Seasoned_Greetings

1. "Handset" is obfuscating legalese to refer to a cell phone in a way intending to distance the meaning of the word from the thing that the old and technologically illiterate people who rule on this use every day.

2. I'm no fan of their strategy, but cell phone providers have claimed for a long time that filling your phone with unremovable bloatware causes the overall price to decrease. Their argument is most likely that they will have to charge more once the propagators of that bloatware realize that they can no longer force it on people and wedge that as a reason to pay less to carriers.

3. The reality is that cell phones are priced based on what people will buy anyway and carriers pocket as much of the money as they can that third parties pay them for their bloatware. Ultimately because of that this ruling hurts their bottom line, but the above reasoning gives plausible deniability in the face of the law as it is interpreted by old technologically illiterate lawmakers

Welcome to sugarfoots, sugarfoot

I like the "formally" vs "formerly" suggesting Elon is never going to get away from Twitter in favor of X

Being self righteous about doing nothing is worse.

Despite your own brand of defeatism in insisting the outcome is the same no matter what, one side actually is better. Even if the metric of "better" pales on the grand scheme of what we deserve or should be doing.

I'm not trying to project self-righteousness by recognizing that there are only two real choices. I'm asserting that advocating non-action or pointless action is such a tired trope that what you're doing is circlejerking for dopamine instead of applying what little influence you have as an individual to work toward the avoiding the actual worst outcome.

When the American populace as a whole is brainwashed into believing the only choices are red and blue, you have to accept that whining about it and voting green (or not voting) is going to accomplish nothing.

So make your colorful allegory and feel good about yourself on the internet. In the end, you are accomplishing less than the people you look down on who recognize the shitty reality of our situation.

Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

For the elderly folk who write and enforce the laws that caused this to come to pass, sufficiently advanced technology just means more complex than notepad

I meant it in jest only. Sorry about your phone, bro

I'm all for replacing the s at the beginning of words with z so you read it in an exaggerated German accent, but you gotta be consistent

Really hoping to zee a zurge in ze demand for "Anti-AI" zoftware/zervices/community

Fixed that for you there, Goebbels

Every time something gets objectively worse there are always people who say "Jokes on them I don't use that!" and miss the point.

Like yeah, we get it. It's only a matter of time until this kind of bullshit reaches something you do use. You should still be bothered by this.

The beauty of being here on lemmy is that I genuinely can't tell whether you said this because you're far right or because you're far left

Stupid opinion either way. That Ai is going to catch its share of r/conservative idiots and be a nice blend of ignorance

This is incredibly disingenuous. The US might not be a true democracy, but it's not an authoritarian regime. Xi and putin disappear people who have an opinion on whether they should be forever-rulers.

The fact that independent parties exist and hold seats at all three levels of government mean you are fundamentally wrong in saying there are only two choices.

The US is a flawed democracy. That's still better than an authoritarian regime.

If only they actually would die on that hill. They won't, because they've conditioned their base to support them no matter what. Instead, they'll rot the hill and move on to the next once the one they're on can't be salvaged.