They’re like the last ones to the party lol

The US has the same rules, and are a driving force for this. They will enforce the rules the same as they do now for 10k payments. If you want clean money in a bank or if you want to travel with the money, or if you’re just randomly stopped and have the money on you, you will be forced to prove its provenance or it will be seized.

This is already how it works in the EU, UK, Canada, and of course the USA.

The cash itself isn’t the problem, it’s getting that cash into a “clean” system where it can be used to buy anything that isn’t cash. And with everything being non-cash on purpose because of these Nazi laws, you essentially have worthless paper you can’t do anything with.

On your own private media server. If you plan on watching any content that the Mouse owns, you better archive and save it. Because they randomly edit or straight up delete content all the time.

All the Steamboat willy stuff will never be released on their shitty platform. Just like Song of the South won’t be.

You activate online usually and have to enter credit card details, addresses, etc. If you use a one time card, and an address that doesn’t match your name on the account you have to make to you in the personal database, then your sim is blocked until verified. Verification is usually sending them images of government issued ID.

The sim can usually access their networks to create the account and verify without using data. Meaning if it truly was your only device, it will allow you unlimited data to use the ISP website.

When was the last time you tried to purchase a burner phone sim in the USA? You can buy them cash only a few places, but are completely useless until “activited” usually with an online account confirming your identity.

Issue is definitely corporate greed outsourcing issues to a mega monolith IT company.

Most IT departments are idiots now. Even 15 years ago, those were the smartest nerds in most buildings. They had to know how to do it all. Now it’s just installing the corporate overlord software and the bullshit spyware. When something goes wrong, you call the vendor’s support line. That’s not IT, you’ve just outsourced all your brains to a monolith that can go at any time.

None of my servers running windows went down. None of my infrastructure. None of the infrastructure I manage as side hustles.

I’d actually love to take some sort of sea train, underground tunnel or floating death wave train one day. It wouldn’t be relaxing, peaceful, or cheap. But it would be an adventure.

Reddit moderators.

2nd worst, Lemmy moderators

Copilot sucks. Gemeni is a sassy teenager. Chatgpt 4o is actually halfway decent. When they announced Gemeni had a million context tokens, that was awesome. But it can’t give coherent output to save its life. Useless.

I’m fully aware of the few buzzword and marketing pitches that cloud hosting uses. I’m forced to use both GCP and AWS for different contracts and I’m good at it.

The real truth is that most websites and internet services do not need scale. They do not need all this crap. A Pentium 3 could host all the data for most of these businesses and services. You don’t need serverless lambda functions to handle an api when an actual endpoint does the same thing to pull some info. The few companies that need such distributed computing and power, will need a big on-site or off-site implementation. It makes sense for that sometimes. But most times, it doesn’t even then. You’re just outsourcing your engineering and paying a premium.

I have seen so many startups spin up cloud accounts costing thousands of dollars a month when they’re in “private beta stealth”. Literally a $500 laptop could host all of their services just as quickly with no monthly fee. But as long as the VCs are paying, just flush that cash down.

Anything that requires a fancy buzzword is usually stupid but a good way to make money for someone. The “cloud” has always existed as offsite hosting. Off-site shared servers, VPSs, whatever. It’s no different than running CPanel on an LAMP VPS in 2003.

But calling it “the cloud” gave all the business majors a hard on and then the accounts department realized they could manipulate share pricing by reducing the amount of assets a company holds. It’s the same stupid reason many companies don’t own their corporate headquarters or remote centers. They lease the, even if from themselves through another holding. It looks better on paper so the share price goes up. It’s all mind boggling stupid.

It’s a Google updates issue since they’re blocked. Apple isn’t but they comply with the Chinese government just as much as they do in the US as does Google. Remember Google is banned because it would not comply with China. How quickly the Americans forget.

Most likely the corporate spyware that Microsoft enables, requires very recent Google services and Apple services to operate. It’s pretty standard in the corporate spyware world. Usually just a few months out of date at most.

I don’t buy anything on ticketmaster. I won’t install their app.

I still see people I want to see. I just may have to travel to do so.

Anecdotally, yes. I know that the similarities in profile and avatar photos as well as signature lines on web forums have been used as evidence to link digital profiles together. This linkage then allows warrant level evidence to be used to subpoena the other sites for all user details. Another one that is much harder to hide is writing style. People have a relatively unique way of writing that is often enough to link data. Even when the user name, ip addresses, and everything else is different.

It’s a company that’s model is one I support. If you’re not paying for the service, you are the product. Eventually the free-ness of other solutions will run out. There’s only so much VC money and grant money that doesn’t have alterior motives.

Paying a company to provide a service, which does cost real money to operate, makes me more happy if they abide by their rules.

But it’s a snowball type issue. I’m not going to use Threema if nobody else I need to talk to doesn’t use it. And they aren’t going to use it if nobody else does. WhatsApp has critical mass across the world except USA because iDiots don’t understand. Signal and Telegram have mostly negative awareness due to copaganda telling the general populace that encryption is bad and only shady people use encryption to hide criminal activity. Everything else, (excluding China and their whole different ecosystem) is really just nerd talk between nerds.

While I know most Americans feel that way it isn’t true.

Migrants, refugees, immigrants… These words apply to white Americans as much as they do to brown central Americans or darker Africans. When you’re wealthy you become an expat.

A expat can pack up their stuff, fly somewhere else, get residency and citizenship based on investment, and that’s it. Very easy in the 2010’s.

If you don’t have the money for it, you can still go but you’re going to be limited where you can go fully legally. You may have to illegally work to get to a “desirable” location.

