skuzz

Crazy how California is speed-running a transition from liberal to left to Authoritarian almost as fast as the Federal government is transitioning from conservative to right to Fascism.

If America as it is known survives this, massive reforms will have to take place.

Random things like:

• The absolutely useless "impeachment" process will have to be replaced with something closer to Parliamentary "vote of no confidence" - no "trial" to be held by one section of one branch of government. It is nothing more than a sham process. If business boards of directors have figured out how to oust CEOs, the government should have a similar mechanism.
• President can't have God-mode powers nor sign executive orders anymore. The President's power should be severely limited. No one person should be a king. Not sure how we managed to do that one thing completely wrong. The position should be nothing more than a communications filter between government branches, nations, states, people, to push policy and steer governance.
• President could be allowed emergency declarations for 15 days, but their action is limited to deploying aid and resources and nothing more. Congress must then convene in 7 of those 15 days to decide how to proceed, in- or out-of-session. They can get off their lazy butts and work for once.
• President should be allowed to be jailed, and no member of government should ever be above the very laws they control.
• Presidential position could also be restructured. Pres and VP are just pres and pres. They both have to agree for any action to be taken. Why having one person with the final decision was ever a good idea when trying to remove kings makes no sense.
• Supreme Court ideally should be disbanded as it was only created to appease the rich, but in lieu of that, it should be completely refreshed. Possibly size expanded to 20 or some arbitrary number that helps break a focused pile of power by a few. All justices removed, replaced with non-partisan justices. If any justice seems to show partisan decision-making, they are audited by (some auditing body) that is probably not the other justices, like how an FAA flight crash incident is audited by a board of retired pilots. Justices will be term-limited. Justices should also be age-limited. Again, borrowing from FAA, if ATC controllers have to retire at 56, we can age-limit every governmental position. This gerontocracy has to stop. Old rarely means wise. Mental fitness should also be a factor, if you're a Reagan or a Mango or a Feinstein where you don't even know where you are half the time, you're out.
• All government positions are term- and/or age-limited, but a staggering rule has to be initiated so there isn't possibility of a 100% turnover in any given period of years. (Boards already have this concept.)
• Some mechanism should be put in place that makes it more commonplace for states to weigh in when the Federal government is doing something wrong. And one for individual citizens. Voting processes should be standardized and modernized to make every citizen's vote more powerful.
• To toss the Libertarians a bone, states rights. The power distribution has to be restructured. Things like "state pays Fed x money, so state can receive y money" goes away. The state sends some money to the Federal government and keeps more internally so they can self-manage. The economies of each state would need balance as there are many welfare states that need the money in the Federal government to survive. Regardless, each state's economy should be structured so that the Federal government is more of an afterthought. Federal government standardizes processes, roads, specifications, etc. so that interstate trade travel and movement is made easier. Basically though, to limit the scope of power the Federal government has. Not to demolish or disband it, just to make it so even if somehow, in the new system, someone tries to play king, they're but king of very little, and can't threaten states to bend the knee by trying to cut off their precious money. (Which alone should be made illegal.)
• All the obvious money in elections and money in politics and political donation stuff all has to die, for good. Codified into the constitution. Each candidate is given y amount of timeslots on various media, and z amount of campaigns, funded by taxpayers equally. No other money can be used. (Funded by the taxpayers so it's all an even ground and some CEO can't come sail in on his space yacht and run a fancier campaign.)

And at the end of it, governance should be made boring again. One shouldn't get into the job to be Lauren Boobert the reality TV trash soundbite handjob star. It should be a paper pushing position that keeps the country and its "economy" going.

Probably some other stuff this ramble forgot to add.

It's weird how business, boards, even HOAs seem to have a better set of checks and balances than the US Federal government.

You're supposed to take it to the Apple store, where they will charge you $800 to "clean" the keyboard, by replacing and throwing away half the computer. This is the correct user experience. /s

Apple hates making functional serviceable machines anymore.

This is by design. Have it happen in select locations (Colorado, Massachusetts) so the rest of the country can dismiss it as, "well, at least they aren't here," or a detached, "they probably deserved it," while the behavior is normalized. They've started in Tennessee now to get red states normalized.

It's all a highly illegal long con so people don't realize the country's freedoms and laws being slowly eroded until it is too late.

Stay vigilant.

