If I had my wallet stolen, the worst part of it would be having to renew id and stuff. It's a lot of faff
AnarchistArtificer
I am surprised I hadn't considered this angle. That adds to the sense of thematic cohesion. I hadn't really thought much about Harry's ex (probably because my Harry had his bi awakening in my play through, lol).
Iconic.
That would be a metal as fuck cell phone stand
I think the science comes in showing that it does actually work. Like, this is so simple of an idea that I would be skeptical of if it would work if I had had the idea by myself. I'm glad that I live in a world where, if I had thought of this and wondered "is this a good idea, or am I just being dumb for thinking something so simple could work?", I am able to go online and find information and guides on this and other diy filters
They may not have been the ones who first thought of it, but the first people to publish research that shows that taping 4 air filters together with a fan works decently compared to other, non-DIY filters (where "worked decently" means does a good enough job that it's worth doing if you want a filter but can't/won't buy or build a more complex filtering system, even if it isn't as good as "proper" filtering systems)
(Tangent: I'm reminded of the "Cox-Zucker machine", a random maths thing that Cox and Zucker made together because when Cox and Zucker met at university, they realised that their names, when combined in the traditional, alphabetical order, sounded "delightfully obscene". )
"The fact that Google has that locked down surely violates some EU laws. But I'm sure they wave away the laws because of "financial security" or some other bullshit. "
I don't know as much as I'd like to about the regulatory side of this, but I know that Google and other big tech have done a masterful job of proactively building themselves into systems such that taking action against them is difficult.
I think that's part of why the US antitrust case against Microsoft a few decades ago fizzled out into nothing — even though Microsoft was deemed to have been a monopolist, the big question was how do we remedy that in a way that isn't going to be harmful? The consensus on this amongst people who I respect is that the results of the Microsoft case was woefully insufficient and something that helped to lay the foundations of the big tech dominance that we see today.
When I first got into Android (I miss my Nexus 6 T.T ), it felt like I could do so much more with my phone than I can now. I had so much cool automation shit that leveraged stuff like Google assistant voice commands, but now it's shit on so many levels. It goes beyond the user facing side of things; I used to use the app Tasker for a lot of the automation stuff, and over the years, it seems like the dev has been climbing an uphill battle against Google gating off functionality, and generally making things opaque and difficult for developers.
To be fair, it is difficult to rebuild one's understanding of the world after finding out that your previous understanding was built on fundamentally wrong ideas. Not that I'm excusing people who respond to cognitive dissonance by digging deeper into willful ignorance — after all, the reason why I know it's hard is because I've done that work myself (a couple of times). I do have some sympathy though.
I wonder how useful this kind of approach would be.
I'm reminded of a podcast recently where someone described that some of their colleagues in their day job (a very union heavy job) got pissed off at some cops at a petrol station, basically saying "ay, why are you protecting the Tesla dealerships, you're union too — you're meant to be on our side". The podcast guy said that although he really wanted to say to his colleagues something like "just because they're union doesn't mean they're on our side. Cops only exist to protect the interests of capital", he felt it was more productive to stoke the existing anger of his working class colleagues by leaning into their concerns
They're so close to getting it, but so far.
I am enjoying saying "Log back in to continue your Oral B brushing experience" in my best "customer-service/salesperson ad lady" voice. Like the kind of tone that's so soullessly saccharine that it gives AI vibes