We all like to joke about cats leeching but they’re definitely not Capitalist. They’re hunter gatherers for whom the concept of hoarding resources doesn’t exist. To them, when there’s plenty, you vie for it all within the social group (seems there are hierarchies?) and no one has to go hungry and there’s no waste (including wasted energy). This also preserves plenty of leisure and social time.

If raised in an environment where it makes sense to hunt and you encourage them to do so, they’ll happily contribute what they believe to be palatable food. If left alone, reasonably fit cats can fend for themselves too if necessary.

They’ll take what shelter they get and bury their waste so it can fertilize the ground.

It doesn’t. Graeber was an anthropologist and Wengrow is an archaeologist. It’s a review of existing evidence from past civilizations (the diversity of which most people are hugely ignorant about), making the case the most common representations of “civilization” and “progress” are severely limited, probably to a detrimental extent since we often can only base our conceptions of what is possible on what we know.

That’s highly subjective, but the fascinating book The Dawn of Everything argues otherwise. There are even parts about the anthropological evidence some peoples just up and changed systems every so often (yes, non-violently). Our problem as people in the modern era is many can’t imagine anything else, not that no one ever did.

If you connect to the wrong tower, can’t they get IMEI info? That won’t include OS, but it will give phone model/mfr and other details. I remember reading about regional police forces or intelligence agencies gathering data in North America at least (and they were explicitly gathering personal & usage data too, to see if they could find criminals supposedly).

Yup, just walk away… or answer ‘no’ since smart folks don’t always say ‘yes’

Infinite diversity in infinite combinations.

(Also, DS9 was the best.)

To add to this – Cory Doctorow, the very guy who coined the term “enshittification,” has written about this. (Been meaning to read some of his books to see his explanations on how to fight it but I’m still getting through another book right now so I’ve only seen vids and read a sample.)

There is a setting in Edge to stop it running in the background after it’s closed (it shouldn’t do that in the first place, but this is at least useful because if you don’t turn off the web links in your Start menu search results, Edge can be triggered to open by accident from there and then continue to run in the BG after you close it).

Still on Windows 10 and I haven’t noticed Edge running in the background on startup (and obviously I have it set not to do that in Windows). I’m guessing though that it’s possible it might always be on if you use Cortana? I always have Cortana off too.