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@froggie But who knows, maybe Apple is recognizing its shift out of being the "mobile device company" that Tim and Steve lamentably announced back in ~2010, instead into the *data company* it has clearly become today. I suppose that would be most evident if they started offering more affordable devices again, but easing off all the constantly screwing service customers is a first step. This would nullify any remaining threat of a Louis Rossmann, if he ever even presented one.

@froggie The latter, at least, if you'll take seriously the prognostications of salivating shareholders. There are plenty of others leveraging Apple's reputation to make similar incisions to your privacy right now. (like, I bet Credit Karma sells everything it can access, down to my tapstream data, to reporting agencies, and that's relatively benign!) forbes.com/sites/barrycollins/

@froggie I still don't know what to make of these moves in context. Truly no corporation is more capable of drawing applause from a pittance than Apple, the pioneers of ROM chips that detect when they're being reused for repair and self-destruct, and who sold phones for 15yrs on a broken ethic of "privacy" that quickly earned the trust of the world, building a data empire that readily hands you over to states when it's not using your biometrics to set your health insurance premiums.

RT @SDonziger@twitter.com

BREAKING: Los Angeles votes 12-0 to ban new drilling and to close all 5,000 existing oil and gas wells in the city. This is a historic victory by @STAND_LA@twitter.com and all citizens over the oil industry and environmental racism.

Never forget we hold the power.👊
bit.ly/3OV1zNT

🐦🔗: twitter.com/SDonziger/status/1

@skry All factors contribute to eye strain, but focusing distance has the most dramatic effect in my experience. The 20-20-20 rule says to look at something 20+ feet away for 20+ seconds every 20 minutes. Seems like a decent minimum, at least.

Once these projects are done, with all their screen-staring, I'm looking forward to getting mostly offline for a couple weeks straight so my eyes don't crap out for good. They are so sore and blurry today.

Hey, MN people, the Minnesota Police licensing board is about to vote on a rule that states that law enforcement officers cannot be members of white supremacist or hate organizations. The MN Police Federation is opposed to this and pushing to get it dropped. Please sign this petition supporting this rule. secure.everyaction.com/bwItmTM. If you can, get your organization to sign on to this letter. forms.gle/7tSwEzJBCcb3wcY67. Please spread the word! #MNastodon

Let me never be mistaken for somebody who sold you Mastodon as a cure for anything. I am a historical materialist. It's a step in the right direction.

Really, it's a pretty dramatic fundamental break (FOSS ffs) that is fated to years of transitional pain undoing its vestiges and illuminating its new potential.

@pluralistic
This is a fantastic interview.

"This is why merger scrutiny is such a big deal, because these companies are not built by super geniuses who use their access to the capital markets to build these impregnable businesses which no one else can assail. They are regular, venal mediocrities who use their access to the capital markets to buy everyone who might threaten them. If there’s merger scrutiny, that just stops happening."

'Venal mediocrities' is going into my autocomplete file.

It's one thing when nonwhite people say something like that and I have zero reaction -- they deserve all the space they need to vent about the shit they're experiencing. But when it's constantly white people preaching to their neighbors to "stop being so racist", especially devoid of content or self-criticism, it stinks like cloutfarming whiteness-distancing horseshit.

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Telling white people to "drop the whiteness" is the most laughable shit. what planet have you been living on. even the best of us struggle to do this, this is not viable public messaging for practically any segment, not even committed leftists

like at least cite specific things that are happening, to challenge people's broken understandings of whiteness with something unflatteringly relatable & directly applicable. I still have little idea what's happening HERE so differently from anywhere else

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I continue not to understand this nonsense affectation, but not because I have another suggestion for "what white people should do" about anything. The only way this space becomes less culturally white is by becoming less demographically white. Whiteness is primarily displaced by nonwhite people. We are notoriously and necessarily incapable of solving these problems ourselves, especially from a position of power -- power which, thankfully, literally anyone can take for themselves. Displace us!!!

'Financial independence' is perhaps this society's most dangerous myth.

We are told we're a failure or a parasite if we don't achieve it, when in fact it doesn't even exist.

Even if you're a billionaire, someone else still grew your food, someone else still built your house. You're still dependent.

Money just allows you to be dependent on people you don't know instead of people you do. Which is miserable.

Yet most give up most of the days of their life to striving for this unhappy illusion.

Manufacturers of all kinds bootstrap the DMCA into a new doctrine that Jay Freeman calls "felony contempt of business model." Removing DRM is illegal, so any business model that hides behind DRM is illegal to thwart. (via @pluralistic) pluralistic.net/2022/12/03/pai

*And* they did so with concepts and code that were intended to be shared openly and freely.

•••

“The internet is a space where a vanishingly small number of firms control nearly all of our speech forums […] The companies that operate those services bought their way to dominance, using predatory pricing to destroy any new company that tried to compete with them and buying any company that managed to survive that treatment.”

- @pluralistic

doctorow.medium.com/yes-its-ce

It's MAC DAY! I'm live right now going over all the G4s, and I need your help finding them new owners! Follow and share: twitch.tv/bobbyd0g

fun fact: if we had a large following on a social media site whose infrastructure was degrading, we could put undue pressures on its internal systems by doing things like requesting an archive as often as possible, going private/unprivate frequently, etc.

1989's Macintosh SE/30L is remembered as one of Apple's biggest flops. MacWorld criticised its rotated L display as "...bringing all of the issues and none of the benefits of a true L display", while MacWeek called it "Some kind of deranged P display nobody asked for".

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Hellsite

The hell site