My sister had a marketing gig that she got let go of, because she was so good at selling her product that the company said they established strong markets in her area and didn't need the publicity anymore.
Exactly that: too good at her job.

the Goldilocks zone of just fucked up enough

Hahaha, I love it

But yet for some of us it's the first time we've seen it.
It's definitely annoying af to see the same, tired crap over and over again, but there's still always gonna be those of us "first timers"

The longer you work anywhere -- and I mean ANYWHERE -- the more you see the bullshit and corruption and crappy rules or policies and inequality all over.
For me it has been about the 3 year mark anywhere I've worked: once you get past that, you fade away from "damn I'm glad to have a job and be making money!" and towards "this is absolute bulls#!t that [boss] did [thing] and hurt the workers in the process!" or similar

I think I had seen something about Toro a while ago, but couldn't figure out what the heck they are/were, but I didn't bother looking into it since I actively try to minimize my consuming. I totally wouldn't have guessed "AirBnB for cars," but assumed finance, since that seems to be like half the dang companies that advertise somehow

I often also wonder about when we'll shift towards some combination of like Google Glass types of vision wearables, communicating seamlessly with some form of headphones (or ear pods, since those seem to be so goddamn popular, even tho I see somebody lose one of their two every dang day it seems...) and communicating seamlessly with the FitBit-style watches that so many people sell their souls to

But I'm still also personally really a fan of big screens, hence why I really love seeing the foldable technologies like Samsung's Z Flip and/or Z Fold

...and then there's the part of me that keeps wondering how long it'll be until there's secure (encrypted?) ways for someone to just like 2FA-verify that they're the owner of a car and use like the Near-Field Communication/NFC or Bluetooth or something of their phone/wearables to unlock and drive their car, or, far more importantly and bringing cybersecurity into question, being able to like "AirDrop" like a 2-hour limited usership to a friend or family member that needs to pick something up or borrow it.
Like, I envision some way to use tech to share driveability of a car digitally to friends or family, but I'm sure that all the layers to make it so it's not like the Kia hotwiring problem are gonna take several years, and be a cat-and-mouse continued struggle.

IDK man, I'm just rambling

Good looking out. And thanks for explaining all that! There's lots of stuff with the security and platform that's still currently beyond my depth of understanding (it doesn't help that tech and cybersecurity are screaming ahead so fast that it's one of those Red Queen "it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place" fields where I can't seem to catch up or stay anywhere close to current)

Mine is currently a Pixel 4a, and, ironically enough to your feelings about the headphone jack, which my Pixel 4a does have, one of my personal/primary gripes related to capitalist consumerism and spending, is that it doesn't have a removable microSD card slot, and I personally prefer to keep and backup my photos and files and everything on the local microSD card that I can switch out to whatever, rather than being forced to pay for Google's additional cloud storage.

So it sounds as if we have similar reasons behind the

Removing choices from users, to put them into ... sales
distaste.

I wish I could just pick and choose a company and device that's not massive, that does have a microSD slot (and ideally a second one for a dual SIM), not un-fixable and un-updatable, and reasonably eco-friendly. And I can't help but see flagship models now of major companies soaring upwards of $2,000 USD, which is just fucked. Ugh, le sigh

So I've seen u/loudWaterEnjoyer suggest the Divisions by zero instance, which I applied for (be sure to follow the vetting rules!), and u/Historical_General mentioned and suggested the lemm.ee and lemmy.ml instances, but it appears that the .ml TLD throws a "registration_closed" error...

Anybody have any other suggestions for backups and secondary accounts, that aren't
lemmy.dbzer0.com ,
lemm.ee , or
lemmy.ml
??