Of course all governments want to control every move and thought of their citizens. It makes governing easier. We expect that in autocracies.
I don't know about The West as a bloc, but at least the USA was supposed to have respect for the basic individualistic privacy and freedom of the average citizen. We've allowed that to largely evaporate. The differences between the US and something like the PRC are rapidly eroding.
Don't get me wrong, the US is still an order of magnitude more free but you can see a future where the trend lines are converging.
In many ways the west is copying what the East and the Middle East are doing. It’s quite concerning that democratic governments and their electorate are going with it, but to be “fair” this seems to be a somewhat orchestrated global phenomenon. Of course it’s not good.
The US adopted credit cards before the rest of the world, so we ended up with a worse network (essentially ossified at v1 when later adopters got v2 or v3).
Corona paranoia incentivized upgraded to tap-to-pay, but it was already prevalent in other parts of the world. It was more ubiquitous in Singapore in 2019 than it is in the US even now.
I'm as concerned about the surveillance state as anyone but let's keep our history constrained by fact. I live in Toronto too and it was still true that for many, many places cash was fine. Cash discounts are super common in various parts of the city and this was still true during COVID.
> let's keep our history constrained by fact. I live in Toronto too
This is hilarious. Toronto has no respect for facts, it has shown it will just fabricate histories out of whole cloth.
Nevertheless I'm tired of people citing anecdata and personal experience when upthread I have linked to a CBC article discussing a Bank of Canada report "arguing that cash-based transactions have plummeted from 54 per cent in 2009 to 10 per cent as of 2021."
>you can only tap your credit card because cash carries COVID [0]
maybe during peak covid? but certainly not now. this comment is either being intentionally disingenuous or just parroting a random article from an extraordinary (and no longer applicable) time of our lives and presenting it as if its still the current status quo.
i am in canada for weeks at a time multiple times per year, and i have family that live in BC, AB, and ON.
cash is my primary form of payment and not once have i been turned down using cash on any of my visits. not once has family complained about being unable to use cash (several of the older of them, like me, primarily use cash).
Congratulations, you are the 1 in 10. This is why we don't use anecdata.
> Even a report commissioned by the Bank of Canada suggests it's time to protect access to money.
> That report, titled "Social policy implications for a less-cash society," recommends legislative action, arguing that cash-based transactions have plummeted from 54 per cent in 2009 to 10 per cent as of 2021.
The purpose was to illustrate how even basic commerce is going to be monitored to a much greater degree in highly electronic socities like those in North America. Go ask the fucking corner store in the deep Philippine provinces, where the power goes out twice a month, to bring out the credit card machine - no, almost all transactions will be done in cash, whereas only 10% will be in Canada. Let's just assume one nine, even - 90% of your business conducted in private overseas in a cash-based society, vs. 90% of your business being surveilled by the government and private industry in North America.
The claim is not false. Did you read the Bank of Canada report or the CBC article, with actual stats and numbers in aggregate, or are you going to keep asserting your anecdata and personal experience?
>Did you read the Bank of Canada report or the CBC article, with actual stats, or are you going to keep asserting your anecdata and personal experience?
you said that i cannot use cash in canada. full stop.
if you wanted to talk about the proportion of cash use, which is a point i wholly agree with, you should have said that in your first comment instead of saying that you cant use cash at all (and linking it to covid?).
Most likely it's a protest. Badplace passed Badlaw, so residents of Badplace can't see my content, so nyah!
But, topics of a sexual nature—nothing really NSFW, just mentions of various fetishes that online people have developed and popularized, and the possibilities for AI to realize those fetishes and potentially spawn new ones—are discussed in the blog post, so it may be illegal to present to minors under the OSA.
My coworker got the reMarkable 2 about four years ago now, and was really into it when he got it. I had sort of forgotten about it until the other day when I was reconsidering whether I wanted to get one. When I asked him about it, he was just as enthusiastic as when I asked him years ago. It was sitting right next to him ready to go, with notes from that same day on the screen. Just an anecdote to consider.
It feels like one of those things where if you think you want it and you can imagine how you'll actually use it, you'll use it a ton. I had been on the fence about getting an e-paper device for a long time. When I heard the details on the Daylight Computer, I knew it was exactly what I wanted. I pre-ordered it within hours and I have probably used it more than any other devices I own since it arrived a year ago :P
I checked it out and they conspicuously omit the thickness from the FAQ "dimensions" answer. They also avoid any photos of the product that clearly show the thickness. So, guessing it's pretty thick?
