I can see this as a one time verification to help verify the video isn’t being faked / you aren’t working out of a remote cube farm in another country.

Clearwater firm KnowBe4 accidentally hires North Korean hacker

Don’t Buy Stuff

Well there are almost religious Richard Stallman GNU/Linux followers.

Your examples would have more similarity with suggesting a vegetarian diet as an alternative to a mix or most meat diet. That would be a functional alternative, like suggesting a different OS or Browser.

Veganism more like a political statement that if you eat meat your are a bad person for harming animals. All vegans may be vegetarians but not all vegetarians are vegan.

I will admit there are many OS and Browser purists that might be more like vegans telling you, you are bad for choosing the one you currently use. There are FOSS purists that only tell you to use FOSS because it is NOT commercial not because the software is better for what you need.

Lemmy is public, no one is going to want to use it for discussion of those topics.

Cost of living has skyrocketed, wages have hardly budged, and people are really, really struggling.

True… However it does appear to be slowing a bit for both the US and Canada

https://blog.bham.ac.uk/cityredi/redi-updates-how-does-the-cost-of-living-crisis-compare-internationally/

People’s standards of living are decreasing

Famines are already being massively exacerbated by climate change, you just don’t hear about them because they’re happening in poor countries.

https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-conditions

There is far less poverty in the world today than in the past.

Everything points to all our previous warnings about climate change being incredibly conservative.

Probably true, but we also appear to be on the edge of a massive move away from fossil fuels to renewables with the cost of solar dropping, grid level battery systems replacing old coal / natural gas peaker plants etc and the move is no longer just about the “environment” these technologies are in some ways superior or cheaper as well which will accelerate adoption

Only thing that is worse in my mind is the “media” no longer news and “social media” both are largely negative and both are full of misinformation these days.

Housing costs may also be a negative…

Other than that MOST things seem better, we just can’t enjoy anything since the media/social media keeps telling us what we should fear and hate.

So use google wallet…

Instead of rebranding / upgrading one product, Google continues to make new products and have awkward migrations between them.

All of my kids messages are super short or emoji filled, my wife, friends and older contacts all text to text me full paragraphs or sentences.

Need some examples

ELI5 due to my smooth brain with these concepts

Database is a broad term, nearly any computer system that stores structured data like lists of names or transactions has a database of some kind. Dedicated database platforms like MySQL just make it more efficient / faster / easier to query and store data.

I would be MORE surprised if they where still there.

I was recently looking at new vehicles nearly all have push button starts.

Proton is built on top of wine for windows compatibility. The wine project has been very careful to independent build its compatible versions of libraries. There should be no Microsoft code in wine.

Other states are irrelevant only the true condition implied matters, it is or isn’t that one state.

is_person_standing, is_standing, bStanding all tell you if someone is standing or NOT standing. Nothing else period. It does not matter if there could be other states as the test is one specific case.

I had QC 2s and liked them a lot. I tried out the Sony ones as well which are very good.

However these days I have Air Pod Pros which are easier lay down on a pillow with and also have excellent noise cancelling.

Full headphones can get hot and uncomfortable in warm weather, so I prefer earbuds these days.

Ya, Amazon dominated by going from books to everything. However more importantly the put warehouses and distribution EVERYWHERE… It used to take 2-4weeks domestically to buy something mail-order or on line. It was amazon that got us down to 3 days, next day, then same day for online orders.

Back in 1993 Sears had this ability… I used to remember my mom shopping from the catalogue and driving in to the closest little Sears pickup location which where everywhere like little UPS stores etc. Hell further back in time you could order a house from Sears.

In hind sight, if Sears still had its credit division and distribution network it would have been able to take on modern online buy now pay later services and been able to out deliver amazon.

They literally had all the pieces already in place with their catalog/mail order/warehouses.

They already screwed up however

In 1993, Sears discontinued its famous catalog to focus on in-store retail operations.

To fight off Walmart they got rid of all the shipping and things that made the catalog work in 1993 like the little outlet /pickup stores in small communities.

They focused on the physical stores and peaked in 2007 just in time for Amazon to take off. They no longer had all that distribution that gave up in 1993.

https://www.businessinsider.com/rise-and-fall-of-sears-bankruptcy-store-closings#in-the-early-2000s-kmart-acquired-sears-to-form-a-new-major-company-sears-holdings-corporation-18

As per the Ecobee notice this only impacts the two original models and they still function as regular thermostats still, they are just not providing any of the smart / cloud features anymore.

Newer units support local homekit control, which can also be paired with open systems like Home Assistant for full local control for automation.

The bags were very noticeably louder and stiffer. Not enough that I would complain but it was something you noticed right away.

You would NOT want to have one in a movie theatre.

Basically no country is what people state or think it is. Particularly if you ask an american, it is like everything becomes communist or socialist if there are any social supports in the system.

Having said that a pure socialist system probably would not work, just like a direct democracy or pure democracy likely would not work… There is some form of mixed policies needed for economic growth and some social for safety of the citizens.