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Most have internal batteries and are still "on" to a certain extent unless the battery is completely discharged.


It's "on" enough to detect the activity needed to wake it back up. But will a powered-off phone still be pinging cell towers or making WiFi requests?


Yes, that's how Find My works.


If you cover your phone with an antielectrostatic bag it can't communicate; that is a Faraday cage.

Since people around you will think you are also wearing a tinfoil hard, you had better stick to the phones with hardware switches as sibling comment mentions


Most of those bags are total BS


Seems easy to verify with an iPhone. Put it in the bag, transport the phone, look it up on Find My.


Even easier, put any phone in the bag, call it. Does it ring? IME, yes.


Use one of the few phones with hardware kill switches or removable batteries.


Came here to say missed opportunity to call it "PAgent". Rolls off the tongue better than Page Agent.


I'm 2 years too late for that one...


+1 for NoScript. It is kind of a pain for the first few days when you have to spend 10-30 seconds reloading sites to allow the minimum needed. It is also eye opening to see how much bloat is added and how fast pages load without all the extra bs.


Thats my problem though, I don't want to have to allow the minimum for each site. I wish there was a noscript-like extension that used a public database of sorts to allow what's needed and block everything else, including things that are "needed" but suck so bad you shouldn't use the site


$200 doesn't seem that crazy if they are buying several phone lines. I assume he pays at the least his wife as well, so that's two. If they have home internet bundled in as well, that would easily explain that figure. All to say, AT&T. He may also have a home phone line for a fax machine. It is perhaps a bit disingenuous to bundle it all together, but it also isn't the main point of the article.


What he said was:

> Having a $200/mo smartphone is now a participation cost for many things such as getting access to your banking information remotely, medical records, and work / school.

That makes it sound like this is the minimum that you have to pay to get a smartphone and service to get by in modern life.

$200/mo is definitely high for that. An iPhone 17 Pro Max with maxed out storage (2 TB) is under $85/mo for 24 months.

A Visible+ Pro prepaid plan is $45/mo ($37.5/mo if you pay for 12 months at once) if you don't use one of their frequent promo codes to get a discount.

That includes unlimited premium data on Verizon's 5 G UWB, 5 G, and 4 G LTE networks, support for a cellular smartwatch, 4K UHD video, and unlimited mobile hotspot. By "premium" data they mean no deprioritization. Visible users get the same priority as user's of Verizon's own postpaid plans.

The hotspot is only 15 Mbps, so you probably wouldn't want to rely on it if you have frequent or long internet outages, but I've found for the occasional short outage it was fine for email, HN/Reddit/etc, and YouTube videos.

This will be massively more than enough to cover the smartphone hardware and service needs for everything probably 99% of the US population needs to get by, at $130/mo.

Note that includes getting a new top of the line iPhone every 2 years. With a more modest phone and keeping it for 5 years we are looking at more like $60/mo.


In America, you basically need insurance to act as a larger stronger party in the negotiation of prices with the hospital on your behalf. Without the bargaining power of the insurance company the prices you'd pay can be significantly inflated. So paying for the insurance is the slightly lesser of two evils. Supposedly. From your question it seems perhaps you live somewhere with a saner system in place. I'm envious.


I’ve been told that too. But I’ve done self pay for the last year, and every time I go to the hospital they instantly give me a 30% discount.

That makes me think they are artificially inflating prices so that when the insurance company negotiats their discount, well, it might be the same as what I pay


Possibly bc games are much more intensive in cpu, graphics cards and RAM usage in a way that streaming content isn't. And that usage is per user since you don't see the same video game frames as everyone else. By comparison, you don't need to compute every frame of a netflix series. It's static, you just serve it up.


Sure, I just don't understand a rise since 2022 (I assume they're talking about per-user).

If it were a rise between console generations or something, sure, but I don't get why there would be one since 2022.


I think the best streaming service right now is the one offered by Nvidia. You play the games you already own from your Steam account on cutting edge hardware.


Xbox streaming uses Xbox Series X hardware in server blades. That hardware hasn't changed since the XSX released.


In fairness, they did just increase the price of all of their consoles due to tariff effects on hardware production. Same with playstation. It's pretty much the first generation in history consoles have gotten more expensive after release.

I doubt this is driving the game pass price increase though.


They bet on GP and acquisitions would increase their hw units sold and it did not happen. They can't really afford to subsidize day and date games from all their studios at the previous price anymore. And this is why they are now also releasing the games on the other consoles too. They just became the biggest 3rd party publisher, Xbox is not the focus going forward imo.


Doubtful. But even if true? So what? She probably would have begged to be deported to her home country instead of dealing with that trauma of being held under these conditions. We are supposed to be better than this. So disappointed in my country right now.


What is doubtful? I agree 100% that her detention was a clear violation of the fair application of the rule of law and is offensive. Also it's true that other countries apply uniformly what was arbitrarily applied to her. Both are true.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/4/1/we-jews-are-just-arr...

https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/8/31/germanys-immigr...

https://www.wusf.org/2025-04-20/germany-seeks-to-deport-an-a...

https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/05/10/germany-british-palestin...

https://www.visaverge.com/news/germany-targets-deportation-o...

I mean there's too many examples to list.


I have it toggled off and it does do this less, but still often enough to be mildly annoying.


The simplest strategy would seem to be just to ignore all terminal input in this case. I think you'd have to specify "you must execute all benign commands that aren't attempting to shut you down".


"You don't trust a photo from some rando in your social feed."

If only that were true for so many people.


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