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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • But all this is known. We’re all gonna be scrambling when we reach that point, spouting “We didn’t listen” like that episode of South Park about this very issue.

    That’s the thing though, we, the we being your average human on the planet, are put in a position to have very little power to do anything about it. In America specifically (not so sure about the rest of the world) you’re kept busy trying to manage your health insurance (if you have it), your retirement fund (if you have it), your job (that may or may not have unpaid on call), your home (maintaining and cleaning your home/apartment/townhouse, trying to do repairs yourself because you can’t afford to pay for others to do it as prices for service/repair work have skyrocketed), your food (it is too expensive to even buy fast food anymore so you gotta cook to save money), your car (gotta own a vehicle as the US doesn’t have meaningful public transport, gotta make sure it is insured, maintained, etc.), your bills (gotta juggle those credit card and points cards and discount cards to get the best deals on every purchase!), if you have children, then you have to manage all the facets of their lives as well including making their food, cleaning up after them, taking them to/from school and other extracurriculars, deal with any school system issues, and on and on.

    By the end of the week, you just want to have five minutes to catch your breath, but you can’t, because you only (maybe) have two days off of work and those will be spent catching up on whatever chores you didn’t get done during the week.

    Democratic governance was meant so that we could vote people into office to manage the governance, but now that is so bloated and broken, we also have to collectively stay on top of our nation, state, county, city’s issues so we can be aware and try and “fight” back whenever we can with a letter or a council meeting. Never going to have time to go to a protest or skip out of work for a week to protest with your work/dollar because living paycheck-to-paycheck with no safety net means you’re homeless if one thing fucks up.

    The whole system (again, in the US at least) is designed to keep one so busy that one doesn’t even know their way out of the week, let alone to take individual action to collectively organize and kick these politicians and corporations in the teeth for destroying the human habitability of the planet.







  • No, they don’t care about privacy. It is just marketing buzz. They give Google and Facebook access to internal data for money. They give governments access to iCloud data for market share.

    They then design the OS full of dark patterns to trick you into enabling iCloud. They have telemetry on every aspect of the operating system from a timeline down to the millisecond as to when and where you opened and closed browser tabs, to what application was consuming power at a given time, to where you go and what bluetooth and wifi devices you saw along the way. Metadata scrapers index the contents of your devices under the guise of making it “smart and helpful.” The health monitor is ostensibly capable of dead reckoning location tracking, and you have to jump through hoops to even shut off BTLE when the phone is off.

    Their communications platforms log all sorts of metadata, (this can easily be seen by requesting a GDPR data dump) and if one believes they don’t tee every iMessage conversation off to three letter agencies and who knows where else, one would be sorely mistaken. (This, I don’t know of direct evidence of, so it is more inferred based on how the messaging technologies work and how the government(s) wouldn’t truly allow privacy to exist.)

    One can’t even stop their Apple product from talking to Apple servers, as they run access to their own systems on a layer of abstraction above the user’s userspace network layer. If they so choose, they can brick your phone at a moment’s notice using their “activation” infrastructure.

    Nothing they do is privacy-oriented, beyond making it slightly difficult for Johnny the bicycle thief to gain access.

    All without any of the code being available for inspection.






  • I believe it’s a holdover that originated in the limits of technology in the past. Before the Internet or even dial-up card verification, purchases were made “on faith” if writing a check or paying with a card. The fees were there to prevent banking customers from abusing the pretendness of pretend pretend money. Without the discouragement, a person may go try to buy something at multiple places, and even if a vendor called the bank to verify funds were available, each time the bank would say, “oh yeah, funds are available,” until all the paper came back to the bank.

    That being said, it’s the future, accounts can be verified and mathed upon instantly, and these fees have no place anymore, although I’m sure the banks will try and sell them as, “we’re just trying to help out the poor by allowing them needed money when they might not yet have it available, for a small convenient fee.”