As I said below, and without knowing if this is applicable to all models, mic and camera can be physically disconnected from the mainboard.

You can open the macbook and unplug the camera and mic connectors from the mainboard.

Neat. Can I put a switch inline? Without setting myself on fire?

You could whip up a quick script to move driver kexts for mic and camera in and out of extensions folder essentially toggling the functionality. This would require a reboot though.

This would also require disabling System Integrity Protection.

I put an inline switch on the supply line of my thinkpad camera. The hardest part is mechanically placing the switch so it's not in the way and can be used easily.

In times when you can't upgrade the RAM anymore after you bought it? I doubt it sadly.

It's actually getting worse. The 2020 macbook air has soldered secondary storage. In a day when NVME drives are as tiny as ever. So now if you want to upgrade from 256 GB to 1 TB you need to buy an entirely new board.

I'm not sure, but hasn't it been like this since... 2018 or so? I thought all after-market upgrade possibilites were gone, because they started soldering the RAM and everthing else. Didn't knew you could upgrade any storage at all.

You're not alone, I feel you. The pendulum will swing back. Let's hope it does so quickly.

Thank you, I really appreciate it.

It drives me up the walls when some kind of list or collection touch UI doesn't offer any kind of batching, and most don't.

Some kind of data-selection mode where I can drag across all the elements I want to select would be awesome.

Thank you. We need to stop thinking of growth as a reasonable metric for wellbeing or relevance of products. When a new product is introduced, certainly, looking how the market reacts is interesting. But many years down the line, things should stabilise. Does your (metaphorical) baker round the corner grow yoy? And yet, somehow their bread is still good, and they have no problem surviving, except when a company with far too much capital just bulldozes in, for example by selling under local market prices.

/rant over

Growth is what the shareholders care about, and capital always rules, even at the expense of anything else.

And there's the problem.

What do you do with the waste? Blow it into the sun?

Bury it underground. The amount of waste generated by nuclear power is a fraction of 1% of all the toxic waste generated by heavy industry. The entirety of the United States' nuclear waste from electricity generation occupies a volume the size of a football field in footprint and 10 yards high [1]. A coal plants generates this much waste every hour.

1. https://www.nei.org/fundamentals/nuclear-waste

You reprocess it to remove all the stuff that isn't actually "waste" because it's usable as fuel. What remains presents a much smaller storage problem which has known working solutions.

The solution to a problem is never to ignore it, lock it away, out of sight where it will just fester. The people who produce bullshit (maybe for a living, maybe as a hobby) don't just disappear.

Aggressive filtering of what people see in their feeds is not a solution. What do all those able to discern bullshit from factual content have in common? Exercise for the reader as I don't have a definitive answer. A proper education can be thrown away or ignored when convenient; some people just seem to have a good nose for bs. I dunno.

What civilization are you talking about? The US, western Europe, capitalism, formally educated people? Who is 'they'? There's enough people who just want to watch the world burn, and they're very much part of society, paying taxes and going to clubs and shopping malls. For instance, all those highly capable developers and mathematicians on adtech payrolls. How is one supposed to concentrate on separating the wheat from the chaff when things engineered to distract and capture attention do exactly that?

You should check out what happened less than a century ago. Among other things, it started this whole digital conundrum.

It's naive to think that concentrating so much power over so many people in the hands of so few people can go any sort of well. What happens when the regulators, or the ones charged of overseeing them, want in on the fun? What if they're coerced, which suddenly is trivial to do?

Progress comes from individuals, as such, individuals should be empowered by great tools to make the most of their data. Wanting corporations to solve all the problems is another case of pushing off personal responsibility.