You are approaching this from the perspective of a rational peaceful person from the west, where usually the economy is number one in everything.

Xi has achieved unrivaled rule over the party. He has successfully established a police state that ensures that any domestic dissent is immediately crushed with brutal efficiency. He has subjugated the provinces that dared to think about self rule and cultural differences, and is in the process of ethnic cleansing without any significant opposition or consequences. He has gained colonial influence all over Africa through economic means. He has taken over Hong Kong. He has significantly modernized and expanded the military, including nuclear weapons. He had made China into a global economic superpower, which other countries, including rivals, depend on for a significant amount of manufactured goods and resources.

So what is left for him? Surely he is not a man who can be content with what he has.

The obvious next step is to make China into a military superpower. For that you need to exert power abroad. What better place to begin with than that small island just off your coast that has been a challenge to Chinese supremacy for decades?

Of course, Taiwan is kind of protected by the US, the dominant superpower of the time. But they are struggling, looking weak. If China manages to take Taiwan, they will not only have removed that thorn in their side, they will also have punched the biggest, meanest kid on the block on the nose and gotten away with it.

“I have Democrat friends and Republican friends. I get along with almost everyone, but I have never worked with a more miserable son of a bitch in my life.”

• John Boehner

„Everyone hates Ted“

• Donald Trump

Audible

You probably can use your tv without it using you, or probably not.

I, too, use pihole. But it does not prevent your data from leaking 100% and never will. And it’s easily circumvented by using other DNS servers or even by connecting to hardcoded IPs. I dont know specifically about TVs, but some manufacturers do that.

The only way to make sure that TV can never spy is to never connect it to the internet.

Hundreds of snapshots a second? So my tv has at least 200 Hz? Or do they snap the same frame multiple times just for fun?

I despise ads because they steal time, and their very existence is an insult to the people that are exposed to them. All ads tell me is „your time is worth very little and we believe you are easily manipulated“.

Based on average ad length and cost on YouTube, ChatGPT has calculated that advertisers pay about $9 per hour of ads. While that seems a bit high to me, it is plausible. My time is worth more than that.

Yes, I do pay for YouTube premium. Though in a cheaper country, because the normal price is excessive imho.

Calling Al Jazeera „independent“ is quite a stretch. They are funded by Qatar, a authoritarian monarchy based on sharia law, where homosexuality is punishable by death, women’s testimony is worth half of that of men and they have fun punishments such as stoning and flogging.

That doesn’t mean YouTube is not suppressing media. In fact, in my experience the algorithm heavily favors right wing propaganda and has done so for years.

So maybe Al Jazeera has fallen out of favor. Or maybe they have themselves inflated their numbers previously with a method that no longer works, or they are just focusing their propaganda efforts on other, stupider platforms, like TikTok.

How? If authorities seize your computer, don’t you think the recall screenshots is the first they will look at?

I wouldn’t use that kind of power continuously. AFAIK the sockets are supposed to handle 16A for at least six hours, when they are new. When charging your car on Schuko sockets it’s good practice to limit it to 10A and check for the socket temperature after a while. Also, any connections in the cabling can have increased resistance with age and heat up with heavy continuous use. That shouldn’t matter that much when running a kettle or toaster for a few minutes, but charging a car or gaming for hours can become a problem.

„Not reliably, no“ sums up Tesla pretty well.

Before I tell you how to create a zip bomb, I do have to warn you that you can potentially crash and destroy your own device.

LOL. Destroy your device, kill the cat, what else?

I must admit that I am biased in that regard, but still I believe blaming Airbnb is mostly a distraction. Even in the worst of the worst places like Barcelona they reach around 10% of rental properties. Usually it’s a few percent in touristy places and much less everywhere else. Is it good for renters? Of course not. But it’s not the biggest factor, by far.

Now if I look at the whole rental market in my country, Germany, what’s on Airbnb is just a drop in the bucket. And still people are struggling to pay rent, especially in the cities. Even in those places that nobody in their right mind would go as a tourist unless threatened with serious physical harm.

Rents here started increasing uncomfortably after rental properties owned by local governments were privatized for a quick buck. Those new, publicly traded companies quickly raised rents sharply, because of course they have to earn back what they paid for the properties, plus a nice payout to investors. For the last two decades they have continued raising rents, neglecting maintenance and bought each other until now we the biggest company alone has almost half a million rental units, in a country of 80 million people. Of course, they don’t own three houses in villages here and there, but whole blocks in cities, with local market shares of up to 25%. That is much more significant than a few percent that are lost to tourism.

And don’t get me started on cost of construction, the chronic lack of new buildings, empty real estate owned by speculators or money launderers,… or I might rant again 😉

Attention whoring as usual. And it’s working.

Did he say thank you?

Me gusta

Well, that someone nefarious who gets access can then only steal from that point on. Recall will allow him to find out you were having a wank last Tuesday at 7PM.

Very normal, very cool.

Some ads have used browser exploits to infect visitors in the past. So this is a very, very bad idea, if it actually is implemented in a way that is hard to filter for ad networks.

As a German I would prefer Danish to Swiss „German“.

People are conflating the LLM and the app.