Except skip soda.

It’s an addiction. No other way to describe it. Like your coke dealer ran out so you gotta switch to crack instead.

No, go out of their way to sign up with foreign payment agencies.

I miss when phones weren’t all black obelisks. I mean, the features today are incredible and far surpass anything available 20 years ago, but the variety of tactile features and colors was incredible back then.

What a monster. Yeah, I definitely don’t miss the old days of the cellular companies vying to offer consumers the least shitty rates and constantly manipulating plans.

You expect everyone to do that?

https://www.openbiz.io/blog/15-things-to-know-about-u-s-taxes-for-foreign-companies

1. Foreign companies are generally subject to U.S. tax on U.S. source income. This includes income from selling goods or services in the United States, from owning or leasing property in the United States, and from investing in U.S. securities.

So yeah, doing business in the US, getting paid by US people, subjects them to some US regulations. Hence, they are affected by US domestic policy and politics.

Their web browsers are restricted off. They cannot install any apps. This discussion is about what my kids have on their devices, and telling me they might see it elsewhere is irrelevant.

I don’t think you understand my knowledge level, you do me disservice by assuming I’m naive, and your rudeness is because of changing the conditions of the discussion to make yourself right by changing the parameters based on that invented naïveté.

No, I can’t control what they see at their friend’s houses on someone else’s device. I saw the playboy channel at a friend’s house when I was a kid and I didn’t have cable at my house. That’s what kids do. I understand and accept this. I’m not a tyrant or control freak or clutching my pearls. That’s the part where you get to discuss good and bad about social media or any aspect of the internet with your kids, like a parent is supposed to do, and do your best to protect your kids’ mental and physical wellbeing within reason.

Yep. That would be great for gaming. Just swap out the rocker on the right side for a stubby joystick and you’d be off and running.

Support business policies of a group that removes oversight, accountability, responsibility, and makes it so he keeps more money.

Thank you for the unpaywalled link.

That feature photo device is a text-er’s dream. You could probably get some serious speed out of it.

No. They don’t.

I installed the home LAN, set site restrictions, app restrictions, use parental controls on all their devices, use OpenDNS family shield, PiHole, and app installation controls on their devices.

Even of they did find a way to see it I would see the IP address flagged.

Sounds draconian, but social media is fucked up for kids. They can have access at 16. They have a shitload of other internet freedom, though. They’re good kids.

Can you just use duolingo as a translator?

Ok.

(I bet tiktok doesn’t shut down, but if it does I can’t wait for my kids to tell me about all the meltdowns at middle school over tiktok shutting down. Too many parents let their kids have unfettered internet access. No, mine don’t have tiktok.)

Sticking their middle finger to the government so they can keep using another government’s spyware?

Ok.

I think the difference is between protecting wealth and power vs protecting basic human rights.

It’s censorship one way or the other. The paradox of tolerance comes into play. We can’t ignore hate, it needs to be visible so people can be on guard, but we also can’t let it take over by letting it run roughshod and unchecked. Those in charge of media and social media are in the first camp - protecting wealth and power, letting hate run rampant. It drives profits and engagement, the extremes of politics they support give them control.

Did you reply to the right comment? My comment was about theft, not arguing about the portability of digital content. Obviously low-cost high density storage has made the greatly reduced for low density media, especially older analog types.

Problem with the old days was that you had to have each kind of cable for it to work. No LPT cable? No printer. Hope the cable is long enough. There was no integrated Bluetooth or wifi, or even a dongle available. Haven’t even gotten around to the internals yet with ribbon cables for floppy or IDE or whatever.

Yeah, USB-C comes with it’s own issues, but I much prefer this to the bin full of cables, plugs, wall warts, connectors and adapters that were kept on hand just in case.

Really? No company has ever stopped supporting something you bought so that it was no longer usable? No lost software, hardware, games, apps? Gameservers shut down so you can’t play online? Live connections shut down so you can’t start the game? Licensing servers offline so you can’t open the software at all? No lost identifying information in hacks? No service bankruptcy or buyout cost you a purchase? You don’t see as having to pay, over and over again, to listen to the same songs that you no longer own, as a kind of theft?

All of these have a price. Maybe you could rationalize it in the legalese of some EULA that it isn’t theft when you lose any of these things, but nonetheless they were taken from you without compensation. Theft of a legal kind.

The only downside to the loss of physical media - whether it be music, movie or software - has been the inverse relationship to how much of any of those you actually own.