It’s really gross to me how people misrepresent taxes so often.

And especially people who I KNOW aren’t complaining about OASDI and Medicare, other than perhaps they need MORE funding. Yet they include those when they toss out random numbers like “25%”.

The tax rates are defined and published. These aren’t fuzzy numbers we can play with, like survey results or experimental measurements or estimates. It’s literally just math and yet people refuse to do it.

So you’d rather be spies on by the formerly largest panopticon ever created AND not be able to side load?

If you think Apple is some paragon of privacy you might want to do some research on that lol.

I have a vague memory of reading an article years ago (can’t find it now) about how pre-industeializarion, the average number of people an individual interacted with and knew wa much smaller.

We used to live in small villages. Houses would contain extended families. You’d probably know your neighbors pretty well. You’d know the people you went to church with. It was not uncommon for someone to be born in a village and live their until their death without ever leaving that village.

Whenever I hear people talk about how humans NEED social connection I’m reminded of that. My college graduating class was perhaps more people than several generations of my ancestors interacted with. There’s a strong argument that we have hyper-optinizsd socialization today. Constantly connected to dozens of people we know and millions that we don’t. Stimulation, novelty, and distraction enough to last more lifetimes than I can imagine.

Perhaps in this modern age, the person most difficult to engage with and the most important, is the self.