In my experience, there’s always a way around parental controls on these devices and if there isn’t, there’s always a way that your child will subvert them in other ways.

Half the time it’s a well-intentioned and ignorant adult providing them the means.

You give too much credit. I think it’s pretty safe to assume no one but socialists and historians care (or know) enough about Deng and Zhao outside of China so they aren’t likely to weigh in. Now if the question included the tinyman trigger-word, you’d have people jumping all over this post saying China bad and quoting Wikipedia until their fingers bled.

Therefore they can continue to extract more from people than before. When you default, the amount owed increases significantly (doubles?).

This means more people are stuck with high payments and are required to work to continue to survive, less people getting retirement or other benefits, a larger workforce that is essentially captive to their debt and can be more easily manipulated because they are worried about making ends meet more than other things.

I see plenty of benefits for capitalists in a wide variety of industries if more people are beholden to more student debt.

There are entire industries that profit from people being imprisoned. The more people incarcerated in a location, the more that location can charge.

All other things aside, there is very much a profit motive.

I’m running arch on mine.

Ah, that’s probably why you like it. I’m talking about a Win 11 machine managed by our institution. I’m sure if I could get away from how we have Win 11 setup, I probably would only complain about the power location and the weight, but those are very minor.

You really like them? I got issued one for work and am not a fan.

The power button on these things is in the least intuitive spot and I’ve had lots of weird driver issues causing hardware to fail intermittently. Specs look good on paper, but the experience has been really lacking. The moment I can swap, I think I will.

Or join an instance they don’t like and they curate themselves for you. :)

Join a different instance, there are ones that are more curated for different regions in the world. Lemmy.world is very US centric and essentially a carbon cut-out of reddit. Lots of redditors migrate there and try to maintain that type of culture on the instance, so they also got many of the most toxic complainers condensed from mass reddit exoduses.

The fediverse is meant to be explored and it may take you a month or two to find where you like best.

At least one company made a soylent, it’s just not soylent green. Not sure if it contains soy or lentils.

I was in the same boat.

Spent all day cooking and listening to podcasts/music. Invited a friend over for dinner like usual and she said she couldn’t come until it was late and well past dark, which was very unusual. Then she told me she was at a Superbowl party and that was how I found out what was going on.

Only way things could have been better is if I had D&D with the food.

And your body is the “collateral damage” in that war.

I think it’s just missing a bit of specificity.

Building more bike lanes will reduce traffic. Building more bus lanes will reduce traffic. Building more tram lines will reduce traffic. Building more car lanes will reduce induce traffic.

Not perfect, but solid logic within reason (Building 100 more bus lanes will reduce traffic).

I’ve seen those orange ones, but was never much of a fan. The demonstrators are beautiful though. There’s nothing quite like seeing a beautiful ink sloshing around inside.

I slept on the kaweco sport, but when I finally got one, it quickly became my everyday. I got a transparent body and fill the body directly with ink like an oil tanker ready to defile the ocean within my pocket, then lube the threads with petroleum jelly. Not a single leak.

Iconic style, affordable, ink lasts forever, one of the most reliable, smoothest gold bibs came with it, and it’s comfortable to write with. I love that pen and wish I had as many chances to use it these days as I did in the past. Unfortunately, my writing at work is almost entirely digital now.

What the fuck, that had to be a trip! Either watch order would suck: ruin your mood before Totoro or get blindsided by the second feature.

It happens constantly in the US too.

They teach us about roundabouts in driver’s education or at least the written tests to get a license. Most of us just shouldn’t be allowed to drive without additional training at this point. Laws are suggestions and when the car can’t go straight and fast without inhibition, it breaks our brains.

I think the sigma lens is worth the price, but no, the more you spend the more the returns are diminishing. The photos won’t be 5x better. The photos taken will depend a lot more on your skills than the equipment and may even be worse than a phone at first.

Eventually, they will be much better than a phone! An improved lens will generally give better clarity and color over a lower quality lens.

I think both of those lenses are fine, but if the price isn’t very different, I’d probably pick the one with IS so I have the option.

