And yet, the Patriot Act and all its evil also still exists.

This isn’t worse as much as it can extend those already unconstitutional evil things for yet more unconstitutional evil.

The fart telemetry from the in-seat methane detector is off the chain.

Changing your workflow is work, but those apps, and Paypal, Stripe, Plaid, and bank account linking services all really exist to harvest all your personal transaction data under the guise of making your life “easier”. There are banking regulations governing (somewhat) how older style payment methods can be tracked. These apps circumvent those regs. Those services are best used with throwaway money accounts not bound to your normal accounts, and at the end of a very long pole, but mostly not at all.

However, even credit card companies like MasterCard and American Express are in on it as well, further limiting options. AmEx is an interesting one, as they marketed themselves as a more premium card, housing most services in-house, and keeping transaction data in-house…only to turn around and profit off of it just the same.

Might as well go back to cash and paper checks at this point. Although a realistic lesser perspective is just to minimize which of these services one uses, and be sure that when paying on a web site to not check the “remember you for next time” checkbox that gathers further information to cross-link your purchases. Can’t block it all, but starve them of what one can.

LOL, and no sense to…I don’t know, unplug it and use body heat like we have for centuries?

Campaigned like shit, arrogant enough to think they were a slam dunk, no platform, didn’t even investigate the very vocal voter fraud the R’s said they did. Why ever trust Dems?

The one good thing about AI video. No reason to pay “influencers” when that content can just be (crappily) generated.

Quinoa obsession has damaged an entire culture. They can’t even afford to eat their own staple crop now.

There are cheap Chinese ODMs that make trackers for companies. Used to be a “cube” branded tracker that was for keys, not sure there still is. Never used the app, just used LightBlue explorer (free app) to scan for BLE devices and noted its MAC address. The app shows signal strength.

If you have to find your thing, you just point your phone around and watch the signal until it gets stronger. Same process the fancy apps use without the creeper crap. This app also let’s you find any of your devices broadcasting a beacon. Fitbit, watch, whatever.

With the advertisement culture constantly pushing “Total T” (which isn’t actually Testosterone) and whatever, it’s a profitable market selling to men that they are inadequate and some magic pill will make them a “man” again. Not to completely disregard the actual real medical use for it, however.

The advertisements (especially on linear TV these days like cable) are almost non-stop to push mail order prescription Testosterone and supplements that don’t do anything, as well, which suggests the male ego is a very profitable market.

Some info on this from the past:

A recent market analysis reports that prescription sales of testosterone have increased from US$150 million in 2000 to US$1.8 billion in 2011 worldwide, with US and Canada driving the growth in sales numbers. Interestingly, a significant portion of men prescribed testosterone replacement therapy did not meet laboratory criteria for hypogonadism, according to a market analysis.

a recent study revealed that out of seven online-only clinics, six prescribed testosterone to an undercover urologist who had normal testosterone levels and did not meet the treatment criteria set by the American Urological Association (AUA) and the Endocrine Society.

Apparently a lot of older men are on supplements or prescriptions for testosterone. Any surprise they’re all so aggro?

Palm Pre did it first. Apple copied.

You’re under-thinking it.

In pseudo-correct but probably not order:

• Step 1: Collect underpants
• Step 2: Keep receiving Google security updates but stop updating Google mainline
• Step 3: Start replacing the underbelly to just raw Linux (or BSD or whatever) and slowly shift the “Android” portion to a VM/container
• Step 4: RIL and other stuff (probably should happen first) have to be packaged up and become their new entity on the modem side (also probably the biggest challenge, but manufacturers and ODMs provide dev kits)
• Step 5: ???
• Step 6: Once the Android side is safely firewalled away from the core OS, start embracing something like PostmarketOS
• Step 7: GUI/graphics are built out with the Android pieces still running in a container
• Step 8: Start writing applications that replace the Android applications, go one by one, remove dependence on each Android application as you go while still maintaining compatibility (I mean the core OS ones that make the device at least basically functional, the F/OSS devs will have to each rewrite/change their apps, or some other magic can be inserted here that isn’t really magic.)
• Step 9: Once the OS itself is beefed up enough, retain Android container for the needs of some for some uncomfortably long frustrating time to maintain, but not too long
• Step 10: Have Obtainium/F-Droid/etc. all simultaneously pivot and start providing apps for the native OS as well as maintaining backwards compatibility with the Android apps in the container
• Step 11: Once some magic point, forced or otherwise happens, sunset the Android portion of the app stores. Keep the containerized Android around a little longer
• Step 12: Sunset the Android container, at this point the phone should be running 100% “native” OS and apps and store
• Step 14: Profit!

