This is silly. A tax is something the government charges you. We'll be paying a privately owned corporation for our their air.

"Every time we demand to be heard, they hold back our water, ration our air, until we crawl back into our holes, and do as we are told!"

And that's why you should always have a can of PerriAir at home!

joke about the air, but in a few short years we're going to be paying for climate control like that because we're in for one hell of a summer here, and from here on out they'll only get hotter.

Doesn't seem much different than now

On the other hand, some Nazi might own quadrillion dollars by then. Think about that.

They flag you as a terrorist because the AI hallucinated, and you find your pay for air button just does not work anymore one day.

So many dystopian novel authors predicted this. P K Dick and Gibson among others. Forced to pay for life critical necessities like air and water, as well as fees to enter your apartment or take a shower.

Companies have given up making anything new. It takes too long, requires a large R&D investment, and expensive tooling to manufacture new things. So they just start making up ways to claim ownership over everything they can and the delivery method to get it there. Robber barons and bridge trolls profiteering as middlemen that actually produce nothing. Want a concert ticket? Buy it through a service that bought it from the venue and pay fees on top of that if you can get them at all on release, if not pay again to the same company that lets scalpers resell and they get fees a second time. Want music? Pay for the data service, pay for the music service, pay again for the album if you actually want to keep it, pay for the cloud you store it in.

It‘s only getting worse.

Bed think literally already happened, some amazon smart bed or some shit that was adjustable and it would fold shut like a clam if you didn't pay the subscription so you physically couldn't sleep on it.

Woke up this morning.

$5 convenience fee for that.

Philip k. Dick, in his novel Ubik, described the main character being trapped in his apartment because the front door required a .25 fee to open and the MC had to trick the door in order to leave his own home.

There's a lot more than that in the book. It would be interesting to see someone try and fail to make a film out of it.

Whatever happens, I'll never forget to charge my Wife Pro Max.

A capitalist's dream come true! ... remember, socialism is bad 😅

That's been the joke for a long time. If corporations could charge you for air, they would. This comic is too real.

Unauthorized Bread

Every subhuman CEO's dream.

Professional wife haver

I hope at least the Unicode Consortium pulls their head out of their ass by then and defines sequences like

U+1F3F3 WAVING WHITE FLAG  
U+ FE0F VARIATION SELECTOR-16  
U+ 200D ZERO-WIDTH JOINER  
U+1F7E5 LARGE RED SQUARE  
U+ 200D ZERO-WIDTH JOINER  
U+1F7F7 (not yet existing) LARGE LIGHT ORANGE SQUARE  
U+ 200D ZERO-WIDTH JOINER  
U+ 21BC WHITE LARGE SQUARE  
U+ FE0F VARIATION SELECTOR-16 (forces emoji rendition of this pre-emoji character, also used in the existing trans flag sequence)  
U+ 200D ZERO-WIDTH JOINER  
U+1F7FA (not yet existing) LARGE LIGHT PURPLE SQUARE  
U+ 200D ZERO-WIDTH JOINER  
U+1F7EA LARGE PURPLE SQUARE

This would render as a striped flag like if supported on the platform (on devices before Unicode 20.0 like yours right now, the fallback is "🏳️‍🟥‍🟷‍⬜️‍🟺‍🟪", much like the fallback of 🏳️‍⚧️ is "🏳️⚧️"). Fonts could include most common pride flags (with exact "canonical" color values) and/or the platforms could generate the stripes on the fly up to a limit. I think both approaches have been implemented for the family emoji set on some platforms (yup, those also use separate codepoints for members and ZWJs), after all. (I hope platforms adopt the latter approach, even though it enables arbitrary, evil "pride" flags like TERF or MAP − well, Unicode has always been able to express evil, valid Unicode sequences include U+0FD5 RIGHT-FACING SVASTI SIGN, U+1FAC3 PREGNANT MAN, U+20E0 COMBINING ENCLOSING CIRCLE BACKSLASH or the entire text of Mein Kampf.) And would people abuse it for color bitmap text art? Yes, like they do Braille now.

Well this is just utterly ridiculous. Yes some things are annoyances but this is just an utter extreme