I’m lucky! Mine (2015 pro) has been awesome, except for when it was going through a Demon AVR. Its fine when direct to the TV or through the Onkyo. It has flaked out before though, and I never updated to the “experience” version that introduced ads on the home screen.

I think that’s the same OLED I have. B7 or C7. It’s starting to band on red, but I got at least… 7 (?) years out of it, and the bands are only mildly annoying. Similarly, I have never connected it to the internet, and don’t use any of the apps.

It’s not very bright, but I’ll take that over washed out or blotchy blacks. I’ll shop for a used OLED like this when I’m ready.

Ahh, crap

Who can use Privacy and do you need a bank account?

Privacy is currently available to US citizens or legal residents with a checking account at a US bank or credit union, and who are 18+ years of age.

privacy com

I haven’t yet. Actually, the corrupt bureaucracy has withheld residency status so far without bribes. That said, here was the path I thought I was on when I moved.

The idea is to have been in the country for most of the year (no less than 14 days out of country), at which time you can apply for residency. Once you have residency, you must maintain it for 5yrs.

Citizenship for Permanent Residence Holders

1. You have been a holder of Permanent Residence for a minimum of 5 years.
2. You have been resident continuously in Belize, this means that upon being granted Permanent Residency you have not resided outside Belize for periods that exceed thirty consecutive days or accumulate to a total of three months in any twelve month period.

I didn’t want to muddy the waters with the reality of what happened once I moved, as the OP was about motivating factors. Power corrupts. And ultranationalism is infectious to other countries.

Edit: If I could do it over, I would form an offshore company or similar and get a work permit. Two attorneys have recommended this, even though on paper it costs more; there’s less headache running to renew visitor status every 28 days (they claim 30-120 days, but no immigration office will renew you for more than that unless you bribe or are over 70 years old). It’s been humbling (scary) going through this process legally and being afraid on several occasions that an angry official will wave their hand and deport me. I can only imagine being deported because of my skin color or where I shop would be even more scary.

When my country first elected a rapist con man president, I started looking. I was born and raised in (and never left) New England, and so I also wanted a place that’s warm year round. It took me four years to tentatively settle on Belize, in late 2019. I made my first visit in Jan 2021, as the pandemic messed up my 2020 plans. By October, I had sold EVERYTHING and moved with two cats.

Reasons (or things I didn’t even know I wanted):

-No DST messing up my sleep schedule.
-No more days with 17+hrs of darkness.
-CARIBBEAN!!!
-Every Belizean I met (exception: gov’t employees and police) is friendly and warm. In N.E., people avoid making eye contact and answer greetings in a way to stop further conversation, but in Belize, the people genuinely want to know how you’re doing and remember everything you tell them.
-No car required
-Culture with proud participation from the public; holidays with vibrant parades, and entire village ecstatically engaged in all aspects.
-Tarantulas walking in the street (my partner and I love them!)
-Path to citizenship without $0.25M investment
-Citizenship there comes with a CARICOM passport, meaning can live and work in most Caribbean nations.
-Food! Fish caught 30 minutes before it hits my plate.

Things that pushed me away from the USA:

-Truck nuts
-Nazi and/or Confederate flags on trucks everywhere
-Cost of housing doubled from 2017 to 2021
-Consumerism -Embarrassed to be a US citizen

The Elders tell of a young ball much like you. She bounced three meters in the air. Then she bounced 1.8 meters in the air. Then she bounced four meters in the air. Do I make myself clear?

Watching from the sidelines as a LOS ROM user, I’m disappointed by the replies from the devs. From mischaracterizing surprise, anger and generally negative feedback as positive praise to completely ignoring the two main asks of the community. For me, there are other red flags, but I’ll leave it alone.

Ego seems to be coming into play here, and the repeated references to GrapheneOS seem to reinforce that. Handwaving new and unique criticism as if it is a continuation of an older conflict is pretty poor form.

The basic issue as I see it (as a non-user of their platform) is to market your OS the way they do while also adding this feature without notice or explanation. Their claim that they want to stay relevant and include popular features is a straw man. There are other ways to implement it, and other ways to introduce it to the community. But that’s not relevant. Their explanation could be used to justify abandoning their stated objective of anti-big tech in any/all ways. Saying people want big corporate tech features is weak and obviously not in parity with the stated mission of privacy-first.

It’s not always the poor choices that sink user trust; sometimes it’s a tone deaf response or unexplained motives, or opaque financial incentive structure.

Sometimes it’s all of the above. This seems to be one of those cases.

Ty @Luffy879 for sharing.

E: spelling

I got sick of GP when they announced AI learning on user photos (or actually that’s just the last straw). I use a combination of these two apps now:

https://f-droid.org/packages/org.fossify.gallery/

https://f-droid.org/packages/io.ente.photos.fdroid/

I think they arrested one guy? And that one guy was most likely being an asshole and pushed his luck past the brink.

