I see the thumbnail but the picture fails to load in full screen view (Boost app on Android)

Somebody is going to jump into this. But I would keep my eyes open beyond just the Chinese market. Vietnam and Thailand are interesting places to watch. V because of the relative sweetheart deal with the trumpist of tariffs. And T because they already do a lot of SSD manufacturing. And China, more than any other country, will be at the mercy of a particular person's bowel movements on Pennsylvania Ave.

You could argue my take is too accepting of the current situation and I would agree with that. At the same time, I would argue yours is simplifying things quite a bit. Subscription TV channels came after free-to-air channels with commercials. This may depend on where you live in the world but most places have at least one local station or a selection of them broadcast through the air, not cable or satellite, and not subscription based. Financed through commercials or in some countries also through a license model (like in the UK). Cable/satellite/subscription channels are iterations on the model brought to you by capitalism. Ads in public transport can lower ticket prices. Billboards can help lower rental rates in buildings and their revenue adds to the tax intake of the community they're in. If you think it already takes too long to get potholes fixed, it would take even longer without them. Not all roads are toll roads. I get it: you don't like billboards. You're going to get all these unintended side effects if they were banned tomorrow.

Online ads are insufferable. I'm running 3-4 plugins to avoid them. I'm also normally watching broadcast TV on DVR so I can skip through the commercial breaks. I bail on any subscription service that adds ads.

The problem online is the cause of the problem. It's the simplicity with which data can be collected and the lack of regulation. It's also generally still paying off a debt incurred when in the early days of www users got accustomed to getting everything 'for free.' Traditional media has lowered the price dramatically of its own offerings to get new eyeballs online while older streams of income still paid for most expenses, like the income from TV commercial revenue or sales of printed paper. And as these traditional sources of great rivers of money decreased over decades, the ones that replaced it were digital trickles in danger of drying out. That brought about a "militarization" of online ads, ever more targeted and annoying. This problem needs a multi-pronged approach including regulation of data collection and new financing models for media in general.

Chose your own dystopia. Where no ads exist and everything is pay per view/read/report/etc. Or the one we're in.

The bigger problem with traffic deaths is that we developed a system of transportation that relies heavily on cars that are mostly driven by humans. Removing billboards is not going to improve on that that much. But underwear model billboard pileups are a thing. But so are those caused by drivers on their phones and my guess there are way more of those.

Tracking and selling of information has gotten out of hand, no doubt. It is political decisions or a lack thereof that got us here.

Btw everybody thinks they're immune to advertising. And we're not.

The unofficial wisdom of marketing is that half of any advertising budget is wasted. They just don't know which half. So they continue. This whole thing boils down to the fiduciary responsibilities to provide as much value to shareholders again, the bane of capitalism. They cannot afford to check which half is wasted.

And just for some context here: personally I don't mind billboard ads to be honest.

I think the abundance of tools available to block ads online hints at a movement in itself. We don't need a leader or a central committee.

The wrinkle I see here is that a generalized 'everybody' hates ads but 'everybody' is also aware of the fact that they finance a large swath of stuff that we would have to pay for otherwise.

None of those ch's are guttural and you skipped an h;)

The delightful thing is that it works in reverse also: ask a native English speaker to pronounce "Eichhörnchen."

Best boss I ever had.

It's an assumption that many people will be unemployed and unemployable in other functions. So far, every big change (like the Industrial Revolution or the advent of computers in the workplace) have lead to temporary displacements, and the longer ago it happened violent side effects. But in the big picture, we have found ways to put the human resource back into the machine. Accountants were supposed to go extinct with the arrival of Microsoft Excel. But their numbers have increased because they can do more useful things with their time than doing the math. The assumption may be more fear mongering. (And it's too early to tell if you ask me.)

So I don't think they will kill us off just yet because it isn't entirely clear that we're not needed. It's also possible that so-called AI frees up people and resources that can be channeled into what are chronically underfunded professions today, like teaching or medical care. We have a tendency to think in Matrix or 1984 terms of the future when more positive outcomes exist.

Yes, you must have missed it. And so it begins.

Google is moving to make Android less open source. I'm not sure more devs following suit is going be good for them or their users. The G doesn't give an F.

What we need is an OS fork that gets maintained. If not that, some other workaround that fools the Google servers. Because you can bet money that nobody made from flesh and blood is going to look at this inside Google.

Maybe devs can band together and form Middle Finger Corp. and designate one willing person as their contact to serve as registered dev for a gazillion apps. Follow the letter of the law, not the misguided spirit of it, in a manner of speaking.

If you are sitting on a mobile OS and you were afraid to fail like Windows, maybe now is the time to give it a go?

Let's take a deep breath and consider what's happened. The Federal Court of Justice has sent the case back to the lower court. They have not ruled on anything. They have not said ad blocking is piracy. They have essentially said: lower court, you had 25 boxes to tick but you only ticked 24 in your ruling. Go back and do one that ticks all of them.

It's entirely possible that the lower court will change its ruling based on the intricacies of German copyright law, which is shit. But it's not very likely if you ask me. Regardless, whoever loses will appeal it again. This rodeo is far from over. And when it's eventually over the technology will have moved on, with any luck the law along with it, and the only beneficiaries will have been the lawyers.

So the headline should read more like "German court does not rule out that ad blocking could be a copyright infringement."

The argument that Axel Springer is just doing it for their love of democracy is also comical. Media pluralism is important, I agree with them that far, but they are stuck in an outdated mindset. They launched a silly tabloid Fox News wannabe TV channel and failed. They are trying to force eyeballs on their content like you are at a news agent. Meanwhile, news is happening on TikTok and so-called AI is going to reduce their page views to dust. By the time we get a final ruling they will have pivoted strategy 10 times to keep the c-suite in caviar while the established media business that made them successful is rotting away under their assess.

If you want to know where it is going in the short-term, have a look at Orban's Hungary. Rightwing populist voted in and then got to work at dismantling the state. Control judges appointments, curb the power of the judicial branch, silence critical media, pick a group to scapegoat, buddy of Putin. The list goes on. Democracy only works if people defend it and from my outside POV there aren't enough people doing that just yet. It's worse in Trump 2.0 because this time he came prepared.

There are already horror stories about people being caught up wrongly in the deportation efforts. That's using very mild language for very traumatic events here. It's come to a point where erstwhile allies of the US are advising their citizens not to travel to the US. Because they have lost faith in the rule of law there. Take a minute to let that sink in.

If you're a US citizen, resist. The free state is under threat. If you're an immigrant, be careful.