There are industry blueprints for this. Apple is probably the best example of how to implement these shifts, from OS 9 (co-op MT proprietary OS)->OS X (BSD-NextStep-based Unix OS), 68k->PPC, Replacing Unix underpinnings with Apple Frameworks, PPC->Intel, OS X->iOS, Mac from Intel->ARM, etc. etc. They frequently used containerization to keep the old running while the new was built up around it and replaced. It is a solid proven design pattern.

And edit72: I’m not just saying “hey magic people do this” - I’ve done this shit. I’m down to help, and I will. But the project owners need to step up for some actual work instead of just putting potpourri on something someone else built. Annoying side-story, I figured out how to cross-compile/rebuild/fix dependencies on a CPAP app called Oscar so it would be ARM-native on ARM Macs. Couldn’t figure out how to contact the devs after much digging to let them know, so. I have 1 of 1 copy of that app running ARM-MacOS native. Would be neat to help them replicate it though.

Graphene would be better off cutting themselves off from Google’s OS future entirely and pivot the fork as quickly as possible to remove all dependencies. Probably too arrogant to consider it, though. Also becomes much more work.

Qualcomm isn’t exactly the best vendor to choose either. They’re US-based, closely-aligned with the US government as a military contractor, and the baseband/processor are heavily integrated on many chipsets, even sharing memory. That means a compromised carrier network could twiddle bits that the operating system sees, if they so wanted. Among many other issues.

There’s something about a Samsung Exynos designed to spec by Google that is actually more desirable even with the lack of compute performance. More fingers in the pot, less chance of some sneakiness working its way in.

Not trying to sound negative in tone, to prefix. Just more factual.

Need is a strong word. Browser can do banking. So can computer, tablet, the bank itself. Check deposit is one thing that an “app” is needed for but happens exceedingly rarely these days. One could also keep an old Android phone around just for that banking app if the usage was important enough. One could also go back to cash, although that has other bulky/theft issues.

Maps also can be done in browser, or open Android map apps like Organic Maps ported.

Digital wallets aren’t really “needed” in the world, there are still non-phone-based techs to replace them. Sure, it’s great having an empty pocket with nothing but a phone, but that is a pure luxury, not a need. Might actually be a good time for more people to stop using “smart” tech to keep non-smart tech in prevalence.

Remember too, all these finance-based “conveniences” are there just so every company along the way can vacuum up all your transactions. Google Wallet gets to see every card/purchase you use/do, for example, even when not using the phone for the purchase.

Fund a dev, volunteer time, and devs need to drop iOS and Android projects and focus on this.

For whatever it is worth, I never saw Saudi Arabia or most middle east nations as bastions of freedom. Selective oppression might be a better term (for the entire damn world anymore.)

Right? A well protected browser is about the best tool in this shi-nternet future.

Back before iOS had apps, webapp devs were clever AF. There was Beejive web for multi-IM and all sorts of clever stuff.

One can still put an icon for webapps on the home screen, and the OS even displays it as a full screen app. (Android has similar but not as elegant.)

Promise I’m not trying to be one of those “but there are alternative opinions” trolls here. Speech isn’t free there, but they can freely talk about things they can no longer talk about in America without being abducted under cover of night and sent to a concentration camp and then randomly dumped in an arbitrary African nation without any paper trail, was the point. Probably a small bit of, “work and money are increasingly hard to find for many, why judge,” was also a factor.

In the grand universe of rage, it seems a waste of time to direct it at easily-ignorable comedians when there’s active Nazi evil to hate and pursue. If anything, ignoring the comedians would literally be their end instead of giving them any attention or clicks.

I suppose people wouldn’t know to do that without the aforementioned rage-attention though, and best to hate-silence all the evil we can everywhere.

Thanks for humoring me, I think the thought experiment was a dumb one, overall, and there’s enough rage to go around for all the Evil things.

Fair point.