Some brands are better than others. I bought a Sony Bravia TV less than a year ago. The nags are infrequent (maybe every fifth time I turn it on) and unobtrusive (a toast notification pops up in the upper right corner of the screen for a few seconds; it's gone by the time the Fire Stick UI comes up).
Getting rid of ads on the streaming stick and various streaming services is an interesting challenge though...
I’ve had plenty of RokuTVs and my previous home had wired gig e Internet in every room. I plugged the TV to the Ethernet to get software updates, unplugged it, set the TV to always switch to the HDMI port with my AppleTV connected and never thought about the Roku again.
The AppleTV supports CEC and controls the power and the volume.
However, if you do connect, then Samsung pushes so many updates (more ads) than anyone else. My ancient samsung tv in the garage was getting weekly updates for some reason.
This must be a very new or not universal feature. I have an Element E4AA70R 70" 4K UHD HDR10 Roku TV I picked up in mid-2023 for well below $1000. It has never once been connected to the internet, and it doesn't nag me.
Might still be possible to jailbreak LG TVs. Not sure what the quality of the homebrew TV firmware situation is like though. Maybe not stable enough for family use.
Some people have to travel for work. For Canadians, lots of international flights connect through the US (especially if you're flying on the cheapest routes), and there's no way to transit through without "properly" entering the country. While the thing in the post doesn't yet apply to Canada (due to us not requiring an ESTA), it very well could become a thing soon. That would be pretty awful for everyone.
This is literally a data collection scam run by US intel / law enforcement to collect biometrics with some “plausible” reason. Now it’s a chance to grab your passwords and private conversations too. Act accordingly,
I’m on the same boat and told management at work that I won’t be traveling to the US while Trump is in power, which they seem to be fine with, but who knows if that’ll last.
> Those people wouldn't want to travel to a police state anyway.
I fall into this camp (little to no social media besides LinkedIn) and I've had no issues traveling to the EU or UK or really any other police state for that matter. Plan to do more this upcoming year.
My advice is to move out of any big cities to some place with cheap rent and get a job unrelated to programming. Be a plumber, electrician or something and work for yourself, not for some company, so you can adjust your own work hours. Do programming as a hobby.
I do acknoledge the better society that socialism can create, but I'm still not convinced it's possible/achievable long-term. My only concern is corruption.
Some people (we could call them psychopaths and narcissists, even though that's a rather strong word and only describes the worst of them) have a natural tendency to exploit other people to get to the top of whatever social structures exist. There are many of them, somewhere between 0.1% and 1% of the population depending on criteria used.
In capitalism most of these people become managers, CEOs, politicians, cops, TV stars, etc. and satisfy their tendencies by legal means. Still bad for society, but at least legal. In a socialist society, when exploitation isn't easy and "VIP" doesn't mean very much, they tend to become corrupt officials, which in time fundamentally break the entire society. This happend in all East-Europe communist countries.
I don't see a working succesful socialist or communist society without some means of empolying these people in a way that they find satisfying, but still not allow them to break society.
> The fundamental flaw at hand here is the belief that you can reprogram human behavior to ignore selfish gain for the greater good
1) You think that human behaviour is selfish by default (it is, but only until adolescence) and not subject to parental education and/or influence by media and general society. Everything in the western world promotes selfishness. Selfish people are a natural consequence of that.
2) If you read the article, socialism can still use (free) markets, which is the basis of your argument that people acting in their self-interest are still good to society.
> socialist societies unwind because someone needs to be getting less for doing more
3) Another of your flaws is to think that only in socialist/communist societies some people need to get less for doing more. Completely wrong. In all societies some people need to be getting less for doing more. The only difference is which, and how many of them. Poor people in capitalist countries can work 2 jobs and still can't get out of poverty while stock owners get passive income for life. You should judge societies by the proportion between those getting less than they work and those getting more than their work - a statistic traditionally called "inequality".
> pot head Beth no-showed the two group meets
A correct and fair approach is to find out why Beth is a pot head and why she doesn't attend group meets (most likely a separate issue with the group).
College campus communists don't have the resources to do drug education, health (including mental health and addiction treatment), career counseling, drug police, etc., but states (communist or not) do. The communist state I lived in did all that, but badly because of corruption, and treatments and counseling didn't invovlve any psychology, which was entirely forbidden as a science.
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