Report: Trump Reportedly To Do Away With IRS Direct File Program For No Discernible Reason

Myocarditis-Man

No reason? There are millions of reasons! Frequently the reasons are exchanged as a piece of rectangular paper that have faces of former presidents printed onto them. Generally, these "reasons" are exchanged for goods and services.

In fact I'm surprised the Trump administration hasn't created a law that mandates the replacing of all circulating bills with new ones that have his face printed on them. Maybe when he secures his third term in office, they can get working on that.

As for the general public, now they can go back to using the "free" tax filing services from the big companies that are full of dark patterns and impossible to find.

Myocarditis-Man

I made the mistake of buying a game from this company once. It won't happen again.

Much older and wiser me knows that literally the entire point of DRM is to ensure that I can't keep what I buy, and to ensure that I'll have to buy it again in 8 years to keep using it. And that's only if they feel like gracing me with that ability, as demonstrated here.

So my strategy now, is to just nope the fuck out of the entire relationship with these companies.

Myocarditis-Man

No more being able to watch remakes of remakes of remakes, oh the horror.

Myocarditis-Man

We aren't the only country who buys Iphones though. And if the rest of the world, who we are also pissing off, decides that they have collectively had enough of Dementia Don's behavior and as a result they all decide to cease exports to us at the same time, we will be really screwed.

Myocarditis-Man

If I were China I would just completely disallow export of Iphones to the USA. Not at any price. If people here couldn't buy Jesus phones, which are seen as a status symbol, Americans would absolutely lose their shit. And if that doesn't work, I would cease any and all technology exports to the USA. Again, not for any price. No finished products, and no critical components like batteries, nothing. "You need them for your medical equipment? Here's a quarter, call someone who cares."

Think of it like taking away junior's Game Boy, to give him an incentive to correct his behavior. It's about showing him who is boss, and he can have it back when he's not flunking math, science, and history all at the same time.

Myocarditis-Man

Could they possibly have picked a worse time to launch something like this, while Trump and his buddies are burning the economy to the ground with tariffs? They could have released it two years ago, or something. Not that I would want one. I am staying as far away from the cloud and subscriptions as possible.

Myocarditis-Man

Bitchin!

My personal strategy for the next four years is to not buy anything but food and basic/fundamental necessities, and to just save as much money as possible. I already have plenty of crap to keep me entertained. Take that, corporate America.

Only thing that makes me sad, is that whatever amount of money I save over the next four years, will be worth half what it is today.

Myocarditis-Man

Office software is one of those things that could probably be provided for free, while the company operating the service still makes money hand over fist. How? By using all your data to train their AI, and targeting you with ads, of course.

Myocarditis-Man

I wonder if this is true, and if so, why would Brother lie? Other printer makers do stuff like this literally all the time, and their response to the public is always "Yeah we blocked your third party ink, and we will do it again too. Suck it down."

So if Brother really is doing this, I don't see why they would bother lying about it, as the government would not punish them anyway. The only thing lying about it would do is enrage consumers even more if/when someone disassembles the firmware and figures out either way.

Myocarditis-Man

Buying services and then shutting them down, reducing competition and choice in the market, should be illegal.

Myocarditis-Man

You know what's really fascinating to me, is how all of this is going on with Mozilla at the exact same time the Chromium browsers are finally nuking Ublock Origin compatibility. Quite convenient timing. Almost like it was scheduled to be a multi-pronged war on the general web browsing public by the advertising industry, who are worse than the creepiest stalker.

"I'm disgusted with Mozilla, so I'll switch to a Chromium based browser. Oh, now I can't use Ublock Origin to protect myself, so now I'm being ass-reamed by advertisers and trackers, resulting in both my bandwidth and personal information being stolen while my battery gets depleated twice as fast."

Myocarditis-Man

My typewriter manufacturer does not get any kind of license to what I write. Neither does my pencil manufacturer. Nor do either of them have any business whatsoever telling me what I can write. Big tech can fuck right off with this shit.

Myocarditis-Man

It will be fun to watch the already tiny market share of Firefox completely crater when these terms of service are introduced to what few users the browser has left, a lot like it will be fun watching Trump crash the US economy over the next few years.

Myocarditis-Man

Give it ten years and all proprietary/commercial software will function in this way, both to facilitate maximum stalkage of the end-user (e.g. targeting you with ads based on the content of your personal files as well as training their AI on your data), and to enforce minimum end-user control.

Myocarditis-Man

Oh yes, I was certainly thinking that if Sony is handed a monopoly on high performance console gaming, they will exploit it and do nasty stuff too to consumers. There are a lot of people who don't care at all about computers, have no interest in learning and only want to play games. That's why there will always be a place for consoles. But if the situation arises where there is only one company producing consoles that can compete on a performance level with the PC, that will be very very bad for those consumers who have 0 interest in computers.

Myocarditis-Man

Looks like the console wars are over, and Sony won. Although actually it's more like Xbox slit it's own wrists 12 years ago and is finally bleeding out today. That whole "connect to the Internet daily or else we disable all your games" thing was a real eye-opener for me in terms of dislike and contempt for the Microsoft brand. It sticks with me, and they haven't done themselves any favors with their bullying of Windows users.

If I were Sony, I think I would wait until the Xbox consoles completely collapse in the market, and then just reject Microsoft games from the Playstation system. Over the years I've decided that the best way to engage with people who act like assholes (as outlined above), is to become a bigger asshole myself. Imagine Microsoft buying all these once beloved game studios, and then being blocked from publishing on the biggest console platform on the planet.

Myocarditis-Man

The rules when buying anything from a big company are thus:

Don't buy anything from them that you can't hold in your hands, and which is not subject to traditional and conventional property laws. Wrenches and couches okay, digital video games and digital movies, not okay.
If a product requires an Internet connection at all, at any point to perform it's functions and fulfill the purpose that you bought it for, the vendor is going to screw you over. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but eventually the product is going to be remotely altered by the vendor to be more favorable to them and less favorable to you. Count on it.

Myocarditis-Man

Dad recently had to dump and get a new tablet because the library service that he uses for digital books, is switching apps, and the new app is not compatible with his older tablet. So that's another fifty metric tons of e-waste in the ground.

If he had PDF or text files of the books, he would not have that problem. And neither would the planet.

Myocarditis-Man

No. It is about setting a new precedent where the government can ban any service at any time. If the government actually cared about me, my safety and my privacy, then they would stop American companies from crawling up my ass by e.g. refusing to take no for an answer (I don't want a Microsoft account), refusing to respect my personal space (not allowing disabling of telemetry), uploading my browsing history and files to the cloud without asking first, rifling through their contents on my local device with AI, etc etc.

Reportedly they won't even be enforcing the Tiktok ban, they just wanted to set the precedent.

And that is without going into all the ethical issues of ruining someone's business just because they won't sell to a company in the USA.

Myocarditis-Man