I guess? I don't know the exact thickness either, but I held it up sideways behind my Samsung S10 and it was maybe a millimeter or so thicker, so it's not huge. Like 9mm-1cm. I have never thought much about the thickness of it
I have a Supernote which I like primarily because it's repairable and the developers are very responsive. It's the A5 version. It's very nice to write on and if you haven't tried eink in a while, it's pretty impressive. The soft surface is also a replaceable film. It has a Lamy colab pen which is very nice.
Downside is no backlight which many users tout as an improvement, or praise it as a minimalist perk. I don't really agree, but it does mean that the ink surface is closer to the pen so there's less parallax error. It makes it less usable as an ebook reader though, for example on a flight you'd have to use the blinding overhead lights.
Sure the price is comparable to 20+ notebooks. I think if you actually use notebooks, they're good. If you don't, it's questionable whether it'll change your habit. It also doesn't replace the satisfaction of a nice ink pen on nice paper. I have a collection of fountain pen ink that I've used since university (for years of daily lecture notes which is more writing than I'm ever likely to do again - we're talking up to 20 A4 sides a day) and the bottles are still practically full. So good writing equipment can be very economical. There are other issues like no colour (on mine) and PDF support is still ropey.
I am currently typing from a Daylight Computer that I've been using as my primary mobile device (over a laptop or smartphone) for a bit over a year now. I've used it so much the edges have started to peel off a bit where I hold it. Easily worth the money for me. Days of battery life, buttery smooth animations, reflective e-paper display, full android with an unlockable bootloader, it's great.
I tried various ones out over the course of a few years, but in the end found they weren't for me and I went back to using paper notebooks.
I won't say they're bad solutions at all, but just that they brought no actual benefits for my use cases so there wasn't a reason to put up with their downsides. The downsides are relatively minor, though. For me, they are cost, the need to charge yet another device, and the inconvenience of the form factor (you can't tear pages out to hand to someone else, they rigid tablets instead of flexible paper, writing on them isn't the most pleasant thing, etc.)
I love it as a reader when travelling, and books too long to print. I do take notes when i bring it to conferences, but most of all just to keep engaged, though to keep all notes at one place is practical.
Though when at home/office nothing beats paper and the possibility to visually have multiple pages side by side. Any research article I want to work through I print out, and I buy more paper books now than before I bought the remarkable. Paradoxically, the remarkable helped me realize the incredible value of paper.
I just commented on another post, so this is a copy-paste of my of other comment:
I use a Boox E-Ink tablet with the built-in handwriting notes app. It exports to PDF and I can copy everything to my Debian machine via ADB. I absolutely love it. E-Ink is close enough to paper for me, and the EMR (Wacom) stylus is close enough to a pen for me.
The device was worth every penny, even before considering the other uses for it.
Yeah my remarkable2 was the only way for me finally to break free from paper bullet journals. And using a custom hyperpaper.me navigable pdf template was a game-changer.
A few months ago I sold the rm2 and got an rm3 "paper pro" and despite the $$ it has ROI as a daily driver (alongside Obsidian running on my M4 macbook air).
There is also the question of real estate. I can have several paper notes side by side (when taking notes on loose sheets) but with iPads or ReMarkables that'll be rather decadent.
I had a ReMarkable2 for awhile and don't really recommend it. It's not the same as writing on pen & paper and I like the aspects of finding different papers, pencil lead, pens, etc. anyways.
To be more specific, the ReMarkable 2 had a wildly inaccurate pen tip, but only on like the bottom 1/2 to maybe 1/3 of the screen, which was enough to completely destroy my desire to use it at all. On top of that the software is pretty meh. It wasn't bad so much as it was minimal to the point of being harder to work with than real paper. The UI was clunky and slow. Any real advantage to digital nature (built-in OCR, sorta search) was so poorly implemented that it wasn't worth it.
Not sure that’s true in general, but the comparison here is between Linux and macOS. And I believe that for the set of users contemplating Linux, GP is largely correct.
can't even really blame Alex for taking the deal, why would Zuckerberg not do more due diligence? Wang has created (a relatively) successful subcontracting operation but that doesn't mean anything about research or new models
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