The only way to learn what something sounds like as a non-native speaker is to look it up or listen to someone pronounce it. There are no rules – or at least no useful rules, because any rule will have many exceptions. Even different English dialects differ in how to pronounce words. There’s simply no making sense of it.

For example, in many British English dialects, the “a” in “can” and the one in “can’t” are pronounced completely differently, despite “can’t” being a contraction of “can not”. It’s literally the same word, just with a different word afterwords, and yet the two get different pronunciations. There’s no way to guess at that being the case, or come up with a logical reason why. You just have to accept it.

How do you pronounce gnocci, gnat, etc? They may start with a ‘g’ but the proper pronunciation is just /n/.

And then there are the cases where two consonants combine to form another sound entirely: ph, ch, sh, th.

I remember back when my mom was just anxious. That was bad enough, and meant that I’d avoid sharing any problems with her because she’d worry too much. Since then she’s gone off the deep end, believing just about every conspiracy theory that exists. So, now it’s not just that I avoid sharing any problems, or any deep things. I actively have to watch everything I say around her to avoid triggering a rant involving a conspiracy theory.

I think the anxiety fed into the conspiracies. IMO many conspiracy theorists feel a complete lack of control over their lives, and conspiracy theories make them feel better because they can blame “the powers that be” for their problems. And, even if they still feel out of control, they at least feel like they know the hidden truth of what’s happening. Knowing that hidden truth makes them less anxious. The world is still scary and they have no control, but someone has control, even if it’s someone evil. It’s not just random things happening with no plan.

Anyhow, I hope your mom just stays anxious and doesn’t go nuts like mine.

I’m continually amazed that my mom manages to function in the world with all her crazy beliefs and issues.

It was 100% of the TVs that RTINGS had reviewed, which was 501 different TVs, but apparently no SCEPTRE TVs at all.

Unfortunately, it looks like the SCEPTRE TVs don’t get very good ratings:

HD picture quality was only decent. It did an excellent job displaying the finest detail of HD content. Color accuracy was acceptable, but below that of most models…

This model has fair sound quality with below average performance.

https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics-computers/tvs/sceptre-c550cv-u/m393713/

So, I guess there is one manufacturer who still makes dumb TVs, it’s their low-end line and doesn’t get good reviews, but it is a dumb tv, which is nice.

The price ranges can take you anywhere from the low hundreds

So, the price of a TV. If I had lots of money to spend I’d love to have one, but realistically it’s not worth it when it’s that expensive. I’ll just get a TV with multiple inputs.

Just don’t connect your TV to the internet? I

Some TV models start to complain if they’re not connected to the internet, interfering with your use of them.

Ok, so that isn’t a suitable recommendation.

PiHole let’s the ad servers think they’re doing exactly that

PiHole blocks the ads by manipulating the DNS entries of known ad servers. So, the ad servers don’t get any traffic. It’s the ad clients that are affected. The ad servers never get any traffic.

Do the PiHole block lists work for TVs? Probably. But, the block lists are mostly built for web / app clients. It probably works if your TV uses Google TV. But, it’s possible that other TV operating systems like Tizen use a different source for its ads that isn’t on the blocklist. The worst case would be if the ads came from the same domain as the updates for the TV OS. You could block that domain, but then your TV couldn’t get updates. And some TVs, if they can’t get updates will start to complain and interfere with your use of them.

I wouldn’t want to risk it, so I’d prefer to get a dumb TV that still had all the standard TV features: a TV tuner, multiple inputs, a high refresh rate, decent speakers, etc. But, failing that, I’d be OK with a smart TV that didn’t have ads built in. But, apparently neither of those things is easy to find anymore.

How much is a nice receiver going to cost me?

Unfortunately, even fixing a smart fridge without the manufacturer’s consent is a crime punishable with hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines and possibly prison time.

Here’s what RTINGS says about one of the Hisense TVs:

Ads Yes

Opt-out No

Suggested Content in Home Yes

Opt-out of Suggested Content No

Unfortunately, like most TVs on the market, the smart interface contains ads, and you can’t disable them.

And someone on another site has a video showing an ad playing as soon as their Hisense TV is turned on. The person posting says it doesn’t happen every time. And, maybe it’s disabled if you have it set to turn on using “input 2” or whatever your USB stick is connected to. But, an unskippable ad on start-up means I’m not going to risk buying a Hisense TV.

On a related note, I was looking at RTINGS recently at their recommended TVs. One really important item for me is that I’m not subjected to ads.

It turns out that every single smart TV they tested has ads, and there’s no way to opt out of those ads.

https://www.rtings.com/tv/tests/ads-in-smart-tv

It’s not possible to “vote with your dollars” to choose a TV that doesn’t have ads, because 100% of the TVs have ads now.

