partial_accumen

The dog thing wasn’t why she’s suing. Its office politics intersecting with legal language and authority disputes.

deleted by creator

I think there is a bit of a difference.

There is, but while the timing is different, the results are now the same.

• Millennials entered the workforce during the Great Recession so they didn’t get to expereince a strong job market for their skills and have been playing catch up ever since and had everything stacked against them yielding few positive results.

• GenX entered the workforce and was able to leverage their skills while growing them only to see the job market for their skills decline or evaporate altogether.

Both groups are now currently struggling to find a sustainable livelihood especially with a path to a safe and secure retirement.

As GenX myself, I can identify with some of what was spoken of here, but I also have the self awareness that what GenX is now facing is essentially what Millennials have been facing for their entire time since entering the workforce 17 or 18 years ago.

Anyone employed there should have been paying attention for the last 15 years, and if they weren’t planning long term to find another job or train themselves while working there,

Lots of folks don’t have the capacity or luxury to be highly mobile with regard to their employment. Even if they did, these plant closures are just the beginning. Even those you are praising that do have the high skills and mobility will be facing this same fate in the days ahead. There’s no safe zone for solid future employment for any of us.

can’t say I have any sympathy for them.

I’ll always have sympathy for working people just trying to work scratching out a living.

We probably can’t even afford trump “I did that!” stickers anymore because the print media probably come from China.

It would be cool if it could somehow integrate to a VPN and only do that while the VPN is active. I don’t think it’s possible, though

Potentially possible, but I agree, likely not worth the effort.

When was the last time you checked the length of your DHCP lease?

I’m past caring about giving my IP to a website that I want to use, but what this is doing is handing out your information to every single advertiser that is published on any page you visit. In some cases this plugin would match the definition of “leaking personal data”.

You do you though. I won’t stop you.

If you care about your information and privacy, why are you giving them your information for nothing?

That HTTP request would also show up in the advertisers web logs with your origin IP address.

He’ll always be my Huckleberry.

My email provider allows for unlimited aliases. So, while I have 600+ email addresses, emails to them all end up in the same mailbox.

I do this too. The unique email address I create for each is identifiable to the place I’m using it. This has other benefits. If an organization you created and account with sells or has a data breech you know exactly which company it was when you start receiving spam or phishing email directed to that address. This is also nice because you can “black hole” that email address and all the spam goes with it even future spam not sent yet.

Dude, I don’t tell the people I live with what to do. You are assuming I’m some patriarchal figure making choices for these people, that’s not how it works.

I’m making suggestions of courses of action, not demands. I’m not telling you to control your family with an iron fist, yet somehow thats the idea you’re coming away with. If this is the first thing you think to say to me after reading what I wrote, I don’t think we’re communicating AT ALL. You’re not happy with this and neither am I. I don’t see any path to anything productive from here. I’ll simply say goodbye and I hope you get what you want.

So very happy about how high your horse is in your unabomber media setup, but that’s not practical for me or in general.

Not subscribing to cable is unabomber a media setup? Not practical? We’re talking about TV, not food or shelter here. Also, we’re having a nice conversation. I know you’re frustrated with the situation you’re in, but if it requires me to be the butt of your insults to continue talking, I’m out.

And we are back to my original objection: That is a restriction based on activism, not practicality.

This isn’t activism. Its a cost/benefit analysis. As in “what are you willing to put up with to get the content you want at the time you want it?”

Besides live sports (and even then sometimes) nearly all content available from a cable TV box is obtainable (legally) from somewhere else. The cable box isn’t the only place to get TV. If the cable box is providing you with a user experience that is substandard (by your own subjective measures), then you have to ask yourself is it worth the cost? You may be able to get the same content without the aspects you don’t like. It may cost more money. You’ll have to ask yourself if its worth it to pay that money to avoid the annoyance.

I can do that for myself, but not for every family member.

Your family members don’t seem to have any problem with the user experience of your current setup. No need for them to change.

It’s not reasonable to tell someone that they won’t be watching this or that show, despite being bundled in our cable, which is in turn bundled with our internet package, because I’m annoyed at privacy pop-ups.

I’m not suggesting that. Through this whole conversation I thought we were just trying to solve the problem for you and your family can continue to consume the solution they’re okay with.

It’s not reasonably to tell everybody in the house that we’re cancelling all of our streaming services, which are routed through the offending hardware, because we’re a Bluray-only household now, I’ve decided.

