If I already own everything and I have a limitless supply of robots to tend to my needs?

Yeah I need some engineers to keep the robots going and some thugs to keep the engineers in line but that's a few thousand people tops. Everybody else can just go live in squalor.

If you've ever seen an Indian reservation before the casinos that's what the Epstein class has in store for you and me.

Basically they are tired of the exact kind of dependency you are describing. And they are taking steps to eliminate that dependency.

There is absolutely no commodity here or anything approaching something regulated by futures trading. This is obviously just gambling.

These gambling businesses are draining about 60 billion a year mostly from Young men. There will be long-term social consequences and if you're not really old and about to die you will experience them. Like it or not you and I all live in the same society.

The message will get refined over time.

When the Republican party in the right wing first started trying to get us to have a freak out over a trans girls they focused on how icky they were and how they were going to rape your daughter in the bathroom.

That didn't really work. Voters demanded that the Republicans stopped going on and on about trans girls and do something about the collapsing economy and out of control inflation. A few of the Republicans that ran on trans panic lost their elections.

The Republican party though refines their message and their tactics. They knew they had something because their focus groups indicated that people didn't really like trans girls...

So they tried something else. In this case two things. First rapid onset gender dysphoria. A bullshit belief that your kid was going to suddenly turn trans because they saw it on TV. Basically the 2020 equivalent of violent video games turning you into a killer.

The second was trans girls in sports. Two trans girls were allowed to compete long before they should have been and they smashed records. That really struck a nerve because it hits on that basic concept of fairness that all animals have. Nobody even remembers that both girls were stripped of their titles and records and adjustments were made. To this day people are still bitterly angry.

Those two worked. They've created a huge moral panic that has swept multiple Republicans into office. Some of the most extremest Republicans you can imagine. Meanwhile gas is up a dollar a gallon and inflation is out of control. But at least nobody is transing your grandkids right?

What's worse is when you point this out it really pisses people off. People don't like being told that they have been made a fool of. It's much much easier to just get angry shout a few things maybe post a few comments and tell yourself that you were right. You were always right.

Meanwhile the price of eggs keeps going up and the price of gas keeps going up and we are about to see food shortages because of the war in Iran

When the work week was established it was a compromise between workers and the ruling class. Even back then there was a push to work fewer hours.

In the old days you worked a farm and you would wake up early in the morning and do your farm work and when the work was done that was it. No more work.

Factories and modern Capital brought a system of endless work. Where you could just work and work and work and work. People who remember the time when you did your work and when you work was done that was it there was no more work remembered that and were kind of pissed that they lost that.

After a hell of a lot of violence there was a compromise of 40 hours. But we seem to have forgotten that 40 hours a week wasn't the goal it was the compromise.

The ruling class though, the Epstein class. Those guys didn't forget. They've been chipping away at the gains made by the labor movement since the 1970s. More importantly they now have a standing army over us in the form of militarized police. The founding father's new damn well did a standing army was bad news. They created a shitload of checks and balances to try to keep that under control and more were added later. And we pissed all that away because of a minor crime wave...

And now we have ice which is something like the third largest military in the world. And they're running around with masks and fully automatic weapons yanking people off the streets and disappearing them for weeks on end. Sometimes forever.

I assume they are gonna finish the sexbots before the T-800 units? "Ackshually", I remember from S.M. Stirling's Terminator books that there was another terminator model I-950 that was female and use charm and sex appeal to infiltrate.

Okay Sam, how about we also tax the robot labor of intelligence. You're outsourcing thinking as much as a humanoid robot is outsourcing moving widgets. So, should we start by taxing the ever lovin shit outta OpenAI, praytell? That's a lot of robot brains you have there in those GPU farms, bud.

It runs MacOS and it's pretty fast, unlike any netbook ever.

Yeah it's got gimped specs but they will be fine for most users, unlike netbooks.

I'm just curious as to why you'd use that instead of any manufacturer or google's offering, since those are feature complete, have no ads and no in app purchases.

"I used it when options were worse, and I just like it the way it is" is a completely justifiable reason. A lot of things in our lives, there are better options but having to switch carries cognitive and time costs that are just not worth it.

We always like to blame the kids because we're old farts and old farts hate kids because kids backs don't hurt all the time and kids have their whole lives in front of them whereas we're staring down the barrel of eternity..

But no the problem isn't that young people don't care about truth. The problem is virtually all of the news outlets have been bought up by a handful of billionaires and those billionaires not only don't care about the truth they are actively opposed to it. So the last thing they're going to do is buy a bunch of AP stories and run them and pay the AP for real journalism. They want AI generated slop propaganda that tells you how great having an Epstein class is.