I know you can get a commercial flat panel intended for restaurants and stuff that doesn’t have any of those features, but those are hard to find, expensive, and don’t have basic features like multiple inputs.

If you think you can get around this by refusing to connect your TV to the Internet, some of them start to interfere with your use of them until you do connect them. Which ones? I wish RTINGS told me.

And, making it all worse, you know that every one of these things is going to have an EULA that allows them to enshittify it even more at some future date. And, you can’t get around that either, because either they’re designed to stop working if they don’t a recent update, or there’s a bomb planted in an update that only activates months later, so rolling back (if that’s even possible) won’t help you.

I know US law is never going to help consumers with this, but I do hope eventually Europe addresses this. People in Europe do still sometimes seem to have some rights when it comes to big companies.

A true smart fridge would be great.

An actual smart fridge would do things like scan everything you put in it, so you’d know that you had leftover lasagne from 4 days ago that was about to go bad. It would know its full contents, and where they were (like that you had some kimchi on the 4th shelf in the back), and when they were going to expire. And it would do it without you having to change how you used the fridge, like stopping to carefully scan everything you put in or took out. AFAIK some smart fridges do some of that, but not all.

I mostly agree. The one thing I’ll say is that police departments weren’t specifically ordering MRAPs. It’s more that the military had a lot of spares that were otherwise going to be mothballed or destroyed. In some ways it’s efficient to reuse military materials like that. But, there are obviously downsides too.

Smaller countries seem to be handling it better. New Zealand, for example, seems to still be relatively responsive to the desires of the people. NZ doesn’t have that much power because it’s so small, so it can get bossed around in some ways, but it does seem like it’s not becoming authoritarian in the same way as other places.

As someone who has travelled to developing countries:

1. Journalists who dared to report negative stories on those in power would disappear or be publicly killed
2. Much more censorship all around, the Internet as we know it wouldn’t exist. The fediverse wouldn’t exist, all media would be centralized so it was easier to monitor and censor.
3. The courts would all be in control of the powerful. Trials would be just for show, because the outcome was already determined. There would be no judicial independence or precedent. In smaller matters where the powerful didn’t really care what the outcome was, bribery of the courts would be rampant.
4. The police would be even more brutal, even more unanswerable, and the text of the laws would be even more meaningless. It wouldn’t be unusual at all for cops to just grab anybody off the street for any reason, and nobody would dare object. Sure, ICE is doing that now in the US but people are objecting, and haven’t been gunned down as a result.
5. Any attempt to push back against the power of the government would be met by brutal force. You wouldn’t have demonstrations, and if you did the cops / military would shut them down with gunfire, not tear gas.

The US is well on the path to this kind of place, but it definitely isn’t there yet. The mainstream press is a bit cowardly, but there are still independent journalists who are digging into stories and they’re not being disappeared or murdered. There’s a fair amount of self-censorship, especially at big tech companies, but that’s more about keeping advertisers happy than keeping the government happy. There’s virtually no true Internet censorship or legal speech. The US supreme court is highly biased, but many lower courts are doing fine, and plenty of judges are ruling against the president. The ICE crackdowns are awful, and they are grabbing people off the street and throwing them into unmarked vans while wearing masks. But… at least they’re still more or less focusing on illegal immigrants. There have been military and police in the streets, but the haven’t been killing protesters, and when a guy recently threw a sandwich at a cop they tried to put him away for assault, but the grand jury laughed at them and they weren’t able to move ahead with that case.

Things are getting worse and worse in the US, and I wouldn’t want to have to live there, but it’s still a long way from an authoritarian state.

Because of things like the North Hollywood Shootout. People don’t want a situation where the criminals have much better weapons than the police. It doesn’t matter that that kind of a situation is incredibly rare. People are scared and want police to never be outgunned.

Of course, that results in a bad situation where the cops in say Fluffy Landing, Florida have an armoured personnel carrier and don’t need one. And, they get to train SWAT tactics just in case, but they never need those skills. And eventually when you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail, so they use their APC for a regular arrest just because they want to justify having it, and they want to use their cool new toy.

It does vaguely make sense to have a SWAT team, especially in a big city in the USA. A sovereign state is basically defined by having a monopoly on the use of force within its own borders. If the bad guys (ACAB, but you know what I mean) can outgun the cops, then it can lead to chaos.

Also, politicians need to be seen as tough on crime to get elected. If you increase police funding, you’re safe. If you cut police funding and there’s some kind of incident, you can easily lose your next election.

In the US, there’s no effective civilian control over police. Sure, theoretically the cops answer to the mayor or something. But, police unions are extremely powerful, and so mostly the cops get to do whatever they want.

Or you could use a console-friendly editor like Emacs, then when you wanted a GUI-friendly editor you could switch to Emacs.