Also Sweden’s population is about the size of Los Angeles county. Every time I see Scandinavia held up as something to aspire to folks should remember how small and historically homogenous these countries are.
Comparing the US to the EU as a whole is a much more accurate way to look at things, with us states being akin to eu member countries.
I’ve come to realize most of the privacy hawk arguments are based on imagined risks, and the average privacy enthusiast is an ideologically driven idealist. What is the end goal beyond pumping one’s ego?
Especially internet privacy hawks are the worst. It just doesn’t really matter at all. Unless you are all cash, off the grid, no phone or bank account etc, you will leave a huge trail. Instagram figuring out I like basketball is the least of my worries.
Haha yes! People assume data brokers “know” a lot about a person, but really it’s fuzzy signals. It is far from a crystal ball or a perfect record of every website you’ve ever visited, etc…
I’ve kind of come full circle on all this to where I no longer care. The slippery slope arguments are largely hypothetical imo…Google knows some stuff about me and attempts to show me ads, the vast majority of which I block, so what?
I pay taxes, have a social security number, my bank and credit card companies know my purchase history, the credit bureaus know my mortgage payment and lender, etc…
The myth of an off the grid life is exactly that, a myth. And what does it achieve for you other than some vague sense of idealistic pride?
Google provides tremendous utility to the world essentially for free; its search engine, maps, mail client apps, browser, etc. are tools billions of people use every day. How do they maintain a global network of data centers and localize their products to hundreds of languages…none of that is free. If big companies want to give them money in an attempt at to get me to pay attention to them then so be it, let them finance it. Imagine if only those who could afford to pay could use these tools.
I still use the original sport band from 2015 on a 7th gen watch, and it fit the 4/5 gen before that. Unless the gold band was non removable from the watch I don’t see the issue.
Also the fact that this was never publicly available means these were gifts to celebs for PR, ain’t nobody losing any money on this.
Does it save to the cloud so I can play on both?
My take on this is not that this is the default early adopter demographic (bereal, TikTok, etc…cmon old dudes don’t act like we are “leading the charge”). But, there’s a good chunk of older tech oriented folks that see a glimmer of hope in the fediverse bringing back some bits of the “old web” imo.
While most of the people like me don’t love meta or Twitter it was kinda good enough, but Reddit was kind of a last straw. I was there when all these companies were born and at the time we were all teen and 20-something early adopters (believe it or not even Facebook used to be cool!) and we’ve watched them all slowly degrade. Very young folks prob don’t care as they don’t really use any of these services, but us old nerds want to avoid the pitfalls of the Web 2.0 era.
Web3 and the crypto-decentralization efforts were really ham fisted…I think most experienced techies saw through all the BS and recognized how wildly inefficient it all was, not to mention outright scammy in many cases. Fediverse is unproven but I think it has potential, and I think many of us older techies feel that way.
I feel reasonably confident that there are just as many languages spoken in just Los Angeles county, if there are any parallels to NYC:
https://untappedcities.com/2019/12/06/fun-maps-nyc-is-most-linguistically-diverse-urban-area-in-the-world/