Well, the easiest IMHO is the Android TV box (mainly because it comes with a remote) but I personally have a cheap Mini-PC because I used it to do a lot more than just being a media box and it still just sits in the living room in the TV stand.

Way back when I started (trying to have something in my living room, rather that absolute started which was way before that) all that I had was a cheap media box with an interface that was basically a file browser, accessing files over Samba.

Stuff is way fancier nowadays AND you can do it with much cheaper hardware if you want to.

Scarcity is money and if there is no scarcity laws will be bought to to artificially create said scarcity.

Already back in the 00s you could get a media player box, with a remote, that hooked to you TV and played video files from any share in your network or an HDD hooked up to it.

Nowadays you can get an Android TV media player box with Kodi on it (or you can install it), again with a remote and hooked to your TV to do the same as that 00s media player box but looks a lot more fancy.

Or instead of an Android TV you can get a Mini PC or older laptop, ideally with Linux, with an HDMI output which you connect to your TV, install Kodi on it and get a wireless air-mouse remote (if you get one with normal remote buttons rather than the stupid “for Google” ones, the buttons seamlessly integrate with Kodi so you don’t really have to use the air-mouse stuff).

Alternativelly if you want to avoid Android but don’t want to spend 150 bucks on a mini PC, you can get one of those System On A Board devices like one of the Orange Pi ones, put LibreElec on it (small Linux distro built around Kodi) and do the wireless remote thing with it.

The back end of any of this is either files on a NAS, on a share on a PC, a harddisk connected directly to the device or even something like Jellyfin running somewhere else (which can be outside your home network) or even any of the many IPTV services out there.

It has never been this easy to put together a hardware and software solution, entirely under your control - read: just as easy to use for corporate streaming services as for “personal” media - to watch media in your living room with the same convenience as purpose built devices for that, and it has never been this convenient to use or looked this good.

I live in a country were, without exaggeration, 90%+ of drivers don’t use turn indicators or do it last minute unless is for their own benefit (for example they’d turning left and need to cross the opposite lane in).

If it’s for the safety of others, especially pedestrians, forget about it.

I just so happen to have lived 2 decades abroad, one of which in Northern Europe, so this crap (and the trying to bully pedestrians on zebra crossings) gets on my nerves big time.

I supposed it depends on the country, but as far as I know in most of Europe you can just enter a coffee shop or the local equivalent and ask for a glass of tap water.

Mind you, even though I bought a metal water bottle years ago and almost never buy bottled water nowadays, as you say sometimes it happens that one needs, though its rare and it’s highly unlikely I would be going to a supermarket to buy water.

Also that newspaper is called “The Fatherland”.

It’s a pretty good hint of where they stand in the whole Left-Right political spectrum.

I’m pretty sure poor people are discriminated against for being poor.

In fact, it’s probably the biggest discrimination around in terms of pain caused.

A lot of the pain inflicted against afro-americans comes via the mechanisms that discriminate against poor people, which together with the actual historical racism (along with some current racism) makes sure they’re kept down from generation to generation.

It’s not just the US.

In my home country, Portugal, there is a massive house price bubble (especially in relation to the average incomes over here, which are much lower), so over half of young University students are leaving the country when they graduate, the average age for people leaving their parent’s home is 34 and young adults have children later and have fewer of them, all in one of the most aged countries of Europe.

Whilst I don’t expect all of the same problems in the US, things like delayed parenthood and lower birth rates tend to really fuckup up the Economy over the course of a couple of decades since they lead to falling populations and importing people from countries with lower educational standards doesn’t exactly help a country’s Economy keep high-value-added industries running.

The problem is that a lot of people, specially Americans, have interiorized “red scare” propaganda notions, even when they see themselves as Lefties.

If you don’t just mentally go “uuh, commies” at the mere wiff of communal solutions it’s a lot easier to actually look at certain ideas and judge them on their actual pros and cons, as is spotting authoritarianism for what it is (whether it claims to want to implement leftwing notions or rightwing ones) and tribalism (of the kind that supports Fascism whilst claiming to be leftwing, and I include both Putin supporting “communists” and Zionism supporting “liberals”)

The wrong kind of Leftist ruined Leftism, not the right kind.

/s (because this one really needs it)

I have this wonderful memory back when I lived in the The Netherlands and worked near Amsterdam of people outside in an open shopping area, sitting down on a table and eating patates (big chunky chips) and a starling on the ground looking at them and seemingly giving them a long speech.

I always imagine it was some “poor me” speech on how he had 8 starving young ones at home and would they thrown a patate his way.

For some reason in that place starlings were much comfortable around humans thanwhat I’ve seen elsewhere, and like sparrows would be going around on the ground looking for scraps.

The total energy of the strong finger wagging that follows this admission will be enough to power a flashlight for 2 milliseconds.

The difference between a sociopath and a murdering sociopath is the belief that they will lose nothing and even stand to gain from murder.

Absolutelly, evil people are to blame from doing evil shit because they chose to do it.

