The look on her face is clearly one of disappointment. It’s funny because it encapsulates the ~~children fyrefest ~~ Willy Wonka Experience but I never doubted she was just trapped in the machine.

I can tell if China is worried about current Russia or a future US under Trump.

An iPhone and Chipotle. That dude is set.

In that case we’re going to need a bigger Death Star.

Michael Bolton

as a consumer accepting that

That’s the special condition we get in the US, though - there is little or no effective choice across the spectrum. Without regulation, corporations will become asymptotic to maximum financial extraction techniques. There are few real choices at the consumer level and the barriers to entry are such that a single consumer - or even an uncoordinated (read: without a national, staffed organization) - cannot circumvent the system.

Maybe in somewhere free like the EU or SEA. In the US, most phones bought from a carrier (and most sales are that way, some exclusively so) are locked so that no other SIM (e or physical) can be used.

Okay - how about corporate data; deep dives into intimate corporate workings and connections by financial wonks.

This isn’t “shady companies mining data in secret” - these are registered, for profit corporations who’s stated goal is to collect, sort, and mine trillions of bytes of information and provide output of any cross section in any sort order to anyone with a big check book. Koch brothers. Disney. Russia. Anyone. The problem isn’t that the NSA is doing its job with budgeted funds, it’s that we allow this service to exist.

At the risk of playing devils advocate, are they not allowed to subscribe to newspapers without a warrant? This is publicly purchasable information bought by a (checks notes) agency with the expressed mission if gathering as much data as possible.

If Rep Wyden wants to prevent this, the first - and most important - legislative action is to prevent its collection and sale, not some anti-TLA circle jerk about the NSA buying it on the open market.

With the small carve out exception of people who are fine with the antisocial behavior and management style of the owner, Inertia is the only reason. Governments, influencers, corporations- they all have a following and an established channel which involves minimum expense to maintain.

Cohen is the world’s greatest showman.

These should, instead, be implemented by NFC. You tap their “reader” with your phone, never surrendering it, and they get your ID number just like a merchant gets your CC info for a charge. Their backend pulls up your record just as if they’d scanned the qr code on the back of your physical card. Or you can locally transmit a facsimile image to a promiscuous reader (airdrop/nearby share) you approve.

I’m going to start out with the obvious- that most of these arguments are copypasta from a decade and a half ago when smartphones got cameras. Distracting. What about the gym? Easy for bad actors to abuse (OMGWTFBBQ!)

The glare from headlights comment was weird. Do the lenses not include an AR coating, or perhaps the author doesn’t normally wear glasses? I decided to check on that last one and was surprised that there was no by line, just a generic nyt link - not even to the article. Of course Brian X Chen appears to be a real NYT journalist, but in no other online pictures does he wear glasses, so I presume he doesn’t wear corrective lenses or he wears contacts. Not too surprising then that the glasses - and a big, black, fat-rimmed resin model at that - would be distracting, even outside of the decisions to record or not.

Which brings up the last bit - to record you have to initiate it. I presume this is for battery life, as powering the sensor, processing, and transmission to a storage device all take non-trivial amounts of power for a device that small. For the panicky fear of constant surveillance the article has I expected it was an always-on live-stream to the Meta servers that was occurring. Color me unimpressed.

Reminds me of one of my favorite ad campaigns

lol - I love when this gets (re-) posted periodically. The first time I read it I was thinking “out in the desert” when it said it was outside Phoenix. It’s not. It’s a single block (1 street x 1 ave) of space *in the middle of Tempe Arizona * with a 4 lane highway on one side. This is not a “no car utopia,” it’s a more-profit apartment complex that is using the “walkable city” greenwashing to cover the entire parcel with dense apartments (and limited, doomed retail) and not have to set aside mandatory parking to cut into profits. Last I looked, a 3BR rental was something like $35k-40k a year in rent.

Don’t get me wrong - the concept is nice, with good massing around the alleys and public spaces. This took planning. And it’s ~1/2 or 3/4 mile walk to a pretty major shopping area (across said 4 lane highway and a massive parking area at the mall). And that last part is good because there aren’t enough units in this development to support more than 1-2 restaurants and a bodega…it’s only about 1/4 to 1/3 the population needed to support a standard grocery store. And - as advertised- there’s no parking and Tempe isn’t walkable so you’re not getting any substantial outside customer traffic.

What kind of cheap-ass, stripped down AutoDesk suite are you getting for $200/mo. Last I checked, the architectural suite was north of $4500/yr.