I really wonder if testing in Europe could be part of the issue. In the US, everyone is a privacy moron and leave things wide open. Elsewhere, people are more conservative about sharing location in general, let alone joining a "community-supported" device location mesh network. (Google's and Apple's are also separate "networks" and don't share, other than being able to both track AirTags and similar trackers to report stalkers.) They also aren't as frequent to have the latest and greatest phones/devices elsewhere, as American corps all rig up loan pyramid schemes to push units as frequently as possible.

Apple customers also tend to be more trusting of that 100% closed-box company's software, it's completely possible more people have that feature turned on, making it more functional (and with Apple's dark patterns to trick users into re-enabling features, they may even be unaware it is on.)

The article author could have done a little more minor technical diving as well, using LightBlue Explorer on an Android device to find the MAC address being transmitted when the phone is turned off, and then look for it later.

Apple's devices when using their "Find My" network, while off, actually start using a different Bluetooth MAC address than when the device is turned on. Android's may behave similar.

Gotta say, this is one thing I miss on most review sites these days. They're so basic, they do the bare minimum, very little black-box engineering, very little sleuthing. It's more important for them to receive free demo units from the manufacturer than to do actual tech journalism.

Meanwhile, whales are smart enough to take out yachts. We are this planet's true plague.

They seem to have a very selective presence. With purpose. Limited visible scope in a few states, other states see no presence, and thusly conclude it can't possibly be as big a deal as this precedent-setting behavior is.

It's next-level evil. Normalize the behavior, scare those you want, make those you want on your side to assume it isn't nearly as bad as it is.

The modern them actually has an app that lets you build out recipes and/or scan barcodes to track what you eat, they use a distilled version of nutrition called "points" and you're allocated Y points a day to try stay in your food budget.

I think their older system was also points based just not software.

The app has training content and some kind of social community (that people say is quite terrible apparently because of the other users).

It isn't a bad concept, and helps one understand that a slice of pizza is insanely unhealthy if one didn't already know that.

Where it falls apart is their skeezy subscription model. Best time to sign up is around New Years, if you do bulk pricing you get a discount for the year, if you sign up partly through the year, that discount only lasts 10, 8, 7 months, however many are left. If you want to get a better rate, even their customer service says to just cancel and then sign back up after you're canceled. If they had honest flat-rate pricing and curated their social space/education material better, they'd likely have had something to offer...Instead, like most health tracking/exercise/apps that cost money, it's difficult to manage, expensive, and abrasive to cancel.

Like so many businesses that went "app" - they didn't embrace a usable and sustainable model that fit on a digital platform, and instead basically phoned it in.

Geopolitics isn't so one-dimensional. The US has long-standing agreements with Israel for intelligence, tech, and weapons in the middle east, like it or not. That can't just be unraveled at the drop of a hat without risking planetary stability.

Should the US not have put themselves in such a position in the 1950s? 100%. Should they have been more aggressive and quick on doing anything when the genocide started? Probably.

It wasn't "the democrats" or "the republicans." It was the US Federal Government as a whole. Choosing or abstaining a vote for a candidate solely on world events outside the US wouldn't have fixed that in any universe.

Reality can't be governed by aspiration, well, actually, I guess it can, because a bunch of idiots decided to hold back their vote that could have saved their own damn country, and look where the US is now, and now is only the beginning.

"Oh, I know, I don't like that my current Federal Government isn't being proactive world police in other countries even though I call out my nation for being proactive world police in other countries, so I'll show them by not voting for a Presidential candidate. They'll get my message...What do you mean a Genocidal Fascist Satan crew will win if I don't vote? They'll get my message! That's unpossible! I couldn't possibly be taking an action that will accelerate their genocide and lead to more genocide right in my home town?!"

Maybe too many people live in the world in their head instead of reality.

Every single vote abstainer is complicit in every terrible thing that is currently happening in the US.

Aww, how cute, he wants to choose the prison he will rot in while awaiting his execution.

Simple-minded spineless shit with no concept of how actions have consequences also works. No concept of empathy, (viewed as a weakness in fact because emotions are scary and hard and complex while simple hate is easy) no value in life of any kind.

One is a republican when one is dumb, rich, or both. Mostly the former.

Kinda sad really, so many simpletons that are easy to manipulate and they all have been played like a fiddle for 40 or so years to do the bidding of Evil.