I was going to add a little more to my comment on how the powers that be have gotten us just comfortable enough to not care to be the radicals that our grandparents might have been. The squeeze was too hard in the early 20th century and triggered revolutions and the toppling of governments in favor of socialist causes. The squeeze was too soft by the mid 20th century and the powers that be figured they were leaving too much money on the table in the form of worker vs say executive pay. Seems today the boot on our neck is just right: just enough to ensure high inequality and an anything goes business environment without very many of us threatening to cut their heads off.
Wrong phrasing, a new political party could absolutely come into power. It would just replace one of the two-parties ideologies but be called the same thing and you still have 2 parties.
IMO the underlying reason for this is one or more of:
1) Americans are [statistically speaking] doing very well, high GDP, lots of consumer products to buy, lots of entertainment, lots of cheap food... and wikileaks is not doing anything to help but maybe destroy this.
2) Americans are also doing very poorly, the bottom 25% have bigger problems to deal with than wikileaks. Why would they care if the CIA is watching them if they can't afford next month's rent?
3) Information overload: Similiar to 1, we get overloaded with things we ought to care about, climate, wiki leaks, wars.... it's too much and people really just want. #1.
Re 2): because you can't have a handful of extremely wealthy people in a completely equal world; so one wonders if enough accidental topplings of foreign democracies would not an "inequality" enforcement agency make?
Reading a bit, it's become somewhat apparent to me that that little independent government agency is the instability enforcer in order to sustain the world as a set of abstractions to keep people artificially poor: from cartels (involvement in Contra cocaine trafficking), to toppling of budding democracies (IIRC, Iran 1953) ... further revealing they and their masters consider that progress is a zero-sum game for them.
Bob Ross was a content creator, and I would like to think if he were alive he'd still be painting, just using a different platform to share. I don't think he would care one bit if people made AI art as long as they were happy and kind.
"You know how to take the backup, you just don't know how to restore the backup. And that's really the most important part of the backup, the restoring. Anybody can just copy a file!"
Amazing question with nobody really answering your question 100%.
The answer is : it's hard. If you only have a iphone and more photos on your icloud than can fit on your phone, you're kinda screwed if you don't know what you're doing.
AFAIK Apple makes it very difficult to get all your icloud photos bulk downloaded, original quality off icloud.
Google is no better.
It's much easier to start backing up from the beginning but once you're stuck on icloud it's hard.
If you have a Mac with sufficient storage, you can just enable iCloud to store photos locally, then export them. That could miss some data (I think descriptions you set for a photo were not exported the last time I checked), but it is most of the data.
I did not try it, and I am nervous the day I need to - but I think there are some solutions to export photos from the Apple technology stack using open source software [1,2,3].
I remember seeing a longer blogpost re the topic of retroengineering the Apple phot sync story, but I could not find it.
Yup. Only reason I'm on OneDrive is that they don't mess with photos and their metadata. For now, at least.
I guess it's because the core offering is still some version of "a folder that syncs", and the photo gallery is just a view bolted on top.
I steer clear of any solutions scoped to photos only, as it always turns out they either screw you up by reducing quality and throwing away the originals, or trying to lock you in by only offering metadata they keep in a database they will not let you export.
Reminds me of a story: I was sitting at a restaurant waiting for my food. I casually notice two young children in the next booth playing with a phone, but pay little attention.
Moments later their dad (presumably) comes back and asks for his phone back and sits down with their food. The kids are eating and the dad is fumbling with his phone with odd looks and I can see his frustration growing.
Then out I hear something like "What did you do to my phone?" repeated loudly over and over. "You erased my phone, it's gone."
The small children (guessing) had figured out how to factory reset his phone.
My thought at the time was something like : How many times did I do something as a toddler I don't remember to piss of my dad like that and that he never got mad or brought it up later (Lots of times knowing myself).
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