Skull giver

I’m no longer on helpdesk duty, luckily. However, one thing I’ve learned is that people are lazy and will lie. Constantly. Even if they’re being nice. Even if they know what they’re talking about.

You say you’ve rebooted your modem. I want to believe you, I really do, but I need to make sure you actually rebooted your modem. At first, I believed people, only to find out half an hour later that the modem has an uptime of three years and the post-reboot reconnect I’ve been looking for in the logs never took place.

You say you’ve just changed your password and still can’t log in. I want to believe you, but resetting the password again takes 30 seconds and troubleshooting a lazy lie takes 10 minutes.

And for the love of god, don’t pretend to check if you’ve plugged everything in correctly when it takes exactly as long as actually checking. When I say “we should check the cabling” that’s not an insult of your intelligence, that’s a step towards resolving the problem you’ve been having for weeks.

I know repeating troubleshooting steps you’ve already done is a massive pain. I hate it just as much as you do. But sometimes, after telling me what you’ve figured out yourself, you just need to let go and do what I say if you want your problem resolved. I know the stuff I suggest doesn’t always make sense, but the shit we’re selling you doesn’t make sense if you look beyond the surface. And yes, I’m just as frustrated about the idiotic workarounds necessary to make anything work, neither one of us has the power to actually change this.

Also, don’t try this “I know the manager/boss/CEO” bullshit. Even if you’re telling the truth, nobody really cares. It’s not the flex you may think it is. Oh, and threatening legal action only slows down resolving your problem, because now someone senior needs to evaluate if you’re actually going through with a lawsuit, and every procedure needs to be double-checked to make sure you won’t win.

Lastly: when I link you something, and you call me because you “don’t understand”, I’m going to go through the steps I linked you step-by-step, directly quoting the text provided. If I’m being paid by the hour, I don’t mind that much, but you could save both of us a lot of time by at least trying to follow the manual.

Firefox had a nasty video decoding performance bug a while back that hit YouTube particularly bad (because it affected webm streams). That’s been so solved for a while, though.

I don’t think any open-source products have anything close to what Google Maps offers.

Microsoft has Here which also does a bit of vehicle tracking to get traffic data. I think TomTom may still be in business, but that’s quite expensive.

Some governments have their own accident/road disturbance databases available for companies or the public, but you’ll have to be lucky to find ones that support your local area if your government even provides such a service.

I get by just fine with 8-10GB per month of data+tethering. It’s no replacement for my fiber internet connection, but I don’t even know what I’d use 60GB for. Might be useful on holidays I guess?

Lots of Elon fanboys like cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is extremely effective at taking money away from victims with no way to reclaim it, and is basically uninsurable.

It’s not just Musk, though. Scams also use the faces of other rich people. Musk seems to be very popular scamming the tech scene, but every billionaire has had scams associated with them.

I don’t think the second coming of Christ will have a tough job proving himself. Apocalyptic monsters and the dead rising would be a pretty clear way to prove the supernatural. So yes, it sure is possible.

People have certainly tried to prove weaker supernatural events. That includes government researchers looking into telepathy. Double blind tests have so far failed to prove every scientific claim about supernatural powers and experiences brought forward so far.

I haven’t seen any convincing evidence of the supernatural and the onus of proof is on the one that comes with the claim. Often, these claims are vague, imprecise, and noncommittal, so the proof is often weak and impossible to verify. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, as they say, and so far all the evidence I’ve been presented with had come down to “someone wrote this in a book millenia ago” and “I just feel it”.

5G has lower latency and higher cell capacity for the same cell tower. Speed isn’t the only advancement. It’s better at maintaining connections while on the move (i.e. in a train) and security and privacy has been improved in a few key areas.

There’s a world of difference between an EDGE 120kbps connection and a 5G 120kbps connection.

You can prove a negative in the mathematical sense, sure. You can’t prove a negative when the supernatural gets involved. Physics, chemistry, and biology aren’t Maths, and the supernatural isn’t formally defined mathematics.

