So the author's argument is that youth have just gone to gig work instead of traditional jobs. OK, maybe true, but first of all, this is not a good thing on its own either. And secondly, we have to consider why gig work even exists, aside from being a fresh new way to exploit workers and deny them the traditional protections of the labor market. Because there is a specific reason gig work exists right at this very transitional moment in the workforce, and I'll give you a spoiler: It exists because of AI.

AI is going to do the same thing to gig work that gig work has already done to traditional youth employment. It represents the transitional step from traditional human labor to full automation. That's part of the reason companies are using gig work in the first place. It makes it really easy to treat workers as instantly and transparently interchangable in an extremely efficient and flexible way. And they are going to start interchanging them not just with other gig workers, but AI drones -- self driving cars, drones, and other machine infrastructure as it gets developed and matures. The flexibility allows them to absorb the impact of any issues with the technology by instantly falling back to more "human gigs" when needed, but whenever the technology becomes successful, the human jobs will just instantly evaporate as quickly as the technology can roll out, and not a single thought will ever be spared for the millions of gig working humans waiting for their phone to buzz for the next gig that will never come while looking at bills that are never going to get paid. That's literally the goal that gig work exists to enable, it's fundamentally designed for the AI endgame, it's inevitably going to leave millions of people suddenly and quietly unemployed and unemployable without warning or even any official notification when it's happening, and it's coming sooner than we think.

Israeli leadership is treating Gaza like a war crime buffet at this point.

"I mean, if genocide's on the menu, why not sprinkle in a little murder-children-by-starvation and robot warfare? It's my cheat ~~day~~ year and a half, after all."

I wouldn't. I like the idea of repurposing old electronics, but the issue is, it's meant to be a low powered device meant to run off a battery.

You can run Plex off a RPi and those are like $20. A bit more if you want the case and heatsinks and such. They are also (similar to the Android) low powered ARM64 computers, but the hardware and software is more open.

I also have an old 128GB Android phone. I use it as a cosplay prop and I treat it like an iPod Touch. I'm primarily an iPhone guy, so of course it has Apple Music on it, but I also know Android and know where Android excels, so it also has Firefox with uBlock Origin, and Nova Launcher Prime. It's way better to type on because the iOS keyboard has always been dogshit.

Also, you're in the Piracy community. Not to be pedantic, but this is where you'd go to ask how to get the files to populate your music streaming server with. That's my weakness there — I mostly self-host stuff I've bought and ripped myself. There are good tools and you'll find good advice here, but something something old dogs, something something new tricks (me being the old dog, not you, unless you are, in which case, good on you for trying to break the mould). Right. So, what you want is the Self-Hosted community. Don't ask them about where to get the music (that's this community), but they can help on hardware and software. Me, I just use Plex, and I host it off a Mac mini. My desktop computer. You don't need to spend nearly that much on a server. My Mac is a couple generations out now, but it's still overkill for a music server.

The only time I use either of my phones as servers in any capacity is to like send a few files or something — and yes, I can do it just as capably with either. Honestly though both of them can easily host a file server another phone (either platform) can connect to and download from.