skuzz

California seems to more and more do categorically weird things. Newsom especially.

Hah, my curse is calls always finding weird ways to drop. Then I moved to a place with no cell service, because I'm apparently a wireless masochist?

Perhaps he was secretly rich, and thusly his esoteric definition was actually an eccentricity.

There's some slight technical reason for it, but I think they swung a bit too far in the asshole direction with blocking too many.

The LTE rollout was completely botched from the start. LTE voice is technically supported on all LTE chipsets, but early on the voice spec changed. Early phones used LTE for data and 2G or 3G for voice.

Complicating matters further, AT&T and Verizon both have separate and slightly tweaked versions of the spec, as they didn't want to wait for it to be finalized, and of course they're both different in different ways. It's also why T-Mobile allows so many devices. They just rode their very fast for the time HSPA+ network until LTE was finalized, got generic hardware on the network, and flipped the power switch.

To top it off, AT&T was sued at one point for 911 not working due to a handset bug and they got very controlling at that point to avoid future lawsuits.

VoLTE is ostensibly VoIP over cellular data at its core. All phones have to talk with the correct SIP signaling on VoLTE for voice calls to work. With 2G and 3G, the circuit-switched method of signaling was much more standardized (although not necessarily simpler, WCDMA at its end spanned literal volumes of books.) This made it so phones and networks were more easily compatible for basic things like voice, 911, etc.

Now, on top of Verizon and AT&T thinking that rolling their own flavors of LTE was a good idea, every phone maker also had their own idea about how the VoLTE SIP signaling was supposed to work. Due to flaws in the LTE spec, carriers going rogue, and companies interpreting things wrong, it has turned quite literally into a clusterfuck.

TL;DR: It took a long time for LTE to standardize enough across product lines, and there are a whole bunch of phone models that don't talk the language quite right. So carriers chose to ban rather than make workarounds or work with the vendor to roll a software fix to the phone.

Baloo does own a cargo plane.

And government agencies. They circumvent laws about citizen data privacy and situations where they would otherwise be required to have warrants by leveraging these third-party data brokers.

Eh, gotta be honest though. Democrats (at the Federal level) love money. Pelosi's latest Visa stock gambit, vaccines, etc. They use the Republicans to stay profitable. Repubs contrive a fear, Dems monetize it. Capitalists at their core. Not looking out for the People. Just wall street. Because they genuinely believe the machine is what keeps us all living our lives, and to love the machine, and why not make some scratch while you're at it?

I found out on one bank site that if you filled up all the phone number slots with bogus phone numbers, Zelle couldn't be activated. Basically try to logjam your bank so Zelle can't be enabled, so that way it's more difficult for haxx0rs to do it.

Stupid. Wish it could be 100% blocked on bank accounts if you don't want to use it as it is a huge security hole.

Stockholm decommissioned its last coal-fired plant in 2020, and its giant heat pumps are a major supplier of heat to the city, along with power plants that burn waste and scrap wood from Sweden’s forestry industry that would otherwise be left to rot. Levihn contends that generating heat and electricity from incinerated waste is more efficient than dumping it in a landfill, although these plants still emit carbon dioxide. Stockholm Exergi is working to install carbon-capture technology in the plants in hopes of making the system net carbon negative, he told me.

"We don't use coal, we just burn waste rather than turning the wood scrap into something useful." Greenwashing at its finest. I suppose the angle is it's "almost" recycling carbon rather than releasing old buried carbon into the atmosphere?

What an odd guilt-laden non-article. It's non-trivial to install underground piping systems in neighborhoods, they then also need a source/sink of heat to power the mechanism, not every neighborhood would have that, not all topographies would support that. Cities already have centralized heating systems that have been around for decades in some building groupings.

Seems it'd make more sense to just install a house-grade heat pump on each home the next time the AC needs to be replaced and some grid-scale solar and/or wind and/or hydro and Bob's your uncle. Toss in some base-load nuclear for good measure. Build out the energy infra enough that resistance or baseboard resistance electric heat can be used for when it's too cold to use a heat pump in the meantime, and then sunset gas furnaces the next time those need to be replaced.

This avoids polluting with big diggers tearing up streets, moving dirt around, possibly destroying gas (causing methane leaks), water, power, Internet infra, and laying new asphalt. No carbon creation by building the piping systems/energy plant and avoids trucking those parts around.

Nah, more of a challenge. California normally leads the way with things that are good. Competition towards good things is good.

The S22 US version used snapdragon 8 gen 1 (in the US) and the chip was prone to performance issues. It worked, but it was rough, ran hot, and ate power for lunch. I'm not sure if that was a year that the international variants had an Exynos, but their performance is generally worse.

So seeing a simpler phone with basic android seem to do fine versus a flagship with super bloated Android on a first gen apps processor makes a lot of sense, really.

Up to $210 if uninsured.