Set the temperature knob to a reasonable level and let it manage itself, instead of causing forced power outage strain, if you intend for it to live a reasonable amount of time.

Some things don’t need home automation.

Not even radical. Just doing anything within the scope of their elected duties. Ever.

Democrats can get stuffed, until they start acting like they remotely care about saving America. Both of those parties are dead. A free America’s future lies elsewhere.

Sad thing is, the dem party smells their own farts so hard, and believe that “our time is coming, just as soon as enough suffer.” They’re just sitting and waiting to be loved instead of taking any kind of action.

This is the point where the pet owner teaches the kitten not to bite so hard. If the human has any idea what they are doing.

We will start fixing ourselves once Bob the Midwest swamprat farmer can no longer get his Doritos at the Walmart. Everyone will finally wake and rise up, the sycophants will all be culled. We will all claim American Exceptionalism saved the day, and keep on being crazy and dumb in new and exciting ways.

Bungle did a sweet remix of a Snow Patrol track.

Rep Guthrie, who apparently voted to impeach Pres Biden, and the secretary of homeland security, as well as being anti-abortion and in 2011 voted for “a controversial provision that allows the government and the military to indefinitely detain American citizens and others without trial.”

Seems to have just the right amount of education to be writing legislation around technology. /s

There’s a relatively nonviolent solution America can do, but it would be complex to organize. Stop. Anyone that can stop working for even a day, or a week. Just pick a starting point and stop working, buying, consuming. They can’t fire everyone.

Same as Apple: total platform control. Like HP and printer ink.

Isn’t that the way with almost every tech introduced into phones? “Track your phone while off (for arbitrary unit of time)” = you’re tracked by any Bluetooth beacon networks whether you want to or not. Also, “you’re now part of a beacon network whether you want to or not.”

Any 911/safety feature is just a reach for more tracking/stalking.

You get to contribute to traffic and wifi mapping so the company gets free telemetry they can use for whatever they please at the expense of your battery.

We’ll introduce notifications and then not give the user enough control, so notifications can become malicious nags to get you to look at your phone as often as possible.

We’ll introduce app stores that become gamified by the app devs, that push updates weekly or more frequently. The changes? Nothing, the dev just wants to reset the ranking of reviews and get the user to notice their app again for more user engagement, meanwhile, burning out your flash with every pointless update.

Oh, shoot, people are using phones too much, we’ll introduce “night filters” that only partially filter out blue light, and then let you feel ok about using your phone all night instead of sleeping.

Reckless transmission of telemetry from every app, which often have some blanket permissions to reach into your phone and extrapolate what other apps are there, characteristics of your phone to fingerprint. If you’ve ever used an app tracker blocker like 1Blocker on iOS or NextDNS or DuckDuckGo App Tracking Protection on Android, you’ll see some apps are spatic about gathering and transmitting telemetry. (Worse, some just start firing telemetry attempts at insane levels, like thousands an hour, if they can’t connect to the Internet, further depleting your battery.)

If you ever spin up an OS like Graphene that has all this telemetry junk removed, you’ll be surprised to find out that your phone’s battery can last days. That’s an actual useful powerful feature to have, runtime. And instead of having switches like in iOS to “only charge when you’re charging off green energy” you’re being more green by only having to charge your phone every 3-5 days. The charge/discharge cycles are also reduced, so your battery is now lasting years instead of 12-18 months.

I used to work on phones, it was so great getting to help design these pocket computers the way I wanted to use them. I honestly saw the future being something like, “ok, cloud is a bit of a trust reach, but on the other hand, your phone becomes a cheap access terminal.” I assumed we’d hit a point, with how cheap the hardware inside the machine is, (to this day) where phones would ostensibly become something you could grab from a vending machine. They’d eventually become highly recyclable so you could just take an old phone and chuck it in a recycling bin to have the parts repurposed/recycled.

“Oh crap, my phone just fell out of my pocket and got run over!” Go to vending machine, chuck old phone in recycling, log in to new phone, old phone is nuked remotely if it still functions, new phone starts caching your “phone”. You’re back in business in minutes.