Other people who protect and support the evil people when they do the evil shit are also to blame because without their support and protection the evil people are a lot less likely to do the evil shit fearing the repercussions.

In this specific instance, given that the US has been vetoing UN Security Council resolutions to stop Israel and is by far much more powerful than Israel in the World stage, the theory that they’re the “main obstacle to peace in Palestine” makes sense, or in other words, that the murdering sociopath would have to stop murdering due to fear of the consequences if the US stopped supporting it.

Whilst it seems likely that it is, whether the US really is the “main obstable” or not is something that we would only know for sure after the US stopped supporting Israel.

On your last paragraph I would even go as far as saying that an actor who can make a relateable character that people empathise with which happens to be some kind of badass super-hero or super-villan, has trully proven his or her acting chops.

A good example would be “Joaquin Phoenix’s” performance in Joker (not saying the movie was good or bad, just that the performance was good, though personally I liked the movie).

A lot, maybe most, of the super-heros and villains as portrayed in movies are charicatural, paper-thin, stereotypical “goodies” or “badies”, not actually full-depth personas. Mind you, this is a thing in Action movies in general, though IMHO super-hero movies seem to go for sterotypical main characters more often than Action movies in general.

Yeah.

“Blackberry” both felt wrong at the time and my brain kept telling me it was familiar hence it must be right.

Showing my years here ;)

Generally no, probably because many males when they end up in physicality make it some kind of dominance thing (playfully violence that’s just a little too much, “higher position” touches like hand on top of shoulder or physically leading other people and even the good old “measuring somebody one the firmeness of their handshake”). It’s not casual and friendly when there’s measuring and testing of others involved.

Outside close family, the only environment I’ve been in were things like hugs were normal was the Theatre world.

Coming from a country which had a Fascist dictatorship until the 70s, I’ve started calling Zionism ethno-Facism, because it’s a far more rabidly racist strain than most Fascist dictatorships and unlike almost all of the others which were mainly Nationalist, claims to represent an entire ethnicity and justifies even their used of the most extreme violence as some kind life or death fight for the defense of their ethnicity.

Fascism as seens in places like Spain, Portugal, Greece or even Italy was mainly Nationalist (still authocratic, repressive and violent) and never anywhere as racist or violent as the kind of Fascism that includes claims of racial superiority and representing a whole ethnicity.

Amongst Fascists in Europe it’s only the Nazis that claimed, like the Zionists do, that they represented an entire ethnicity, who similarly committed extreme genocidal violence against specific ethnicities whilst claiming it was all in defense of their own ethnicity and who in the same way claimed than critci sm of their acts was being against that ethnicity.

Any Fascism is bad, but ethno-Fascism adds to it the whole layer of ethnicity and hence is far more cold, calously violent and genocidal when it comes to other ethnicities - think Ku-Klux-Klan crossed with Fascism.

Pretty much the entirety of the Zionist propaganda follows the same ethno-Fascist lines as the Nazis stuff, from the “chosen people” and them claiming to represent a whole ethnicity to their claims that their agressive murderous violence along ethnic lines is “defense” and even calling anybody who criticizes their violence as being against their race, in the case of Zionists by calling the “anti-semites” whilst the Nazis would say that such critics were “against the Arian Race”.

Most of what the Zionists say is just Nazi propaganda with “Arian Race” replaced by “Jewish People” and “against the Arian Race” replaced by “anti-semite”.

So one kind a member of an ethno-Fascist ideology - a Zionist - directly quoting the leader of another ethno-Fascist ideology such as Hiltler, is not at all surprising.

The work is almost all done by integrated circuits, so what they did was basically supply the necessary crystal and caps to get the integrated circuits to work, add what looks like a voltage regulator to regulate supply and route the whole thing on what’s almost certainly a 4 layer board.

Also at the speeds we’re talking about we’re not yet in the domain of having to worry about stuff like the impedance of lines and the signals in absolutelly normal circuit board lines bouncing or getting distorted due to things like impedance mistmatch.

What’s impressive here is not the size of the thing (you would be surprised at how stupidly small even very complex functionality is nowadays - stuff like the Blackberry Raspberry Pi-Zero is only as big as it is because of making available so many pins to connect to not because of the actual hardware), it’s that this is pretty advanced electronics for high-schoolers even with good teachers, as figuring this stuff out generally involves a lot of datasheet reading unless you’re starting from somebody else’s design.

Back when I last worked in Tech Startups, at the point in my life when I was already a salty old dog of the programming world, Founders were all about wanting to hire “enthusiastic” people, which I found hilarious.

“Enthusiastic” was me at the age of 12 in the swimming pool not really knowing how to swim properly because I hadn’t been taught how to properly swim yet, so basically my “swimming” throw water all over the place to move very little, which metaphorically also describes my mode of work as a developer in the first couple of years of my career.

Whilst “motivated” isn’t the same thing as “enthusiastic”, it’s quite often used almost as a synonym by the Tech Bro types in the Startup world when it comes to the kind of employee they want, so that meme made me think of this.