Not true. Every phone Iâ(TM)ve owned in the last 10 years will make/receive phone calls and send/receive text messages while connected to literally any Wi-Fi network. Itâ(TM)s called âoeWi-Fi Callingâ, and it works on all major US carriers, AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile.

On my dual SIM iPhone, I can even make and receive calls and SMS on one carrierâ(TM)s network while out of range of a cell site, using only the data connection from the other carrierâ(TM)s SIM. I donâ(TM)t know if that works on Android, none of mine are dual-SIM.

At any rate, iMessage is Appleâ(TM)s product - they are a private company and they donâ(TM)t have to let anyone use it they donâ(TM)t feel like. If you need blue bubbles so bad, but an iPhone. There are a million other ways to communicate other than iMessage. Use one of them if you canâ(TM)t afford an iPhone.

They are communist.

God damn is Europe a dystopian nightmare shithole

This is exactly why I don't let stores "scan" the barcode on the back of my ID to buy beer, or whatever else they deem necessary. I get very vocal about telling them no, and asking for a copy of their data retention and privacy policies. All I ever get is a blank stare and "we have to scan it to sell you the item, sir."

I have even called the customer service hotline of a few large chains and asked them for the privacy policy or at bare minimum what they do with my DOB, Name, Address, DLN, and license information, and they flat out lie and tell me that the data isn't stored or logged.

Which is obvious bullshit, because:

A. Why scan it at all if you aren't doing anything with it? Just let the clerk read the birthday and let me be on my way.
B. No one collects data who isn't doing *something* with it. It's 2022, and I won't believe for one second that even Jim Bob's Beer & Gas isn't somehow attempting to monetize my personal data if they are going through the trouble of installing the infrastructure to scan IDs then enforcing a policy to do so.

I liked the old system, where there was no barcode on the back of your license, and there was either a color code or orientation shift of the card to denote if you were of the age of majority. I find it hard to believe that so many people think that kids buying beer or cigarettes (or weed in some places I suppose) is such a huge deal that we need national digital ID cards and such. Imagine if we had biometrics encoded in our IDs here. Every gas station in the country would have a copy of your most important identifying information.

And before anyone gives me any bullshit about terrorism, someone with nothing to live for doesn't give a shit about carrying an ID. It's all smoke and mirrors to monetize and track everyone, every moment of their life, and I refuse to participate.

The Tolerant Left, folks.

They'll be here all week, try the veal.

Considering half the population has already had this, we now know that being infected means absolutely jack and shit.

Of course, he's probably lying just to whip all you stupid fucking libs into a frenzy and, like clockwork, here we are.

Every person in my office has tested positive for antibodies. Not one has been sick since February when this virus actually started making the rounds in force. But keep clutching your pearls that the big-bad-corvids are going to be what *finally* gets him!

So, just expanded welfare then?

UBI has the keyword right in the name: Universal. When we start saying take from the richest and give to the poorest, it's just an expanded welfare program at that point.

Your scenario only disincentivizes people from making over $25,000 or over $150,000, which in both cases drives down the capability for the system to work. If I'm a fast food worker making $15,000 a year and I get the opportunity to take a factory job making $30,000 a year it would essentially be a $5,000 pay cut. If I'm a salaried manager making $140,000 a year why would I take that promotion that comes with a 10% raise if in practice it means a pay cut.

I get it, life isn't fair. I don't make what I think I should either, but I like my job. However, if I need more money I ostensibly have the opportunity to find a better paying job even if it sucks. Under a system like this you remove that option for millions of people. Does that make life more or less fair for those people?

Face it, a merit-based capitalistic system is the only one that even offers the *chance* of being able to get out of it what you put in.

Let's try some... In the USA: 330,000,000 people

Let's give them all $100 a month.

330,000,000 x 100 = 33,000,000,000 $33 Billion a month.

10 months = 33,000,000,000 x 10 = 330,000,000,000

So, in a year, 396 Billion dollars just to give everyone a paltry $100 a month. A basic living wage is roughly $3000 a month for a decent suburban middle class lifestyle. So multiply that 396 Billion times 30. Lets say 400 Billion x 30 then. 400B x 30 = 12 Trillion Dollars

So you somehow expect to find half the GDP of the USA just lying around under the couch cushions every year? You run out of other people's money awfully quickly, even if somehow you had only half the people getting UBI. Or even halved the UBI and kept it Universal. Especially when a not insignificant portion of the population now fails to produce anything at all. Seriously, how does anyone expect communism to actually work?

"Take it from the rich" is what I usually hear. But even if you took the $625 billion away from the richest 5 people in the world, you get about 5% of the way towards one year of UBI just for the USA. Expand that out globally, there are over 7 billion people in the world. It just doesn't work.

Change my mind.

Awesome news! Iâ(TM)m so glad to hear the large telcos have to directly subsidize the small ones. My feelings feel so good when I read about communism!

Never mind that itâ(TM)s a big loss for a bunch of other providers who will just be passing the costs on to the primarily underprivileged minority urban consumers which in turn get to support small ISPs out in predominantly white upper class rural areas.

I guess thatâ(TM)s White Privilege(tm) at work for ya!

News for cowards. Stuff that makes no difference.

Eh, at least in the case of the riotous criminals here in the states, it couldn't have happened to a finer bunch of idiots.

Masks and distancing are disregarding societal norms, you useless fuckwit.

Do you have sources for the papers that have shown this? I need some ammo to show the anti mask crowd.

How does Android allow any old app to pick up unique identifiers like MAC addresses?

That's insane. I'm sure there are ways to do it on iOS too (I doubt the methods are sanctioned if so) but in my admittedly limited knowledge of mobile app development, its seems like something that the app stores would look for and reject - especially on hugely popular apps like this.

Why would anything at the application layer ever need access to the low-level hardware address of anything?

Early?

What dimension were you living in back in March? The line was that we all need to stay home for 2 weeks to make sure the hospitals don't get overwhelmed with the dead bodies, since we were going to have, in a good scenario, 2.2 million dead by summertime. We needed to make sure we could handle the 2.2 million dead and tens of millions who would be in the process of dying without medical care in a somewhat orderly fashion rather than having everyone dying at once which would be a nightmare scenario.

Remember? That was what we were told. Then when it didn't happen, the power-mad megalomaniacs we have in power in this country started the "two more weeks" line, because mass deaths were just around the corner. Then two more, then two more. Then we have to open in stages. And so on down the line. No one politicized this except the media and the governors drunk on their new powers that were handed to them on a silver platter.

As a result of an actual reopening, riots that can't spread disease, combined with testing almost 700,000 people per day because of the new medical tyranny we have installed, the raw count of cases detected is going up, yes. And in many states, the CDC is conflating antibody tests with virus tests, so there's that. But the curve couldn't be much flatter. Deaths continue to plummet. We've had about 130,000 deaths in 4 months, many of which could have been avoided had we not sent infected patients into nursing homes where people already have one foot in the grave.

Either what we did in this country was a success, because we didn't have 2.2 million dead. Or the virus was not that serious, because we don't have 2.2 million dead. Which one is it?