There is no simple answer to this. It’s like at least three factors interacting. How much empathy do you feel towards the other person? How close is your relationship on the scale of strangers bumping into each other on the street to best friends forever? How big an issue has any of this been objectively (or as close as you can get there)? So that’s three sliding scales to adjust to get an outcome. The closer a relationship is, the harder this can be because there is history and people (I’m including myself in this) can be very petty.

Just judging by the hints you dropped you should probably reconsider your approach to your coworkers. And I don’t mean you need to be submissively apologetic all the time and share everything from your private life, even your hemorrhoid problems, with the crew. You’ll probably make your life easier just on a human level plus improve odds of promotion if you do more of that, even if it feels more line cosplay to you. I share your “grow the eff up”/no bullshit stance but that only works in a group of like minded people.

I think it’s the wrong label, anti-intellectualusm. Sense of reality might do it more justice. I think there are two factors at play. 1) how much does higher education cost you? Does it put you in debt you’ll be lucky to have paid off before you retire? Have other people gotten degrees and still ended up unemployed? Why get majorly in debt to get no job in the end? That’s more a North American specific problem. I’m in Asia and I haven’t heard anybody shit talking college degrees in favor of the trades. 2) We need plumbers and carpenters and welders and whatnot. And due to declining birth rates in many places and the fact that the numerous birth years of the boomers are retiring and will continue to retire in the short term, we are running out of sparkies, masons, and HVACs. So if you had to career advise people today, you’d be silly not to bring up a profession with near certainty of getting a job once you’re trained up.

Shitty work environments exist in more high brow professions as well.

I think your definitions don’t quite match common use. When people think about sideloading, they think about installing apps from a third-party source that are not approved by the primary vendor. That’s precisely what Google is going to block.

See the end of my pervious comment. The fact that we call that “sideloading” in common parlance is a magic trick Google has already played on us and we ate it up. Resist.

The way I understand sideloading is installing an app through a way that isn’t Play. So F-droid - as one example - is sideloading because you need to go through the overly dramatic warning messages to enable the install from unknown sources. If all the devs in F-droid’s repository theoretically registered with Google, nothing will change. The only difference is that Google wants to know who made it. They make it harder and shittier and thus limit our choices, yes. But they don’t block everything outright.

The problem arises for apps, whose developer doesn’t want Google and by legal extension the American judiciary to have access to their information. That’s a privacy concern that I find very concerning too. I’m not defending Google’s choices here. I hate it. I also don’t like the inevitable hyperbole going the other way.

Not defending Google but I have a but (no typo - although I’m the proud owner of a double t version as well. But I digress.)

Google is not getting rid of sideloading. They are implementing a registration process for devs and then do a check if they have the info on record before allowing an app to be installed. It is possible for you to download an APK from wantsomalware dot com and install it as long as the developer registered with Google - as all the malware dipshits will manage to do on burner accounts, which will not curb the spread of malware, which is their stated aim. Technically, your bank could distribute its app on its website as long as they registered with the Goog. But it will render abandoned projects uninstallable and that’s the rub.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like this either. Twisting their words though isn’t helping either.

Corey Doctorow pointed out that it is mad that we call it sideloading. Installing an APK is the same, whether it’s coming from Play, F-droid, or the dark web. There should not be this distinction. Lobby your politicians on this matter. G will not GAF about this petition - it’s PR for the cause at best. Only the tag team of legislature and judiciary can set this right.

I think your sister is stuck in an unenviable position. This shit is new. All good studies that I would label reliable information are surely yet to come. The lab coats are just getting ready to dig in. And everything that’s out there on the internet today is piecemeal or corporate PR.

A dult R ecording S urveillance E nforcement

would be a better acronym if you ask me.

People are mad. There are mad people on both sides.

Consumers can feel very empowered by a few hundred followers and one bad experience. And that translates more into a diss track, embelished and dramatized, than an honest review. Entrepreneurs justifiably fear this because this can hurt their businesses significantly. So they fight back with this legal retcon attempt. It’s most likely not enforceable - and they probably know that too. If they wouldn’t mind you speaking positively about you online, they cannot keep the negative stuff out either (as long as it is based in fact, libel is a different story). This little boiler plate serves only to give pause to the consumer. It plants a seed of restraint in their minds (if they actually read it).

Humans are a complicated species.

It did for me. Anything with file access will ask for permissions first time around. (Android 13)

We can all agree kids shouldn’t be watching porn. We do not agree on how to achieve this.

That was only option 2.

You need to try for yourself. Or consult a therapist who knows you well enough. Us idiots on the internet cannot look inside your head.

Consider leaving reddit. Vote with your feet. I did when they made these API changes and I beat the FOMO with my furious anger.

