This novella is a masterpiece and needs rediscovery.
> The protagonist (P. Burke) is a lonely, severely depressed teenager. After a failed suicide attempt, an international telecommunication company offers her a new job -- to become a remote operator of a public celebrity. She is given a new persona "Delphi", and her new job is to buy products publicly to advertise them.
The protagonist is basically a Youtuber/Instagram influencer/TikTok streamer today.
Since I had some trouble getting my credit card accepted at the apple store I always order my apple products by phone and pay with cash on delivery. When the delivery person comes with the box and leaves with the cash it feels good.
There was a more or less visible campaign against Chinese made radios recently in Japan (mostly due to transmitting without a license and also the fact that the transmission itself caused a lot of noise in a wide spectrum. I’m not a ham but I’m interested in radios, so my terminology and what I understood about the “offending” transceivers might not be accurate)
The popular Baofeng UV-5R (or a close model/clone) is available at Amazon and Rakuten, but I got cold feet about buying one of the noisy units and be visited by the Radio G Men.
The price of Japanese made units is 5 times more, but on the review sites I consulted, they all agree the quality is worth the price (I looked for Yaesu units).
Related: Japanese news segment about illegal transceivers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNGSJFSMvlA
I don't know how it is in Japan with how fervently they defend spurious transmission but in the US we have people doing "key down contests" which is the radio equivalent of "side shows" or / road takeovers and there is barely any enforcement against them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ef6z3MaLOrU
Yep, there's a subreddit for baofeng radios on reddit, and probably 3/4 of posters there have no licence at all and just bought the radios because of the combination of being cheap and the ability to get "tactical" variants (camo colored, useless huge antennas, etc.). They usually have no idea how to program the radio (input frequencies/channels) and just use the preset ones which are set to seemingly random frequencies, sometimes even outside of ham bands.
I tried Orion a while ago: in that version background tabs with YouTube on pause made the bottom of my m1 air get very hot. I really liked that it supported chrome extensions but battery life was not great. I’ll give it another go now that I’ve been using arc for some time.
I live in a country where annual checkups are mandatory (companies are fined by the government a lot of money for each employee who does not get it done). I've been told a couple times now that something is a bit off, not too concerning by itself, but it requires more tests to rule out suspects from a list. had a lot of blood tests done, nothing unusual came up, still being regularly told to keep doing tests in between checkups. I can say perhaps one of the upsides is I get nudged by the doctors to keep a healthy lifestyle.
