"US credit card balances 90+ days delinquent hit 13.1% in Q1, the highest in 15 years and the worst reading since the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis"
-via @Bloomberg and @elerianm
Why do I need a firmware update to use my own living room?
Three years ago, I decided my house needed to be a "smart home."
I spent $800 on WiFi-enabled lightbulbs.
This was a catastrophic mistake.
Yesterday, the internet went out for ten minutes.
My wife tried to turn on the kitchen lights using the physical wall switch like a Luddite.
The bulbs factory reset themselves.
Now they cycle through rave colors while emitting a high-pitched pairing frequency.
I spent my entire Saturday trying to connect my kitchen ceiling to our router using a 2.4GHz band.
I am a 52-year-old man standing on a stepping stool screaming at a lightbulb because my phone can't find its Bluetooth signal.
Tomorrow I'm going to Home Depot to buy $2 incandescent bulbs.
I want my house to be stupid again.
I think I know why everything sucks...
...and it's because everything is fake
We are getting fake college degrees that cost 4 years and six figures that teach you fake education and get you fake jobs.
We are eating fake food, with fake ingredients, funded by fake research.
We are scrolling through fake lives, with fake relationships, who take fake, curated vacations to promote brands that make fake products.
We are voting for fake candidates, who run on fake promises, inside a fake system that was never designed to fix anything.
We are raising kids in fake schools that teach fake history, fake science, which quietly produce fake adults who can't think for themselves.
We are watching fake news, about fake crises, produced by fake journalists, for fake outrage.
We are borrowing fake money that was printed from nothing, to fund a fake economy that would collapse in an afternoon if people stopped pretending it was real.
We are buying fake organic food that's just a paid label, and drinking fake juice with two percent juice in it, and putting fake cheese on cheeseburgers that's just "cheese product" on fake burger meat.
We are donating to fake nonprofits where the moeny never makes it to the people and then funding fake foreign aid that buys real weapons to prop up fake governments.
We are going to fake therapy that teaches fake coping skills instead of telling you hard truths.
We are buying fake furniture made of fake wood that's actually compressed sawdust and glue that looks like wood, ships in fourteen boxes with instructions written in a fake language that isn't quite any language, requires tools it doesn't include, takes 4 hours to build, wobbles on day 1, and is totally destroyed in 6 months.
We are downloading fake "free" apps that charge a subscription after three days for AI features that don't work, hidden behind a paywall we didn't see, protected by a privacy policy we didn't read, buried inside Terms of Service written by lawyers specifically so we wouldn't read them, that we agreed to by tapping a button the size of a thumbnail, that gave a company we've never heard of the right to sell our data to companies we'll never hear of, to build a profile on us we'll never see, to influence decisions we'll never know were made.
IT. IS. ALL. FAKE.
And we all yearn for what was once real.
Don't you remember? Did you forget?
There was a time with a simple handshake between men was a contract.
When bread went stale because... well, that's what real bread does!
When kids played outside all day until it was dark, and nobody tracked them.
When a family could live off a single income.
When music was made by people who LIVED something real and you could feel it.
When schools was HARD... and that was the point!
When doctors knew your name and your family, they even came to your house,
When you bought something once... and it was yours forever.
When the chair your grandmother bought once lasted 70 years and she passed it onto your dad.
And now nothing is real, and that's why everything sucks.
The Sentinel Google Chrome proxy extension is live! Encrypt the traffic on your browser without needing to install software for your entire PC.
The Sentinel ecosystem is one of the only ecosystems which builds real products for the mass web 2 audience.
https://t.co/LkPhGaaMeu
All you need is a Sentinel RPC to build real privacy consumer dApps.
Get ready for the Sentinel Chromium Proxy extension. End to end encryption through Sentinel's community hosted dVPN node network directly from your browser.
The decentralized proxy will be open-sourced