Sorry, I should’ve given something. I linked to a small taste of it below after you wrote this, but it runs deeper than that. Delay after delay for years (even pre-COVID), people e.g. having to contact their AG to get a refund on a phone they’ve been waiting literal years for (this one didn’t contact their AG; they just waited two years for a product they never received and an additional four for a refund), hardware that’s functionally equivalent to a phone from c. 2013 (plus abysmal battery life), etc. The refund stories are absolutely rampant; this is not a one-off. Honest businesses do not do anything even close to this.

Overall not a business you want to let hold nearly $1000 hostage.

They intentionally, systemically withheld refunds from customers who’d been waiting years over schedule for a phone, and I’m sorry, I didn’t realize COVID-19 was responsible for them scamming their backers in 2019. Mind that the ship date announced August 2017 was January 2019.

Fuck the fuck off with this disgraceful apologia. Either you know better and are preying on people who are less familiar, or you should know better for how trivial it is to find this information.

The only type of debt that does exist, is the one humanity has towards earth.

Untrue. We all owe a debt… to ourselves, for always being there. But… does that mean we’re the Earth? This is so crazy.

I can’t believe it mentions the Librem 5 and absolutely nothing about its sordid history of scamming customers. Friends don’t let friends purchase a Librem 5.

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I’m neither stoned nor a teenager

“financial acumen of a stoned teenager”. Can you just not read either, or do you not understand this is that thing you learn about in 3rd grade called a “comparison” and not literally calling you a stoned teenager? I’m getting concerned here.

You also clearly have no idea what an “ad hominim [sic]” is either.

make no pretense to be some financial guru.

You certainly considered yourself well-informed enough to say the person BBC News quoted had no fucking idea what they were talking about without doing the most basic research first.

Ah, yes, I forgot that if I rack up $3000 in CC debt but have $10,000 in the bank, I actually have zero debt, “depending on who you ask”.

Really tried to “um ackshually” the article with the financial acumen of a stoned teenager?

Edit: Anyway, to answer your question because “does GameStop currently have debt” is kind of beside the question: leveraged buyouts often put debt toward the company being bought out. Thus, the debt being discussed is likely the debt from the buyout, not the $4.36 billion GameStop has right now. I got sidetracked because of your completely bullshit, confidently incorrect claim.

Gamestop has, depending on who one asks, no debt

GameStop has 4.36 billion in debt who tf are you asking and can I borrow their confidence?

Edit: Anyway, see edit below. This whole thing got kind of sidetracked.

With your phone you can get any music you want at any time - essentially 100% convenience.

With streaming you can, but again, that’s a “streaming versus local playback” argument. I have to buy and download the songs I play. Even piracy would be jumping through some kind of hoop to find a good copy (purchasing being arguably more convenient). I download them to my PC and make a copy to my phone so I can easily listen on both (and stream via Jellyfin on LAN if I want).

The iPod is barely an inconvenience by comparison, even if I directly downloaded to my phone. It’s such a minimal step to physically transfer the digital audio to the iPod. The actual inconvenience is having a second electronic device taking up valuable pocket space, and that’s not a quaint little spice-of-life inconvenience like a retro console taking up shelf space; that’s just fucking annoying.

Dude, I do get it. I work on PCSX2; I’m around people literally all the time who will use physical hardware for no other reason than that it’s more holistically enjoyable to them. I think it’s super cool. My PS2 console is objectively inferior in every conceivable way that actually matters to me as a player; I will nevertheless sometimes boot it up simply because it’s pleasant and more unique. I buy all of my PS2 games and burn them even though it’s more difficult for mathematically the same outcome. I think it’s cool as hell that the author enjoys using their hardmodded iPod.

What I don’t get is why the article’s arguments for the iPod are so abysmal. It decides to ditch apples-to-apples (local-to-local) and go straight into apple-and-oranges (local-and-streaming) for an inordinate amount of time, decides to frame the iPod’s inconveniences as a convenience (e.g. “don’t have to bring a charger”), and overall gives exactly one valid argument for why the iPod is nicer, namely the ClickWheel. It doesn’t even mention the potentially different feel of the DAC and just gives that as a straight win to the smartphone in a throwaway line.

I don’t think the vinyl analogy holds up here, because even though I don’t use vinyl, I recognize it’s a very different way to experience music. Vinyls you have to physically go out and buy, physically retrieve, physically place into your player, and then listen to in one static location. The iPod, meanwhile, is damn-near the same thing: you have 1) a portable electronic device 2) of a similar size and form factor 3) holding the mathematically exact same digital recordings of songs 4) which you listen back to through nearly the same medium (same speakers; different DAC) and 5) can see displayed on a screen. Navigating through the music is very slightly, near-meaninglessly different. As noted: the ClickWheel™.

Nevertheless, even under the premise that it’s highly analogous to vinyl, this would be like if you had a comparison of vinyl versus digital audio and spent half of it ranting about streaming services while basically ignoring local digital playback. That’d be fine if you set out with “vinyl versus streaming”, but you started on the premise “vinyl versus digital”. “Here’s my comparison of CRTs and OLEDs. But first, a rant about Netflix.”

Also, thinking 40GB fits 10 FLAC albums is stupid.

