Hello!
I’m a nonbinary Canadian Blender artist! You can find my work here: Galleries, commissions, prints, and more!
she/her
It’s getting really bad. You can look up the most mundane, everyday search term and there will be a distracting amount of fake images in the results.
I look up a lot of reference images for art projects and so I have to skim over a lot of AI slop.
One of the many reasons I will never integrate smart home stuff into my house.
My light switches still work because they’re powered by my finger instead of the “cloud”.
It isn’t. Not yet, at least.
Most Americans still have jobs, can afford food, can find food, and have their cars and homes. Some have lost some of the former, it’s true, but not enough to ignite any real change.
Imagine a scenario of Trump enacting martial law and beginning to mass arrest and imprison US citizens in detention camps. Not immigrants, refugees, or tourists - actual US citizens taken from their homes. Imagine the US government gathering troops on the Canadian border. Imagine the government disappearing members of the Democrat party. Imagine the government enacting a China-styled internet blockade.
Those are the things that will likely spark some kind of call for change.
Not going to happen. Not for a long time. As much as we would want it to.
The phone market is brutally, viciously competitive and an outsider trying to jump in without Android or iOS is almost guaranteed to fail. We used to have numerous options from all kinds of companies that came with a variety of operating systems but each one fell to the duopoly.
People are glued to their phones and social media more than ever. I would expect an attempt to get them to move to a non-American mobile operating system and phone would fail very quickly. Blackberry did used to make their own line of phones that ran BB10 and they were excellent. Nobody bought them though, or at least not enough to justify their continued production. Even fewer bought the following Android-powered BB phones and eventually Blackberry pulled out of the market. The same story for Windows mobile phones.
There are plenty of options for non-American cellphones and I’m sure in the coming years we will see Canadian ones too. The problem is that they will almost certainly run Android which means American control over your data and feeds. Getting Canadians to accept a sacrifice in short-term phone functionality to regain digital freedom in the long run is a tall order.
I’m a frequent Craigslist user for both sales and purchases. Selling stuff has become extremely difficult since Marketplace took over as the the “standard” for the area I live in. I’m in the same boat as I refuse to make an account on that shit heap of a website so getting my sales to move takes a lot more work.
It also does not help that the second-hand landscape has changed a lot in the past 5ish years. People expect a lot more money for their used items now and buyers expect steep discounts for like-new condition items.