Phones would have no value to be stolen, phones are accessible to all walks of life, a fairness of technology access helps balance the world.

None of that happened, instead, it was a war of walled gardens, information hoarding, privacy violations, expense, distrust, and loan pyramid schemes so people can dump $1500 on $50-$200 worth of parts that will probably just end up being stolen and sold in aftermarket/underground markets in countries that are less well-off.

I’m kinda irked I ever tried to work on the tech to make lives better and do not regret my choice to not go back to that industry.

A bunch of old people that burned the world are afraid of losing their power and wealth, and as climate change becomes the unstoppable force that even they can’t stop, their hunger for power accelerates. They brainwashed the low-educated general masses (including brainwashing tech billionaires who have long since forgot what intelligence is and are easy to manipulate) through decades of biased media and promises they’ll never keep, all the while building a plan that’s mostly just copied from the Nazis, as they themselves aren’t really that intelligent, but some are cunning. The cunning and greed begets plans to keep the wealth and power. The plans are so fundamentally wrong and evil, they can never admit the wrong and evil part. They try to hide it behind “Christianity” to sleep at night.

Then, they wait for the correct time.

It was icing on the cake to have a senile mango to be the puppet.

Crazy how California is speed-running a transition from liberal to left to Authoritarian almost as fast as the Federal government is transitioning from conservative to right to Fascism.

If America as it is known survives this, massive reforms will have to take place.

Random things like:

• The absolutely useless “impeachment” process will have to be replaced with something closer to Parliamentary “vote of no confidence” - no “trial” to be held by one section of one branch of government. It is nothing more than a sham process. If business boards of directors have figured out how to oust CEOs, the government should have a similar mechanism.
• President can’t have God-mode powers nor sign executive orders anymore. The President’s power should be severely limited. No one person should be a king. Not sure how we managed to do that one thing completely wrong. The position should be nothing more than a communications filter between government branches, nations, states, people, to push policy and steer governance.
• President could be allowed emergency declarations for 15 days, but their action is limited to deploying aid and resources and nothing more. Congress must then convene in 7 of those 15 days to decide how to proceed, in- or out-of-session. They can get off their lazy butts and work for once.
• President should be allowed to be jailed, and no member of government should ever be above the very laws they control.
• Presidential position could also be restructured. Pres and VP are just pres and pres. They both have to agree for any action to be taken. Why having one person with the final decision was ever a good idea when trying to remove kings makes no sense.
• Supreme Court ideally should be disbanded as it was only created to appease the rich, but in lieu of that, it should be completely refreshed. Possibly size expanded to 20 or some arbitrary number that helps break a focused pile of power by a few. All justices removed, replaced with non-partisan justices. If any justice seems to show partisan decision-making, they are audited by (some auditing body) that is probably not the other justices, like how an FAA flight crash incident is audited by a board of retired pilots. Justices will be term-limited. Justices should also be age-limited. Again, borrowing from FAA, if ATC controllers have to retire at 56, we can age-limit every governmental position. This gerontocracy has to stop. Old rarely means wise. Mental fitness should also be a factor, if you’re a Reagan or a Mango or a Feinstein where you don’t even know where you are half the time, you’re out.
• All government positions are term- and/or age-limited, but a staggering rule has to be initiated so there isn’t possibility of a 100% turnover in any given period of years. (Boards already have this concept.)
• Some mechanism should be put in place that makes it more commonplace for states to weigh in when the Federal government is doing something wrong. And one for individual citizens. Voting processes should be standardized and modernized to make every citizen’s vote more powerful.
• To toss the Libertarians a bone, states rights. The power distribution has to be restructured. Things like “state pays Fed x money, so state can receive y money” goes away. The state sends some money to the Federal government and keeps more internally so they can self-manage. The economies of each state would need balance as there are many welfare states that need the money in the Federal government to survive. Regardless, each state’s economy should be structured so that the Federal government is more of an afterthought. Federal government standardizes processes, roads, specifications, etc. so that interstate trade travel and movement is made easier. Basically though, to limit the scope of power the Federal government has. Not to demolish or disband it, just to make it so even if somehow, in the new system, someone tries to play king, they’re but king of very little, and can’t threaten states to bend the knee by trying to cut off their precious money. (Which alone should be made illegal.)
• All the obvious money in elections and money in politics and political donation stuff all has to die, for good. Codified into the constitution. Each candidate is given y amount of timeslots on various media, and z amount of campaigns, funded by taxpayers equally. No other money can be used. (Funded by the taxpayers so it’s all an even ground and some CEO can’t come sail in on his space yacht and run a fancier campaign.)

