1. “Handset” is obfuscating legalese to refer to a cell phone in a way intending to distance the meaning of the word from the thing that the old and technologically illiterate people who rule on this use every day.

2. I’m no fan of their strategy, but cell phone providers have claimed for a long time that filling your phone with unremovable bloatware causes the overall price to decrease. Their argument is most likely that they will have to charge more once the propagators of that bloatware realize that they can no longer force it on people and wedge that as a reason to pay less to carriers.

3. The reality is that cell phones are priced based on what people will buy anyway and carriers pocket as much of the money as they can that third parties pay them for their bloatware. Ultimately because of that this ruling hurts their bottom line, but the above reasoning gives plausible deniability in the face of the law as it is interpreted by old technologically illiterate lawmakers

I like the “formally” vs “formerly” suggesting Elon is never going to get away from Twitter in favor of X

Aiding the less fortunate in society benefits everyone, same as maintaining roads or building libraries.

For decades republicans have artificially raised the bar for that aid and lowered the aid actually received, for no reason than to appeal to the crowd that thinks taxation is theft but uses modern public amenities anyway.

The rampant cutting of those benefits and handing the rights over to corporations is one of the major reasons we have a nationwide health care crisis, just for one example of how those cuts end up hurting everyone.

Being self righteous about doing nothing is worse.

Despite your own brand of defeatism in insisting the outcome is the same no matter what, one side actually is better. Even if the metric of “better” pales on the grand scheme of what we deserve or should be doing.

I’m not trying to project self-righteousness by recognizing that there are only two real choices. I’m asserting that advocating non-action or pointless action is such a tired trope that what you’re doing is circlejerking for dopamine instead of applying what little influence you have as an individual to work toward the avoiding the actual worst outcome.

When the American populace as a whole is brainwashed into believing the only choices are red and blue, you have to accept that whining about it and voting green (or not voting) is going to accomplish nothing.

So make your colorful allegory and feel good about yourself on the internet. In the end, you are accomplishing less than the people you look down on who recognize the shitty reality of our situation.

Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

For the elderly folk who write and enforce the laws that caused this to come to pass, sufficiently advanced technology just means more complex than notepad

And this is why my math teachers never gave multiple choice tests

I like the idea of an infinitely exponentially growing base of users seeking help from some poor call center

I meant it in jest only. Sorry about your phone, bro

I’m all for replacing the s at the beginning of words with z so you read it in an exaggerated German accent, but you gotta be consistent

Really hoping to zee a zurge in ze demand for “Anti-AI” zoftware/zervices/community

Fixed that for you there, Goebbels

Every time something gets objectively worse there are always people who say “Jokes on them I don’t use that!” and miss the point.

Like yeah, we get it. It’s only a matter of time until this kind of bullshit reaches something you do use. You should still be bothered by this.

Yes. Our country is run by geriatrics who, among other things related to modern society, legislate on technology they don’t understand. We need younger members with more flexible minds who have at least spent some part of their younger lives dealing with problems we have a modern variation of today.

But especially SCOTUS members. Any kind of term limit on them would be better than what we have.

The beauty of being here on lemmy is that I genuinely can’t tell whether you said this because you’re far right or because you’re far left

Stupid opinion either way. That Ai is going to catch its share of r/conservative idiots and be a nice blend of ignorance

Antarctica is technically not a country

This is incredibly disingenuous. The US might not be a true democracy, but it’s not an authoritarian regime. Xi and putin disappear people who have an opinion on whether they should be forever-rulers.

The fact that independent parties exist and hold seats at all three levels of government mean you are fundamentally wrong in saying there are only two choices.

The US is a flawed democracy. That’s still better than an authoritarian regime.

If only they actually would die on that hill. They won’t, because they’ve conditioned their base to support them no matter what. Instead, they’ll rot the hill and move on to the next once the one they’re on can’t be salvaged.

Obligatory “Sounds like Nightvale” post

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The paradox of tolerance applied to this situation suggests that in order to keep a community where choice is preserved, we need to be intolerant of bad actors with the ultimate goal of killing that choice.

Meta absolutely is a bad actor looking to Embrace, Extend, Extinguish the fediverse.

They’re pivoting the overwhelming userbase of Facebook/Instagram into a sort of federated Twitter alternative that their users as a whole don’t understand but do generate content for, in an attempt to steer the federation architecture into something they can control and make money off of. It’s not subtle.

Whether it will work or is even possible for meta to do remains to be seen.

But, yes. To answer your question, we need to “deny the choice” of federating with what amounts to a wolf in sheep’s clothing to preserve what we have, because that wolf is looking to destroy it.

This post demonstrates that all of the major instances on lemmy but one understand this concept. If lemmy.world doesn’t want to acknowledge what meta is doing, then they’re also a bad actor in enabling meta to do it.

For people who consider this a sign of social status

Ok well,

1. Anyone who considers apple products a status symbol already has bought in and won’t be swayed one way or the other by windows becoming worse.

2. Anyone who actually understands technology knows that regardless of how many different apps or environments apple OS’s provide, you are always operating in a closed system with the tools they allow. Whereas an operating system like android, or Linux, or (at least for now) windows, your options for the capability of a tool are limited only by what exists or what you have the capability to write.

In short, apple isn’t an OS that technologically literate people flock to as an exclusive option.