So for example they don't want journalists reporting on all the dead bodies in Iran from the civilian infrastructure we are targeting. And they don't want journalists explaining that when Trump said he would attack Bridges and power plants in order to get leverage during the negotiations that it became a war crime because you aren't allowed to attack civilian infrastructure just to get a leg up and negotiations, they have to be legitimate military targets.

Stuff like that is why the AP needs to go. Now billionaires don't do things out right and directly because you would notice and get pissed off. Instead they buy up all the newspapers and TV stations and then just stop buying content from journalist outlets. And then the predictable happens that the associate press can't make enough money to survive and here we are.

And most people don't put two and two together and realize that it was downstream impacts from the Epstein class season control of our media that killed journalism. Instead we blame tiktok which is to say young people because tick tock is associated with young people...

When you know damn well they're not going to happen. It makes it look like you are getting out ahead of all the problems you're causing even though if there was the slightest chance of us actually taxing them they would spin up dark money super packs so fast your head would whirl.

Throughout all of human history everything you have has been taken from the Epstein class with that best the underlining threat of violence.

Unfortunately violence doesn't really work anymore because you cannot beat a standing army. Fuck over 200 years ago the people who found it America knew that and they didn't want standing armies because of it. But you have to have a standing army or somebody else with a standing army comes over here and takes your stuff.

Honestly I just saw a story about how the police are using the data generated by people's routers to track where they're moving in their homes and who is entered their homes and where people who are being tracked have moved in the homes. I mean Jesus fucking Christ what do you even do with something like that?

Honestly don't think this civilization has a future. People are too fucking stupid. Every single system designed to protect you is collapsing and every single right and privacy you have is being taken away and about 40% of the country is deathly afraid that trans girls are going to play in women's sports. Sports they have never once given one rat's ass about..

I get it it's a moral panic it will eventually burn itself out but Jesus fucking Christ it never should have happened in the first place. It's like when we all freaked out over mortal Kombat or when we all freaked out over Satanic music lyrics or when we all freaked out over comic books or when we all freaked out over Penny dreadfuls or when we...

Seriously at some point we should fucking figure out the pattern.

Nobody? Let's run down the list shall we?

Firstly we're talking about the core messaging app. I think people would be rightfully pissed if they were given a phone which lacked an app to send and receive SMSes out of the box. That's what we're talking about here. Samsung is replacing a core phone feature with a Google app. No thanks. Samsung messenger is nice and basic and does what it needs to do.

Samsung Browser - I use this. It's Google Chrome except you can install adblockers on it. Because God knows Google Chrome is a piece of shit on Android.
Their App Store - I use this. Only for one or two apps, but Google arbitrarily blocking apps from Huawei is a pain. Samsung still allow Huawei to publish apps in their store. Competition is a GOOD THING. You want vendor lock-in go buy an Apple toy.
Fitness tracker - I know plenty of people who use this. I use a Huawei one, but virtually everyone with a Samsung Gear watch or the Samsung Ring (which sold incredibly well) will need this app for core functionality.
Payment System - I know plenty of people who use this. Not everyone likes to be locked into Google Wallet, and above all not everyone CAN be locked into Google Wallet. I used to use Samsung's payment app back before my bank supported Wallet.

Bixby, and AppCloud - I'll give you that, that's a cancer. You can't actually disable Bixby though.

Precisely none of those need to be removed to make the phone fit for purpose or usable. In fact all of them do precisely nothing unless you click on them.

Poor phrasing. You say it is doing so without consent but then admitting that you actually give it consent and that you blindly click agree to whatever is on the screen? Maybe someone else should setup a phone for you.

It can be disabled. If someone doesn't know how pre-installed apps can be disabled then there's really no helping them. This was a feature introduced in Android 4.0 some 15 years ago.

[learn to internet]

Everyone who cares about this already knows this

You don't actually care

So fuck off

I think you'll find most people actually know how to use a phone and for apps they will never use they simply long press the app and then hit "Disable" which not only removes the app from the home screen, but also blocks it from updating freeing up space on the user writable partition on the phone.

Forgive me if I sound snarky, it's probably due to the fact that this feature has existed for FIFTEEN YEARS having been introduced back in Android 4.0

  Also I'm not sure anyone on the face of this planet would call the default shipped SMS/RCS messaging app "bloatware". People generally expect the phone to do out of the box functionality of a phone when they open it up. What else do you consider "bloatware"? The contact list? The phone dialler? How about the OS itself?

Samsung has always had a messaging app. Always. In fact in the early days of Android *all* phone vendors had their own messaging app and virtually none shipped with a Google default.

And? Early adopters have bugs. The question is was your ex happy with the phone, not whether it lasted as long as someone other than her expected it to.