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 think it’s not necessarily a contradiction to hold your pro-choice and anti-death penalty stance, but it’s still a contradiction to hold the pro-life and pro-death penalty stance if your reasoning behind the pro-life stance is that all life is sacred.

I agree that a person’s body autonomy and the state’s power to execute citizens should not overlap, but I still think that giving the “all life is sacred” line to justify pro-life and then being pro-death penalty “because some people deserve to die” amounts to hypocrisy.

My mind is blown. This is very well written. Thank you

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

Touché

You can die of cirrhosis from drinking too much for too long, but it’s still culturally held as a stress reliever. You can die from diabetes if you eat too much sugar for too long, but it’s still sold to children as edible happiness. Hell, you can die slowly and painfully from taking too much Tylenol, but it’s still the world’s most popular painkiller by far.

Too much of anything kills eventually. That doesn’t bare any significance to whether or not it’s good for stress in some amount.

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.

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

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.

most of the time for no reason at all

Not for no reason. It’s a form of control. If you genuinely believe that the opposing party is going to bring the country to ruin, you’re a lot less likely to consider their position in politics.

Look at the affordable care act. Conservatives hated/hate it because “obamacare” was portrayed as giving free health care to the lazy poor that you have to pay for as a hard working conservative. When asked if we should repeal Obamacare, conservatives poll something crazy like 95% yes, simply because it’s a bad word they learned.

Many of those conservatives have health care through the ACA and get mad when Republicans take it away because they need it. Those same conservatives mostly aren’t even aware that what they have is literally obamacare.

It’s control all the way down.

Politics is fundamentally different for conservatives. They have to have someone to hate. It’s drilled into them by their media outlets.

The tactic is a form of fear based control that conservative media has been working on since Nixon, and made into effect with the birth of Fox News in 1996.

Seriously. Nixon’s think tank conceived the conservative media outlet as a catch-all, exclusive source of news that as a primary function would steer conservatives to not trust other news sources.

They did this because they did not want another Watergate, where conservatives turned against Nixon because of hard evidence laid out by popular unbiased news, which at the time conservatives still were informed by.

The Frankenstein’s monster of a party that that tactic has turned conservatives into requires manufactured rage to fuel the fire. If the outrage ever simmers, you begin to see smarter conservatives recognizing what their party has become and it begins to fall apart.

So there’s your answer. It’s because the hate is necessary to continue the control. If you don’t believe me, turn on Fox news. There’s always the manufactured rage-of-the-day filling the air time.

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.

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.

In addition to the other great points in this thread, Apple has a cost barrier that other operating systems don’t.

In an economic climate where everything is getting more expensive, a consumer isn’t going to fork out $800+ on a MacBook or an iPhone without first actively wanting to be part of the ecosystem, especially if the hardware they have gets the job done.

The reason Apple isn’t growing as fast as it’s competitors right now is exactly that. Apple is expensive to get into. No amount of enshitification on other OS’s is going to change that.

You have a very lofty misconception about people.

I gave you reasoning and a real world example of a vulnerable demographic. You have given me an anecdote about your friends and a variation of “nuh uh” over and over.

You think this is confined to gab? You seem to be looking at this example and taking it for the only example capable of existing.

Your argument that there’s not anyone out there at all that can ever be offended or misled by something like this is both presumptuous and quite naive.

What happens when LLMs become widespread enough that they’re used in schools? We already have a problem, for instance, with young boys deciding to model themselves and their world view after figureheads like Andrew Tate.

In any case, if the only thing you have to contribute to this discussion boils down to “nuh uh won’t happen” then you’ve missed the point and I don’t even know why I’m engaging you.

And you don’t think those people might be upset if they discovered something like this post was injected into their conversations before they have them and without their knowledge?