It’s used by the delivery people to contact me if they can’t find the delivery place or I’m not there. Also some of the local delivery companies will, for more expensive things, send the recipient an SMS with a code that you then give to the delivery person so that they know for sure they’re delivering to the right person (or somebody authorized by them).

It’s actually a pretty good way to solve a lot of problems with delivery, but it does mean I need to have a mobile phone number which ends up in the hands of at least two entities.

The less info about you is out there, the less handles they have to pass themselves for those who can legitimatelly ask money from you or which control access to your money, be they family, friends, your bank, the government and so on.

They can’t spoof a family member’s voice if they don’t know who is your family or have access to samples of their voice - both things often obtainable via Facebook and would also be obtainable via a Chinese equivalent one might be tempted to use instead.

Anyways, my point is that Chinese companies are inherently no more trustworthy than American ones, they’re just not as bad yet because they don’t yet have the same access to masses and masses of personal information for people all over the World - once they do, they’ll be just as bad because regulations in China are also shit and they don’t give a damn about foreigners.

Joining in and doing what their enemy is already doing and which they’re been unable to stop, is literally the only way the US and the Trump Administration can claim they’re winning anything in this war.

It’s also pretty much how the Far-Right in at least America and Britain does politics: if civil society momentum builds up in a direction which isn’t at all something they started or even wanted, rush to the front of the crowd and shout “Follow me!”.

The thing is, it doesn’t quite work at swindling people into thinking you’re a great leader when you don’t have a thoroughly captured Press conveniently “forgetting” that they didn’t actually started it and spinning that as “leadership” of and the result as a “victory” for the Far-Right leader.

So at least outside the US and in the context of their war against Iran the whole thing looks incredibly stupid, maybe even derranged, even will the “geniouses” at the White House think this will make America and Trump look like winning.

PS: There is one take which makes them actually seem intelligent (in the kind of “intelligence” a low-level thief would display) - that the actual individuals in the Trump Administration, including Trump himself, are doing it purely to personally profit from front-running Trump’s announcements. This would work but the returns would keep on getting smaller and smaller as the Market stops believing Trump’s words and/or expecting that sufficient people believe them for his words to cause market movements.

In a normal giraffe the neck (and the legs) is long in order to be able to reach the leafs high up on trees, so it makes sense that in a giraffe centaur arms would be at a that would let them use theirs arms to help with that, which would either be higher up or, alternativelly, lower down but long enough that they can both reach the leaves above AND the ground below whilst standing up.

Let me put things this way: after my last AliExpress purchase I was targetted for the first time in my life by a PayPal fishing phone call from India (starting with a pre-recorded message in my native language but then switching to some guy speaking English with an Indian accent).

Somebody I know has been targetted twice by “you package is awaiting at customs” phishing messages after making purchases at AliExpress.

Maybe coincidence, maybe AliExpress is having their trade payment processing ops outsourced to somebody that sells it to people that will use it to fraudulently pass themselves as a natural entity involved in the purchase process (like PayPal or the destination country’s Customs) or maybe AliExpress themselves sell that data. Judging by the amount of outright fraudulent sales claims there (the capacity of any power storage devices is at times hilarious, as is the output wattage of solar panels and storage capacity of external SSDs), my bet is the latter, though if it’s not that totally not giving a shit about the risk of the second possibility is almost a certainty.

That kind of “why should I care” bullshit you’re peddling is exactly the same kind of bullshit that was peddled a decade and a half ago about having one’s e-mail with Google, and look at were we are now.

Unless you’re stupidly isolated from it (not even giving them your e-mail), you’re going to leak stuff that can be used against you, even if only by criminals (and the authorities in China couldn’t give a rat’s arse about their people swindling or stealing from laowai).

Like in the US, it’s going to be “Free Enterprise” abusing data about even if the local authorities don’t really care about you.

For now.

The problem is that once it’s out there, you can’t take it back.

Also it depends on the tip used for the soldering iron: those large surfaces have a lot more volume of metal that needs heating (plus you also need more volume of solder) so if one uses a conical tip it doesn’t transmit heat fast enough and you ended up with an irregular solder hill like that.

If you’re use to soldering smaller components, doing something like that is quite different and won’t come out as well until you get used to its peculiarities.

If you’re not at all used to soldering, that’s actually pretty good.

