• 1 Post
  • 844 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: January 21st, 2025

help-circle


  • You say this but in many communities churches are the only option or the primary option because government has failed its populace.

    When I worked with the homeless shelters would fill immediately, like within an hour of opening doors, and they would kick you out at 7am so you’d have to come back that evening and hope you make it. Closed during the day because of no funding for staffing. but churches would have much more space, would be open during the day, would have hot food, etc.

    The funding for the homeless is nothing and gets cut year after year. In my state it’s somewhat decent too, in the more conservative states my understanding is that it can be more dire.

    My conspiracy theory is that this is intentional: homeless services, rehab services, etc get minimal funding that is consistently slashed to funnel people into churches when they’re most vulnerable which allows them to be indoctrinated more easily. I worked with many people who either became very religious or if they were already religious became far more conservative and evangelical. Guess who also tended to vote against their own interests based on wedge issues like abortion and lgbt rights once they got back on their feet?

    At the same time liberals don’t actually want to fund mental health services. They are viciously anti taxes and viciously anti homeless. Look at California: when programs start that are positive to improve the lives of homeless and start to break the cycle the NIMBYs come out in full force










  • This was maybe the case back during the Snowden era where the government pushed for compliance and backdoors (like the leaked prism program). That’s the real driving force behind things like e2ee and “privacy forward” steps in the interim that are ultimately just theater. Now if they use XKeyscore to spy on the actual infrastructure of the web it’s not as helpful - WhatsApp, iMessage, etc are all encrypted in transit. But most of these things are not encrypted in a way that prevents the companies from running analytics, selling those analytics to data brokers, who then share with palantir and the NSA (remember Cambridge analytica? Shit like that is an insulating layer so apple, google, and Facebook can now sell your data to the government without directly doing so)


  • Okay nerd, modern advertising. Targeted advertising. Whatever you want to call it. The ad industry works on ways to learn everything about you and then contracts with the government to sell access to this data (or they are compelled, but often the former via data brokers). Snowden revealed this with prism and a number of other programs but it predated that and has been going on since




  • IP is a bullshit concept that slows down the progress of humanity. They take what is learned and improve on it then sell that because why the fuck wouldn’t you. The only people who have a problem with this are moronic capitalists that say “grrr how dare you improve my technology before I earn my money from it! It’s my idea! I own it forever”.

    There is maybe some debate about a small reasonable period to allow someone to recoup r&d costs. On the other hand we can look to an example like during Covid: American pharma companies were not sharing research about mRNA vaccines with each other or the world in the hopes of being “the first” and the financial gains that would come with this. Accelerating this process through collaborative effort would’ve literally saved tens of thousands of lives. This was often defended by Americans who are so indoctrinated they couldn’t possibly conceptualize a world without this approach. “Of course Pfizer needs the IP? How else will they make their money??”

    We excuse it because most of the time it doesn’t really matter. A slightly better phone or laptop or whatever is not a huge deal. But then you see things like the Covid example and start to wonder: if that broke down and everything was basically “open source” how much further along would we be?


  • Lmao no they fucking won’t. I mean maybe like 0.5% of consumers, or less, will. Some number that pales in comparison to the amount that just buy a bambu because “it’s just easier, FOSS needs to get on usability and make it so that it just works 🤷‍♀️” while failing to see that their utter laziness and incompetence to solve even the mildest of problems and expecting everything to “just work” in exchange for money always means trading their rights and privacy away.

    Look at the people that complain about jellyfin but then also complain about plex becoming increasingly hostile. Look at the people complaining about Linux but also whining about windows descent into madness. Etc etc. and in cases like this the buy in cost is nothing but your time! You think the average consumer, who openly invites corporations to fuck them, is gonna be like “hmm I’m gonna spend money to build a solution.”

    No goddamn way. They’re gonna bitch about the legislation, they’re gonna bitch about how things got this way, then they’re gonna give bambu and anycubic and Microsoft and openai and Google and apple etc etc all their money. They’ll probably sign up for subscriptions with each company