skuzz

That's a good point. Although living in the now, what did old Series 40 or Series 60 do behind the scenes? Probably not much because the extra power to mine user data wasn't there yet. Also HMD could have made the "+" telemetry. Not to diss it though. I'd much rather risk their software than any other right now.

It's basically the waffle house thing but much less clever, and even that was stupid. "User engagement" is what they are looking for. Our talking about a can of burned wood, hamster bedding, and old coffee grounds guarantees a sales increase. People should start boycotting products when they do stupid crap like this to discourage the behavior, but honestly, much bigger fish to fry right now.

Yeah, the hardware realm is the real difficult piece, and even if one can manufacture a device with off-the-shelf parts and manage to find chips with enough support for bands/modes for usability on carriers, getting carrier certification is a PITA.

Good luck with that too, with carriers sunsetting legacy networks, old dedicated dumbphones will no longer work in most cases. KaiOS is sometimes used on dumbphones, but most these days just run a fork of Android designed for dumbphones.

Maybe Meshtastic with an SMS API gateway is the way to go. Or cans and string.

Meanwhile you can still cherry-pick the tip, and go right to the head, and fork away.

Yes, thanks for that, I forgot to mention that very important point. We need our communities more than ever. When stocking up, try and stock a little extra so you can help your family, friends, neighbors if they're short on anything. Especially the medications and medical supplies, double-especially for the old and infirm. Kindness and generosity is the real strength.

All the bags of beans and bullets in the world do nothing if there isn't a community working together. Any and all community.

That is an amazing dedicated ride. Kudos to your ingenuity!

Here's the thing, if it got to that point, it is 100% game over for America. No coming back. Guns are a tool to delete life. That is their purpose. Randomly shooting random people to prove some kind of one-off point doesn't solve the problem, it justifies Stephen Miller's warped reality of furiously masturbating to the suffering of others by actively sending shoot-to-kill military into every city. They have many more resources at their disposal than civilians. Same reason every other targeted shooting has been absolutely pointless thus far, and if nothing else emboldened Evil, capital E.

What you can do if you are even in America, is get to a range, (find a good one, there are garbage ranges, and they should be avoided) rent a firearm, and train. Take classes. Do your due diligence in safe firearms handling. You should have already started this in November, but no time like the present to catch up. If you have the resources, acquire firearms once you're trained, they don't have to be fancy or new, they just have to work. Stock up on ammo. The classes will be sobering as if they are good, they get into the nitty gritty of displacing the most amount of fluids and all sorts of things that will likely unsettle if not gross out most civilized human beings. You're also meeting fellow firearm owners, which is a community all its own, the more citizens armed, the less the Nazis can take out, the more we can all reinforce to each other that we're in this together and it's just a bunch of rich angry soulless sycophants trying to destroy America. There's a reason the Swiss issue firearms to every home.

You also should have been stocking up on supplies, food, medication (medications can be time-consuming to stock up on due to silly insurance, we'll fix that later) since last November. Not crazy prepper level storage, but enough to get by through supply chain gaps. The pandemic taught everyone how to do that already. Most of all, after all of that, you should be spending as little as you can into the US economy and prepare for a 0 spend. If we can get any consistent messaging and language out there, a general strike should come sooner than later. We're past the hot shit summer and have some time before winter. Should minimize life loss due to such a thing. There are 340some million people in America. Not everyone will (or be able to) join in, but it just takes a few key choke points to shut the whole thing down. How about tomorrow when the Federal government shuts down? (But realistically, probably some time in the near future.)

Johnny Larper all by himself with an AR-15 is going to be no match for the loosely-trained ICE dolts due to sheer numbers, and especially not a Predator drone they won't even see or hear coming if it actually got real. (Although, hopefully our military has more respect for America than the current administration, and point their weapons in the correct direction.)

Edit: I chuckle at the uninformed (and/or troll bots) that are downvoting reality. Life, unfortunately, is not binary. Keep downvoting, but at least go out and read (well, hard for the bots) some documents on history, civilization, community, defense, medicine, care. There is a lot (especially in America) that school does not teach. Bonus points: Read the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and amendments, the Gettysburg Address even. Actually read the words. Figure out what you think your nation actually means to you. Not talking "patriotism" which is stupid blind faith - just the dirt you live on and your community and what you find acceptable behavior.

That comes later after the FBI can successfully tamper with the evidence.

Reboot Congress in next elections, who have power to impeach the Supreme Court members and replace them. Reboot SC with stricter control. Likewise, strip many of the assumed powers the President has. Then a mass-cleanup of the Federal legal system to erase all the corruption that has been slowly injected over the last 40 years. Fixable, but a lot of focused work that will likely span a decade or more. Also likely something pretty historically unprecedented at this scale.

Biggest problem is: there needs to be a face, a movement. It doesn't have to be one person, it won't be Democrats, and it has to be ostensibly decentralized, especially from Big Tech, as they have tools to manipulate everything now.

This is the beefy news we should all be paying close attention to.