I would argue peak car was a little earlier, maybe the 2000-2010 decade. Fewer screens to fail, analog buttons and dials. Airbags, and ABS for safety but without the additional computers/screens.
Still got my E46!
Readit Newssoramimo commented on BMW PHEV: Safety fuse replacement is extremely expensive evclinic.eu/2025/12/04/20... · Posted by u/mikelabatt
Your examples of the US doing good for democracy is correct. My examples of the US doing bad and dismantling democracy for its own benefit is also correct. The US has been fantastic for its own people and its allies. Not so for others. Please note that 85% of the world population lies outside.
But all your examples are vs Russia. I will be happy if Russia is dismantled. Both the Soviet Union and Russia has been terrible for its people. China has been absolutely fantastic for its people. They went from absolute poverty to challenging the greatest empire the world has ever seen in just a few decades. I doubt the Chinese people hate their regime.
> to assess which sphere of influence (and its implications on national self-determination) is preferable
Iran, Guatemala, Brazil, etc. All had democratic govt's overthrown by the US.
> I personally view Russia and China as adversaries because they are a serious threat to democracy worldwide (that I think we agree on?), which I believe is the very thing we're discussing.
I personally view Russia, USA and China as serious threats to democracy. Because all three have toppled democratic countries for its benefit. And no I don't think they do it because they hate democracy. They do it because it helps their superiority. The victims just happened to be democratic sometimes.
> So in summary, there are very good reasons to be critical of China (CCP) independent of the current US administrations actions and historical baggage of the US.
And there are very good reasons to be critical of the USA independent of the current Chinese administrations actions and historical baggage of China.
My whole point is that administrations do things for economic and military superiority. Things like morality are just used by administrations to justify actions to their populace. I am sure you _personally_ dislike China for purely moral reasons. Most people are good who think in terms of morality. That is exactly why framing a rival as "evil" works so well. It's about power. If the world works on the basis of justice then the EU should have sanctioned the US for the Iraq debacle and now Palestine.
Can you maybe take a few minutes and write down all the good+bad things the US has done since say WW2 vs China? You'll understand why a neutral third party is wary of both.
> You'll understand why a neutral third party is wary of both.
Oh I can understand this, yet my conclusion stands that China (CCP) is and remains a threat to democracy woldwide (which is my original point).
You are not disputing this, correct? (if anything, you're drawing an equivalence to the US, which I disagree with, but doesn't refute the conclusion on the original point)?
And I'm saying this has nothing to do with moral goods like democracy. The US has toppled plenty of democracies and killed millions of innocent people for its own benefit. "Might makes right" is what we always practiced. The current administration just doesn't care to hide it.
This has everything to do with maintaining economic and military superiority. That's the reason why people consider China a "adversary" not morality. If you don't understand this you won't understand why such a huge percentage of the world's population is wary of the USA just like they are wary of China.
I see where you're coming from, but I disagree.
The US is far from perfect, but - so far, TBD where we go from here - has had IMHO a net positive influence on keeping democracy around (specifically, I'm thinking of Germany after WW2, Western Europe during the Cold War, Japan and with detours South Korea).
Perhaps you'll point out that the US did this out of pure self-interest and these countries are just vassal states to the US. However, a useful comparison in this context is comparing Western Germany (US) to Eastern Germany (Russia), South Korea (US) to North Korea (China) or, say, Poland (US/EU) to Belarus (Russia) to assess which sphere of influence (and its implications on national self-determination) is preferable.
Going back to democracy, in my view is not the "default state" of human society (the default is probably mob rule like we have in Russia).
> That's the reason why people consider China a "adversary" not morality.
I personally view Russia and China as adversaries because they are a serious threat to democracy worldwide (that I think we agree on?), which I believe is the very thing we're discussing.
So in summary, there are very good reasons to be critical of China (CCP) independent of the current US administrations actions and historical baggage of the US.
> if you care about democracy
I do
> they are the only power that can arguably undermine it
Stares at current administration
> tiktok
Meta. Myanmar. Report: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
> fueling division
Again stares at current administration
> funding antidemocratic parties like Germany's AfD
Elon. Vance. Report: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/14/us/politics/vance-far-rig...
> support of Russia in their war of conquest against Ukraine
Agree. Looks over at Palestine.
> the treatment of their neighbors like the Philippines
Venezuela. Today.
To be clear, I'm not arguing in favor of the current administration. In fact, I would argue that they have a similar "might makes right" mindset to the CCP and should be opposed on the same grounds.
If anything, foreign adversaries like China or Russia welcome / help to power parties like the current administration so democracies self destruct.
What did China even do to be seen as this super evil enemy? Apart from actually challenging American economic superiority?
Well if you care about democracy, they are the only power that can arguably undermine it, not just at home, but worldwide (tiktok, fueling division, funding antidemocratic parties like Germany's AfD).
Further, look into their support of Russia in their war of conquest against Ukraine, the treatment of their neighbors like the Philippines and look into what their fishing fleet is up to worldwide.
soramimo commented on US moves to cancel one of the largest solar farms ft.com/content/7a3cd922-8... · Posted by u/doener
Can't help but notice the reliable pattern of right-wing naming conventions. German Democratic Republic, not at all democratic. Democratic People's Republic of Korea, again not even remotely democratic. Make America Great Again, not in fact trying to make America great. I get it, slogans work and are more important than the reality behind them. But it is depressing nonetheless, to imagine all the nice things and prosperity we could create if we actually did try.
Truth social (or similarly Pravda)
soramimo commented on Open, free, and ignored: the afterlife of Symbian theregister.com/2025/07/1... · Posted by u/mdp2021
Symbian wasn't really designed from scratch though. It has its roots in the nineteen eighties. The 32 bit version of Psion's Epoch is what eventually became Symbian and it wasn't until other consortium members gave up that Symbian was taken over by Nokia.
