Maybe they’re right. Steve Carell once took action to protect the future from God’s plan. Maybe we do too.

Ah see if only I had your genius those years back. I do still have that Blackberry, maybe I’ll get a new battery and set it up again.

To my surprise, you’re right. Brigades letting buildings burn didn’t happen - at least not by company decree.

The most I’d ever looked into it was to see what those plaques looked like. I appreciate you countering the idea, it led me to an interesting read of this correction article that seems a great summary of what really occurred.

Primarily it seems they all just worked together for reasons that, after reading them, are painfully obvious and I can’t believe I hadn’t considered even the first one.

• preventing fire spread from buildings uninsured to those insured
• quick efficient response was good advertising for the insurance company
• resolving fires in uninsured properties is an act of charity and displays goodwill

I did this with a Blackberry a while ago, but it destroyed the battery after a year unfortunately.

Might be fine if the charging could be stopped and resumed at a lower point. Maybe even a dumb solution like one of those holiday light timers to only charge for a couple hours a day would work. Damn, I should have done that.

Edit - Turns out, this just isn’t true. Thanks to Teft for the correction. Details in another comment.

Once upon a time fire brigades were private entities operated by insurance companies. When they heard of a fire nearby, they’d roll up and only take action if the plaque on the building had their company name on it. Domestic authorities these days certainly resemble that behaviour.

I’m unsure we are talking about the same comment. The misinformation is the claim the Gates foundation is continuing to fund Kurzgesagt, when that clearly isn’t the case. This incorrect information is veiled by beginning the statement with the truth of the 2015 grant.

Insofar as the reputational damage Kurzgesagt has incurred, I’m not sure there’s much meat on that bone. Sure, you might believe they have fallen from grace or some such, but as I pointed out in another comment here, we can’t just connect everything under the sun and say ‘group A is bad because groups B through Y are all next to one another and with group Z doing all those injustices, group A is complicit in those crimes’.

To me, the question of whether Kurzgesagt is a Gates mouthpiece is pretty cut and dry. A few reasons for this, but the most glaring is simply that the money didn’t keep coming, and it wasn’t much money to begin with. I wouldn’t be going out of my way to talk up my employer to clients if my last bonus was a decade ago and didn’t even cover my rent for the month I got it.

Thank you for linking that video and doing what you can to share these conflict free sources you hold in such esteem.

Sorry, I didn’t think the word ‘continued’ would have needed underlining for anyone that could read what I wrote.

Using a piece of factual information to prop up false information within the same sentence is how false narratives take hold.

They accepted, and continue to accept a great amount of money from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

It’s interesting how any false narrative starts with a granule of truth.

Kurzgesagt was indeed provided $570,000 in 2015. That money was paid out across the following four years.

They have not continued to accept any amount of money from the Gates foundation.

I did a few searches and while I didn’t find that quote from Kurzgesagt’s CEO, I did find the contribution listed from a decade ago on the Gates foundation website. $570,000 paid out over four years. They also gave NPR $2,000,000 the next year.

Since I didn’t find the CEOs quote you’ve mentioned, I can only question the context around it. Would those videos not have been made because the Gates foundation specifically tied the funding to those videos being created? Or would they not have been made because Kurzgesagt didn’t have the money to do so otherwise?

Regardless, Kurzgesagt is a private company and if they wanted to conceal hidden agendas by corporate contributors, they would just keep quiet - not openly acknowledge that they made content with money given to them by some larger organisation.

If we’re going to denounce any group of people that are connected via Bacon’s Law to a disastrous corporate industry, the moral high ground will be unachievable for the entirety of our species.

Brought to you by the same people behind all those #cookingwithgas social trends.

The simplicity of the Slate interior is fantastic. They developed a screenless touch screen that you can rotate without even looking at them. I wish I were in the market for this type of vehicle.

According to the open letter those donations to Organic Maps were used for a personal holiday. Along with everything else in there, I’m not using it any longer.

Small shoe.

My perception of Proton was never that users would be kept safe from governments, but that users would be kept away from advertisers.

Is Signal equivalent in scale to iMessage or WhatsApp? Does it come preinstalled on devices as well? All three are tools, I agree, however one of these things is not like the others. The average toolbox will have Phillips and Robertson screwdrivers, but not a Torx type.

Signal takes at least a grain of interest to even get a user to install it, whereas iMessage is already there ready to go and that suits most people just fine. The question I asked was based on my incorrect assumption that centred in the Venn diagram of people whom bother to use Signal, read a technology forum, and look at an article about backups, there would also be an overlap with people that already had a backup solution in place.

Your Marlinspike comment notwithstanding, thank you for demonstrating that I was wrong. I should have remembered most people just want to drive a car, not concern themselves with how or why the wheels go round.

It does strike me as funny that some fixate on the ‘why bother’ question when viewing what amounts to be another person’s hobby.

Well my point was not that every random maintenance task under the sun gets done and ticked off a mile long list.

It seems a reasonable guess that a person whose hobby is building custom mechanical keyboards probably does keep it clean. I figured people using an encrypted messaging system with backups enabled would probably go to the trouble of ensuring those backups didn’t live in one place.

From your comment and a few others, it’s evident I was wrong in this thought. Among other things, it seems some people don’t want backups at all, which is a bit surprising to me. That’s why I asked the question.

Are people not copying their backup off their device periodically?

Personally I’d find it useful to create backups by year so the process doesn’t take twenty minutes and wouldn’t create a massive backup file.

A couple years ago I had to make an effort of sending gallery links instead of sharing images and video directly through Signal since my backup file had grown so large. It’s a bit arduous.

I didn’t give the privacy concern much thought in the moment, mainly thinking how useless and poorly designed those apps usually are, but I do agree.

Considering it now, I do have loyalty cards in my company vehicle for certain things, primarily fuel, and those of course remain in that vehicle as they serve no other purpose. Perhaps keeping an old phone for purposes of doing this scanning thing might be ideal. Though ideally I’d imagine a few dedicated handheld terminals kept in store for redundancy purposes.

Speaking of redundancy, you’re right about paying in cash. Perhaps as easy as a ‘cash’ button and it would send the purchase total to a customer service desk. Around here, all grocers have a ‘cashier’ desk where you get lottery tickets and gift cards and such.

Though it would be funny to see these handheld terminals have a compartment to accept notes and coins haha.

The only solution for that which I see is taking photos of the labels for every product taken off the shelf, but that’s quite the imposition obviously. Trouble is there are no laws guiding these practices, and the result is going to be quite the mess for customers to understand.

In my opinion, the best purchasing experience for this type of shopping is using a handheld device with which you both scan the product as you take it off the shelf, and also process payment on your way to the exit. No cashier lines, and even better, no more unloading and repacking of your items just to purchase them. From the shelf into your bag, only back out again in your kitchen.

On another note, it boggles my mind to see the square footage used by all these self checkout machines when these terminal systems exist. Sadly I’ve never used one in North America. This is an aspect of shopping that could make me loyal to a single vendor. I would actually install the vendor’s phone app if they built in this functionality instead of having these terminals.