It’s so messed up that some states legally allow merchants to charge a “credit card fee”. Providers of services much like the above can charge if it’s a debit, credit, etc. even if they both say “Visa” on them. The concept of money in the US is so obfuscated now.

To directly quote a painted piece of wood in a pile of rubble on the side of the road after a big flood in Colorado in 2013: Fuck Allstate.

It’s been difficult to buy clothing that’s not made of plastic since the pandemic. So many are synthetic or synthetic blend now. Commoner clothing to be clear. Not some rich person’s bespoke alpaca sweater hand-crocheted off the back of said alpaca as it grew up.

The amount of high-ranking spam reviews for that program is astounding.

It looks like Google hijacked their own project “Google Package Verifier” that has been dormant in the Play Store since 2012, and hadn’t been touched in 13 years until 2025.

Google is no better than the spammers this process purports to protect against.

The original:

https://www.apkmirror.com/apk/google-inc/google-package-verifier/variant-{"arches_slug"%3A[]%2C"minapi_slug"%3A"minapi-14"}/

We have the power to say no, not just accept crap.

Motorola is owned by Lenovo since 2014, which is also Chinese: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/d/motorola-smartphones/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Mobility

That phone claiming US/western hemisphere support is laughable.

It supports T-Mobile native bands, but without more extensive band support, domestic roaming will not be the best. (Some LTEiRA markets T-Mobile can currently roam on Verizon thanks to the USCC acquisition, for example. No band 13, no go.)

I’d not really claim it supports AT&T either. It’s missing band 14, 29, 30, 46, 48, n260, n261. It’s also not on AT&T’s list of supported phones: https://www.att.com/scmsassets/images/support/pdf/Devices-Working-on-ATT-Network.pdf

14 is basically the only way to get signal in markets where AT&T doesn’t have 5 or 12 licenses, like 2/3 of Nebraska.

n260/n261 are big at venues, airports, etc. The lack of those mmWave bands will affect coverage in high-density locations on all three carriers.

Even if it did support Verizon, without band 13 in the modem, Verizon’s low-band nationwide band, it’d be a mostly-brick.

All three carriers require some kind of certification to be allowed on carrier networks (which alone should be illegal as they do it as a tactic to control the phone market.) Not just Verizon. (Verizon, at least, has a web site of certified devices: https://opendevelopment.verizonwireless.com/device-showcase and it’s quite broad.)

Ironically, it will probably work with Verizon, even the BlackBerry Key2 does without certification. It just falls back to a very basic profile for flip phones. They don’t tend to actively block phones like AT&T does.

Basically, it’s a T-Mobile-on-network-only phone. Things are going greeeeeat over at that carrier right now with the tens of thousands of layoffs and forcing customer plan changes even on grandfathered plans.

100%. Everything they say should always be inverted.

Insane how weighted response filtering and graph search have existed for eons, to say nothing about the fact the search query could be pre-parsed by an LLM/“AI”, and only now do these moronic companies use hard keyword filters.

Makes you wonder if it’s really “for the children” or just attempts at hard-censoring to train their future AI models.

So that’s justification for being robbed via phone? Delete the app after every use. I’d go into my bank and fill out a paper form versus that malarkey.

Especially given banking apps track so much side data for their stupid hustles.

It’s like someone in 1600s Europe traveling with a chest that contains their entire life’s gold coins and documentation of every action they performed in the world everywhere. Makes no sense.

Use a computer, or a web site. Or a bank.

Why would you ever carry your entire life’s worth in your pocket. Ever?

“I now have 2 homes, a wife and kids, a dog, a boat, 3 cars, all on my 1920s programming union salary! Wife doesn’t even need to have a job! Just remember to show confidence, it’s easy!”

Interviews right now in software:

• Apply to job
• 1.5 months later receive email to take an AI-“proctored” code interview where you have to show your ID, share screen, cam, mic like some Orwellian njghtmare
• Maybe get a soft-interview with employees where they are just asking you about local weather while seemingly personable, but actually just trying to find out if you live where you say you live
• Possible technical interview with humans where it’s “pair programming” but actually just a human-proctored coding puzzle irrelevant to the job description and the “interviewer” is looking at another monitor surfing reddit
• Contemplate if homelessness isn’t that bad versus all this bullshit
• Maybe retail? Construction? Farming?
• Work at CostCo?

All to get a job to be a condom between Claude and source control as that other recent lemmy post shared.

And can be ignored by the very same government whenever it chooses to do so.

When the market has no options while people still need to replace old or broken things, people are forced to buy that stuff. Then the market says people want that stuff. They’re controlling the whole thing.

Best way to combat it is buy as little as possible. Which thanks to economic collapse, it is happening organically.

Even beyond that, most non-US phones don’t support western hemisphere bands. The EU makes some fantastic handsets, but they use modems that limit function on the other side of the pond.

So it is purely a function of “won’t connect”.

Although, to your privacy point, perhaps not getting signal is actually the bold move that wins.

Another one of those things to think about at scale. So many vibe-coded web sites have such terrible performance. Computers burning power on absolutely nothing, phones draining battery on absolutely nothing. They are causing energy usage to go way up across the planet by lazy ass design that isn’t tested or verified all across the board.

Pixel has better US band support. All the open phones simultaneously never have US or that entire hemisphere’s band support for some terrible reason.

Pixel has all the US 4G and 5G bands. Ironic, although Pixel 9 was likely the last to have such freedoms.

Oof, you’re in a world of hurt with that phone’s band support. Especially on T-Mobile which is majority 5G now.

4G supported bands B1, B2, B3, B4, B5, B7, B12, B17, B20, B66

T-Mobile has a sliver of band 12 in most markets, so that helps for indoor/low-band coverage. No band 71 support means you miss out on their nationwide 600MHz low band, however. No band 25, which means you can’t use T-Satellite. No band 41, so you can’t use T-Mobile’s high speed data band (although in most markets it is all 5G now so you wouldn’t be using it anyway.)

On T-Mobile you’re using B2/B66/B12 in markets that still have LTE running on those bands, and it will continue to reduce as they shift further to 5G.

May want to start planning your next phone move now and/or return it if you still can.

US Mobile is terrible. You can’t even change your e-mail without contacting chat, and then they don’t even always do it. Changing SIMs can result in their “migrating” you to another plan that costs more with no way back. Getting your port-out PIN, you again have to chat with their chat people. It’s suuuuper-grifty. Plus you’re putting an MVNO between you and your cellular services. US Mobile has had outages in the past where their customers lose cellular but the main carrier was fine because there wasn’t a third party injected in the middle.

One will find USM has shills all over the web trying to plug their mediocre service when one could go to Visible, Cricket, or even the prepaids of the tier-1 carriers.

Yeah, they’re such a pain I indeed wasted that many words describing why they should be avoided.