I worked at Nokia Research and Nokia Maps between 2005 and 2012. I witnessed the arrival of the Iphone and Android from the inside. There was a lot of disagreement internally on what the right thing to do was. And part of the company was actually very clued in and trying to do smart things. But Nokia did a lot of things wrong and most of that was just not getting that it was a software company. It had all the wrong reflexes.
The problem with Symbian from day 1 was that at the time it launched, it was already getting clear that embedded Linux was going to be a thing and it was a bit lacking in features relative to that. Between the late nineties and 2005, there were quite many attempts to use Linux on mobile and embedded devices. By the early 2000s it was widely used on things like routers and other devices. And there had been some attempts at building pdas and phones with it. Google bought Android (the company) in 2005; and they launched phones around 2008. 2005 was the year I joined Nokia. Rumors about Apple working on a device were already getting quite concrete around that time (i.e. Nokia execs would have had good intel about what was coming) and over the course of the next few years it became clear that it was going to happen.
Nokia was focusing on flip phones instead. They were really worried about the Motorola Razr. And the Blackberry. They completely missed the point of desktop operating systems being repurposed for mobile. They thought mobile was special and that they owned it. They stubbornly ignored all the internal signals (there were many) that that was wrong. Nokia even launched a Linux based device in 2006 the N770. It was not a phone and that was not an accident. Operators would object. This could not be. So, they crippled it.
Apple and Google both proved them wrong. The Symbian strategy was dead as a doornail before they even launched the first devices (around 2003/2004). Apple proved that operators were weak and could not ignore popular consumer demand. And of course IOS was a specialized version of OSX for mobile. And Google ended up benefiting a lot from Nokia's Linux work. The kernel was essentially the same for Maemo and Android. Google even bought N800s to dual boot them into Android before they had the first Nexus phone ready. The point here is that Nokia had a shipping touch screen based Linux device in 2006. Years before Google or Apple had phones on the market. The only reasons it didn't have a sim card were political. It could have been a phone, easily. The N800 continued the tradition. It even had a webcam and skype. But no sim card. Only the N900 fixed that. But that was way too late and they positioned it as a developer toy. Innovation around this topic was stifled. It was the obvious move. But the Symbian crowd successfully blocked and frustrated that.
By 2008 it was scrambling to undo a lot of really bad decision making around Symbian in the years before that. Which included actually cancelling S90, which is a touch screen version of Symbian that never saw the light of day. That happened around 2005. S60 3.x was the current version when Apple announced the iphone and had no touchscreen support at all. Nokia had to rapidly create a new version with touch screen support. It was a rush job and the first versions completely destroyed Nokia's reputation because it was unstable and unusable (both). The launch device for this was a complete flop. And it took until the early 2000s to stabilize it. And by then the phone reviews were brutal for any Nokia device. Apple was running circles around them. And Android was starting to actually eat into non Symbian (S30, S40) Nokia revenue. Which actually were most of the market. Nokia's entire OS strategy was failing at that point.
It's feature phone market started imploding and this was until then the money maker. They sold hundreds of millions of those. And then we got the whole drama with pissing in your pants to stay warm (Ansi Vanjoki, one of the VPs) and then Stephen Elop getting hired and chucking him (and Symbian, Linux, and all the rest) out. And then Windows Phone of course didn't make it and the MS acquisition happened and MS unceremoniously pulled the plug in 2014. Too little too late.
Thanks for sharing this, comments like yours are the reason I come to this site.
Okay - newsflash. Microplastics are everywhere already. In the water you drink from tap. In the wild caught (or farmed) fish you eat. Soon we’ll be told they are also present in the fruits and vegetables we eat, maybe even in milk and eggs! Pretty sure meat and chicken already contain them to varying degrees.
So yeah, sure, there are microplastics in drinks in glass bottles. But to say they contain “more” microplastics than plastic containers sounds like the BS concocted by packaging lobby.
Here’s a fun fact: did you know that a good RO system can filter out most microplastics from the tap water, but it also releases some (of its own) into the filtered water! We really dug ourselves into a big hole by using plastics for just about everything.
Yeah, reverse osmosis systems adding microplastics themselves is a scary fact I also learned on hacker news a few months ago.
Does anyone here know if they are RO systems that don't have that problem?
You're right on target with the over consumption line.
AI is a drop in the bucket compared to the insanely unnecessary nonsense that people buy because they just want more crap.
Anyone who is talking about how much energy AI uses should be looking at themselves and their communities as well. Change begins with small decisions/actions and americans have been convinced that small decisions/actions don't make a difference because it's an easy excuse to do nothing.
There are a handful of very simple things people can do that would make a huge difference, such as reducing food waste/red meat consumption, less air travel, using less energy to power their homes, buying less stuff, using less plastic(buy glass/metal stuff) and driving less. All those things can reduce an individual's consumption by over 50%(red meat can make up nearly 30% of that reduction). But nobody wants to do these things because we're told it's the corporations/rich people's fault. Americans are BY FAR the heaviest consumers in the world and we have all the excuses in the world for why we think it's okay.
FWIW, the energy use per capita in the USA (and other western countries) is lower than in the 1970's and has been steady/declining [1].
Granted, some of the energy intensive manufacturing was outsourced to China and other places, but then again there's also an increase in efficiency standards (e.g. vehicles, heating etc).
CO2 emissions per capita in Western countries (including the US) have peaked in the 1970s and are now roughly on pre-WW2 levels [2].
(note that I'm onboard with reducing waste etc, but the claim that consumption drives energy use is somewhat misleading)
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use?tab...
[2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita
We could free up a lot of capacity by somehow taxing/regulating the externalities of bitcoin to get people to use etherium (if they must use cryto).