My wife bought one of these pieces of shit before we got together. A few months back I finally got to the point where I had the “honey we need to throw out your printer and get a new one.”

“OK - should we give it to my sister or see if any of our friends want this?”

“I’m not sure I dislike any of your friends or family enough to inflict this much frustration on them.”

It’s almost like Trump when to a seminar on the incredible healing power of tariffs, and believed every word he heard.

Gee wonder where he got the idea from.

https://www.livemint.com/market/cryptocurrency/trump-meme-coin-investors-lose-2-billion-in-less-than-a-month-how-are-melania-bitcoin-performing-11739522934272.html

Late this fall, after all of the nonsense on Reddit, Facebook, and Instagram I asked myself a very simple question.

“Is the reason I joined these sites still valid? What do I actually enjoy about social media these days?”

The answer was basically “rose colored glasses.”

I joined **Reddit **after the ‘deaths’ of Slashdot and Digg. It became my source to get new and interesting content I probably wouldn’t have found otherwise. Now it’s bots arguing with bots and 75+% of the content is just recycled shit by people trying to make money. Much of the rest is from people trying to manipulate you.

Delete.

I joined Facebook to keep in touch with my friends and family - especially those I don’t see often. Over time, the amount of good content from people I knew dropped to maybe 25% of my feed. Most of it now is AI-generated bullshit or more of the same recycled content you see on Reddit.

Delete.

I joined Instagram to share some of my landscape photos and view some of the great photos some close friends were sharing. Over time that became less and less. Queue the recycled and AI-bullshit content.

Delete.

So, I challenge everybody to ask themselves do they actually enjoy social media? Do these sites actually add value to your life and in any way remain true to their promise when you joined them so many moons ago. Are you actually making any connections with people? The ‘social’ in ‘social’ media? Or just watching people talk at each other, not to each other.

After answering those questions, the answer about whether to stick around is pretty clear.

Mercedes also includes a number of items as a subscription in some countries. Some stuff is app related. Others are things like getting full use of your rear-steering wheels and unlocking extra horsepower.

And the rest comes from a hyper inflated Tesla stock price.

I think people are reading too much into this. They’re changing it to ‘Choose Love,’ as an obvious shot at the orange-haired man who’s never gotten a hug.

4. Participate or organize boycotts of companies that are enabling the Trump regime, starting with Elon Musk’s X and Tesla, and any companies that advertise on X or on Fox News

Don’t underestimate the effectiveness of consumer boycotts. Corporations invest heavily in their brand names and the goodwill associated with them. Loud, boisterous, attention-getting boycotts can harm brand names and reduce the prices of corporations’ shares of stock.

I’d take the Fox News piece a bit further and start boycotting sites like YouTube TV unless they put it on a pay tier. There are hundreds of thousands - if not millions - of people subsidizing Fox News through their streaming/cable subscriptions who have no intention of ever watching it.

Ivermectin prescriptions are about to go through the roof.

I am now scheduled for deletion.

If you’re looking for a VPN, check out Mullvad.

It’s just €5 / $5.25 / £4.15 a month. They haven’t changed that price since launching in 2009. So they’ve also been around a while. Does everything you need a VPN to do. And they’re based in Sweden, which seems to have some good privacy rules. They also don’t keep logs.

Just when you thought the NY Times’ reputation couldn’t get any worse this year …

Back during the Napster days, Howard Stern had the Foo Fighters on. He asked them what their thought of the whole Napster vs. Metallica legal debate.

Dave Grohl told him he was 100 percent for Napster, explaining that they barely made a dime from record sales, and instead made the bulk of their money from touring and t-shirt sales. And that very few musicians were in the same boat as Metallica, actually making money from their album sales.

So from that point of view, the more people who were exposed to their music meant the more folks who might want to go see them in concert.

I enjoy that they’re focusing on ‘promoting pirated software and game cheats’ before talking about malware first.

Cybersecurity ethusiast Karol Paciorek who spotted the playlist said, “cybercriminals exploit Spotify for malware distribution. Why? Spotify has a strong reputation and its pages are easily indexed by search engines, making it an effective platform to promote malicious links.”

That’s a very different, more helpful story. “Watch out, Spotify links are being used to distribute malware to your computer.”

When abusing platforms, spammers and scammers leave no stone unturned to promote their agenda.

Money. They aren’t doing this as part of a ‘peons of the world unite to steal software’ scheme. They’re doing it to generate traffic so they make more ad revenue.