Yeah people don’t really understand that HOAs are a two way street in most states. Bad HOAs exist because of bad neighbors, neglectful neighbors, or both. All it takes to right a ship is to show up and vote (or fill out the paper absentee ballot…) when the yearly elections happen. And then show up to some meetings so quorum can be met.

My HOA has to reschedule important meetings several times a year because nobody can be bothered to show up for a 30 minute meeting every quarter so quorum is met. Bad HOAs are like bad local unions. They only have power because you let them have power. Lobby your neighbors to do something about it. Unfortunately my experience is such that the typical homeowner who chooses to live in an HOA does so because they want to be rorLly hands off as much as possible. Kind of the opposite of the default pictures people have of obsessive neighbors in HOAs.

So the argument boils down to it being due to bad parents rather than evil technology, yes?

That’s not the main arguments being used to ban these devices and advocate for more radical plans. Removing access to these doesn’t make someone a good parent. Kids turn to other methods.

And to an earlier point in another comment: guess which cohort has explosive growth in smoking at the moment? Not people our age. Teens and young adults of legal age. Gen Z, in particular, is a huge market for that industry now. Cigars and pipes in particular. Vapes are counted separately but are wildly popular.

Banning the sale of highly regulated goods where the state is the official and only legal seller of said good in many states is one thing. We are talking about the internet here, though. And cell phones. And computers. And tablets. May as well put TVs and connected devices on the list, and definitely console platforms.

That’s the real problem, kids being able to spend unlimited time unsupervised because they have horrible absent parents. Parents shouldnt let their kids have unrestricted time like that. That is one reason why kids suffer in school not because of phones; because their parents aren’t involved to guide them in making good choices and forcing good habits.

So we take away the phones as the luddites demand. What fills the gap? Definitely not independent learning. Most definitely not suddenly mindful and present parents.

There is a lot of fear mongering and blaming, but no actual effort to fix it. Banning or removing doesn’t fix it. There is a reason that, when absent parents for latchkey kids were huge problems, they didn’t simply decree gangs illegal and pat themselves on the back. Communities offered alternatives. But no alternative is being offered here. All the woes are shifted onto the unholy smartphone and internet.

Ya know why predators can find success online? Because shit parents don’t parent. A better use of resources would be forcing the parents to sacrifice their phones contingent on spending time with their kids, right?

No, you don’t get. Or didn’t live it. Or are being purposely obtuse.

None of those qualifiers were attached to those things at the time the applicable fear mongering luddites were vilifying them. What we have right now are 21st century Tipper Gores. People engaging in moral public freakouts over tangentially related things which affirm a much larger fear of the whole (technology in this case). You see it also with how people violently and emotionally react to “AI.”

Remember when D&D would turn you into a Satanist who’d go on to sexually abused children, maybe even engage in ritualist murder? Remember when similar was said for merely listening to even the radio edits of Marilyn Manson?

People pearl clutch over hypotheticals. Parents who engage with their kids and set healthy boundaries which are enforced don’t often run into these problems. Hell, the arguments people make about tech right now could also apply as reasons not to let them play outside. Never know where a predator is lurking. I mean, we actually do: in your church and in your house. The two most statistically likely places for children to be preyed upon.

But let’s blame the internet. Apple makes it trivial to lock things down and monitor it all. No kid is able to outsmsrt those restrictions because adults can’t either.

No, what’s happening is yet another hype cycle. The entire reason all these schools are banning devices this year is due to a marketing effort from Haidt’s publisher. They put copies of his book into the hands of higher ranking faculty with purchasing authority for their districts. And they talk with each other. What a brilliant way to weaponize ignorance and make a buck doing so.

And it magically doesn’t make bad parents into even mediocre ones. Who or what will they blame next? Definitely not the person looking back at them in the mirror every morning.

There’s also credible reports that Reddit is testing an even sneakier method. They will hide the “deleted” comments when you are logged in and looking for them in your history. But other people can still see them; Reddit just understands you are a hostile actor in their eyes so they pull manipulation games like with shadow banning.

Fark still exists with that small monthly payment to support the site model. Drew, the owner, regularly meets up with folks, too. And if you’re a subscriber he must buy you a beer if you ask him per the “terms” of service.

A nice, relatively small, community. That’s what Reddit used to be. Your post really resonated with me.

my experience is such that people don’t get these sweeping bans for having opinions. They get them for acting like sociopathic aggressive individuals.

And based on what I’m seeing when I check folks’ profiles reiterating the same story… Yep it checks out more often than not. There’s no discourse on the internet when it consists of calling people slurs in a weird barrage of insults. Those are the people who get banned here or there.

This is most definitely a feature here. What ARS won’t say (but their source articles do) is that Newsbreak is an app right out of China. That’s why they don’t care that this creates entirely fictional stories. This is the leftwing equivalent of all those rightwing agitprop sites that pretend to be local news in order to trick people

They hook you into an ecosystem. That’s it, thats the game. I don’t think it has too much to do with insecurity. Group chats and video chats with people outside of imessage is awful. Group chats lose a lot of features because SMS was all there was for a long time. Standard (not Google-ified) RCS is still too bare at the moment so I don’t think the looming rcs fixes that aspect of it.

