Just “USA” works fine. It’s easy to type and the world already understands it means “Festering pile of shit”.

Twice!

I never had a particular love of Microsoft at any point in my life but at least they had a diverse portfolio of various products from software to services to hardware of all sorts.

Now they have abandoned most of that (and continuing to abandon more with each month) as they pivot to being one of many AI-focused grift companies. They now sell bullshit, lies, fraud, and scams as their primary products.

Incredible transition into a poisoned, bloated, festering asswipe of a company that isn’t worth a moment of anyone’s time or respect.

I’ve had a personal EA boycott going for over 10 year snow. One of the best decisions I’ve made and I’ve never regretted it once.

Lol. Lmao even. Rofl perhaps.

We’ve seen with other industries that the prices never come back down once they’ve gone up.

That said, expensive RAM kits (and a lot of tech in general) are not exactly a mandatory purchase for many people like food is. Those that can stop buying expensive electronics certainly will once the price is too high.

Grocery companies price gouge and shrinkflate because their customers don’t really have a choice other than to starve. What are tech companies going to do when customers go an increasing amount of years between purchases?

It could run on 8GB of RAM but that would require trimming out a lot of the shareholder-mandated bloat

This right here. Companies like Google effectively have infinite money and it’s not a big deal for them to pay off the (usually miniscule) fines that they get hit with.

Kagi is highly intriguing but their prices put me off every time. $15CAD per month for a search engine is a hard pill to swallow. That’s a higher cost than basically any other digital subscription that I pay or have paid at any point.

I’m sure Chrome users will find another excuse to not switch just like the last few dozen times Google screwed them over.

I’m lightly active in the headphone enthusiast space. Even in the more light-hearted circles there is still an elevated amount of placebo bullshit and stubborn belief in things that verifiably make zero difference.

It’s rather fascinating in a way. I’ve been in and out of various hobbies over the course of my life but there is just something about audio that attracts an atmosphere of wilful ignorance and bad actors that prey on it.

I am open to the idea of paying for quality services that put the customer first. Hell, I pay for my email and have done so for years.

But Kagi has always squicked me out a bit. Some of their business practices over the years have been rather questionable, especially their push into AI which is exactly the sort of thing someone looking at Kagi would probably want to avoid. They are also very expensive. They’re one of those services that just assumes everyone is American so they just give a $ cost and don’t specify beyond that, so I’m going to assume their prices are in USD which means a plan for my dad and myself is $21CAD a month. That absurdly overpriced for a search engine subscription.

To put that into perspective: A YouTube premium family plan covers up to 6 accounts and is the same price and includes unlimited video and music streaming. Thoughts about YouTube aside and looking at this from a pure value perspective, paying that same price just for a search engine is a godawful shit deal. Do you know what my email costs per month? $1.25CAD