Added to the stops. This is going to be a busy fieldtrip through time.

“Enshittification” better be the word of the year.

If I ever invent a time machine, I’m making a few pit stops on my way back in time to cap Hitler, and Milton Friedman and his friends are on the list. He’s the misanthrope who popularized the idea that the only duty of a company’s leadership is to deliver profit, and any other pursuit is a disservice to the shareholders. This is known as the Friedman Doctrine.

Didn’t you have ads in the 20th century?

Well, sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games, and on buses, and milk cartons, and T-shirts, and bananas, and written on the sky… But not in dreams.

Additionally, the jobs AI can adequately replace are often the jobs companies use to train and vet people beginning their careers. Put another way, you don’t get any senior devs if you replace all your junior devs with chatbots.

Most salaried people in the US have hours on paper but are coerced into working more. I’m theoretically supposed to work 40 hours per week, but if the production line is down they beg me to come in. I can say no, but the people who say no don’t get promoted, and when layoff season starts, they’re the first on the chopping block.

I’m hoping the brownshirts aren’t smart enough for that, but you may be right.

I don’t know if any phones have this, but on a PC you can set up multiple partitions and have the password you entered determine which is logged into on boot. Then if the ICE brownshirts demand to see your sick memes, you can show them a boring install with some basic apps, instead of the install where you’re informing the denizens of the interwebs that Trump raped kids and the entire GOP is covering it up.

You could do some OG lithography (the litho in lithography means “stone”) by masking the white or block parts of the QR code and painting on an etchant. I don’t know what the best etchants for stone are, but I imagine HF-containing glass etch would do the trick. (Be very, very careful with HF.)

Instead of making the QR code point to something, you could encode the information directly. A short blurb about a person would fit.

I didn’t say you lived in a metro area. I said those distances and travel times are only realistic in the parts of the US people consider very densely populated.

That’s how the US is in certain metro areas. In the boonies there are hundreds of miles of rural back roads where people drive 60mph during rush hour.

Psshh you won’t trick me. They weigh the same.

the corner shop 500m away

A lot of Americans live 30 minutes from the nearest real grocery store.

But yeah they still don’t need a lifted truck to go there. It’s not like the cashiers at the Wal Mart Super Center are going to be impressed by their Carolina Squat lifted white pavement princess, but that’s what they insist on driving.

There should be a carbon tax, but whoever signs it will be the least popular president in history. One of the flaws of democracy is that sometimes the thing that really needs to happen is unpopular with the moronic citizenry that can’t understand why it needs to happen.

This will be mine:

I appreciate the info! A TV box really doesn’t require much in the way of hardware. Have you considered picking up an old laptop? I personally use a SteamLink to stream from my desktop. (Pretty rare that I want to watch TV and game at the same time.)

I believe that’s possible but I just don’t think it’s worth it when 99.9% of normies are going to type in their wifi credentials. You have a source of this actually being implemented?

My car is pretty old, so this may not work for everyone, but I can pull the fuse that powers the modem, then program the carnet or whatever VW calls it so it doesn’t expect to find a modem. All you need is an ELM327 dongle and one of the apps. (Car Scanner Pro is like $8 and a single payment.)

They can get around your Pi Hole with DNS over HTTPS these days. I don’t have one. Do you find yours still works well?

1. Build a cheap PC or buy an NVidia Shield to be your media center. (I actually use a SteamLink to my desktop PC.)

2. Never tell your TV your Wi-Fi password.

3. Use a wireless keyboard with touch-pad as your remote.

(4. Pirate stuff over a VPN.)