And at the end of it, governance should be made boring again. One shouldn’t get into the job to be Lauren Boobert the reality TV trash soundbite handjob star. It should be a paper pushing position that keeps the country and its “economy” going.

Probably some other stuff this ramble forgot to add.

It’s weird how business, boards, even HOAs seem to have a better set of checks and balances than the US Federal government.

You’re supposed to take it to the Apple store, where they will charge you $800 to “clean” the keyboard, by replacing and throwing away half the computer. This is the correct user experience. /s

Apple hates making functional serviceable machines anymore.

This is by design. Have it happen in select locations (Colorado, Massachusetts) so the rest of the country can dismiss it as, “well, at least they aren’t here,” or a detached, “they probably deserved it,” while the behavior is normalized. They’ve started in Tennessee now to get red states normalized.

It’s all a highly illegal long con so people don’t realize the country’s freedoms and laws being slowly eroded until it is too late.

Stay vigilant.

I really wonder if testing in Europe could be part of the issue. In the US, everyone is a privacy moron and leave things wide open. Elsewhere, people are more conservative about sharing location in general, let alone joining a “community-supported” device location mesh network. (Google’s and Apple’s are also separate “networks” and don’t share, other than being able to both track AirTags and similar trackers to report stalkers.) They also aren’t as frequent to have the latest and greatest phones/devices elsewhere, as American corps all rig up loan pyramid schemes to push units as frequently as possible.

Apple customers also tend to be more trusting of that 100% closed-box company’s software, it’s completely possible more people have that feature turned on, making it more functional (and with Apple’s dark patterns to trick users into re-enabling features, they may even be unaware it is on.)

The article author could have done a little more minor technical diving as well, using LightBlue Explorer on an Android device to find the MAC address being transmitted when the phone is turned off, and then look for it later.

Apple’s devices when using their “Find My” network, while off, actually start using a different Bluetooth MAC address than when the device is turned on. Android’s may behave similar.

Gotta say, this is one thing I miss on most review sites these days. They’re so basic, they do the bare minimum, very little black-box engineering, very little sleuthing. It’s more important for them to receive free demo units from the manufacturer than to do actual tech journalism.

Meanwhile, whales are smart enough to take out yachts. We are this planet’s true plague.

They seem to have a very selective presence. With purpose. Limited visible scope in a few states, other states see no presence, and thusly conclude it can’t possibly be as big a deal as this precedent-setting behavior is.

It’s next-level evil. Normalize the behavior, scare those you want, make those you want on your side to assume it isn’t nearly as bad as it is.

The modern them actually has an app that lets you build out recipes and/or scan barcodes to track what you eat, they use a distilled version of nutrition called “points” and you’re allocated Y points a day to try stay in your food budget.

I think their older system was also points based just not software.

The app has training content and some kind of social community (that people say is quite terrible apparently because of the other users).

It isn’t a bad concept, and helps one understand that a slice of pizza is insanely unhealthy if one didn’t already know that.

Where it falls apart is their skeezy subscription model. Best time to sign up is around New Years, if you do bulk pricing you get a discount for the year, if you sign up partly through the year, that discount only lasts 10, 8, 7 months, however many are left. If you want to get a better rate, even their customer service says to just cancel and then sign back up after you’re canceled. If they had honest flat-rate pricing and curated their social space/education material better, they’d likely have had something to offer…Instead, like most health tracking/exercise/apps that cost money, it’s difficult to manage, expensive, and abrasive to cancel.

Like so many businesses that went “app” - they didn’t embrace a usable and sustainable model that fit on a digital platform, and instead basically phoned it in.