Think again, señor:

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Shortly after they began guarding a Los Angeles federal building Friday, U.S. Marines detained a man who had walked onto the property and did not immediately hear their commands to stop.

The brief detention marked the first time federal troops have detained a civilian since they were deployed to the nation’s second-largest city by President Donald Trump in response to protests over the admin[…]

The man, Marcos Leao, was later released without charges and said the Marines were just doing their jobs.

Such an asshole…

Neither one is right. Effect is typically a noun. Affect is a verb.

This looks cool, but the dev seems pretty unavailable for updates for the past few years. Does the app still seem pretty solid in spite of that?

I like NetGuard, but think that TrackerControl is a bit more privacy focused. It had tracker detection, includes a traffic log as a free feature (NG requires purchase), and a few of the other NG Pro features are implemented in TC as well. In the end having either is better than neither.

*affect

I was wrong that it was water-themed. It was “Pacific Drive” which I guess made me think of underwater. I never got a chance to play it, and it’s no longer in my library. I think there was another one, but I can’t remember now. It was a while back that I discovered it.

EDIT: I agree with you 100% about ABZU. Boring after the first five minutes. Also, I don’t see Pacific Drive on the free games list. I need to try to remember the sequence of events. I know I never bought it, because I’ve never bought any games from EGS; all my titles were free ones.

I still have hundreds, but they do disappear like any purely digital asset.

I don’t even remember the name of the game, but it was one that was next to a title I do play often when sorted by “recent” which is based on purchase (or redemption) date. Might have been that underwater exploration title.

I’ve claimed probably 70% of the free games for the past four or five years. I’ve noticed some of the titles disappear. So one catch is, you may not get to keep the free game(s) you grab.

I looked into these so-called “responsible” indexes a few years back. It seems that whenever I dug into them, they invested in companies that didn’t seem to fit the description. These don’t change that assessment. You don’t have to look past the second page to see the primary holdings are not “socially responsible” companies at all.

SRI holdings:

NVIDIA
TESLA
HOME DEPOT
COCA COLA
ASML HLDG
NOVO NORDISK
INTUIT
DISNEY (WALT)
VERIZON COMMUNICATIONS
BOOKING HOLDINGS

Tesla? Come on. Coca Cola? Implicated in more environmental destruction than some oil companies, not to mention their irresponsible use of local water resources, including locking up a sole source of water away from local tribes and villages. Novo Nordisk? A socially responsible pharmaceutical company? Dream on. Intuit? They lobby to make the tax code impossible to understand without professional help, and also to ensure we can never file our taxes for free. Disney? Too many issues to list here. Verizon? Known for red-lining; being complicit in gov’t domestic surveillance; making empty promises to get gov’t subsidies, pocketing the money and not bothering to do the required work: stealing taxpayer money. All of the holdings are financial backers of Trump and the GOP, and most of them happily removed all mention of diversity or equality from their public facing materials to cozy up to this administration.

If you really want social responsibility in a stock, you’re going to have to do the research yourself and find individual stocks that meet your definition. Any day, one of those companies could change their direction, could be exposed as participating in activities you wouldn’t have expected, or simply be bought and or taken over by a non-scrupulous competitor or parent company.

Otherwise, you just have to accept that our money will be part of the problem, and sigh, hoping that your investments at least hold up long enough for you to retire, and hopefully you don’t feel too guilty.

I know we want to invest in funds that aren’t evil, but I’m not convinced that social responsibility and trading publicly are compatible. At the very least, of not likely you’ll find these kinds of finds are anything more than ugly companies packaging the same ugly stocks and trying to appeal to your conscience.

ETA: the climate change one is just as bad, full of Amazon, Google, Microsoft…

Edit2: just invest in the total market, a la Bogleheads, and spend the proceeds responsibly. That’s the best you can do. Social responsibility is defined by the individual.

Edit3: Consider a solar panel company. Green energy is good right? What if you find that they source their materials from a country known for human rights abuses, in the backs of exploited workers? Or they pollute? Or they simply post on ex-Twitter about their favorite fascist leaders? Does that change the SR value to you?

I completely agree. I thought Plex would be fast in the collective rearview mirror as soon as they started forcing connections to their servers, pay-walling, etc. I also had issues with the database corrupting and causing huge slowdowns. I spent days trying and failing to preserve my ratings, watch data, etc.

In the end, I switched to a much simpler setup of an NFS/CIFS share accessed by Kodi on my Nvidia Shield TV. If Kodi chokes (happened once since 2017), I can just wipe the app and/or reinstall and then import the local metadata (XML or NFO IIRC). That takes about five minutes. It just works. Kodi also gives me access to the IAGL, so that’s a huge plus.