askchapo
Ask Hexbear is the place to ask and answer ~~thought-provoking~~ questions.
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This one haunts me. The hardest part about living under a society where the ability to profit is the primary objective is mourning for all the wonderful and amazing things we could be accomplishing if the objective was to actually give people better lives.
I have a programmable AI that controls my house for me. I can personalize to my preferences completely. I cannot afford my prescription toothpaste that has slightly more floride in it.
Billionaires and pop music stars fucking off to space for fun on a whim, while the rest of us try to figure out how we're gonna eat next.
You're basically fucked if you don't have a smartphone nowadays because it's like your wallet/keys/money/bank/email/notepad everything in one. And yet at the same time it spies on you and spams you with notifications and ads.
Overall the necessity and ubiquitousness of our tech but it's also hostile to the user and almost inescapable.
My car insurance provider didn't mail me an insurance card, I need to have their app on my phone, but I forgot to reinstall the app after I switched to a newer phone. Of course I got pulled over and couldn't provide proof of insurance. By the time I downloaded the app again the cop said "we're past that" and I had to go to the court house to prove I had insurance at the time of the stop.
So convenient!
That cop was a complete cock, but we’re way past that (with cops).
I bet the app spys on your location data to judge how you are driving/get an excuse to increase your rates.
Yup! I did one of these a year ago, against my better judgment because we really needed the discount.
Had to give the app unrestricted permissions, had to run it for 6 months straight, and it kept a running list of "incidents" ranging from crashes and hard stops all the way to slightly fast turns and even driving at more risky hours of the day.
Luckily, my agent is a family friend so he gave me the lowdown - this one lets you view the reports, and you can mark any negative incidents as "I was a passenger" and clean up your record as you go. So when the 6 month period finished, I had an absolutely impeccable score, basically the best you could possibly get.
You also don't get any discount at all until a year after the start of the program, so it was all in the understanding that eventually some day we'd get the discount. Also this company does some discount for length of service, so we would be getting that as a discount when renewal comes.
My insurance just renewed with the new discounts a month ago. After all that, here's the big savings:
cw insurance company fuckery:
Price went up about $10/mo (roughly 10% of the original price).
That spoiler-tagged ending lmao 
Yeah seriously. I suppose I should have said it only went up by that much, as I assume it would have gone up way more otherwise (despite having no claims or additional coverage between those times).
A military parade thanking its sponsors including Coinbase(crypto company)
boxed wine is really just bagged wine.
don't call it that 
Americans think goon is a weird slang for wine, but also think Dick and Randy are just ordinary first names.
There was a pro baseball player named Randy Johnson and its one of the funniest names ever
Dick Butkus
we shouldn't call ourselves that either
It was called that long before gooning got the new meaning
"In my day we called them Space Bags." 
3d printed guns maybe
drones
You know those drink dispensers that can mix fifty flavors in any combination you want? Closest thing to replicators IRL.
And the most cyberpunk part about them is that they started cool like that, hey mix any combo you want from this huge list, but now it's basically: yeah you can have plain coke, cherry coke, or vanilla coke. You can have plain root beer or vanilla root beer. Here's about 6 other drinks with 1 extra flavor option each.
It feels like the tech was too much work to keep clean (also true of all other soda fountains), so they canned any interesting interactions pretty quickly.
Feels like it should have a flashing neon sign hanging about it banging on about "over a million flavor combos!" but with the last part perpetually turned off and dropping sparks on you and into your cup during the process.
Yeah the machines are going away in most places too. They were just too good for a failing society like ours.
Probably the self serve checkouts that use AI to falsely accuse you of stealing.
"DID YOU SCAN THAT?"
"DID YOU SCAN THAT?"
no i didnt you fucking narc, now shush
I've found passive aggressively holding up the item to the camera jiggling it and then putting it back works well and makes me feel better than it should.
militarized police that only exist to protect corporations and their government dogs
app slave operated burrito taxi
Climate change
One of the things that comes to mind is ads everywhere, a lot of the time in cyberpunk fiction there's like holographic ads and video billboards and stuff and ads targeted towards individual users, long before that became viable IRL. That scene in Minority Report where the ad talks to the main character as if it knows him was still in the realm of scifi 23 years ago, but now it'd be totally possible.
Puppygirl Hacker Polycule. 
They put the punk in cyberpunk.
blinding headlights of cars 😡
Cw weed lmao
I got an induction heater for the dry herb vape I use, and it’s like whoa I’m smoking with magnets 
Capitalism
Palantir
Drones recently have been fucking me up. Just zip tie some explosives to consumer quadcopters, drive a truck somewhere, and boom instant attack
Are you familiar with slaughterbots?
(I'm sorry. But it's better to be aware.)
oh lovely
"As of 2020, DARPA was actively working on pre-operational prototypes that would make swarms of autonomous lethal drones available to the US military."
The best defense imo is to make yourself either useful economically or culturally, or at least not specifically hated by anyone powerful.
The future of warfare, and of organization in general, is distributed. One might even say "swarm-based".
Good thing the political ideology of this website isn’t specifically in opposition to the current power structure
As long as your opsec is okay, that won't work against you. Only your fellow posters are watching you post.
Anyway, it's like the Deng gambit. If you're economically useful, the government harms itself by knocking you off, and has an incentive to keep you in place. It's a slightly different story for non-state actors, but those have less intel by several orders of magnitude, and you can appear benign to them too.
American flag by the front door to virtue signal (the only cost is $10) and dissimulate, communist flag inside the house where your friends' eyeballs are. Grillpilled AI slop main social media profile, spicy pseudonymous account. Patriotic law-abiding citizen when your face is showing on camera, whatever you please when it's not.
Taking notes
I went to a show yesterday, expecting to pay at the door. The people running the ticket counter had no physical tickets and were not taking cash, but said "Can you log in on Facebook? That's the best way to do it."
It must have been important to be able to reserve a specific seat in an auditorium that had 4x as much capacity as the crowd that attended.
Obviously there's more serious stuff but I rented a moving truck recently that was ancient with a big touch screen mounted rather ad hoc to the dashboard, it was slow AF and I remember a very clean white Tesla tailgating me along a one lane either side road before silently overtaking me near a solar farm almost having a collision with a truck going the other way.
All felt cyberpunk to me
Yeah that's a vibe, for sure. Could make a fun short film, though I'd give it a slightly different ending. 
Not answering your question, but bag wine is the best drink to smuggle into a music festival. Best volume (to minimise wees and concealability) to alcohol to pleasantness ratio.