🌞 Alexander Daychilde 🌞

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Huh. Thank you for text.npr.org. That’s nice!

Well, that’s not how it would happen and you know it.

Car threads degrade to fucking stupid quickly.

Funny, I was looking at your comments and thinking precisely that.

When you take into account that the original assertion was tht eighty billion was given to the auto manufacturers, I don’t think my comment deserves the reaction it got, not a reply like yours.

Would you rather they ended up with zero dollars?

I mean, that’s still pretty darn impressive.

For better or worse, it’s one of those sticking points keeping many away from electric. I was like that several years ago, but I’ve noticed my driving patterns since then. I can’t do electric because I can’t afford a new car and even worse I’m an apartment dweller, so there’s no infrastructure. But if I could, I absolutely would get a vehicle. Long as it had a couple hundred miles of range, that’s all I need (we have a second car anyway, so if we needed longer trips, we’re covered). And less battery means moving less mass means even cheaper to run.

But my dad went looking a few years ago and ended up with a gas car again - because they do take trips and drive sometimes, and so the idea of having to recharge, even on infrequent trips, was a sticking point. But with 500 miles of range, it’s getting to the point where that’s getting close to a day’s comfortable driving for a lot of people, and if you can charge overnight, then it becomes enough for trips and it helps eliminate the range anxiety.

I think once people start transitioning over to electric, their second vehicle might have less range…

No one should be driving that far at once,

What a ridiculous blanket statement.

Nobody should make such silly blanket statements. :P

Well, it was $79.7B to be exact. And what the US government did with that was not cut checks, but rather, purchased stock in the companies.

When it sold the stock it bought from manufacturers, it sold for around $70B. When they sold the approximately $2.4B invested into Ally (an auto financing firm), it sold for $17.2B.

So the money spent in 2008 actually made a profit. It was not distributed to the manufacturers or finance companies at all. Just used to shore up their value to prevent them from going out of business – and more importantly, probably, make sure investors didn’t lose money, or at least not too much.

Ideally, although the US is trying our best for monopolies…

Y’know, if that’s true… I can’t afford a new computer. I just got one last year after almost a decade of using my last box. I was lucky that this one runs 11 - I’m not anti-Microsoft - I like Linux and Windows… but I’ve been perfectly happy with 11 (maybe just lucky, but none of the problems I’ve heard others having).

But yeah, if this box won’t run 12, I will be staying on 11 until I can’t, and then that’ll push me to Linux. I could switch now, jsut about, but a few little things that run better with Windows for me. But I could survive under Linux if I needed to.

Basically, I’ve never been a big Microsoft apologist, but man… that would kill it for me.

Not that they care. They care about corporate uses, not home users. Which is why you can find any number of ways to get your Windows for free these days. They gave up on the consumer market.

This is what I came to the comments to gripe about this whole thing. Yes, they can play some games and probably will, but consider: People will be watching. They do this and you bet people will track this crap and post about it. The blowback will be huge.

If they’re stupid enough to try this, it will not last. lol. You can raise prices over the long term, but fuck around with short term prices people can see changing for no good reason? Yeah…

And on the “personal pricing” - that’s written by someone that doesn’t understand how barcodes work.

But I’m sure they will try to play some games with it.

Ahhhh, sometimes I forget the implications of me opening my big mouth in cases like this. lol. Well, I’m glad it was a positive experience. :) It’s something I need to remind myself constantly of as I am bad about getting sucked into responding to perceived rudeness with rudeness of my own - I definitely have RSD and it fucking sucks.

There’s a difference between trusting something written for general purpose use not to have harmful code vs. something written specifically for communications people want to keep private that would therefore be a target.

So either I felt I was making a valid point for consideration that I thought was valuable to make, or I’m a troll wasting everyone’s time.

I know what I am. And I’m starting not to care what you or others think. Go blindly and trust whatever you want, it’s no skin off my back. Frankly, I use Telegram because none of my comms are particularly sensitive, and I have no problem with that. I’d rather my private conversatiosn not be actively posted somewhere, but in the case of a breach, it wouldn’t be the end of my world. So I’ve no problem trusting Telegram thus far, personally, in my case.

Anyway, have a nice time. Understand my point or don’t.

You can take your rudeness and bugger off. I’m done with you.

Make all the accusations you want. You think you’re smart, but you are not.

If you are not auditing the source code, you are trusting those that are.

Precisely.

And it’s worth repeating here - the level of trust needed is affected by the nature of what you might lose if that trust is broken. For non-important things, trusting a third-party company is probably fine. If you’re in a country and being found out might mean you get put to death, though, the stakes are a bit higher.

Frankly, I have trouble believing that you don’t understand the difference here and are making your argument in good faith.

Let’s back up to what I replied to in the first place:

You don’t have to trust anybody

I even took the time to quote that, because it’s important.

Of course there are different levels of trust. But what you said is flatly wrong and misinformation, if you want to get technical about it. Arguing in bad faith? I beg your fucking pardon, friend.

Just becuase it’s less likely to find nefarious code in open source doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. There ahve been multiple cases of it found in open source code. Blindly trusting something because it’s open source or you host it on your own server is a very very false sense of security, especially in the context of the larger discussion, which came about in regard to what information is exposed by certain messaging clients.

It’s also a matter of the importance of what you’re doing.

I wrote a little CRUD app a while back to track me giving my cat medication. I sanitized inputs, but I left it open without a login on my server, just an obscure URL that didn’t get published anywhere. All you could do was click a button to indicate the cat had been medicated, or another button to delete the latest entry. That was plenty of security for that. If I was writing a banking app, I’d use a bit more.

So yes, in the same way as that, hosting something you use to chat with friends about whatever is one thing; trying to communicate secretly from a country where your comms might lead to being put to death is quite another. And in the latter case, it’s important to know that no matter what you use, unless you wrote it or read all the source code, you are trusting others with your life. Perhaps you feel comfortable doing that, but you should be aware of it.

So no, this is not a discussion in bad faith at all, it is valuable on multiple levels.

Sure… and my point is that you have to trust those services that aren’t hosted in the USA. It’s a choice you have to make. I’m not judging either way, just pointing out because what I responded to in the comment to which I replied was:

The problem is that you just have to trust them

Which is true of open source unless you read the code and can verify nothing nefarious exists; which is true if you use a service in a country you trust; which is true no matter what you’re doing.

Not all entities are deserving of the same level of trust - some are more trustworthy than others - but you are still making a decision to trust someone unless you write the code yourself or verify the code yourself.^[1]

But again, you either read the source to confirm there’s nothing nefarious, or… you trust the programmers.

Which is not a problem, but it is a choice to trust. All I’m pointing out. :)

You don’t have to trust anybody when you run your own server,

You have to trust the people that wrote the code.

or you use a server that doesn’t collect information it has no business collecting.

Again, you’re trusting the authors of the code.

Which is fine, but it’s a choice to trust them.