The whole increasing concentration of wealth and fall in median quality of life can be traced back to basically each individual of the Owner Class thinking that somebody else will keep the system going by employing people and paying them well enough so that they keep on buying stuff.

The whole think is pretty much a Tragedy Of The Commons as defined in Games Theory, only instead of a shared grazing commons that would be fine if just one person had a few more sheep than they should (but gets overgrazed and then everybody looses if more people have a few more sheep than they should), we have the Economic system.

Historically one of the big reasons for the invariable appearance of some kind of social construct above the individual with the ability to make decisions for the group and force individuals to comply (from the “council of elders” all the way to the modern Democracy) is exactly to stop people from, driven by pure selfishness, “overgraze” in the various “commons” we have and ending up destroying the whole thing for everybody - if you have one or two doing it the “commons” can handle it, but too many and you get a tragedy.

And here we are after 4 decades of Neoliberalism whose entire purpose was to reduce the power of entities making decisions for the good of the group to overseeing the commons and force individuals from overexploiting it, so it’s not at all surprising that we are seeing various common systems starting to collapse due to over-exploitation.

I’m pretty certain that whatever societies will be dominant next are not those which embraced Neoliberalism the most as those will be the ones with the most collapsed systems and that stuff takes a lot of time to recover, plus the very people who overexploited them to collapse will do all they can to avoid having stop what they’ve been doing and that gave them so much personal upside maximization and they’ve basically bought politics in the West, so there is no actual will to do it in the Power Elites (there’s a will to get the upsides of a well functioning society but no will for they themselves to do the concessions needed, only for somebody else to do it, which is exactly the mindset that when not stamped out by some kind of oversight entity causes the problem in the first place).

Mandatory random cavity searches.

It’s the only way to keep society safe!

The air mouse remote I use is actually wireless with a little USB receiver, which is generally better than IR, IMHO, though you can’t actually turn the Mini-PC ON with it, wh8ch is fine since purposefully chose a Mini-PC with an N100 processor exactly because its TDP is pretty low and I can just leave it always ON (which is also necessary because it’s running other services).

The thing does have an IR LED and 5 programmable IR buttons (it was designed for use with Android TV boxes, so this is how one could turn it ON with the remote even though most of its functionality is via wireless with an USB receiver), which I use for controlling my TV.

And, absolutely, that stuff works perfectly with Kodi and once Kodi is up (which in my case I don’t yet do automatically but only because I’ve been too lazy to get around to figuring out how to do) I can do everything in it with just the remote buttons, no need for mouse or keyboard.

There we reports of that for some, so it’s worth it to check the model before you buy.

There are however, A TON of models, most which haven’t been flaged as having malware and spyware.

That said, you can always pay more (about 2x to 3x) to get an alternative from a Western brand that’s not one of the big corps (whose products are also “filled” with at least spyware).

The other option is to instal LibreElec on a Single Board Computer (essentially “make your own Media Box”) were you have full control since LibreElec is basically a Linux Distro from media boxes with Kodi, compiled for the main ARM architectures used in those things (A6 and A7 if I remember it correctly), but that requires a bit more expert knowledge and you need to get yourself (or print, if you have a 3D printer) a box for it if you want it to look nice on your living room.

The option I’m currently using and which so far I think is the best is the Mini-PC with Linux, Kodi and the air mouse remote, but then again I’ve been using Linux on and off for 3 decades and for part of my career was designing and implementing server-side software so am very comfortable setting up and using Linux (not that installing Lubuntu and then Kodi on a N100 Mini-PC was at all complicated, as it just works and most modern Linux distros seem way ahead of the stuff I’ve worked with before when it comes to hardware compatibility and ease of use).

I actually had for maybe a decade what’s now a really old ASUS media player (which they don’t even make anymore), which couldn’t play media with newer codecs so I upgraded it to one of the cheapest Android TVs (€18) but that turned out to be sluggish, so I upgraded to a better one (€35, which seemed to work fine), but then I just went “screw this” and replace it with a Mini-PC with an Intel N100 (€150) with Lubuntu and Kodi and also moved other services into it (it’s now also my home NAS), then added always on VPN and a Torrent server.

