Amap doesn’t support English unfortunately. Neither does Baidu. So it’s about as useful in the US as Google Maps is in China.

Edit: Apparently as of late January 2025 it supports English. This is SO USEFUL for foreigners visiting China, it was so annoying to navigate before without being able to read Chinese characters.

This also is under the assumption you’ve met your deductable for the year already which for many HDHP can sometimes be hard.

Their access to news is controlled and for some topics all available news is what we’d call propaganda. Particularly anything about Japan or the Taiwan issue. Most people I know there realize this to an extent but without any other information do still believe the core idea even if skeptical of details.

But at the same time I’d argue there’s no such thing as a population that’s not propagandized. In the US the big news corporations only will present views favorable to their profitability and continued growth. Sure they disagree with eachother, but it’s still always a pro-business view. State news from Russia is (I’d argue rightly) not available on many US platforms to discourage it’s influence for example.

As a portion of median income it’s still far far better than the out of pocket costs in the US (just like pretty much every other country on earth)

Generally it’s not too hard to disable the smart TV part of it and just use HDMI for TVs running Android. But on Roku TVs for whatever reason you need to connect them to the internet and a Roku account at least once to unlock the picture settings. Hardware features of a TV like brightness adjustment have no business relying on some random server.

This depends on perspective. Reddit is much better for most very specific communities, but also much more of a time sink than Lemmy due to just how much larger it is. In terms of reclaiming some of your time back using Lemmy is a great alternative to Reddit because you can’t scroll forever, forcing you to stop. This is thoroughly in the realm of a feature for me, not having Reddit on my phone or PC is much better in terms of how I use my time.

As an outsider I’m just amazed that with Brexit there wasn’t a large push to unify with Ireland. They never wanted to leave the EU and the border issues it has created have caused so many headaches.

Notably this post gets it wrong too, missing the S. It’s “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”.

AA is the last United States based airline to even have one. This move is an industry-wide trend now that lie-flat business class seats are standard. Business class has gotten much nicer in the past 10 years and taken away the customers that previously would have flown in first.

I’d rather fly Qatar qsuites or many other si-enclosed business class seats than the first class ones remaining on European airlines like British Airways, Lufthansa, of air France. And doing so is a fraction of the price.

Yep, I used Relay Pro previously but seeing the cost breakdowns the dev posted for the new subscription was disheartening. The dev’s portion of the subscription fee is near zero if you use near the limit of you subscription’s monthly API requests. So at that point even subscribing isn’t really supporting the dev as much as supporting the company that forced these changes upon us. So I chose to not take part.

Lemmy definitely isn’t perfect, especially for smaller communities. But it’s definitely workable and something I’m happy to contribute to.

Lurkers using third party apps were in many ways worse impacted by the API changes than those actively participating. The high cost of API access is only worth as much value as the service is to you, and if lurking that’s going to be lower and less likely to be worthwhile in the few third party apps switching to the subscription model.