Gen Z and Gen A in the US increasingly don't use SMS for messaging. They have caught up with the rest of the world and use WhatsApp, TikTok, Instagram, and other applications.

As they do this, their dependency on iMessage wanes dramatically. When you keep in touch with your friends all via Instagram and TikTok there is no reason to be bound to iPhone anymore.

I am disabled too but I still go out. It's strange but... I'm missing a few body parts, and the small degree of functional augmentation my implants provide my partially-failed biological body feels like fighting back disability through technology, if that makes sense.

It's hard to explain and most people don't understand, but my implants give me a degree of feeling like I can do something more than just endure the loss of amputation. It's entirely psycholofical, I know, but if you're disabled too, you understand.

You probably don't know any trans people personally. I grew up with the same beliefs about transgender people you have, until I actually got to know some of them. As impossible as it is for us to understand and as nonsensical as it appears to us, it's clearly not something most trans people choose.

It's OK for people to be different in ways we don't understand. Nobody has a duty to make sense to *us*. In any case, only about 0.6% of the population identify as transgender. Even if you completely outlawed gender reassignment surgery an gender-affirming care, it wouldn't budge the fertility needle even assuming trangender people decided to have children -- which they won't.

Of course, there's a counter example for any theory about people in general, so there's probably someone out there who chose it as a lifestyle. But that's just not the norm.

Also, employment is a lot less stable than it used to be. When I entered the workforce in the early 80s it was still common for people who were retiring to have worked for the same company all their lives. Young people now live in a gig economy; if they *do* work for a company, often they don't know how many hours they'll get from week to week.

And while things like TVs are cheaper than ever, essentials are often far more expensive. Median rents for a studio apartment in the US were about $250 when I got out of school; today they're $1200. If you have income twice the poverty rate and you follow the advice we were given back then to spend no more than 20% of your income on housing, you'd be looking to pay $483/month in rent. In most of the US even if you have roommates you'll be spending over $1000 per month.

Today it's more economically important to have a degree than ever. While wages for new college graduates have increased only modestly, wages for non-college graduates have dropped since the 1980s. Let's say you're thrifty and decide to commute to a state college. Your four year costs have risen from $3,200 to over $44,000. So families in their prime reproductive years are burdened with debt; it takes years to overcome that and to raise.

We often take poor families to task for being irresponsible and having children they can't afford, but the fertility rate in families below the poverty line isn't that high and it's remained steady for decades. What's happened is that the fertility rate at 200% of the poverty line has crashed.

Most women, with access to contraception and abortion, are doing what we told them is the responsible responsible thing. But if they *all* did it, it would be a demographic catastrophe.

Haha no. But I don't shy away from going all the way on solutions that I deem worth it to improve my quality of life.

Implants aren't fun to put in, they're not cheap, and the devices you use them with - like RFID or NFC locks and such - aren't cheap either. But if you have the money and you're willing to grit your teeth for a few minutes, they're totally worth it. At least that's my opinion.

There is, again if you have the money. I use this stupidly expensive padlock with an equally thick chain.

I hate having stuff on me. Worse: I hate having to remember that I need to take stuff with me, and then realize I need something and I forgot it. To each his own I guess.

I've been through a 2T MRI machine twice and have had numerous X-rays taken, no problem.

I can't count the number of times I've misplaced my keys or cards, or left them at home. Some people are good at never losing those things. I'm not.

But even if you never forget anything, there's nothing like going about your life without ever carrying anything in your pockets. It's truly liberating.

There is no inconvenience: The card is in my hand, and when I'm not using it to pay for something - which is like 99.99% of the time - it's like if it wasn't there. The only inconvenience is getting sliced open to insert it. But that's a 10-minute affair, then 5 minutes to get the stitch out 10 days later.

And no, sadly the card is not truly tokenized. So it has an expiry date. Mine expires in 2029, after which I'll have to have it replaced. But once every 9 years is acceptable for the convenience (I've had mine installed in 2020).

Wasn't Huawei on the US administration's radar for being a PRC spyware distributor?

If that doesn't convince you the US spews out just as much propaganda as China does, I don't know what does.

I'm gen-X and I don't do phone payments either. Not that I don't want to, it's just not part of my groove.

I have many implants to do many things. Paying for stuff is just one of them. But I also open doors, share my contact information, log into my computers, do 2FA...

It's hard to explain to those who don't wear implants, but once you get used to never needing keys, access cards or payment cards, it's hard to get back. I seriously couldn't live without them. Like popping into any store to do the groceries and simply waving my hand to pay instead of fumbling in my pocket, only to realize I left my wallet at home or something. It really does grow on you.

As for nudity, you jest, but my local swimming pool has NFC lockers and I can enroll one of my implants when I close my locker, so I don't have to wear a bracelet while I swim. It's little things like that...

It's not "the Western world" so much as the US. I'm pretty sure Spain or Germany have no problem with hentai.

Case in point: I have a payment implant in my hand. What that is essentially is a contactless Mastercard payment chip from a keychain wearable that's been extracted from the wearable and embedded in bio-compatible goop.

Well, if the payment processor or Mastercard ever learn that my wearable is in fact under your skin, Mastercard will strike it off their network. It's happened to others who didn't keep their mouth shut and got checked out by the payment processor: they were asked to produce a selfie of them holding the wearable, and of course they couldn't.

Why you ask? Because after all, what does Mastercard care where people put their wearables provided they're valid, right?

Because of the religious right in the US spewing off nonsense about the "mark of the beast". Mastercard wants nothing to do with implants to appease the religious nutters and avoid bad publicity. It's the ONLY F*ING REASON. And that forces implantees in all the other reasonable countries in the world that don't have ridiculous religious groups to play hide-and-seek with Mastercard.

...will be translated into "The suspect was resisting arrest and the officer had no choice".

Each. And. Every. Time.

This is just going to be automated whitewashing. Because why would Axon antagonize their customers by making an impartial AI bot that transcribes the truth eh? They clearly have a conflict of interest here.

The only reason diamonds are expensive isn't because they are hard to find. It's because DeBeers pretty much controls the market and only would release a "few at a time" to keep the price jacked up. As other options have popped up that look as good as a "real" mined diamond, maybe the market will finally flatten out and they won't be as expensive.

I might use it maybe once a month if I can't really find what I'm looking for, and use google on the off chance I MIGHT be able to find something obscure I'm looking for. Usually, all you find is junk/ads unless you have it all blocked.

It works out to $638/per registered car.