Quantum mechanics show a break between the classical understanding of physics and the equations and laws derived from plain observation and the probabilistic and unstable nature of matter and energy at the smallest observable level.

Physics isn’t a done deal, we don’t know how a lot of stuff works. Our simplified classical models clearly don’t work on every level, but that doesn’t mean gravity suddenly doesn’t pull the earth and the moon towards each other.

Large scale physics (somewhere between molecules and stars) is full of simplified models. From spherical cows to “assume you’re walking along a perfectly straight, frictionless surface in a vacuum”, very few of the formulae taught in school actually model what really happens. They’re approximations that work at every relevant scale of physics, as we lack the ability to accurately simulate the chaotic nature of individual particles and energy fields.

Scientists were initially hoping that we could use Newton’s laws to describe how atoms interact (and then quarks and such, when they were discovered) and quantum theory has proven that this is not possible. That does not prove or disprove the existence of a higher being, it just proves that earlier extrapolations were wrong.

There’s no common definition of “natural cause” within physics as a science, so there’s no way to prove or disprove anything regarding natural causes. You can define the term within a specific paper, but that just proves or disproves something within the confines of that specific paper, experiment, and definition. I can call a puddle of water “Jesus”, evaporate the puddle, and claim to have killed God, but outside of my own wacky experiment nothing religious has happened.

Science will never be able to prove a negative, so no matter what happens, belief in the mere existence of the supernatural is always a possibility. Religion brings forth very few scientifically provable facts. We know lightning is caused by electrical discharge now, but we’ll never be able to prove that it’s not caused by an invisible Donar riding around in the heavens, swinging his hammer.

To the millions of girls in college in Afghanistan, I do think society has collapsed. They’ve been thrown back into the dark ages. If it weren’t for the extreme brevity of democratic Afghanistan, I would call the takeover by the Taliban societal collapse for sure.

Not all cities are still there. The ones that died out don’t appear in stories and ended up being swallowed up by the ground. Farms were deserted, cities disappeared from maps, entire civilisations vanished.

Just because humans still exist doesn’t mean society didn’t collapse. Humans existed before society did, and humans will continue to exist even if society doesn’t, until new societies will be formed by the survivors.

Societal collapse can happen; it happened to us in the Bronze age, several times in fact. War and famine causing enough chaos to destabilise and destroy cities or empires that took centuries to recover, if they recovered at all.

I don’t know what the Sea People event of the modern era would be. I do know that bombing a handful of factories around the world will set us back a couple of decades when it comes to computers and integrated devices. A second COVID hitting us right now while the world is still recovering would probably do a number on the world as well. Plus, nuclear war would ruin civilisation as we know it pretty quickly.

Unless Putin or Trump start launching nukes, I don’t expect any sudden collapses within one lifetime, but societal collapse is something that can happen eventually.

I don’t think the European second hand market is quite as prolific as the American one. Prices stay up as a result.

Many of these marketplaces are also full of companies putting their ads up, often offering new/nearly new products which will bring in significantly more than second hand stuff.

Many countries have their own ebay alternatives as well, and in some places Facebook is the only place to get any deals on second hand stuff. Google suggests bolha.com is where Slovenians go for second hand stuff, for instance. Here’s a second hand ThinkPad for a much more reasonable price. Local second hand sites will often refuse to ship internationally, though, that’s something I’ve only seen done for expensive stuff (i.e. the price you were quoted). Personally, I see eBay as a website I would only ever visit if I wanted to import something cheap from the USA or maybe the UK.

Another issue with laptops specifically is that many European countries have specific (non-US) keyboard layouts, reducing the supply. Compared to all ThinkPads sold, only a small amount of them have a dedicated Đ/đ key, so the price can stay up for longer than you may expect. Newer, faster hardware is nice, but it’s rather useless if you can’t type your name on it!

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