That Mini-PC is the best setup I’ve had for this stuff and there’s still plenty of room in there to add more services (both storage-wise and in terms of computing power) and I highly recommend it if you’re comfortable enough with the software side of Tech (a SBC with LibreElec is a little more demanding of familiarity with hardware).

You can get an Android TV “TV box” or “media box” or “media player” for that which will cost you about 35 bucks from Aliexpress for a decent one (get something with 4GB).

Or you can get a Mini PC for 150 bucks and install Lubunto on it with Kodi. Get an air mouse remote for it (the kind with more buttons, rather than the Google version) and it pretty much works the same as a media player - you generally don’t have to use the air mouse functionality, as the buttons just map to the appropriate Kodi functionality.

The mini PC has the upside that you can put a lot more stuff in it as it has way more power and storage that you need simple for streaming and media playing - for example you can hang your home media collection from it and have it be your home NAS.

I too once disguised to experience life as a Non-Famous Person, and it turned out to be exactly the same as my everyday life.

Well, that phone is a Xiaomi, not a Samsung (who had already made my shit list some years ago thanks to all their bloat), and the new ROM is just a bloat free MIUI, so from the same maker as the phone.

And yeah, as somebody else mentioned, if the banking app stopped working it would be the bank losing me - it wouldn’t be the first time I changed banks because they pissed me off.

Retail banking as a service is a commodity - they’re pretty much all the same - so sticking or not with a bank should be something one does based on cost and convenience and a banking app that doesn’t work on my phone reduces convenience.

As it so happens my banking app works fine.

That said, your alert can be important for other people and points one more reason to avoid Samsung like the plague.

Since that machine is mostly for gaming, I went with Pop OS!

Thanks in party to the spirit in Lemmy (thanks guys and gals) and getting pissed off at the ever more enshittification, I really went full-on on taking back control, and I don’t mean just changing my home PC (mainly used for Gaming) from Windows to Linux, but also replacing the TV Box that’s bundled with my ISP subscription (and will be changing ISP when the current contract is over) with my own Mini-PC with Lubunto and Kodi (which is also my Torrenting host with an always-on VPN and my home’s NAS) replacing the original Samsung Android (which had been bloated due to updates to the point of filling up all memory) of my aging tablet, with LineageOS and even doing the same on my brand new Smartphone.

Granted, I’ve always had the spirit of avoiding “smarts” in stuff that doesn’t need it - like TVs - but now I went and as much as possible took back control on even the stuff that does need “smarts”.

So far I’m quite happy with it all: I’ve maintained (improved, even, such as my Tablet now having more available memory) my level of Tech access whilst cutting of the ways in which companies exploited my time and patience for advertising money - I definitely feel I’m better now than before: a lot of things became more convenient and less restricted than they were before.

Things are becoming really bad out there when it comes to treating customers as cattle to be milked and I reckon that the only future were Tech is actually a pleasure to use for users is for those people who take control back from the corps on all of their devices.

For starters, bulk copying a person’s documents without their approval sounds like mass copyright violation.

Since the user did not approve it, it sounds like mass copyright violation to me.

Scarcity is money and if there is no scarcity laws will be bought to to artificially create said scarcity.

I remember when I was a kid, at some point in early highschool we had a colleague who was a bit dumb and had blond hair (in a country were that’s pretty rare) so he was commonly bullied and called “piss head” and I did join on the bullying once or twice.

Still to this day I sometimes think of it and feel guilty of, even as a kid myself, having been an asshole to that kid simply to feel I was part of the group.

Sometimes I have the impression that even here in Lemmy a lot of supposedly adults either were always assholes and will always be so, or didn’t go through that part of maturing were you figure out that pilling up on somebody just to be “one of the crowd” isn’t exactly a mature adult thing to do.

Or maybe I’m just overeading it or projecting.