Republican politicians and influencers frame everything as an "attack" by the "woke" and "radical left". It makes for a great preemptive distraction when they're actually responsible for most of those things. Bland gray/beige color schemes get decided in board rooms full of uninspiring executive-class types who can't think of anything but trying to cargo cult their way into making the Line go up.
Not everyone is so eager to go into Trumpist pretend land. Don't pay attention to what people say, pay attention to what they do. And everything Trump has done has benefited China and Russia at our expense. Whether he is a willing agent or just an overconfident dupe might be an interesting academic debate, but either way the results are clear.
I mean every single different thing he's done. Raising taxes raises immediate revenue, sure. The problem is all the second order effects down the line. The only halfway sensible policy has been the $100k for H-1B, and even that is being implemented so ham-fistedly as to create pointless harm for individuals (ie diminishing the appeal of the US), while actually benefiting companies that hire foreign labor (one more thing to hold over employees' heads). But I'm not really looking to argue this for the umpteenth time with people who are still buying into the administration's marketing.
What am I buying, just sharing what I noticed. The US houses most of the top large cap companies in the world, it still has plenty of appeal, the companies need to balance their hiring with profitability, and maybe that means hiring H1Bs will become more expensive, or losing tax benefits for offshoring.
If you look at the previous years when Trump hadn’t enacted his agenda, then the difference between current deficit levels seems primarily due to interest rates.
This is one of the exact frustrations that has led the US to our current open fascism, so try not to take your state of affairs for granted. It's much easier to resist and avoid a bureaucracy (as it mostly operates on predictable rules), than a cult of personality autocrat who chooses new targets by the week.
Our constitutional rights have been effectively nullified - first with a slowly creeping "it's fine if a corpo does it", then with "it's fine if the President directs it", and now recently with a shameless full-on embrace of both.
Sure they can, by setting up a VPN. The same kind of software-config friction people have to overcome to avoid the anticompetitive megacorpos. I'd say it's sensible to have the default lazy option land somewhere in the middle rather than completely lopsided against users.
When a parent stocks up on a bunch of bland tasting generic imitation food because "it was on sale", and then the kids get tired of it so they stop eating it, do you consider that "savings" ? In my book, that's called being "penny wise, pound foolish".
It's really not a cancel hell like say Comcraps or a gym membership. It's several pages of trickily-worded and misleadingly-styled buttons meant to make you mess up and not click the ones you need to click. From a real computer (ie no "mobile" myopia) you'll be done with it in under 5 minutes. I think you could even do it right now and still keep your benefits until your actual expiration, but I'm not exactly sure as I only ever do 1 month free trials or $2 "1 week" trials if I need something quick in the middle of a project.
(This is not to say that they totally don't deserve fines for violating users' trust with user-adversarial design in the first place, just to point out that these dark patterns are mostly mitigable annoyances that they make up for on volume)
I'm a stickler for reading details, and they still got me once by making the 'sign up to pay for prime' "offer" looking/reading very similar to the 'free trial' offer. The customer service chat straightforwardly canceled it and refunded the fraudulent charge, but the way all of their dialogs are set up and stylized its obvious they're trying to induce mistaken (ie fraudulent) transactions.
"Secure" boot is mostly a red herring, as there are lots of hardware options these days. Remote attestation takes away your ability to run libre Linux on any device if you want to interact with Google (or other surveillance company) network services. It completely repudiates the idea of the mutual-consent-based protocol.
Secure Boot, or similar bootloader root of trust schemes, is the reason millions of phones and tablets will never run anything other than the manufacturer-provided OS and not what the user wants to run.
Yes, of course. I agree 100% that the designed-to-be-ewaste market is terrible. If I had my way, any manufacturer-privileging signing scheme would be illegal. So would the anticompetitive bundling of software with hardware devices, for that matter.
My point was that the threat of prohibiting libre Linux isn't from all manufacturers deciding to lock out installing Linux on their devices. But rather from remote attestation making it so that Google (et al) are able to force you to run a locked down operating system as a technically-enforced condition of interacting with their servers.
Most of the times the user prioritizes more convenient options over privacy. "Pressure for competing options" will mean that options compete for the most convenient way, not most secure or most private.
Sure, but the point is that the more convenient less-secure ways are going to be criminalized. Otherwise nobody would use the age verification app in the first place.
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