I want to see real Linux phones that don’t run Android and are somewhat competitive with Android phones, at least in the mid-range space.

There’s a large graveyard of attempts at this. The most recent and successful is probably Tizen. Prior to that Firefox OS. People just don’t buy them so there’s no market for them.

Thank you for that link, I appreciate it. Here’s what I searched, and as you can see your link doesn’t show up:

Your direct link does indeed show China successfully tested it. Thanks!

I did search it before I wrote my original comment, thats what I cited about the anti-satellite satellite effort China did. So I’ve already taken the time and came up empty. You’re saying it exists, but I didn’t find it in my original search. So I’m asked you because you encountered the info firsthand and may have a better chance of finding it.

I haven’t seen it. I’d happy to look at a link if you have one.

Maybe, but not guaranteed. Starlink satellites aren’t very big (meaning not very large pieces if they blow up). Additionally, Starlink satellites have active avoidance systems that can “dodge” debris to a degree (its slow, but space is big). Lastly, because the pieces would be small, they’d experience more atmospheric drag and fall back to Earth faster. Whether that means weeks instead of years, I don’t know.

That picture of the F-15 jet firing the missile was at a satellite 300 miles up. Starlink satellites are about 350 miles up.

It would be hard to do? How much would that affect the general use of starlink for users on other parts of the world?

Only two countries have demonstrated air launched rockets that can destroy satellites on orbit, the USA and Russia. There is good speculation that China has built anti-satellites satellites, but no one is aware of any actual proven test.

Here’s the USA’s anti-satellite rocket being launched on its one and only test:

Now, lets assume that all 3 countries decide they want to attack Starlink satellites at once with all their weapons. Perhaps they destroy 30 satellites in total. As of November 2025 the Starlink network surpassed 10,000 satellites in orbit. As for replacing the lost satellites, a single launch places 25 to 28 satellites in orbit at a time. Within the next 24 hours 25 more Starlink satellites will be launched:

In 4 days, another launch is occurring that will place 24 more Starlink satellites in orbit.

source

So destroying a few dozen Starlink satellites might cause a slight blip in coverage for maybe a few minutes tops in specific narrow geographic locations, but only for a little while until replacements move to positions.

Yep, this is what I do too and what I as pointing out. The carrier locked phones are even cheaper used than carrier unlocked.

You’ll usually end up paying more in the long run then if you went with unlocked and a MVNO.

You’re missing a component: you can buy used phones and go with an MVNO and skip the contract subsidy requirement for savings

I purchased a used carrier locked flagship phone for $250 when they were still selling for $1100 as new carrier-unlocked, then put it on my MVNO which is a subsidiary of the primary carrier (so the carrier lock doesn’t matter).

You can’t get those cost savings with a new contract phone nor a new carrier unlocked phone.

Make sure it’s carrier unlocked, but yeah.

I’m all for buying my own phones and not getting one bundled with service. However, many times getting a carrier unlocked phone carries a price premium. As long as you’re fine sticking with your current carrier, they can even be carrier locked and work just fine. I agree though, ownership of your phone outside of your carrier’s billing is the right way to go.

I just read an article stating that Ford lost 36k on every EV they sold in 2023…

Ford, and other American auto makers, were asleep at the wheel when EVs were starting to take off. Ford and GM doubled down on selling pickups and big SUVs which had good margins. Instead of investing in R&D to make a solid product they were caught unprepared and had to throw everything at the wall to see what stuck with their first EVs. Yes, they were able to bring them to market fairly quickly (good), but at the cost of efficient of the product and the production method.

This means for every EV they make, they do it expensively where they wouldn’t need to if they improved their designs and production methods.

Because Biden said you could? He’s the one that doubled tariffs on Chinese EVs from 50% to 100%. Biden also gave the EV tax credit which was essentially a subsidy to Tesla, which Trump ended.

I don’t fault Biden for adding a tariff on Chinese EVs to temporarily protect the American auto manufacturing envornment. We just have too many jobs tied to the domestic production of cars. The immediate loss of those jobs would plunge the USA into deep recession. It looked like this was working too with many American companies adapting and coming out with EVs.

However, most of those American EVs have been scaled back or canceled. Further, with the exception of the Chevy Bolt no domestic maker produced an affordable EV. Since American companies decided they don’t want to play in EVs anymore, I fully support removing the tariff and letting Chinese EVs into the USA. It looks like that will be the only thing that will force American car companies to compete. This situation closely mirrors the 1970s where Japan introduced small, reliable, fuel efficent cars, and affordable cars at a time when gasoline was crazy expensive.

