I feel like we need to shout from the hills: vote in person. I know it’s unpleasant, and can be a time waster versus mail in. But the hostility for mail ballots is so overtly transparent, we should all be striving to bypass it to beat these clowns.
Meshtastic with mqtt (maybe?)
The uber rich in India are doing ok. It’ll probably be like that. A caste based society
It’s by design.
Once upon a time, the USA had a strong middle class. Billionaires got taxed heavily, and our public schools were the envy of the world. Well funded and produced a lot of great students.
But educated people are difficult to control and even harder to dupe. The GOP realized that if they can gut public education, the masses will become malleable again. Meanwhile, the children of the rich can continue to go to expensive private institutions for their own education. So the rich stay educated, and the poor’s go in the gutter.
You’re correct OP. I think the difficulty of modern times is multifaceted. A lot of other comments here speak to various parts of it these days, but I want to add one I’ve noticed related to this issue.
Pre mid-2000’s, technology worked for us. If you look at the hayday of tech (1980 thru early 2000’s), it seemed like every tech innovation was aimed at the consumer. The tech got better and we did too. The tech worked for us.
Nowadays (and I think I can see all this turning course around the time of the 2008 collapse), tech is not for us. The consumer has become the product, and tech is built around working through us instead of for us. Manipulating us instead of helping us. It sucks.
I have no doubt that if the washing machine was invented today instead of like ~100 years ago, they would be the size of car, and only installed in corporate offices. You’d have to go to an office to get your clothes washed. Consumer-level washers wouldn’t be a thing. They’d tie it to work like healthcare. It seems like no one is interested in making quality consumer devices. The consumer devices we do have are designed to become obsolete quickly without any repairability, so you buy another fast (i.e. all modern cars).
So yea, I think when you add this on top of everything else, it help explains what is amiss with life today. My 2c
Would a Roku work? Forgive my ignorance, not sure if they count as android based
We must all make sacrifices in these trying times