Mehdi Hassan is amazing, what are you talking about.

Ha ha ha ha 4 years… Despair

You are framing the issue to read the way you want it to be read. The customization and software options I am currently using, I have been able to make 90% of it work with a rooted phone and a combination of many open source tools and more. Now I get 100 % without theming breaking randomly, bluetooth being stable, not having to reset the phone every time I update to a new version, and more random issues I had with banking apps and others. I have control over my device stop dooming lmaooo. People use devices that fit their needs.

To give you a second opinion from the other guy, I’ve had quite a few Samsungs in a row at this point. From Galaxy S2 to S23Ultra skipping years between every purchase.

They are effectively the premium vendor of Android, at least for western audiences. The midrange has some good ones, but other companies do well there too. At the high end, Samsung might lose out a bit to google on images of people, but the phones Samsung sell are well built, have a long support life, have lots of features that usually end up being imported to AOSP and/or Google’s own version of Android. The last few generations are the Apple of Android. The AI features they’ve added can be run on device if you want, and idk what the other guy is talking about, but the AI features aren’t that obnoxiously pushed on my device, the S23 Ultra. I have some things on, most things off. Then again, I’ve used HTC for a few years and iPhone for two weeks, so except for helping my dad with his Pixel 6a while that device lasted, I’ve not really tried other brands. The added customization on Samsung is kind of a problem for me, because I don’t feel like changing brands after being able to customize so much out of the box.

And I’ve never had issues connecting to a simple Windows computer, given that the phone has always been able to use the normal Plug-and-play driver that is there already. If you have a macbook like I do, it’s a bit cringe, but that’s a macbook issue moreso.

So when faced with facts you just turn away. I mean, I’ll even concede that some of the member states didn’t hold elections and therefore, we have no statistics on them. Not every facet of your enemy can be unreasonably demonized. Not every element of Soviet life was as bad as you think, and it’s totally fair to say that the lower socioeconomic class was harmed by the dissolution.

In the aftermath of the dissolution oligarchs did dismantle a lot of the social security nets that existed and concentrated a lot of wealth.

I can just as easily shit on how Norwegian social security has been harmed by for-profit initiatives on the back of 8 years of Høyre and Frp rule.

It’s not revisionist what do you mean? It’s a very normal fact that is literally even easy to wiki.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Soviet_Union_referendum

I mean… the Soviet Union was illegally dissolved and as far as I remember, the people didn’t want the dissolution to happen. A lot of tomfooleries happened after that and many former soviet countries did lose protections for their least economically safe population.

This is not a defense of the Soviet Union, but dealing with the first statement you wrote.

I don’t particularly agree. Publishing is a tricky thing in the private sector, and we’ve seen a lot of scientific suppression by companies. Peer review literally requires the field to assess your work, and doesn’t end with the publication, but is a process that continues forever. Reproduction is a major issue, especially in fields proximal to mine (neuroscience , Medicine and psychology) and the whole process of open science with this type of review process makes it much easier to create papers that are reproducible.

The external influence is basically a given to produce science that holds up.

I installed PopOS this week. Let’s see if my experiment works better than this experiment from Microsoft.