Totally agree on “works” being the gold standard, especially on a something like that which isn’t subject to significant mechanical forces (like, for example, a push switch would).

Maybe, just maybe, the US Administration shouldn’t be discriminating in favour of the Empathy Impaired.

I read that from top to bottom and not a single thing was wrong or even an exaggeration.

It really is that bad.

Alternativelly, they’ve just been competent in the execution of their less savory intelligence operations and thus not been caught doing something too outrageous.

It makes a lot more sense for China to arrange an “overdose” than shoot somebody in the middle of a busy street in broad daylight from a car with diplomatic plates and a Chinese flag.

Same for all other countries, by the way, though in Autocracies politicians have less to worry if the country ever gets caught murdering people in foreign soil than politicians in Democracies do (though, judging by a century of American murders, even those in supposed Democracies almost never have to worry about it)

What we’re talking about is “The Great Game”, not Tit-Tac-Toe.

Do you have a source for that or is it just a conclusion you reached?

The reason I ask is that I vaguelly remember of seeing somewhere that the way the front of modern ICE cars is designed makes the engine literally fall when a high-speed frontal collision happens exactly so that the front can act as a crumple zone rather than the engine being pushed inside the passenger compartment. That being so, things aren’t quite as simple as you say and I think we need actual real world test results showing that difference in safety rather than mere expectations extrapolated from superficial knowleged about cars.

Well, we do see news about celebrations of their birth.

With age this improves: I can now come back to were I left the story after I went down on a tangent, even after going down tangents of the tangent.

(Well, usually).

Passenger: Watch out for the old ladie.

Passenger: Watch out for the old ladie!

Passenger: WATCH OUT FOR THE OLD LADIE!!!

*Bang!*

Passenger: Shit man, if I hadn’t opened the door you would’ve missed the old ladie.

Now is a very good time to exercise one’s Delayed Gratification ability.

por qué no los dos?

Steam’s policy is to, if a gamedev company gets a better offer in another store that doesn’t add the 30% markup that Steam adds to the price of games and shares that with their customers by selling their games cheaper in the other store, Steam will take their games down from the Steam store.

Now, if Steam was just one amongst many small games stores, the gamedev could just ignore that, but Steam has such much of the Market of digital game sales that gamedevs cannot ignore having their games taken down from the Steam store.

Oh, by the way, this applies to Indies as much as it does to the rest, so we’re not just talking about widelly hated AAA publishers here.

Steam absolutelly is using their dominant market position to shaft both gamers and game devs, including Indies.

Which is why simping for Steam is so, so sad.

Absolutelly: the system in the US is designed to remove choice from the “riff-raff”.

Then again to a large extent in the past it was also so in those EU countries talked about here (and, as an EU resident, let me tell that there’s a lot of effort going on around here slowly reverting things back to those days)

Further, people too have make it so in the US, for example by not joining Unions or by parroting propaganda about how Free a country America is (which is pretty close the opposite of true: real Freedom in America is something only the rich have).

Whilst I dislike the near-religious take on the “Founding Fathers” of America (who at best were “progressive” for slave owners) the “American Constitution” (a prototype for Democracy which is riddled with problems, hence the current situation), many things from that time including some said by American Founding Fathers are eternal truths, such as the one about “eternal vigilance”, and the one about the tree of freedom needing to be periodically refreshed with the blood of patriots.

What the US doesn’t do enough compared to Europe are General Strikes, rather than protesting.

Protests don’t really hit the Owner classe were it hurts them the most and can easilly be portrayed as a violent rabble or simply not talked about (both things which in countries were the entirety of the Press is captured, are the norm in terms of news coverage).

For all the feeling of release of righteous rage they give to protestors, Protests by themselves are just people walking and shouting (with at most small shops rather than big companies suffering) and thus are easy for the powerful to ignore.

General Strikes, on the other hand, have a way bigger impact on the money making of the people who have a disproportionate amount of power and there are even more impactfull options when the HQs of certain companies or the homes of very rich people are targetted.

Unless they’re properly inconveniences the powerful only pay attention to Protests when they’re a signal that there is insatisfaction amongst the general population which, if not addressed, will lead to things much worse than Protests, and in countries were things don’t actually go further than protesting like the US, the powerful can easilly not care about protests.