Yeah, Reagan was always talking about small government, and then he blew up the deficit with unchecked spending. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

All countries spy on each other.

I definitely agree about being more worried about the US spying than China though.

This is amazing. Thank you!

Well that’s disappointing to hear. Although it makes me glad that I am too cheap to buy one. 😅

I mean, there are Purism phones. Super expensive, but they keep selling out so I guess they are reasonable.

My point is that there is an actual difference. It’s not just a repackaged web app, and has actual drawbacks.

My personal plan is to move as much of my day to day stuff to a Mecha Comet, and also carry my Fairphone running Android for whatever proprietary crap that the world wants me to run. It’s two devices, but hopefully will minimize exposure to big tech.

My bank requires using a card reader for ID if you use a web browser. It can be done but it means carrying three physical things (phone, bank card, bank card reader) instead of one (phone).

Keep in mind that the book is very old, published in 1931. DNA hadn’t been mapped, information technology was limited, and so on.

In the book, people are born in factories. Working class people are born in from split cells, as quintuples if I remember correctly. Your role in life is largely determined by your genes - workers don’t have the psychology for anything but labor.

In spite of that, it’s not an especially oppressive society. There is a “perfect” drug, soma, which is sort of like a non-addictive, non-physically harmful heroin that can be delivered by gas. When there is unrest, security forces come in and get everyone high until they chill the fuck out.

Sex is open and easy, but always completely voluntary by everyone involved. When people are turned down they are sometimes surprised but never upset or aggressive.

Entertainment is presented as vacuous, but the people seem to enjoy it. There are movies, TV, and so on. Sports are engineered to require people take trains out of town to stadiums, and require deliberately-complicated equipment to play, in order to create demand for production.

So… is that a dystopia? There is no discussion of environmental damage, but overall it seems sustainable, not predicated on infinite growth. People are stuck in the role they were born to, but it seems like there are no artificial barriers to advancement… just that not everyone can be good at everything.

Definitely. A world where people are happy and healthy and live basically fulfilling lives. There are a few fanatics who opt out, and they’re unhappy. Go figure.

I don’t find Brave New World to be especially dystopian. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Or ask your work to give you a phone?

My company insists on spyware for my phone, so I insist they give me a phone for work stuff. I leave it off in a drawer at home when I’m not on call.

They fled Britain and stayed in Holland a few years first.

I just bumped into Poe’s Law.

2 years ago i would have said i can’t believe this article needed to be written (supposedly–equally likely generated)

You obviously didn’t read the article. 😥

It’s mostly about Facebook, probably because Twitter already ditched anything other than raw, unfettered Musk-directed propaganda right after he bought it, and also because Facebook ended their fact checking immediately after Trump won, as a visible bending of the knee and kissing of the ring.

As far as I know, there are no fact checking capabilities in any Lemmy setup, which could be useful, so the study is not pointless even in a federated context

Kind of like elderly people in eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union?

Kind of like elderly people in eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union?

I always find the same study referenced, which was good science but also almost 30 years old. I wonder if this is still true for modern batteries?

I mean, we call the software that runs computer players in games AI, so… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

License plate readers? Facial recognition? Speech recognition?