But most people who are in the USA came because of relatives that left everything behind except 1 trunk/suitcase and went for it. It is not easy. But it is possible.

To say you just can’t because it’s expensive is the lazy way out. You can’t do it comfortably and easily if you’re poor. But you can walk across the Mexican border, 2000 miles walk, just like others do in reverse. You just choose not to.

For Americans and Canadians on a budget, southeast Asia is a great place. Easy cheap visas and lots of countries to do border runs if you need. You can cheaply buy residency in many of them.

I’m intrigued by Threema.

But I have enough trouble getting people to use Telegram and Signal.

In the end, don’t let perfection be the enemy of better than what you have.

For example I use WhatsApp for like 80% of my communication because 80% of them are non-nerds that are barely moving from rawdogging SMS to an encrypted platform. I’d rather use WhatsApp than SMS.

I don’t have any meta accounts and my WhatsApp number is different than my cell number and is registered internationally in a privacy focused country. So to Meta, I’m protected by those rules and any invasion of my data by government forces would need an excuse big enough for international cooperation. Not just the local PD of a podunk town.

You cannot stop the collection. It ALWAYS collects. It may not transmit, even if connected. For example the black box in many cars is really an assortment of ECUs that contain fine grained historical data. It does eventually roll over and get replaced but the data is there.

For example there are public cases you can find where the police, not even needing a warrant, were allowed to dump this data off of a rental vehicle that a suspect, not convicted just suspected, was thought to have been in. Of course the copaganda story showed that they the used this data which was mostly location by gps and speed by the wheel sensors and gps to get a track of everywhere that vehicle had been in the last 6 months. Every person who rented it and drove it somewhere had their privacy violated. But I guess that’s normal now.

The infotainment systems are the biggest jerks for data storage as they’re just mini generic computers today with lots of storage.

To stop wireless transmission you can remove the sim card from the modem. Many vehicles won’t work or even start if the modem is disconnected (unplugged or unfused). A Nissan for example will drain its 12v battery overnight trying to find the modem if it is unplugged. But if the sim is bad or disabled, it will try and fail to communicate, then retry later which won’t kill the battery.

You lose a lot of convenience and the data is still there. So the answer is basically you can’t drive a new vehicle without it violating your privacy with collection. You can only make the wireless transmission more private or disabled. I suppose you could buy a scanner yourself and before you leave the vehicle, factory wipe all ECUs. But even then you’ll need to enable them for emissions testing and such if that’s in your area.

You escape BEFORE the regime change. You do not wait to escape.

It was evident that this was the path the US chose in 2008 election vitriol and then 2012 with the tea party. Then in 2016 Trump, it was as blatant as can be. You’ve had 8 years to plan and leave. You now have 6 months.

Make sure you have a passport. You should have been trying to obtain secondary citizenship. Even with all the money and education, you are only allowed to stay in a foreign country on a residency visa. Americans call theirs a green card for example. It is tied to your passport. When your passport expires, OR IS CANCELLED, then all the visas tied to it are also affected. In some places you can stay as you transfer your visa to your new passport. Some places you cannot, you must exit and re-enter. If your passport is invalid, you can only exit back to the USA if you are only American. The cancelled part is the scary part because the USA already does this. If you don’t pay your taxes, or child support or if you have a warrant or even probable cause against you the US will cancel your passport. It’s the easiest way to force Americans back home for prosecution.

Your #1 goal should be starting to obtain citizenship elsewhere. If you have grandparents from Europe, see if you can get it. You have relatives in Canada, mayve you can get it. If you can’t, then start looking to buy citizenship or residency with a path to citizenship. This is 6 figures and can be instant like Vanuatu or take years like most of Europe. But again, better to start now.

As the Chinese routinely say, the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time, is now.

The US is vast and it’s unlikely to devolve into anarchy. It may get very violent and bloody or it may become more like a governmental issue where you just get locked up if you’re bad. In that case storing some of your stuff in a storage area isn’t too risky. If it goes into anarchy, then it’ll be lost. Otherwise just keep paying and avoid.

I believe we’re looking right at 1930’s Germany. The parallels are uncanny. Those who survived, left. Those that waited until they were being rounded up to leave, mostly did not make it. And they lost everything they had and their families ever had.

I completed my move out 4 years ago now. I can now eat popcorn and watch the US implode from the other side of the world. I will lose some money, some possessions, and unimportant things. But my keepsakes and most of my assets are now free of the US.

I am not affiliated with them at all:

http://www.dzozo.net/

I purchased from a sales rep for the company over WhatsApp and using Alipay because it was easy. They sell their products on Alibaba as well which would give you the sales protection and all that. I’ve bought about a dozen of them so far for 3 different houses. Wonderful.

What I didn’t understand from their catalog until I got one, is that they are very modular. Basically they have a couple bowl designs, lots of lid module designs, and then a few tank designs. Mix and match them to get all the SKUs.

I got the extra large tanks in-wall with wall hung bowls and then the super awesome everything lids. So the final product installed is just a floating toilet, with some buttons on the wall above it. You walk up to it, the lid opens. You either sit and the seat is heated or you wave your foot and the lid opens for guy mode. When you’re done in guy mode just walk away and it will flush and close and clean. In sit mode press the little knob on the side and it starts the water and then heat dry. You can also rotate the dial to get articulating wash and dry action. It comes with a remote control (why?) and an lcd on top. The soap dispenser inside creates a foam that shoots down when the lid opens. I’ve never been so impressed by a porcelain throne.