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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 3rd, 2023

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  • So many want “change” … Trump is “change”, right from his personal nature and demeanour.

    Back in 2016 when Trump as sill “new” I fell very squarely into this. I was still too young to vote and had just started learning about politics. Looking at both major parties all I saw was people who didn’t care about normal people, politicians that seemed too involved in the political game to actually get anything done. I remember seeing Trump as a kinda of wild card that would hopefully stir things up enough to hopefully get something done. That someone removed from the traditional nepotism in politics could make real changes.

    Unfortunately that’s not what happened, and not really how any of this works. It seems like his presidency just made new problems, and all the old ones still persist.










  • Short answer yes.

    The longer answer has to deal with the way that our cellular networks are set up. Most people “rent to own” their phones here and usually trade in their phone long before they get to the owning part.

    Contracts are set up so you can get discounts, but only if you stay with the carrier for 2-3 years. The discounts are given as monthly credit towards your bill and if you pay off the phone early you forfeit all future credit.

    This system allows for carriers to sell more expensive phones at rates that, while not low, most people will stomach. Phone manufacturers avoid selling good budget phones here and I think that’s a big part of the reason. Why sell a budget phone when you can probably convince someone to finance a flagship?

    Now, as an enthusiast aware of other budget phones you might think importing might be an option, but that unfortunately isn’t the case. A couple years ago all the carriers here switched off using the 3G network for phone calls and instead we use Voice Over LTE (VoLTE). This new system requires cellular carriers to explicitly support phones/models for them to be able to make traditional phone calls. These support lists are not public and make it incredibly difficult to tell if a phone not sold by the carrier will function on their network. Gone are the days were you can just check the bands the phone supports and pop in a sim.

    This got a bit long and probably was more me ranting than actually explaining anything, but I hope someone finds it at least a little bit informative






  • I definitely feel this happening for me as well. The weirdest/hardest part for me has been getting used to not being able to answer everyone’s questions. I’m less familiar with the facebook/twitter/amp webpages side of the internet now and having to learn to cope with not being my friends one stop shop for everything on the internet