Except, what everyone seems to be ignoring is that those buildings literally aren’t filled with the evil dudes most of the time. I was born in DC. Those buildings are almost entirely empty, and there are always multiple orders of magnitude more tourists in and around them than there are potentates. Most of the most powerful people in the country don’t even live in DC most of the time, because they’re rich enough to just fly in whenever they need to, or drive in from nearby states, where they have massive mansions. I’ve given my perspective in a different reply which you are welcome to read, but torching DC is an inane idea, tantamount to screaming and breaking a plate so you can feel like you’re helping the situation.

As I said to a different response: when demolishing buildings, we use high explosives, not gasoline. I was born in DC. The buildings didn’t do anything wrong, nor did the people who live near those buildings. Very few of the traitors to the nation even live in the capital most of the time. Burning a city to the ground is never an acceptable solution to any problem; It wasnt appropriate in WWII for Dresden, London, or Hiroshima, it wasn’t in the war of 1812 for D.C., and it isn’t now. Large-scale retaliation will only cause collateral damage and put up a smokescreen. It would be nothing more than senseless violence amounting to stomping your feet on the ground. Any action which has a hope of success in bringing justice must be done in an orderly and methodical manner, I don’t go in for all the modern second amendment crap, and am a conscientious objector, because the one part of that amendment which is most important is this: a well-regulated militia is necessary to protect the rights of the people. The declaration of independence makes it clear that we have a right and a duty to throw off this government, which is openly seeking to reduce us under absolute despotism, but that doesn’t mean just burning some uninhabited buildings with god knows how much collateral damage is a good plan. It would be nothing but theatre with an extreme innocent death toll.

Are you aware of how large-scale fires work? Don’t be dense yourself. There’s a reason we demolish buildings with high-explosives, not fucking gasoline and matches.

“Remember, just one more and then you all go home!!”

You mean the D.C. that is famously full of people of color, none of whom have representation, despite having a larger population than two states, and who have been historically marginalised, in large part because a few blocks of the city have some marble buildings filled with ethnonationalist, corpofascist kakistocrats? You’re suggesting we burn down that D.C.?

Fucking Christ. It also seems entirely unclear to them that the JOKE is that even the FRENCH don’t like their government. The only thing that could make it clearer would be for you to give the French pooh a guillotine.

Yeah, they made that clear when they said that they were discriminating against you based on the TLD of your instance. It’s given me quite the chuckle.

Fair enough. I literally do not even mentally consider apple to be a smartphone producer, because the market for apple is “I want a brick that is a slightly smaller status symbol than the last $1000+ brick I paid you for”, while android was a market with competition, open-source development, and hardware selection. When apple removed the headphone jack for a proprietary port, I saw it as just more of apple requiring you to pay $100 for another proprietary cord that would fall apart in 3 months. I remember when google decided to remove the headphone jack, and at that point, I knew that everyone else would follow. that is what I do not forgive. It also happened to occur around the point at which I first read cloud atlas and snow crash, and began to clearly perceive what was coming for our world, so that is one of the primary acts I remember as defining the enshittification of the world of personal computing, as the true death knell of backwards compatibility and flexibility, in favour of a smartphone just being a Propaganda Brick™

Just to clarify, the basic functionality of which I was speaking was “listen to music”

Saying “not only should you have to buy a peripheral, but you should plan to have to replace the port every once in a while, just so you can have basic functionality” is just clearly not an optimal solution. As someone who has seen how >80% of the dongles you buy just fail to function, constantly destroy the ports they’re plugged into, and sometimes just physically self-destruct when you stare at them from the wrong angle like some collapsing wave-function, I think I’ll keep arguing for the added flexibility, redundancy and ease of use without additional peripherals which a second port would provide, with virtually no downside.

That flag is the flag of Aotearoa New Zealand, you addlepated twit. Furthermore, you absolute buffoon, the REASON they are depicted this way is because the French, with knowledge and consent all the way to the chief executive of the country, committed an act of war (espionage, murder, arson and terrorism) against them because the French didn’t like some hippies trying to stop them from nuking south pacific islanders.

Talk about fucking “counterfactual”

I feel like it’s objectively more correct to either include Aotearoa under “penguins” (given that a couple species of penguin basically only exist on the islands), or to include Antarctica under “weird birds”,

Hardly any phones have 3.5mm NOW. Google started this shit, and I do not forgive. I do not forget.

However, there is simply no reason why the manufacturers SHOULDN’T put a second USB port down there, since it would allow for dongle-less use of wired headphones, listening while charging, open up many more niche uses for the hardware, AND it would provide a redundancy for what is, in most cases, the only method of charging and accessing the data on the device

1. using a cumbersome dongle introduces a single point of failure for a port which is required to stay us able for your phone to function
2. using a dongle introduces a single point of failure for your ability to listen to things, so you’d better hope you only have one pair of headphones, or that you never misplace tiny wires.
3. using a dongle is an additional cost to purchasing the phone
4. it’s a matter of principle, as it is a symptom of the continuing enshittification of all modern life.
5. using wireless headphones depletes two batteries at once.
6. Sure, don’t like a 3.5mm jack, despite the backwards compatibility with older headphones? Fine, but there is no good reason I can think of for there not to just be a second USB port down there. Additional data ports are good, and allow the device to be used for even more flexible, niche purposes, beyond being a redundancy against a single point of failure.

It would, if there were more than one port, allowing you to simultaneously charge and use the headphone jack without a fucking dongle.

Does it have more than one usb port, so that you can simultaneously charge and listen to wired headphones without a ridiculous dongle? If not, then I’ll take the jack, thanks. I don’t want to have to keep ANOTHER device charged just so that I can have the privilege of using one of the basic functionalities for which smartphone were originally designed, nor should I have to choose between listening and charging. It’s that simple.

E: FURTHERMORE, not only does a Bluetooth connection require battery-based headphones which quickly lose power when connected, but it ALSO drains the phone’s battery even faster.

An unexpected, but welcome, nichijou reference.

No, they are complaining that a single replacement part for a cochlear implant, which they already paid for, has a base cost anywhere near $23k, since there is simply no way that a processor chip costs that much, and it’s clearly price gouging.

I mean, sure, but also blackbody radiation. And much more of that.

Or, better, give them the old Admiral Nelson treatment! Just stick them in an airtight suitcase with the contents of all of those wee little liquor bottles!