Israel is committing genocide. Israel are harboring war criminals.

What's a world cup? America failing; land of poverty and circuses.

I don't get it either, OP. If the DJs don't go mad how do the listeners retain sanity? It's madness. (No, really. You have trades people who listen to the same station day in day out and they play the exact same songs, over and over, every day. Those listeners are demented. At that point you're just listening for the ads...) Tune into the local community stations. All the commercial stations are just repeat rubbish. You'll find variety and local music on the community stations. They likely need your financial support too. It's sad seeing these stations shutter one by one...

Consume the ads like a good corpo-drone. Lobby the unicode consortium to have your emoji added/removed because you have no control over your computer; you have no property. Drone does what the computer says to do. Consume ads. Beep bop.

A lot of money is made through the 'web'; the vast majority of users access the web via a browser: control the browser and you can direct that insane flow of capital. Which is actually a bit strange, because you'd think you'd get a lot of competing vendors, but the global market is served by two really: Google or Firefox.

Google basically shapes the web. They propose new standards and everyone has to go along with them, because they don't have a choice: Google has their own web-browser. If the other's don't like proposal X Google can go ahead and implement it anyway. Now your users will claim your browser is broken, because "it works on Chrome".

Web-devs are just people--lazy and stupid. As memories fade some devs think the web is "Google Chrome" and just design for that, which can make it incompatible with other browsers. "But bro, 90% of my traffic comes from Google Chrome. I'm going to lock in and dial it up to 100%. Hail Google!"

Capital accumulates and now you find yourself in a technocracy, because you were previously fooled into believing capitalism is the way.

I recently read a witty remark that went something like this: two nations were destroyed via British colonialism. They eventually revolted and threw their colonialists out. One chose the capitalist road, the other communism. Both have obscenely large populations: China and India. Which one would you prefer to live in?

Ah... the point I was trying to make, is there's an obscene amount of money on 'the web'. Users are seen as chattel to be sold and brought. I've seen glimpses of how laypeople use the internet: it is horrible. It's more accurately described as how tech-companies abuse their users. The more abuse you can get away with the more capital you can accrue. It leads to a general trend of web-browsers getting caught up in 'controversies' and general degeneracy. There's a lot of money in this game and tech-corps will attempt to overthrow governments to maintain their monopolies. But sure, let's pretend the browser is just an innocent thing used to look up cute cat pictures:

Manuel Bronstein - Chief Product Officer, Roblox.

Maybe a hotel in Ireland needs to be shot up. Take out Pete Thiel once and for all. He's making a big mess everywhere.

gestures broadly at the whole Iran war

I would like to direct the reader to Yacy. It's a free-software, self-hosted search-engine. Users have the option to peer with other users, creating a larger decentralised search engine.

Build it. Use it. Promote it. Finance it. Bupf it, for short. Build the future you want or piss and moan endlessly.

Most of the world is capitalist and poor.

Sports coverage is not news; there's always a sports segment in every 'news' program. Entertainment masquerading as news. Kill Rupert Murdoch and his progeny.

I wouldn't blame fiat at all. It's an issue of governance, classes and growing poverty. Capital has been shrinking labour's share, year on year. Your inability to afford a nominal price has nothing to do with fiat. The capitalist class have just grown more brazen and they've realised no one will say "no".

https://fortune.com/...

If you want to quip about AI being mentioned in the above article do note that labour's share of GDP had been on the decline before 'AI' was a twinkle in your father's eye. It's been a set trend, with politician's endlessly arguing with the working class: you'll get your share soon(tm), but not now. It never came and it never will. The political promises are the same, but they increasingly sound ever hollower.

It's just more capitalists doing what capitalists do.

And the dog brought every camera. He even set them up; installed them and connected them to his internet-connection that he pays for. The dog payed for all of it. The dog did all this because he wanted... well, because the ads told him he wanted to.

He blew the whistle because the surveillance apparatus was surveilling Americans; everyone else was fair game. The complete rejection he suffered from the Americans might've morphed into "mass surveillance is generically bad", which now catches non-Americans too, but he's an American dog who got a fright when he saw the reality outside propaganda reels. The system continues unabated. ACAB.

The state of Isreal is committing genocide and is scared of retaliation.

Build the alternative and use it.

You're either the dictator of your computer or you're not. A government 'forcing' companies to hand over logs describing what happened on their commercial platform means you have not even begun the fight. It's a complete farce.

It's a distraction from the fact all these companies are rolling in capital by manipulating their users--oh, but I want to be manipulated by daddy Apple or daddy Discord, just not daddy national-government. What?

It's a fucking larp. How many of you will agitate against this, but you will still use your fucking Discord/Apple/Google/Meta whatever?

Oh, the government is going to hunt you down for using different software that is non-compliant with legislation? What? In what fantasy land? Wake me up when there's boots on the ground invading people's homes by authorities to check what software I'm running on my computer. It's never going to happen.

EDIT: Sorry, the more I look at this cartoon the more this pisses me off. It's painting Apple as an innocent. It's fucking not. Come on, dear artist, labour more to paint mega-corp dictatorships as benign, aloof, white, middle-class targets. Get fuckt.

Computers are machines for war; if your computers aren't liberated they're working for someone else. You pay for the hardware. You pay for the software. You pay for the electricity. You pay for the data-connection. You create content/data. They take it all. They keep the profits. They don't even pay nominally for the labour.

