..."classified a family of three earning $133,000 to $400,000 in 2024 dollars as upper middle class"

The median income in 2024 was $45,140. So a family of 3 all earning the median income would now qualify as upper middle class. Baloney.

This is clearly a rebranding of "upper middle class" than anything truly informative.

>> I use Motorola phones because they give you the closest thing to plain-old Android that you can find anywhere.

Wouldn't that be a Pixel phone? I mean by definition...

AI has been running at a big loss to get the users hooked. It was inevitable that prices would start climbing. That process is nowhere near done, running AI is expensive as hell.

Once the market starts reflecting the actual costs, you can bet the cost/benefit will not be nearly as rosy as it looks now. But some customers will already have gotten themselves between a rock and a hard place and will be sucked dry, then discarded. Those "expensive" people that are getting dumped will start looking like a bargain, but they will have already been snapped up by smarter companies by the time management that can't see past their own toes figures that out.

All of this makes me remember a short story reading assignment in the 5th grade. It was about kids growing up in a society where machines did all of the intellectual work. To them, writing was 'squiggles'. They managed to disable a filter on their "bard" (a story teller for children) and had it tell them a tale of machines ruling over Man.

Nobody expects prophesy from a 5th grade reading assignment.

The problem is that the people who could afford this and would do it are exactly the people the rest of society is better off without.

As a counterpoint, The Linux kernel and much of the userspace in various distros is done remote. It can work, even on highly collaborative projects. Like anything, some will enjoy that more than others.

Required physical equipment can be a limiting factor, of course. Though I have done firmware development from home because the dev board wasn't expensive nor is a debugger for that hardware.

"If you've built great apps on any platform and care about crafting meaningful user experiences, I'd love to hear from you." ...so I can remove you as a direct competitor to our slop.

oh I'm forgetting that he as a human lives with something so dangerous to humans that it quickly killed an otherwise very fit and healthy cop just from being accidentally scratched by him?

So Mudinho came from a crashed flying machine that caused the army (and apparently some secret US 3 letter agency) to immediately respond, has feet and hands with 3 digits, leaves tracks matching the same, has large bright red eyes with no pupils, no visible ears, and can even fool a room full of doctors? got it.

No it didnt, it linked to an article on Skeptoid.com.
Besides so what even if it was linked? I suggested the poster watched it.

... to never buy Apple products. I don't need a nanny, and my children have parents that pay attention. Why should I have my privacy invaded and surveilled just because some parents don't know how to parent.

And anyone who doesn't think this will be easily circumvented is naive or has never had an intelligent child.

There is a nicotine source that isn't at all age locked. I guess the teens will move on to these "cigarettes" you hear about from time to time.

They even come in cool Menthol.

The laws are a joke by people who apparently flunked "Hello World".

They demand a mechanism, but don't even offer guidance on what mechanism it should be. You can technically comply while having no 2 Linux installs following the same API, making it effectively useless.

A better approach would be a purely optional userspace package (perhaps call it "Californication") that returns 1 dword with the age information encoded in it. Each person installing it gets to decide what that encoding will be.

Yes, it returned 0x0BADF00D, that's the code for 18+.

Someone else might decide 0x0B00B1E5 means 18+.

Some early adopters of "Here's a complaint one, pretty please use it" included small operations like PGP. Others were small companies then, later to become large.

Not too long after, there was the whole flap around DeCSS for DVDs. The medium itself is nearly dead now, but it was individual efforts that rendered region coding largely a joke. The Chinese vendors whose DVD players didn't give a damn about region codes came second.

I can buy alcohol because I don't live in Saudi Arabia. I can have an OS that doesn't know or care how old I am because I don't live in California. That law literally doesn't apply to me. If I make a distro where I am, why should I bother with age verification at all? It's none of my business if a friend of a friend or a complete stranger decides to download it and install it on a machine in California. Not my circus, not my monkeys.