I find it fascinating that in today’s world, private companies are allowed to decide how long they want to keep the entire populace under surveillance, just like that, without any laws or any judge involved, without the entire thing instantly turning into a giant scandal or people rioting in the street over it.
As a gen-Xer who has known a world where privacy actually meant something people deeply cared about, the world we live in today is frighteningly dystopian.
private panopticon
That’s the only thing George Orwell got wrong: he envisioned surveillance conducted by the state - i.e. a communist dictatorship, but what we end up with today is surveillance conducted by late-stage capitalist monopolies in cahoots with the state - i.e. a fascist dictatorship.
Either way, it’s a dictatorship.
you don’t have the right to make us
Apparently they just take the left.
I don’t think the surveillance capitalists are asking for your opinion…
Gee, I feel so much better now…
And even there, they don’t get no sunshine. the beach and the sunny islands in the background are reserved for the Epstein class. The salaried workers can stay in the cave.
This caption is incorrect: they’re not asking you for money, they’re just taking it.
They just also speak standard.
Well they shouldn’t. It’s harmful.
Yet somehow Celsius seems to speak to everybody outside the United States just fine.
Norms may be dumb but they make everybody’s lives easier when everybody follows them.
As for temperature specifically, there’s nothing inherently better in Celsius or Fahrenheit. It’s just a choice. The only unit that is superior to all of them is the Kelvin because it has a true zero, but it’s not commonly used in everyday settings.
Which units are best doesn’t matter: the point is, nobody else uses standard units anymore, apart from a couple oddball countries, and only one of them - North Korea - isn’t trying to extricate itself from it.
Everybody else tries to be a part of the world’s technical and scientific communities by speaking the same language, but of course America has to be different. Because of course it does… And it’s tiring if you ask me.
Americans have compatibility issues with the rest of the world, and it’s not getting any better - in more ways than this one.
I didn’t watch, because of corrupt FIFA and Temu Hitler
If I ever need to buy slate, I will make extra-sure never to buy it from Porto Slate Importers.
I always tell people who ask me what I did with my PhD: I managed to get a good education and become a trusted professional despite the schooling system.
The only thing my degree did for me was prove to my first employer that I was willing to sit tight for years and go through the pointless motion of getting a degree. I managed to grind through to the end to get an idiotic piece of paper, and that told him I was unlikely to flake out on him after 3 months on the job. That’s all my degree was ever useful for.
Payment tokens are very common. Usually they’re sold as keychains, wristbands or rings, and they’re provisioned to work with the myriad of payment processors out there - which aren’t banks.
in my case, it’s a token from iCard. The way it works is, it’s connected to a regular bank account number with an IBAN number (supplied by iCard when you activate the token), and you transfer money to it that you can then spend with the contactless token. The nice thing is, if you lose it, you can’t lose anymore money than you put on it.
What I modified was in fact a contactless payment token. It had the form factor of a payment card, but it only does NFC.
I have another card for chip+pin.But I almost never use it where I live, because all limits were lifted on contactless payments a few years ago. If I try to pay something really expensive contactless, it will ask me for the pin - which is specific to the payment token.
I’ll do one better:
My payment card was just a bit too wide to fit in my cellphone’s cover. The phone’s own NFC antenna is at the top - and I use it all the time - so the card had to be at the bottom of the cover to avoid triggering the phone all the time, in portrait orientation so-to-speak.
So I dissolved the card in acetone to extract the NFC chip and its antenna, then carefully reshaped one end of the antenna so it’s a bit less wide (and since I couldn’t modify the length of the wire or the number of turns in any way to avoid de-tuning the antenna too much, I sort of accordioned one side of the rectangle to accommodate the extra length of wire).
Then I set the new shape of the antenna permanently by carefully applying a piece of packing tape over it, flipped it over, taped over the other side to seal everything, then carefully cut around the new, ultra-thin, stubbier contactless payment “card”.
Now it fits really smartly in my cellphone cover!
Better metaphor:
I 3D-print my own glasses, and they’re so thin they obviously can’t contain any electronics.
I never designed them to demonstrate to others that I’m not spying on them, but I’m glad they convey that message now in the age of the Facebook pervert spectacles.
Ole Ben Franklin is particularly relevant here:
In other words, Flock can go fuck themselves with a stiff wire brush.