think that this is the next big innovation they should be pursuing and have given up on innovating anyplace else. it was obvious to me when i saw that they all are pushing ai shit on me with everything from keyboards to search results. i only use voice commands to do simple things and it works just about half the time, and ai is built on the back of that which is why i really do not ever use voice commands for anything anymore.

I’m glad for them.

they don’t make electric vehicles. they make human sized battery powered over engineered poorly designed toys that were somehow street legal.

is there anything android auto compatible?

i think when they rebranded as alphabet, they repealed that corporate philosophy.

i would much rather have a chinese ev with that long range battery tech and framework than an american car company’s ev option not including tesla which i don’t even consider a car company. they’re a shit tech company that makes shit cars shittily.

my view on it lies in two seperate buckets:

1. if the thing being pirated is vastly overpriced for its function i don’t see it as immoral
2. if the thing being pirated is no longer available or was never made available for private ownership, ie only able to be streamed and only available on said service so long as the host streamer still has rights to do so, it isn’t immoral.

and just to be clear, i don’t see piracy as inherently evil or anticapitalistic. there have been several books and apps that i pirated that i liked and converted to an actual buyer to get more books in the series or get updates to the program.