Agreed that it likely depends on the region it was bought in. For most businesses and government services I have found the quality of customer service has dropped through the floor in North America as compared to 20 years ago. I worked in customer service for years and it’s always been a horrible job. But it can be made better or worse by how the department is managed.

Lenovo Canada’s customer service, shipping, and possibly quality control teams appear to be overworked because the result is slipshod work, ignoring the customer, and general incompetence. Again, I worked in the field and don’t blame the individuals.

They are trading on their good name, and eroding it at the same time. Glad to hear it’s better in Europe.

The whole shipping, returns, and reliability experience for Lenovo was rather bad for me (Lenovo Canada). My Legion shipped with a faulty motherboard and faulty power supply. Bought in Canada, but I work in China. International warranty didn’t cover China so I paid for replacement power supply out of pocket. Then multiple usb keys were fried before I figured out it was my laptop. Back in Canada they fixed it, but jerked me around on the turnaround time. Overall bad customer service, shipped a lemon. It was cheap for the specs though.

Propaganda is usually truthful or exaggerated truth. It’s the framing that is important. Some facts are focused on. Some facts are omitted.

I acknowledge that Russia, China and the DPRK have made mistakes and even done things that are deeply questionable. But I’m interested in comparing their mistakes or misguided actions to those of the most powerful military empire on earth. The one involved in hundreds of military actions and dozens of coups since its inception. The one with the largest per capita prison population on earth. The one which controls many of the world’s financial levers.

There is a difference in the scale of their mistakes or bad actions. Propaganda distorts that difference of scale. It focuses on the crimes of the “enemies” / “axis of evil” / “rogue states” but doesn’t examine context or culpability of the empire. They’ll choose one conflict, downplay 9 others, and give a one-sided view of that one conflict.

That’s how propaganda works. Every state produces propaganda. One state produces billions of dollars of propaganda each year.

Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty is straight up State department propaganda.

Calculator?! Those thieving, energy-sucking piles of garbage! Abacus till I die!

But seriously, AI is insidious in how it data mines us to give us answers, and data mines our questions to build profiles of users. I distrust assurances of anonymity by big data corpos.

The article states that there is no evidence that this is caused by Russia. But then goes on to speculate that it’s caused by Russia. Journalistic standards have fallen.

Would be funny if Boeing started cutting corners with their hitmen, too.

Apple is also super good with software updates on old hardware.

Except for that time they deliberately slowed down older phones with software updates so people would buy new phones.

What if we didn’t even have ads on the internet?

That’s because you haven’t tried cool ranch yet

Purchased upvotes and downvotes that make criticism invisible

I will gather all the time crystals and become quantumly immortal! No one can stop me!

Since Reuters is writing this up like it’s just the norm for Pakistani PMs to be charged with crimes, rather than giving context, here’s an article explaining that the US pushed Pakistani lawmakers to remove Khan. He was friendly to Russia and visited Putin just at the moment that the Special Military Operation began (aka invasion of Ukraine). He was also on a serious anti corruption campaign which would have threatened the very strings the US pulled to unseat him. He is hugely popular in Pakistan, and when there was an attempted assassination the crowd rallied around him to protect him.

https://theintercept.com/2023/08/09/imran-khan-pakistan-cypher-ukraine-russia/

EU to Hungary: get on board with the payouts or we break your knees.

Yes, that’s the one. Stodgy, “respectable”, shitlib drivel.

I’ve followed the developing belt and road initiative and it works like this: China invests in various countries’ infrastructure to expand trade capacity. So far the only criticism the western media has leveled at it is that it is supposedly a debt trap. And the big evidence for that is Sri Lanka’s port. However, the majority of Sri Lankan debt is held by Western banks. The Chinese loan was not at a higher interest rate. Yet somehow, China is to blame? In what way do you consider the BRI to be a hegemonic project?