Smartphones and tablets are essentially digital babysitters in this day and age.

Go to any restaurant and look around ( assuming you aren't a part of the problem by being addicted to your own phone ).
Make a note of how many families are there with every member of said family doing nothing but playing with their phones.

Go to the park, make a note of how many people are walking, jogging, riding their bikes, walking the dog, etc. all while staring at their phone.

Blasting down the freeway at 80mph and, yep, many of them are staring at their phone.

It's rather sad.

Hands down the most addictive invention within the last several decades imo.
But the Governments will do nothing about it because the devices are loaded with surveillance / data harvesting tech they love.

The smartphone is to humanity in modern socieity what a pacifier or security blanket is to a toddler.
They're fine as long as they have their favorite little toy in hand.

Deny them said toy, however, and they will absolutely lose their mind.

Appologies for the silly question ( I just woke up ) but wouldn't a simple VPN be all that is needed to
bypass this ?

I'm assuming they're doing some dynamic geolocation to determine if the phone is in Texas at the time
the App Store was accessed.

If true, I think Texas will become the greatest salesman for VPN's there is.
( I can't imagine how many have one installed already for sites like Pornhub )

Unless they next plan on banning VPN's within the State, they should probably look at alternatives to
this idea of annoying the sh*t out of all the voting adults while also annoying all the future voting kids
they're trying to " protect ".

The odds of Anthropic only using this for Chinese users is quite low.

I would be more surprised if the public " AI " systems like Claude aren't tracking everything and everyone.
Regardless of what country they are in.

But, like usual, anytime they get caught, they will simply blame some junior engineer or claim this was developer
code that accidentally made it into production.

So, if you become known as the guy who hates these cameras by bringing it up in court / city council meetings, they'll have their primary suspect
when said cameras start getting destroyed after city coucil / courts do absolutely nothing.

It won't get all of them, but banning smartphones for anyone under 16 will likely cull the majority of this issue.
( They can still have a dumb phone to keep in touch with parents )

Parents will have to be parents and keep them off home desktops / tablets / etc.

The other method would be to instead fine the parents instead of the platforms.
( The parents are providing the hardware means to access to the platforms in most cases )

Make the fine cost 2x the price of a smartphone and the parents will take away said phones themselves.

While there are potential substitute / alternative applications that claim to be just as
good as their Windows counterparts, I've never seen it. If they truly existed, folks
would have switched to Linux a long time ago and never looked back.

Gaming is a good example.

While it has improved a bit over the past five or so years, Linux is still lagging behind
Windows in this category. When any game that runs natively on Windows can also be
run -natively- ( read that: no emulators ) on Linux, then we can consider this problem
to be solved.

Music and DAW

I have both Ableton Live Studio and Akai MPC 2/3 on a Windows box. Neither are
available on Linux nor are the drivers that interface the hardware with the software.

Zbrush

To my knowledge, Zbrush is not available on Linux with Blenders sculpting tools being
the only contender that I am aware of. While Blender tries, it can't compete with Zbrush.

Adobe CC and Substance Suites

None of the Substance Suite ( Painter / Sampler / Designer, etc ) is available on Linux as
it is part of the Adobe CC Suite. Gimp is not a substitute for Photoshop imo. Affinity
requires Wine or some other emulation to work.

I have a Cintiq Pro 32" display and I have yet to get Linux to recognize the stylus so I can
actually use it as a tablet. It isn't natively supported on Linux by Wacom and ultimately I
gave up on trying.

As a result, I run two separate hardware boxes. One running Windows with much of the
aforementioned software that Linux can't deal with and my daily driver Linux box for
roaming around the internet.

I see it as a catch-22.

Developers won't commit to a Linux variant of their software because the market isn't there.
The market will never be there until developers commit to it :|

Quantum is nothing but a marketing buzzword to generate interest / investment.

Similar to:

AI
Bitcoin
Blockchain
Cloud
IOT
etc

So, Al Gore used to preach the same things about conservation and how we all need to limit
our consumption of everything to help save the planet.

It's funny how the upper class never seems to suffer through any of this. They're not using less.
In fact, they're using far more than the average person by any measurable metric.

Yet, they want US to sacrifice our comfort for the sake of their own. :|

I laugh when I see the " Please set your thermostat to 78f to conserver power " all while we're
allowing the Team Bitcoin Mining Facilities to eat more power than entire cities. . . . .

AC systems typically use far less power than heating systems ( assuming electric ).

A central heating system can easily pull 10-15kW while running. ( the latter being a two stage system )

It's somewhat easier to build out power generation systems based on variables that you know.

Where it tends to go sideways is when those surprise variables turn up and flip the entire table over.

I suppose one of the ways to counter the unknown variables is to simply build enough generation to cover
twice what you really need. Use a portion of it to act as a buffer for the aforementioned surprises and sell
any remaining to your neighboring States to help pay for the upkeep or the cost of ever expanding demand
as the population continues to grow.

" I have yet to see anyone explain to me how you prevent businessmen from coming in and skipping all the maintenance so they can pocket a shitload of short-term profits. "

It's called State and Federal regulation.

If you don't pass ( and continue to pass ) all of the State and Federal inspections that go on during the lifetime of the facility, they simply revoke your license
and shut you down.

" So says the owner of a U.K.-based used-car sales company that specializes in Evs "

There can't possibly be any financial incentive or motivation for a used car sales company to stretch
the truth about the most expensive replacement part in an effort to boost sales of the used EV market. :|

Is the fact that surveillance capabilities are being built into ( or already exist within ) much of the technology we use on a daily basis.

Even if you never plan on doing anything that would be considered criminal, if you utilize the tech, you should do so with the understanding
that everything you say and even places you go are likely being recorded and certainly can / will be used against you if the need ever arises.

While I no longer use a Windows OS as my daily driver and / or internet machine, who can say if the various flavors of Linux and / or MacOS
aren't doing the same thing ?

It's a rather sad way to live honestly.

The US Government has a stake in multiple companies so adding OpenAI to the expanding list
isn't really anything new or groundbreaking. Many of them are critical sectors / technology /
materials from a national security or tech advancement point of view.

You can read about them here:

https://moeonmargin.substack.c...

I will agree that specific sub-reddits are useful. Especially for niche / strange topics.

However, it largely depends upon what sub-reddits you visit and if you dare to question anything within said
sub-reddits that does not fall in line with the group think found therein.

An example would be jumping into a Linux sub-reddit and praising Linux. Thus would you be accepted and
praised. However, make any comment critical of Linux ( factual or otherwise ) and your karma would get carpet
bombed back into the Stone Age in short order. The downvote button would probably catch fire in the process.

While just an example, the same is true across the majority of sub-reddits found there.
With the most fanatical being found in any of the political threads.

Reddit is a place where conversations are very much one sided and the bots, karma-bombers and ban-hammer happy
moderators are all too happy to keep it that way. Basically, those who dwell within a sub-reddit are all part of an
echo-chamber who pat each other on the back and are quick to swarm attack those who dare to disrupt their digital utopia.

As for your asshole comment, you aren't taking into consideration the other possibility.

Assholes exist everywhere within Human society.
One needs only to go outside, put the phone down and pay attention to see them.

But, as a variation on what you quoted: " If you can't see the problem, perhaps the problem is you. "