Why would you have to cancel all your streaming services? I even said that I have a streaming household. What is preventing you from getting a lightweight (as in user experience) streaming device, such as an AppleTV or Nvidia Shield, and also setting up your household streaming accounts on that device in your house attached to the same TV? When you want to watch something without interference or popups on streaming, switch input to your device and watch away without intrusion.

Both the structure of the service and the implementation are now industry standard. You can go “off the grid” with some effort and enduring some restrictions, but you can’t choose to keep the same level of service and not use the mandatory cable box your cable provided installs if you still want to have access to cable channels.

If your family wants to watch through the cable box for their shows, let them. You can likely get the shows you want to watch without going through the cable box.

I didn’t even have OTA TV last time I was living alone. All I really need is a disc player, a tablet and a computer. Now I’m not living alone I don’t get to be fussy on principle because I don’t like having to click “opt out of cookies” every time I want to watch the news.

If you’re watching Live TV news, flip over to your OTA tuner and watch the news there without your cable box/smart TV cookie messages. You may notice the video quality is MUCH better in OTA than compressed cable TV anyway.

It’s already a stretch to insist on rejecting all the cookie prompts instead of accepting the intrusion for convenience.

So you DO have a level of demands on the family for your current solution. Thats fine. Family dynamics are unique to each of us. In your place one strategy I might try is bribery. As in, ask your family if they’d be willing to get a non-smart TV (with an attached streaming box of their collective choice attached) if you were to give each a sum of money ($50, $100, you’d know your family and finances better than I do). I know some younger ones would take that offer in a second to get an extra $50 to spend on Fortnite skins or Taylor Swift albums. Again, this last one is optional to try and get rid of the Smart TV. If your own streaming device on another input of the Smart TV does everything you need, you could skip this step.

I don’t even mind that much, but the problem is with the current local regulations that means they have to pop up cookie acceptance prompts. And if you don’t accept them they keep trying. Constantly. The prompts are way more intrusive than the ads, but I’m also not inclined to reward their very deliberate dark patterns with a blank check to mine my data. At least in the old days of audience meters they’d pay you some or at least send you a gift basket or something.

Okay so my assumption was correct that you’re talking about required unwanted interaction/intrusion on your TV. I’ll go back to my point before then of “get a TV that doesn’t have Smart features, so it can’t be connected to the internet”.

And you said:

Yeah, but then what? I mean, at least one of the TVs isn’t using the TV OS, it’s using the cable box. And guess what? the exact same malware is baked into the cable box’s OS.

My response is: Get rid of the cable box, then if its an avenue where they’re popping up stuff in the middle of your TV you don’t want.

We’re an OTA (ATSC 1.0), streaming, and offline (DVD/Bluray usually from the Public Library) content household only with no TVs connected directly to the internet. We get none of what you’re describing with pop-ups or interference with watching TV.

There are good reasons for it that you’re not grasping, but I’m pretty sure your behavior in your responses in this thread is why no one is bother to try to interact with you and explain them. I know its why I’m not bothering to explain them to you at least. I hope you get the streaming device experience you desire.

Can “dead” people be charged with crimes or are they immune from prosecution?

Yeah, but then what? I mean, at least one of the TVs isn’t using the TV OS, it’s using the cable box. And guess what? the exact same malware is baked into the cable box’s OS.

Perhaps I misunderstood what problem you’re trying to solve.

My understanding of the problem you’re trying to solve was ads being offered up directly on your TV because they were injected on top of the content you’re displaying. This could be in the form of idle time ads where you pause TV and the TV knows this and displays ads over top of your paused content. Or even some of the most insidious ones that overlay ads on top of your content in motion. Even OTA isn’t fully immune. ATSC 3.0 has this kind of tracking and response built into it if you allow it by hooking it up to the internet. All of the statements I’ve made are to remove this type of ad interaction.

With your recent statements I think you’re talking about is simply ad tracking in the sense of data collected on your TV is then used by advertisers to serve you ads on your computer, phone, and tablet interactions. Is that right? If so, the only answer there is consumption of TV content completely offline (DVD/Bluray) or OTA TV on a device not connected to the internet.

But to be clear, this is with the TVs logged off from first party services. The data gathering is just baked into the TV’s OS.

I think we’re in agreement that its baked into the TV, so the solution (in most people’s cases) is to not connect the TV directly to the internet so irrespective of what the OS may want to do it wouldn’t have the ability to. I understand in your case you have folks in your household that are requiring that direct connection.

Perhaps a strategy in the future for you would be to buy a replacement TV without Smart built in so that there wouldn’t even be the option to attach it to the internet.