A lot of good ideas like that died when reddit pulled APIs or made access to them prohibitively expensive for developers. They are so set on making you use their shitty app.

I would say “AI” didn’t decorate it either. It provided an image of an idea. It’ll take the fictional wife another 30 years to make it happen. And my money is on divorce before that. How come it’s her job only? Pull your finger out of your butt, “AI” meme maker, and do it with your wife.

If you were using Photos as a photo roll app you need to stay angry at yourself a while longer. That’s on you when you should know you cannot trust the G. Don’t grant an app permissions to photos and videos that could sync it to the cloud. And as another precaution, don’t keep sensitive pictures in the DCIM folder. If I have to take pictures of sensitive documents like that I disable WiFi (sync set up on WiFi only), take the picture, move it to a folder that’s never backed up elsewhere on my phone, and then turn WiFi back on.

You are not normal because you care about these things. The normal user doesn’t care and that’s who they are catering for. I’m not excusing their behavior (I don’t like it either) and at the same time you need to be more on your toes.

I’m planning to move to Ente this year when my Google cloud subscription runs out. Not looking forward to the work it entails but to the [paints face blue] FREEDOM!

I think the future will surprise us with a new method of digital obfuscation other than bitcoin et al. Crypto is a bit tainted. We can only look at the tools we have available today to make a guess about the future. My belief is that we will come up with something new, something else that isn’t as speculative and volatile. People don’t want their bribes to be devalued because some people found their long forgotten hard drives with crypto wallets and eff up the exchange rate.

Maybe barter is the wrong word in this instance. I mean rudimentary, handshake trade within an equally rudimentary community. Farmer A has wheat, hunter B shot two deer. A agrees to give half a blurb of wheat to B for 2 blorbs worth of prime venison. Both make it through the winter. That’s what I meant.

I’m not Scandinavian or live there, I think they are possibly the most cashless countries today. I’m in Japan where we just moved away from fax machines for banking and cash is very much alive and well. So I don’t have any specific experience to share, just general thoughts.

how much longer until they take cash and browser-based banking from us?

I would question the framing here. I don’t think “the man” will come in and “take it from us.” The move towards digital money and online banking isn’t so much prescribed by a dark cabal than it is driven by convenience. If the majority of people didn’t find anything useful about it, they would not adapt these things like tap to pay or online banking.

Bartering wasn’t made immediately illegal when currency came in. Currency was made to make bartering easier and more fairly divisible. Things changed at a glacial pace to get to our modern economy.

Banks and credit unions do have an incentive to get you to do your banking online. They can close all their locations except for ATMs and get you to do your in-person interactions with a central video call center. That saves them labor costs and they like that.

And security agencies and the revenue service like people spending digital, traceable money. It cuts out the gray area where under the table shenanigans take place.

As far as a push to online banking is concerned, there are a few factors that overlap. The aforementioned labor cost issue for the banks. A lack of legislation or regulations to provide banking that is accessible to preferably all people online. And then there is competing regulations to make it safe for people to use. And with that you run into the issue that you need the two biggest mobile OS’s to get you access via the web or the app that does all. This is where we need to lobby our political leaders and the stance should be: don’t leave grandma in the lurch. We have more old people than young ones in most western countries, old people vote in higher numbers, let’s frame a way to preserve online banking in the most privacy-friendly manner around how an octogenarian should be able to use it safely. I think this is how you cover most bases with a good chance of success, even in the pre-authoritarian US. That should include browser-based banking and authentication means that don’t only depend on Google and Apple.

As far as cash or concerned there will come a point where governments and central banks just throw their hands in the air and say: it’s too expensive to keep printing and then maintaining the money in physical form. That’s it, we go digital, damn a possible apocalypse and the fact that when we do we will be absolutely hosed when that happens. And, realistically, even if we retained physical money during the apocalypse, the economy would still collapse. Wars have shown us that money is quickly replaced by barter of cigarettes, booze, and other desirable or necessary goods. So you’re “only” left with the privacy and liberty considerations to spend cash without anyone keeping a constant ledger. And I fear they will be drowned out by “hey, we can stamp out all drug trafficking” promises. Not realizing that like most rivers finding the sea most drug traffic participants will find a way in the new digital only system as well. And that gives me hope. I think we will see physical cash disappear this century. But at the same pace, people will find ways to avoid being tracked.

What can you do? Keeping your fingers crossed, become politically engaged with parties who want to protect old people in an online banking world, and vote for politicians who want to preserve cash. Just know that your best funded co campaigners will be the mob and tax dodgers.

Wortfindungseuphorie.

That’s not universally true. Necrophiles may be past that, according to preference.