That is a bummer. BMW owns them now ans I LOVE the media controls on ours. Simple & straightforward.

Corporate “motivational” nonsense. Leave the woodpile higher, write everything in pencil, drink your most expensive wine first. Some companies base - quite literally - everything on these nonsense blurbs.

That, and the way many [past] jobs tried to cover up the lack of compensation opportunities and bumps by things like basketball courts, restaurants on “campus” (sigh), goat yoga… I can’t feed my family with a basketball court at the office. I guess I could feed them a yoga goat but I surmise it would be frowned upon.

Thank goodness for WFH. Never going back.

It’s a lyric from the song Jeremy by Pearl Jam.

I remember, long ago, going to breakfast with a group of people that partied HARD the night before and laughing that “we’re paying for last night” as we ate and laughed only to go do it again that night.

Now I drink two whiskeys and need 3 business days, four Xanax’s and a metric ton of Pedialyte to even raise my head from the pillow in bed. I’m in my late 30s. It’s usually better - for me at least - not to drink at all. Mileage definitely varies.

That was a well thought out and utterly terrifying take. I believe many of the points you’ve made will indeed be true, much to my chagrin.

Honest comment with a bit of a question buried in here this novella… I use Google devices; Pixel Pro’s, Pixel watches, Nest hubs, Nest thermostats, etc. This is a understood agreement (not symbiotic) between me and the behemoth that is Alphabet: I pay them for hardware, and use their “free services” that are heavily subsidized by pillaging my data. I know the hardware does it too, and I’m paying.

I’ve switched most of my networking and cameras to UniFi, my browsers are all Firefox… The question is what’s next? I dislike Apple iPhones but like my wife’s MacBook, but I’m a nerd. All of my devices need to “play nice” in their respective ecosystem. I’m tired of having the inbox app, hangouts, etc only to find Google has grown tired or doesn’t care and scraps them.

When the iPhone 15 comes out, I was getting the wife that and myself the Pixel 8P. Now I struggle. The “ultra” premium phones (we both care most about camera) are few and defined. I don’t want to jump to Apple, it’s the same thing, just packaged differently. Ugh.

Duplicati. It just works. Paired with Backblaze (not free) it’s been our default home backup for a long time.