Gay for trains

I can’t do that without negative consequences

I can’t do that unless I have support for it

I can’t do that

Back in the early 2000s, my mom took me to visit a friend of hers who was dying of colon cancer. He’d reached the point where they give you morphine for the pain and that’s about it.

And he shows me all the remote control stuff he has in the living room. Remote control ceiling fan, remote control lamps, remote control Venetian blinds, and none of this is connected to a WiFi network or anything (this was about 2002, when WiFi was something only nerds had, and downloading a 640x480 jpeg took ten minutes.)

Anyways the point is, it was all unspeakably cool, and none of it required connection to an off-site server. None of it required access to your contacts and your camera and your microphone (that would have been weird, camera phones weren’t in vogue yet), just a remote control that took standard AAA batteries.

This stuff has been available for years, it’s old technology. They’ve just marketed it as cool and new because the product is your personal info.

That’s why all this stuff is so cheap. It’s spying on everything that happens on your network, and it’s sending it off to be data scraped and packaged and sold to the highest bidder which, usually, means a government.