FriendOfDeSoto

Because we don't want an American system where 16 blorbs equal 1 waboom. We want as much centi and milli as possible! Resistance is futile.

People who really want to communicate with each other will find a way.

I think English<>French is a language pair you could get instant translations with the help of Google. So there's a tech solution that will cause humorous misunderstands but will make do. You could hire somebody who is bilingual for the first meeting to let the parents talk behind their kids' backs.

If they are French, they may actually be able to have a simple conversation in English but the boyfriend wouldn't know because they lose this ability the moment they cross the border back into France. That's a silly stereotype but I like it.

So, as I said, we need to look at the legal situation at the same time. The assholery of the bank is possible due to the assholery of these OS restrictions and the duopoly of mobile OSs. Everybody wants to have a walled garden. Outlaw or at least restrict walled gardens.

One thing politicians like to say is that they want to protect consumers. Forcing consumers into walled, privacy-invading gardens for essential services such as banking should be a change item on their agenda.

So looking at the status quo you're correct. I'm just hopeful we can change that. I'm also looking at these mobile compute devices in our pockets as universal ones. They can run any instruction set that doesn't burn their hardware. All of these restrictions - chipped components, unaltered OSs, software only from one place - are man-made/big corp imposed. With a view to a walled garden. That's where the law needs to intervene so you can bank safely from where you want.

We humans always underestimate the time it actually takes for a tech to change the world. We should travel in self-flying flying cars and on hoverboards already but we're not.

The disseminators of so-called AI have a vested interest in making it seem it's the magical solution to all our problems. The tech press seems to have had a good swig from the koolaid as well overall. We have such a warped perception of new tech, we always see it as magical beans. The internet will democratize the world - hasn't happened; I think we've regressed actually as a planet. Fully self-drving cars will happen by 2020 - looks at calendar. Blockchain will revolutionize everything - it really only provided a way for fraudsters, ransomware dicks, and drug dealers to get paid. Now it's so-called AI.

I think the history books will at some point summarize the introduction of so-called AI as OpenAI taking a gamble with half-baked tech, provoking its panicked competitors into a half-baked game of oneupmanship. We arrived at the plateau in the hockey stick graph in record time burning an incredible amount of resources, both fiscal and earthly. Despite massive influences on the labor market and creative industries, it turned out to be a fart in the wind because skynet happened a 100 years later. I'm guessing 100 so it's probably much later.

Why isn't this a popular thing? Because the majority of people on this planet does not care about time zones and either doesn't have to deal with them at all or doesn't see a problem when they do. It's tradition, it's convention, it's well-established, and it just works for most people. We should abolish DST but otherwise this ship has sailed.

We should use the aftermath of a civilization killing meteor hit or thermonuclear war to decimalize time keeping - it would need a catastrophic, cataclysmic event like that. A day is now 100 jiffies long. Each jiffy has 100 centijiffies. Now, if we could alter the time it takes the Earth to orbit the sun to something more even that'd be great.

Google has a vested interest in keeping Android open source. Because the moment they turn away from that more antitrust action is going to hit them like a ton of bricks.

What's an "important app" to you here?

It's not just Americans. There are many countries in Asia where the default is year month day. If you ever had to organize files by name and date this is the supreme sorting order. Both Europe and North America are getting it wrong.

If this gets you mad don't ever look into how the French count from 80 to 99. Or how languages disagree on what's blue or green. These things happen.

But that's not all phones, is it. If you buy your phone directly from Google, you made a mistake. Like buying one from Apple. If Google want to continue to claim Android is open source, they have to allow for devices that forego any of this crap and boot vanilla non-Google-Services Android. And if you're privacy oriented enough, you will give up on apps that are not.

And given enough time somebody is going to work out how you fool a modified system into booting. The problem is legal. Depending on where you are circumventing any digital locks can mean jail time at worst. We have to address the legal situation at the same time.

Security is one thing. I was more thinking about the pain of having to move everything again when the single provider goes bankrupt or becomes politically intolerable or gets swallowed by the kraken.

The solution should not be one single provider. Use Ente for pictures, maybe Proton* for other cloud storage and Docs replacement, look into a Nextcloud server hosted by another provider for calendar and email. Don't put all your digital eggs in one walled nest.

*Proton is plagued by a CEO who can't keep his mouth shut about politics. Look into that and how you feel about it before you sign up. Their VPN is good but I wouldn't use them also for email to make switching less of a headache - and I don't think you could use your own domain there anyway.

Why is this in privacy? Because it's an obfuscation, which is good, or because there will be another database to be hacked, which is bad?

I was disappointed they didn't go for a system like these three words. Or just structuring their addresses around street names and house numbers, like normal people. If you don't know: currently, addresses are not written as 123 Example Road but mostly as Subdistrict name and number, Block number, House number. The splits into numbered subdistricts is fairly random, the block split just fairly less random, and the house numbers can be in order of building completion so number 6 can be next to number 13. Most streets have no name. It's so utterly absurd that even if you knew the address there is no guarantee you will actually find the right place without a map provider with correct addresses. It's a miracle not more people die because first responders couldn't find the right address. But they don't change this system, no, they just exchange one incomprehensible system with rando numbers and letters! Well done, the Post Office.

If we needed everyone we want to name anything after was required to be a saint, we wouldn't have anybody to name stuff after.

Churchill - the man who rose to lead his country through WW2 - was a big colonial killer in India before. Both the reformator Luther and the philosopher Kant were raging antisemites. A non-insignificant number of US founding fathers held slaves. Bill Clinton balanced the budget while molesting an intern (and allegedly worse). It's rare that we already know the president is a sexual predator before he gets elected. Yet, there will be a probably very small library named after 47 if there isn't one already. It's probably the best library in the world!

History goes through many hands before it gets whittled to a generally agreed upon narrative. Churchill was lucky in real life. Daystromn was lucky in canon. And while sympathies may change over time, I'm not expecting a name change in trek Okinawa.