Sorry, you’re right; it’s more like around 20 of mine.

I can’t imagine putting this much effort into complaining about someone using their media player of choice.

I’m not complaining about their media player of choice; I’m remarking that the way they chose to discuss it in this article – especially being so focused on streaming – is stupid as fuck. Like 50% of this article is spent bitching about non-issues with phones. I don’t even mean “non-issues” in the sense that they don’t annoy me personally; I mean “non-issues” in the sense that this devolves into a comparison not of iPod versus smartphone but of iPod versus streaming, or that they’re talking about it being so convenient not to have to worry about charging a second device. They can enjoy what they want to; the reasons they describe are, for the most part, asinine.

You’re not considering the iPod DAC which is higher quality than most cellphone DACs.

The author of this article certainly did consider DACs: [Modern smartphones have] got […] a DAC chip that is by all measures transparent, near-lossless wireless streaming […]" and that’s the last they mention of the DAC, so they clearly don’t give a shit about the Wolfson.

The fact they chose to wait until the middle of the article to say “yeah btw this thing is hardmodded for the battery and the storage” is so telling. That’d be the first thing I’d mention about a technological comparison.

Truth is… the oil was rigged from the start.

Yet, when I want to sit down and actually listen to an album, the phone is often the most frustrating tool in my pocket. Between the constant pings from Slack and the AI-generated discovery feeds that keep trying to shove viral tracks down my throat

Bruh, what? Just have the songs locally like on your iPod; you don’t have to stream, and it’s easier to put on your phone than your iPod. And what do Slack notifs have to do with this? Just turn it on DnD or whatever. In what universe are Slack notifs distracting you less than your phone while you listen on your iPod? If you give that little of a shit about them, you can turn them off.

I can leave for a week-long trip with my iPod and not have to think about bringing a charger along.

??? But you’re already bringing a phone that needs to remain charged?? Playing audio doesn’t drain the battery that hard, and phone batteries nowadays get enough charge that even an absent-minded dipshit like myself barely has to worry about it.

This author is either nostalgia-baiting for clicks or an absolute moron. Using an iPod might be a fun novelty; absolutely the fuck is it not “the best way to enjoy music”. You’re carrying around a separate, fairly large device just for music that probably even has worse audio quality; that’s so unnecessarily cumbersome if I just want to listen to music.

They’re using a ClickWheel with, at most, 40 GB of storage. That’s like ten twenty FLAC albums. Is what I would say, except: “Since I replaced the original spinning hard drive with a microSD adapter, there are no moving parts and significantly less power draw. I am currently running 512GB of storage paired with a significantly larger battery that lasts weeks, not hours.”

So they wait well into the article to tell the audience that they hardmodded their old iPod and that’s why it’s actually viable. What the actual fuck. Basically nobody is going to do that. Even with that hardmodding, the literal only advantage they have here, then, is the ClickWheel – because again, your phone should be charged and always on you in 2026. The ClickWheel is not that special to warrant hardmodding a 2006 iPod and using it separately for music.

Then they have a gargantuan segment whining about streaming as though local storage just doesn’t exist on their phone. It’s literally a non-issue. Right now I’m listening to a FLAC album I got off Bandcamp months ago. On my phone. Because I don’t use streaming services. On my phone.

This piece of shit article could’ve been boiled down to “the haptic feedback on the ClickWheel was cool we should bring that back lol”.

Kingsman 3 just isn’t doing it for me so far.

An unstoppable Hannah (literally perfect; 9/10) meets an immovable Newgrounds reviewer (game wouldn’t boot; 5 stars).

Shit’s dire when Spirit Airlines can’t keep up with the race to the bottom.

Edit: What’s the over–under that Spirit Halloween can get a sick deal on this for a portable costume store this fall?

I can confirm this guide is accurate and very straightforward on the OpenStreetMap and Wikimedia Commons side. Unless I’m missing something, I think “Make sure you publish the image under a CC0 Waiver license” is an overcorrection. You’re just linking to it on OSM, so the Open Database License shouldn’t factor in. I speculate that line is an opinionated one and not related to a technical hurdle for using the image on OSM. CC0 could theoretically be better depending on how downstream users want to use it for e.g. activism – that is, if they want to download the image from Commons and redistribute it. I just don’t know what context that would happen in.

I deserved worse for this, so I appreciate you giving me more dignity than I gave you. You learn pretty quickly on Qatari astroturf farm Wikipedia to accept that, no matter how hard you try, sometimes you’re just inevitably going to be the stupid, confidently incorrect fuckface, and you don’t stick around long if you can’t adapt to that. You cope with it, I think, by fully internalizing that you have to hold yourself accountable in the same way and to the same standards you expect of others because doing otherwise rots your own behavior, your ability to set realistic, useful expectations, and your position to call out others if you think they’ve been negligent.

Oh, sorry. I was mistaking you for pete_link. There’s no good explanation for that; just a total brain fart. Sorry, pele. I have to take the L on that; crow eaten. And I do, for what it’s worth, appreciate you calling out Axel Springer. The owner is a massive piece of shit, even if e.g. Politico is quite reliable for US politics. I just saw it as severely hypocritcal because, well, I thought you were pete_link. Because I was being a dumbass.