It looks like this time around it will be the Chinese that teach the American auto market to adapt instead.

Yeah, well, there’s no Oil in Europe either,

C’mon. I’m a dumb American, but even I know without looking it up about Norway’s vast petroleum production as well as the North Sea petroleum platforms off the coast of Scotland.

For the 2040s, if the pattern holds, local compute power will be come dirt cheap again, and there will be very few reasons to pay someone else to host your compute power remotely. Maybe it will be supercomputers on everyone’s wrist or something.

So, what prediction did Bezos make back then, that seems particularly poignant right now? Bezos thinks that local PC hardware is antiquated, and that the future will revolve around cloud computing scenarios, where you rent your compute from companies like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure.

This isn’t a new idea, and it certainly predates Bezos.

I’m older now, but throughout my life there has been a pendulum swing back and forth between local compute power vs remote compute power. The price of RAM going up follows the exact same path this has gone half a dozen times already in the last 50 years. Compute power gets cheap then it gets expensive, then it gets cheap again. Bezos’s statements are just the most recent example. He’s no prophet. This has just happened before, and it will revert again. Rinse repeat:

• 1970s remote compute power: This couldn’t really compute anything locally and required dialing into a mainframe over an analog telephone line to access the remote computing power.

• 1980s local compute power: CPUs got fast and cheap! Now you could do all your processing right on your desk without need of a central computer/mainframe

• 1990s remote compute power: Thin clients! These were underpowered desktop units that could access the compute power in a server such as Citrix Winframe/Metaframe or SunOS (for SunRay thin clients). Honorable mention for retail type units like Microsoft WebTV which was the same concept with different hardware/software.

• 2000s local compute power: This was the widespread adoption of desktop PCs with 3D graphics cards as a standard along with high power CPUs.

• 2010s remote compute power: VDI appears! This is things like VMware Horizon or Citirix Virtual Desktop along with the launch of AWS for the first time.

• 2020s local compute power: Powerful CPUs and massively fast GPUs are now now standard and affordable.

• 2030s remote compute power…in the cloud…probably

Thw issue youll run into is effectiveness at that small scale, sonyoull be tempted to share data with other systems like that, and eventually you’ll end up creating a different flock.

I wonder if a segregated system design could address this. Similar in-system segregation like a TPM for the actual detection/matching part of the system separated from the command and control part.

As in, the camera and OCR operations would be in their own embedded system which could never receive code updates from the outside. Perhaps this is etched into the silicon SoC itself. Also on silicon would be a small NVRAM that could only hold requested license plate numbers (or a hash of them perhaps). This NVRAM would be WRITE ONLY. So it would never be able to be queried from outside the SOC. The raw camera feed would be wired to the SoC. The only input would be from an outside command and control system (still local to our SoC) that and administrator could send in new license plates numbers to search against. The output of the SoC would “Match found against License Plate X”. Even the time stamp would have to be applied by the outside command and control system.

This would have some natural barriers against dragnet surveillance abuse.

• It would never be possible to dump the license plates being searched for from the cameras themselves even by abusive admins. The only admin option would be to overwrite the list of what the camera is trying to match against.
• The NVRAM that contains the match list could be intentionally sized small to perhaps a few hundreds plate numbers so that an abusive admin couldn’t simply generate every possible license plate combination effectively turning this back into a blanket surveillance tool. The NVRAM limit could be implemented as an on-die fuse link so that upon deployment the size could be made as small as needed for the use case.

Shut off and leave your phone at home, buy a pay-as-you-go to bring with you for emergency contact /coordination

Leave the pay-as-you-go phone powered off too, and only power it up if you actually have to use it. If you have to use it once, you need to get a replacement for a future event.

I’m thinking perhaps something like Meshtastic transmitters and receivers should be used for coordination instead.

Well sure, if you’re in a time crunch that makes sense. Additionally, you did attempt to shop elsewhere, but in your case it was such a specialized opening you only had one choice from all the retailers available to you. I imagine, had there been multiple to choose from, you would have examined the choices more closely, right?

Was that the only refrigerator store close to you, so even if there were other choices that fit manufactured you wouldn’t have been able to lay your hands on one?

I feel like the problem here is that you get people who are curious or like the other features the fridge has and just get what they can when theirs goes out. And while, sure, those people learn not to do that again,

Part of what makes us intelligent is learning from others. I guess I would expect buyers to do even the most basic research on a large dollar figure purchase which would likely expose them to the headlines about Samsung putting ads on fridges after the sale.

Do people actually just walk into an appliance store and just drop more than $1k on what they see on the floor without researching reliability, warranty, or other features from articles and news sources?