I’m pretty happy with my P14s (essentially a T14). It’s even worse in that all the RAM is soldered, but as I understand things, AMD had legitimate performance reasons for doing so, and the trend is likely to continue.

IBM did the same thing 25 years ago on the Thinkpad 600 series.

However, there are no limits to political donations in the US afaik, which I guess means the rich and powerful ones can invest as much as they can to denigrate the other side, usually a democrat (correct me if wrong).

Almost right. There are limits on contributing to candidates, but not on political action committees advertising anything they want, including a candidate. PACs aren’t allowed to coordinate closely with a candidate’s campaign, but that hardly matters in practice.

Is it possible for local candidates to run against their own party and actually win? Like a republican that lost his party’s nomination for a district, then becomes an independent and actually wins against his former party?

Yes, but it’s extremely rare for it to succeed due to the voting system in use and in some states, ballot access rules biased against new parties. The governor of Alaska was elected that way in 1990.

Do candidates have to give back the money that was given as a donation that wasn’t actually used to try to win an election?

No. They can, but they can also donate it to charity, make (relatively small) contributions to other candidates, hold it for future campaigns, transfer it to a party committee, or give it to a PAC.

Can a politician actually pretend to raise money for a campaign and then simply pocket it?

That’s illegal, which doesn’t always stop them from doing it.

That sounds like a very negative experience, pretty much opposite to my experience with the same model.

She got 50 USD back. Not worth it at all.

50 USD was one of the compensation options Google offered; a battery replacement was another. The latter might have been wise if she wanted to keep using the phone.

Be sure to give it a one-star review.

So far, Magisk and Play Integrity Fix have been sufficient for apps that don’t like it.

Messaging, web browser, podcasts, navigation, a couple services that require a phone to access. I tend to not install apps that could be websites.

Hardware drivers are surely dated. Android, on the other hand is 15, and I assume getting updated to 16 soon. I think I’m pretty good with regard to the sort of zero-click exploits I’ve heard of used for targeted attacks. If somebody slipped a trojan into a software update, I could have a problem, especially if it was a privileged app like AccA or Adaway. Of course, updated drivers wouldn’t protect me from that.

The entire smartphone industry.

I use five year old smartphone (Pixel 4a). I can afford a new one, but I don’t need a new one, and it would be worse in ways I care about (bigger, probably without a headphone jack), without being better in any way that really matters to me, so I don’t want a new one.

Official software updates ended a couple years ago, but I’m running LineageOS and I got an update this week. Google has intentionally made it hard for most people to use LineageOS or any other Android distribution not blessed by Google as their primary phone by allowing app developers to check whether it’s Google-approved. For now, I can usually work around that, but it would be too big a hurdle for most people.

The kernel is getting pretty old though; it’s 4.14 when I’m up to 6.17 on my laptop. This is because SOC vendors don’t release open source drivers, nor maintain the proprietary ones for very long.

Finally, there’s the battery. Mine is in great shape because I use AccA to limit charge to 60% most of the time, but charging to 100% as most people do would have greatly reduced its capacity by this point. Replacing it requires melting glue and some risk of damage. Most phones are like that now (though that’s changing due to EU regulation).

I don’t have a problem with the police entering private homes and installing spyware when authorized by a court order supported by strong evidence. That’s narrowly focused on investigating crime.

What I’m very concerned about is attempts to perform surveillance without individualized suspicion or independent oversight.

If you are trying to get the Wordpress software and install it on a server you own or web hosting account you pay for, yes.

If you’re trying to do something else, like sign up for blog hosting from a privacy-respecting service provider without having to administer software yourself, then no. If you want recommendations for services like that, you should probably make a separate post asking for that, with as much detail about what you want to do and whether you’re willing to pay for it as possible.

Edit: I see you did make such a post. If you’re “not tech savvy” as your post says, I don’t recommend administering Wordpress yourself. While it’s something nearly anyone can learn if sufficiently motivated, it’s much more effort for someone without a technical background.

Wordpress the software is open source and isn’t known to do anything shady. Wordpress.com the hosted CMS product uses tracking pixels.

Google has partly backed away from this plan, and it was only announced for “certified” Android devices, which yours isn’t after rooting.

It does affect you indirectly though. If open source on Android gets harder, fewer people will do it.

Yes, the Kel-Tec KSG bullpup shotgun has two magazines and a manual control to choose between them. In addition to twice the capacity of a single tube magazine of the same length, it offers the user the option to switch between two types of ammunition - a more significant advantage for a shotgun than most firearms due to the variety of ammunition available.

I’m old enough to remember the web being primarily text, and turning off automatic image loading being a good way to see fewer ads. I’m old enough to remember popup windows and popup blocking.

I suppose the underlying issue is that if something I don’t like happens on my computer, my first thought is to look for a way to change it, and most people don’t think about computers that way. I’m sad that most people don’t think about computers that way.

Right, I do understand that’s a limitation. I think I’m more puzzled that many people find the presence of ads in a device they paid for to be a minor issue rather than intolerable.

I haven’t moved to a privacy OS on Android yet because of money.

That’s entirely reasonable. You can still block most ads if you want to:

• You can use a web browser that supports extensions. That includes Firefox and its various forks, and perhaps surprisingly, Microsoft Edge. uBlock Origin is still available for both, despite Edge being Chromium-based and Google trying to cripple adblockers there.
• You can use web, rather than app versions of most services so that they’re covered by the browser’s adblocker.
• You can use DNS-based adblocking to reduce ads where you need/want to use apps that display ads.

“But personalised ads are really convenient!”

Not seeing ads is really convenient, and I have trouble understanding why anyone wouldn’t block ads aggressively on every device they spend much time using in 2025.

To cover a couple common objections:

It’s a corporate/institutional device and I can’t

Then it’s the institution’s IT department I’m puzzled by. If I was running corporate IT, ad blocking would be part of the standard install. The FBI recommends it for security.

The device is too locked down for that

Why would you buy such a device, or continue using it now that you know better?

Someone logging timestamps for messages received on both ends of a conversation would be able to determine that two people are probably talking to each other given enough data. Signal is probably not doing that, but Signal’s other security guarantees provided by an open source client that encrypts communications end to end hold even if the organization was infiltrated or taken over by a bad actor. The anonymity of participants in a conversation is not protected as strongly as the contents of messages.

It depends on what phone you have. Some phones have bootloaders you can’t unlock, and you can’t do much at all with that. If you can unlock the bootloader, your options are determined by which third-party Android builds support your hardware.

LineageOS is a popular option with pretty broad device support; GrapheneOS is a privacy/security focused option that only runs on Pixels.

I’ll expand this question to my entire social circle.

I haven’t found that anybody cares about my email provider. It doesn’t affect them because email is federated. Nobody has ever asked me why I’m mailing them from a domain I own rather than a service provider they’ve heard of.

Where I do run into a lot of resistance is trying to get people to use Signal. Some people seem to find the concept of having multiple messaging apps objectionable, which has never made any sense to me as long as they have basic computer skills. On occasion, I’m on the other side of that conversation when I’m unwilling to use Facebook Messenger for reasons that should be obvious to anyone in this community.

You will get rid of that phone long before the battery dies.

Why? There was a time where smartphone tech was improving fast enough that there was a large benefit to a new phone every 2-3 years, but that time is in the past for most use cases.