A lot of travel ones aren’t really intended for anything but hand washing.

Reputable places won’t print shit that infringes copyright.

My phone has access to my whole life. Anything that isn’t brand new out of the box is way outside what I’m OK with for security.

Ignoring that, iPhones don’t get that discounted and there’s no amount you could pay me to use Android as a phone.

Cameras are different. Professional stuff is built to last forever and can be really good value.

I wouldn’t take a used tablet or laptop for free, though. It’s genuinely worth nothing to me.

Depends what it is. I’ll buy used books all day, but there’s almost no level of savings where I’d buy most used electronics.

I’m sure that would probably be smarter.

You’re missing the point. Meme isn’t something you gatekeep. It’s simply a term for any arbitrary amount of idea. Everything is a meme.

Your argument is like saying “nothing has mass if you call everything mass”.

Literally any shared idea is a meme.

We have an actual original definition to refer to. It’s Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, and it’s very comparable to general “message” in information theory. “Internet memes” fit into his definition exactly.

Also the original (and more useful) definition is “a gene, but for ideas”. This is an idea that more people should consider, so it qualifies anyways.

Yeah, I really have no particular interest in taking my birthday off.

I do this too often lol, but I’m going to leave Range by David Epstein here as a decent read on the subject.

He partly frames it as a direct criticism of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, but Gladwell goes pretty overboard on what the research says. (For the actual science, Peak is your alternative. K Anders Ericsson was involved with the actual research and doesn’t take liberties and wildly over-generalize what it says.)

Anyways, the highly specialized and the broad knowledge base viewpoints aren’t incompatible. Both have value.

Beautiful username for this post.

There is no actual logic to having time windows to access confiscated devices that are not ever going to be returned. Anything that’s not technology is completely unaffected by that silliness.

There’s no world where a legally confiscated physical object is held to the same standard.

I don’t see the issue here.

The seizure of the devices happened with appropriate warrants, the actual search was done with appropriate warrants, there’s apparently some weird time limit on the search warrant on a seized device, and some of the maintenance involved took place outside that weird time restriction.

The actual hacking of the device and the actual search of the contents of the device were with a warrant.

Unfortunately, I did.

There is no context where your “disagreements” have a shred of merit. They’re pure idiocy.

Did you even read the OP? It’s not just about war. It’s about the power of privacy across the board.

The literal only thing splitting information into “tactical information” tells anyone is that the person doing so is clueless and absurdly unimaginative. Again, ignoring that totalitarian governments are completely within scope, “basic” spying has expose sensitive military installations, among many, many other things.

War is simply the most direct example. All information is power.

It’s all identical. You’re trying to distinguish between the exact same thing. Corporations aren’t spending billions of dollars to spy on you because that information is worthless. It’s incredibly effective as part of the process of changing behavior.

All information is tactical information. Every bit of additional information strengthens control.

Knowing what every citizen buys from the store is an authoritarian government’s wet dream.

Information is an obscenely valuable resource and information asymmetry decides wars.

See also Door in the Face, which is very similar and one of the ways anchoring is used in practice.