Has to be Krampus, and Anna and the Apocalypse.

Krampus really scratches that nostalgic itch every year and I don’t know why. The broken family dynamics, the environment, the sound and set designs are amazing. And it has a lesson like every good Christmas movie should.

And Anna and the Apocalypse is similar. It is funny, musical, and ultimately an allegory about growing up and leaving everyone behind to forge your own path. A good reminder that you never know when it will be your last Christmas with someone. Or maybe I’m looking into it too much and I just like zombie musicals.

Yes generally, but it can be very cheap. Some places sell block accounts which let you pay a one time fee for a set amount of data. Black Friday deals are coming up, and you an usually get amazing deals (1TB for under $5, able to be purchased multiple times, or subscriptions which work out to a couple dollars/euros a month).

The other thing you’d need is an indexer. Some are free, but for the best experience you’d want to pay for acess to a private indexer. Usually a few bucks as well, almost all of the big ones run sales this time of the year.

For subtitles: there are several solutions. Jellyfin (and Plex) support finding subtitles that you either download with a tool like Bazarr, or via Jellyfin/Plex’s own interface. Bazarr auto downloads them based on your parameters you give it though.

This is literally the reason Apple changes the bubble color. iMessage is encrypted by default and uses normal data instead of MMS. That’s the indicator.

This entire spiel about bubble color envy is ridiculous. Features are the separation. The media will whip things up with their sample size of a handful of cherry picked anecdotes. But almost every teen has an iPhone and uses iMessage in the USA. Apple has over 80% of that market.

What Google wants is for Apple to implement Google’s proprietary RCS implementation, not RCS proper. Because RCS proper lacks a lot of features that people take for granted with iMessage. That is presumably one reason Google forked it and requires it to run through their proprietary middleware.

Edit: Don’t get me wrong. I would love for an open standard to overtake the proprietary bits from both Apple and Google. But Google is disingenuous here. They are complaining because, despite their efforts, they can’t crack the market. Teens aren’t bitting for Android. iMessage has network effect going on, so Google is trying to crack that open since they can’t get a compelling overall product and ecosystem for a valuable demographic.

I’d rather there be open standards. But that means Google RCS has to change as well.

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I’m so happy to see someone else is finally talking about this. RCS, as implemented by Google, is distinct from the actual open RCS standard. Google added a proprietary middle layer which is how they get features working which RCS doesn’t support.

And that proprietary middle layer (Jibe being part of it) is why there aren’t a million third party RCS clients out there. Google must give API access. They are gatekeepers. And they only share keys with strategic partners (Samsung being one of them, telcos with their own app like Verizon used to have being another).

But in the end Google did what Google does best: fragmented a product. And now Google holds the leash for RCS proper. I bet Apple isn’t too keen to route all customer data through Google servers even when encrypted. Because it’s another piece that Apple doesn’t control.

Mastodon often feels to me more like Facebook for software developers

I wish. I’ve tried to curate mine as such.

My mastodon feed is awash in spam from authors hucking their LLM generated stories. Constantly. And random low viewer count streamers spamming hashtags every hour 24/7.

It’s crazy how much LinkedIn-like sociopathy is out there right now. Makes sense given the huge spike in new accounts we’ve had in the last month.

Citations Needed had a mini series where they discussed why this happened. The US government will give material support to movie and game studios in exchange for some creative control over the content. That’s why so many movies with military equipment in it are rabidly pro-war; the studios don’t get access to the real equipment without the government’s support, and they don’t sign off on extremely critical scripts.

COD and similar games don’t just pop out of a void and still strive for some semblance of realism. That is a huge selling point after all. So the government gets involved, even if in little ways. Same way China gets to censor movies, either by omission or fundamentally changing things, around the world.

For now. Google is locking down certificates in Android 14 which absolutely cannot be changed even by devs (barring exploits, which will be patched because this is Alphabet’s bread and butter on the line).

Google has put into place infrastructure to lock apps down as well with its App Bundles to replace APKs. And, wouldn’t you know it, they just so happen to rely on Google to be functional and even built! Custom made for your device and configuration and account. What a coincidence that you can’t rip that off your device and widely share it without massive workarounds. And even then, with Google clamping down on CAs….

People best become acquainted with ROMs again. Providing, of course, that Android doesn’t start employing anti-root tactics like Apple does which essentially eliminates the possibility of almost everybody actually owning their devices.

Not even the rich. Apparently workers earning $90k per year is enough to qualify as enemies to these people.

The rich aren’t people who work for a living. The rich are the bourgeousie who live parasitically off the rest of us. The people who can buy citizenship to nearly any country they desire. The people with multimillion dollars doomsday bunker communities.

I see a lot of people taking issue with how it was handled. An obvious troll controlling sock puppets apparently spurred this, sure.

But the mods of Lemmy World went on a reddit-like spiteful ban spree, apparently forgetting that we can all see their modlogs or simply not caring about it. People got up in arms over the very childish and assholish behavior of the Lemmy World mods, and folks were eventually unbanned in some cases, but still banned from the main communities as punishment. For example, people saying they would just leave and federate their own instance got banned with mod messages telling them “let us help you with that”.