Then my laptop is a phone? It’s sort of a phone but it doesn’t connect to the phone network, so only sort of. Since it needs a wifi signal it’s not so mobile either.

Ok but wifi only isn’t really a phone?

I didn’t watch the video but I don’t think there is any phone that lets you avoid having your location tracked. If there is wifi near where you want to use the phone, you could run a voip client on on a wifi-only tablet, perhaps.

I’ve been wondering whether satellite communications gizmos with no GPS allow any type of precise location tracking from the satellite. I’ve been interested in this, which lets you exchange text messages at fairly low cost (about 2 cents per 50 byte unit). Besides possible privacy advantages, it also lets you communicate where there is cell coverage:

https://shop.blues.com/products/starnote-starter-kit

I’ve never been able to get a library card anonymously, but anonymous email is pretty easy I thought. I use mailinator sometimes, which has no registration even.

Mute the entire TV and use the closed captions when watching the programs. I do this.

Don’t, just don’t, or maybe do. A lot of those apps phone home with your period info to help marketers and the secret police infer when you might be pregnant. So if you’re going to use such an app at all, use it for anything except actual period tracking. That should at least confuse them.

Psychological or possibly medical disorders. There is a whole branch of clinical practice to deal with this. It might or might not help, but it probably beats asking the internet.

In chess there is a fairly common situation where you are in first place in the last round of a tournament, 1/2 of a point ahead of your opponent (you get 1 point for winning a game and 1/2 point for a draw). So if you win or draw the game, you win the tournament and get a lot of money. If you lose the game, your opponent wins the tournament and gets the money. You get 2nd place, i.e. less money possibly split with other competitors.

That means you can choose a safe playing strategy that likely leads to a draw, while your opponent has to choose a risky strategy with higher chances of winning.

(Some chess context: high level games are usually drawn. They are only won by someone making a mistake. Also, the first move (white pieces) confers an advantage, so it’s usual to seek winning opportunities if you have white, while just trying to hold the draw if you have black. To attempt winning with black requires seriously risky play. Bobby Fischer basically conquered chess in the 1960’s by constantly trying to do that, which required playing with maniacal intensity all the time).

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Ok, I emailed my friend (above) and she said Khan Academy and she says it has exercises. That’s great, I had thought it was just video lectures. So I’d go for that.

I’d expect textbooks would have tons of exercises at that level. Schaum’s outlines are good for college level math but I don’t know if they have them for stuff like basic algebra. I have a friend who is a HS math teacher so I can ask her for recommendations and get back in a day or so, hmm.

You didn’t see the movie “My Beautiful Laundrette”.

You have to write out a lot of exercises and there is no getting around it. You can’t learn the violin by watching videos or reading a book. You have to practice. It’s the same with math. But as people said, Khan Academy lectures are very good in steering you through a topic.

Besides algebra, I think it is important to know a bit about probability and a bit about logic. Don’t worry about stuff like covariance matrices, but understand what conditional probability is (be able to explain the “prosecutor’s fallacy”) and write out some of those annoying exercises about urns full of colored balls. Also, show how to write e.g. “you can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time” in predicate logic notation, and see how the parts of the sentence involve switching the order of quantifiers.

I don’t know what to add, I haven’t used Matrix so I’m unfamiliar with it and might be misreading it. But it seems to have an aura of “look how cool and hip this is”. Irc is old and comfortable even though it has a bunch of annoying limitations.

Irc works fine, people I know are there, and matrix has always seemed too attention -seeky for my tastes.

Irc still. No matrix so far.

How about elephant jokes? There are so many of those.

Two angry men on separate occasions have made comments to me about masking and how I don’t need to do it. I just stare right through them and ignore,

I just say thanks, I prefer wearing it and I’m more comfortable with it on. That generally works.

but why are they so angry?

Might go back to the conflicting and stupid instructions we got when the pandemic started. The public health establishment lost all its credibility and continues to mess up.

Well, a good scandal might have come along to take out a few of the candidates, though that didn’t happen afaik. Other than that, I mean, what is the hurry? I don’t follow politics all that closely anyway, but there are a few local organizations that I like, so I figure on mostly going by their endorsements. It usually takes me about an hour to fill in the ballot.

I’ll try to fill mine in today. It wouldn’t have been any easier to do it earlier, and it’s preferable to do it on election day or close to it, so you have all the information available. The main contested elections in my district are local ones, and stuff is always happening.