If you are really worried about needing IS, I suggest reading this article from B&H. B&H is also a good online retailer. 99% of the time I shoot in low light, I use a tripod, so image stabilization isn’t necessary and can be detrimental. Have I tried shooting at low shutter speeds with longer lenses in the dark? Yes, but I always bring a tripod in the evening or for indoor portraits now. It’s not likely you’ll be able to hold the camera anywhere near steady enough in those situations, so you’ll either want to mount it or set it down and set a timer.

Like I said, it’s easy to get caught up in feeling the need to buy bigger and better equipment, but if you haven’t touched it, you don’t really know what you need. You need to get your hands on a camera and go shoot first. If you know someone you can borrow one from or if you can rent one for very cheap, it could be worth trying that first.

End of the day, we are considering an entry-level camera for a budget of $600. There are always exceptions that will allow you to go outside that budget and get more/better features, but if you buy big and don’t use it, that’s just more money spent for no gain.

My first camera was a Canon 70D at $1300. That’s a high entry point, but I feel like it was a great purchase at the time. I made that decision after handling a DSLRs for 10 years because my dad always had them. One of those was a Canon 10D handed down to me that I shot on until buying the 70D, the other was a Canon 5D mark III. I was lucky to have access to those, but they were too much camera for me at first.

Before you go spending a whole bunch, commit to a budget that you will not abandon no matter what shiny thing you see (there are infinite shiny things, I know) and get your hands on something you can shoot with. You’re overthinking things at this stage.

Canon R50 is good at $600. Canon R10 is better at $1000. Sony A6100 is good at $800. Sony A6400 is better at $1000. Fujifilm X-T30 II is good for $1000.

You can find even better (though older) cameras (particularly DSLRs) for sale second-hand from people looking to upgrade. Don’t expect lenses this route because people tend to keep them, but a friend of mine just sold a Canon 5D mark III body for only $300. That’s a lot of camera for the price.

Don’t worry about lenses just yet, get your hands on a camera and shoot with the stock kit to see what you actually need. You may even be happy with the stock kit for now. Experts will push and push and push better equipment, but that’s because they are working at a higher level and marginal gains or quality of life improvements are worth it when your work is photography. When you are starting as a hobbyist, as a beginner, those things are mostly distractions.

The only ones missing IS are the 50mm and 28mm prime lenses, right? You may be able to find a higher end version of each of those with IS, but I included them as budget alternatives to the 35mm, which does have IS. Those two are only for if you don’t like the lens that comes on the camera and want something short other than the 35mm.

Whether it’s important to have IS really depends on the conditions you are shooting in and it’s not usually a priority of short, prime lenses. I guess it’s possible you could run into those, but it’s more likely in low light scenarios with slow shutter speeds. If you are shooting in those conditions, you probably want a tripod, so you wouldn’t need the image stabilization. It’s usually more important on larger lenses.

Good to be thinking about these things when you get to buying one though.

Something I didn’t mention before, you don’t have to stick to canon lenses, you just may need an adapter. Sticking to canon made it easier for me to find lenses that would fit the R50.

I’d shoot with the stock lens for a bit before you decide (maybe a month? 5+ sessions of whatever you mainly feel like shooting). Get a feel for the camera and what you like shooting or things you want, but can’t do. If they have a decent return policy, you may be able to swap out after trying it if you find you don’t like that model. I doubt it, but that’s just a guess.

Take note of what you like or struggle with, then return to that original list of lenses I posted to see if any of those could fill a gap. There were some smaller lenses and a couple larger ones for ~$500-600 that are good choices. If the money is burning a hole in your pocket, look to set aside up to $1300 while you work with the base setup in anticipation. It’s very easy to get trapped in spending money on equipment before you actually need it. Learning how to use the basics outside of auto settings, framing shots, and your style is more important at first than equipment.

That said, it’s probably worth it to get at least 1 extra battery or a power bank and an extra memory card within those first few shoots. Probably ~$100 total at most. See if you are running close to using all of the battery or filling the card in those sessions.

Session 1, start out with using auto settings (flash off), try out A or AV (aperture priority, the marking varies by camera) and read around about the basics of photography to get a feel for what settings do. Aperture looks like f/#.# (f/4.8 or f 4.8). Larger numbers typically mean more things are going to be in focus and smaller typically means less things will be in focus. There’s more to it than that, but it’s a good place to start understanding the setting.