Shoshana Zuboff will claim it's surveillance-capitalism. I claim she's a reactionary reacting to a new domain of exploitation under capitalism that the intelligentsia were previously protected from. It's not new; it does not need a clunky prefix: it's still just capitalism. Only now this particular type of exploitation can be done invisibly, silently and on an industrial scale that spans the globe.

Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, et al kills. If you use these technology companies you contribute to sophisticated targeting-software used by militaries to kill. You're not a goofy innocent, just wanting to post 'selfies' to Facebook on a Google-Android mobile-computer. You're willfully ignorant at this point.

Putting aside ideals of privacy: economically you're being exploited with no nominal compensation at all. You've been trained to grovel and you wonder why tech-bros have a god-complex as you use their software obeying them absolutely.

You're either free or a slave. Maybe drone is more apt: computer says go here; computer says take photo; computer says input real-name of person photographed; computer says buy this; computer says don't think--just accept--just agree--obey! The computer will set you free!

Addendum: the frustrating thing is this is a matter of consent. It can be halted entirely, but it requires users to make a choice: reject proprietary software. Think about what the software is actually doing with those CPU cycles you pay for. Stop donating data, capital and other resources to these surveillance networks.

Kill all those who hold obscene wealth whilst depriving their sisters and brothers their human rights. Vanquish the landlords, the economic speculators & the remote-owners who make profit in leisure. You should not even miss them for you do not even know who they are.

The vast majority will never see those they labour for or those they support through legalised exploitation in the paying of rents. This anonymity and remoteness of the owning class allows them to be cruel and vicious in their actions. It's also a one way mirror: for the working class must be surveilled in ever more obscene detail. Through technical innovation you will be deprived another fundamental human right! The right to privacy. Every moment of your life becomes their data.

For the working class there is no loss. Until we are all free there is work to be done. Those that shirk that responsibility can be thrown to the wayside.

It appears that China is offering a bold future, whilst Western democracies are decaying and squabbling amongst themselves; their political class espousing nothing but the projected degradation of living conditions for the masses. Social spending cut back! No money for that. Wages declining! Too burdensome on business. Collapsing population demographics! Import foreign labour from previously ravished and plundered colonies.

Housing crisis! What housing crisis? I have fifty properties! Cost of living crisis! Shut up! More of the same! More of the same! Continue doing the same thing! Plunder! Exploit! Profit! War!

Even if you want to spin it all as ambitious rhetoric then China is the only ambitious nation. It has no peers. The future is truly China's to take.

The future is built in China.

This post is acrid; I'm venting. You'll probably feel attacked.

I'd like a serious answer, but I'll probably will only get replies from petulant adult-children though. That's not a provocative jab; it's a statement of disgust. The whole consumer side of tech is largely adult-children who fail to take any responsibility. This isn't even new. From day dot commercial software vendors have been exploiting you.

the market only has two offerings: Google's Android and Apple's

Does no one see an issue with this? A duopoly? It's not even one market in one country, it's nearly a duopoly on a global scale.

get mad at increasing surveillance by surveillance companies (Google, Apple, et al.)

scream at internet, for the Nth time

Just don't use them.

but my Discord my Bank apppppp~

You're all willingly giving up your autonomy whilst crying about it. Why? Just why? The alternatives aren't good enough for your pampered ass? Stick an external battery to the pinephone and suddenly it lasts for two days.

That's too goofy; what would my friends think of me?

Install GrapheneOS on models that support it.

Too many buttons to click; it should all be done for me. Waaaaaa~

Too hard to escape the Google/Apple ecosystem

Are you all for real? Pressing buttons on your computer is too hard? Holy shit.

From what you've written you've conflated separate things. Passkeys are not related to biometrics. Google wants your biometrics. Full stop. Google is a surveillance mega-corp. Full stop. Why are you still using Google? or Microsoft, which you clearly are uncomfortable with? That's rhetorical. Don't answer that. No one's interested in your pissing and moaning for why you can't leave this abusive relationship. Passkeys say nothing about biometrics. They're unrelated.

The surveillance corps implementation of passkeys will always be in their interest. Hardware passkeys are superior to device-locked passkeys that are stored in a TPM. Such schemes are nothing but vendor-lock ins. Oh, I don't want to buy a new phone; all my logins are stored on this phone. It's too much hassle. I can't leave Google's Android, it contains all my credentials securely. Hardware passkeys have no such friction. I can use them on any hardware.

The surveillance corps software-implementation is dodgy too. They've opted not to use some of the spec, which objectively weakens security. They'll claim it's for user-ease and whatever else they want to spout. The ease of silently using passkeys to access data they shouldn't, or to migrate the users passkeys to their new Google android phone--only Google android can migrate you to a new Google android device. You need Google android. Hit me harder daddy.

I mean, really, what are you trying to ask? You clearly don't trust these surveillance-companies. Passkeys are a good. Just like cryptography is just maths. There's no issue with the maths or passkeys. The issue lies in these mega-surveillance-corps that parasitically extract value from your computers--whether that's a desktop, laptop, server, smartphone or some other mobile-computer. You pay for the hardware, electricity, data-connection and you labour on them and these corps take everything from you. That's why Alphabet, Facebook and whatever other shit software-company has valuations in the billions or trillions.

Security is something they want. They want to be the sole holder of your information. They want a market monopoly. Strong cryptography helps them do that. Much like how a serial rapist and the police both like steel bars: one to keep their victims locked up in, the other to keep their victims locked up in too... huh... point is everyone likes strong cryptography.