It’s not like you have to give your SSN to a carrier to get a phone

Actually it is like that, if you are getting any kind of deal where you're paying off the phone with your service plan and/or commit to a term contract. They use it to run a credit check on you. Most companies where you're committing to a length of service do this. It happened to me when I was going to get some kind of cable or internet service one time, where you got x number of months free if you promised to keep the plan for two years. They asked for my SSN and I refused, so they wouldn't complete the transaction. That's how I found out about why they want your SSN.

On a side note, I don't discuss anything with gmail users that I don't want indexed and stored in Google's dossier of me.

You can buy a prepay phone at Walmart or similar, then just buy cards to add airtime. You don't have to register your name anywhere. I had one like that for years.

Nice summary! I've been here through that whole time period. If it had stopped at the stage around 1995-2000 (before FB & web 2.0 took over the internet, before every business model became about bombarding us with ads and spying on us), our lives would be much better today.

Yes you are correct, it's worse now. At first it was creative, innovative products that made things more convenient or fun, or at least didn't harm its users. Now all the new things are made by immature egotistical billionaire techbros: generative AI which has ruined the internet by polluting it with so much shit you can't get real information any more, not to mention using up all our power and water resources, the enshittification of Web 2.0, Web 3.0 that was pure shit from the get-go, IOT "smart" appliances like TVs, doorbells, thermostats, refrigerators that spy on you and your neighbors, shit "self-driving" killer cars that shouldn't be allowed on the roads, whatever the hell that new VR Metaverse shit is, ads, ads, ads, ads, and on and on. It's a tech dystopia.

I can only hope that nothing ever happens to where I'd have to use Windows again. (been using only linux for over 10 years and the latest Windows I ever used was win 7 at work).

If that happened, the shock of all the last 10-15 years' accumulation of enshittification hitting me at once might give me a stroke. The boiling frogs of today have gotten used to their OS serving them ads and spying on them by now, but I wouldn't be able to deal with it.

I've always said governments and public institutions funded by taxpayers should use FLOSS and not be beholden to private companies. Any shortcomings or unfulfilled needs in Linux and FLOSS software would quickly be dealt with once large organizations like these started using it as the default, since they could easily fund whatever features or fixes are needed for significantly less money than they pay for proprietary software (especially now that these days they're forking over annual subscriptions), and thus they'd also have much more control over the making sure the software meets their needs.

It seems like a no-brainer to me. Maybe it wasn't in the earlier days of Linux but not for the last decade or so.

She even has a phone in the garage. :)

Oh I see, that makes sense! Thanks

We’ve got four more years of ...

I see this all over Lemmy. Do people still not realize what has happened? The next 4 years is just the beginning of what has been unleashed for the US for at least a generation or more.

Not 10 million. As of today (all votes still not counted) trump leads the popular vote by 2,557,324. That's 49.9% to 48.3%. Current vote count: https://www.reuters.com/graphics/USA-ELECTION/RESULTS/zjpqnemxwvx/president/

Not that the popular vote matters in who wins, but it's nice to know he didn't get a true majority of all votes cast. 1.8% of votes were 3rd party, more than the difference between trump and Harris. If the amount of those votes that were "to teach the Dems a lesson" were added to the ones where POTUS was left blank to "teach the Dems a lesson", well ... anyway.

The correct way to do this is by making them into meatballs and make a meatball sub.

They came out all right at the end.

He authorized Ukraine to use US missiles to strike inside Russia. Waited too long, but at least he did it. UK has followed suit. So remember, just because the media likes to show the things like going to the rainforest because they have video of it, doesn't mean he's not still doing stuff.

I've read that they've been doing a lot since well before the election to protect or shore up what things they can to make it harder for Trump to do some of his dictator stuff. Some things they've worked on since he first took office. Unfortunately, there's not a whole lot that Biden can do on his own that Trump can't just turn around and undo. But they're trying to make it as difficult for him as they can bureaucratically.

As far as rallying a resistance, nope, he's apparently not willing or able to do anything like that. He greeted Trump like everything was normal, which I found pretty irritating. It's up to the people. I hope we can find someone charismatic to lead a movement. Charisma seems to be the most important or maybe even the only thing that matters these days.

Garland was the biggest mistake Biden made.

Who said they had a "burning hatred" of women? Most of the men in the focus groups who said that they wouldn't vote for a woman wasn't because they hate women but said things like, women were "too emotional", would not be able to handle dealing with adversarial foreign leaders, or that it's "just not appropriate" for a woman to hold the office of POTUS. Oh, and even some women also said that.

Yes indeed. https://abcnews.go.com/US/trumps-deportation-plan-private-prison-industry-sees-lucrative/story?id=115775702

The article expresses my feelings pretty well. I had subscribed to the WaPo for quite a few years, don't even remember how many. It's quality has been going downhill for some time. the clickbait headlines kept getting worse. I'd pretty much decided to not renew when the sub expired, especially after they installed Lewis as the new CEO. Then the pulling of the Harris endorsement was the last straw and felt like the best time to officially cancel along with a quarter million others. Democracy dies in darkness and WaPo has already been dead for awhile.

Just because burning fossil fuels is bad doesn't magically make nuclear good, or somehow no big deal. The chance for a catastrophic accident mentioned in the meme is only one drawback (which is bad enough--get real, denial is not a strategy here). Just a few other issues:

• the problem of what to do with the waste: no permanent solutions have yet been implemented and we've been using costly-to-maintain "temporary" methods for decades. Not to mention the thermal water pollution to aquatic ecosystems

• the enormously out of proportion up front costs to construct the plants, and higher ongoing operation and maintenance costs due to safety risks in proportion to amount of power generated

• the fact that uranium is also a limited resource that has to be mined like other ores, with all the environmental negatives of that, which then has to go through a lot of processing involving various mechanics and chemicals just to make it usable as fuel.

Anyway I'm not going to try and go into more detail on a forum post, but all this advocacy for a very problematic method of producing power as if it's a simple solution to our problems is kind of irritating. At least I hope the above shows we should stop pretending it's "clean energy". We should be focusing on developing renewable and sustainable energy systems.

“A lot of Latinos, those who can vote, did so because they think he [Trump] can improve the economy. That would be very good for us too,” said Carlos, an undocumented Mexican who lives in New York City.

Oh Carlos, mi dulce niño del verano ...