Chrome is already spyware on its own. That’s basically the reason Chrome exists.

Is Brave the one with the built-in crypto scheme and its own ads?

That could force a change in the DNC, but the change would be to push them further to the right. The issue is that the right-wing party won the election. They got more than 50% of the total votes. So the democrats aren’t going to see splitting their own base as a viable pathway to victory. If a left-wing faction splitters off, then the DNC will be forced to try to capture more votes on the other side instead.

If the democrats won the election then we’d be in a situation where we can talk about pushing them further left. But when they lose, that’s not really an option. (Most of these strategy problems disappear with ranked choice voting… but I doubt the current government has any interest in pushing for that kind of change!)

X’s supreme dictator openly campaigns for Trump. He even promised to pay millions of dollars to help people vote for Trump. So yeah, I reckon that probably had an effect.

Yeah, and although it will be painful for Mozilla in the short term - it would be a good outcome. It was always bad that Mozilla’s main source of funding was from their most powerful competitor. It’s an obvious conflict of interest. And obvious way to skew decision making. … But that money is just so addictive.

There will be some pretty severe withdrawal symptoms if the money gets taken away, but everyone will be healthier in the long run… unless the overpaid CEO continues to suck in all the remaining money and leaves nothing for the people actually doing the work. That would be bad. In that case, if the corporate structure chokes the company to death, I suppose we’d be hoping for Ladybird, or something like it to take Firefox’s place.

Also, I’ve seen a video of an experiment done in a vacuum chamber. (Although they kind of botched the point of the video by showing lots of slow-mo and junk like that.)

Unfortunately, USA doesn’t have ranked choice voting. So voting for someone who doesn’t have a chance of winning is basically the same as throwing away your vote.

I mean yeah, subscription services are shitty, but what’s wrong with lifetime purchases?

This thread is about subscriptions. So I’d assume that when people talk about ‘rent seeking companies’ etc, they are referring to subscription payments rather than lifetime purchases.

I’ve literally never bought anything from Amazon ever, at all. Not once. Nothing. Zilch. … So I think it is more than fair to say that there are plenty of alternatives to Amazon.

I agree that there shouldn’t be any people with that wealth, and so does the person you were responding to. But taking away 90% of people’s money above a reasonable threshold is definitely not going to help those people become ultra rich. It would make becoming ultra rich more difficult, and instead spread the wealth across the wider population - decreasing wealth disparity.

And although there is almost certainly a better way possible, this method is relatively easy to implement and is an obvious improvement over our current situation. So we can just go ahead and do it while we continue to find consensus on a better system in the long run.

You seem to be arguing that taxing the rich is somehow bad because it isn’t perfect. Your argument makes no sense. You are saying that taking their money helps them maintain a position of wealth. That makes no sense. Of course taking their money will make them less rich. Surely that’s easy to understand.

Inheritance tax is very good and fair. But a tricky problem is that if one place has a big inheritance tax, and another place doesn’t - then rich people basically just put all their money in the place with no inheritance tax. … We should do it anyway, but it does mean the bulk of that money probably won’t get taxed.

Good, but hard to measure fairly. Essentially all the emissions for everyone are ‘indirect’. They are the result of the processes used to produce the goods we consume, etc. So then, should the consumer be responsible for those emissions directly, or should it be the factory workers, or the people who own the factory, or the people who supplied the fuel that was used to run the factory, or the people who payed the people who supplied the fuel… etc.

We could think about untangling it, but probably easier to just tax the rich and then tackle the CO2 problem separately - probably by also taxing the people who own the factory for emissions.

What the hell are you talking about? We’re talking about increasing taxes for the ultra-rich. Saying ultra-wealth people should be paying >90% tax has nothing to do with feudalism, and it certainly isn’t supporting the concept of a rich and ruling class.

I find Widelands to be slow and relaxing; but also challenging and engaging.

Jeff Bezos killed. Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris. Paper reports.

That’s a big news day.

By default there is a shortcut to the terminal shortcut on task bar. From memory it is one of three default shortcuts. (File browser, Terminal, Firefox.) You can also find it by pressing the menu button (the ‘start menu’). From there the terminal has a prominent special position where it is always accessible. And if you don’t notice it there, you can always start typing to search for it - as with any other installed app. I find that if I type ‘t’, then “Terminal” is the top result; and obviously I can kept typing to eliminate the other results if I want.

So if your difficulty in finding the terminal is your main complaint about about Mint… I’m not sure what to tell you. Do you want it to auto-launch or something?

Mastodon isn’t a person. So I don’t know who you are talking about when you say ‘mastodon was attacking people’. I certainly didn’t see anything like that. Perhaps you have an example link for context?

When I was young, I really valued the idea of technological progress. It was almost axiomatically the goal of humanity. Getting greater abilities to do more things more easily… it seemed like the ultimate goal.

But now that I’m older, I’ve seen what happens with technological power like that, and it isn’t great. Yes, we can do more things more easily than before. And what is the result? The main result seems to be increase consolation of wealth and power, and increasing the rate at which the world’s resources are depleted.

• People can now connect instantly and effortlessly with anyone anywhere in the world - and the result is that enormous numbers of people shun their local peers and instead have shallow parasocial relationships with strangers who’s job it is to advertise products to them.
• Clothes are cheap and easy to create - and the result is mountains of waste created by fast-fashion low-quality throw-away clothes largely made from slave labour. Similarly for many products, in particular plastic products are now choking the world in waste.
• Cars are more efficient, and production quality is high - and the result is massively oversized monsters, completely negating the efficiency benefit and instead increasing the amount of space and maintenance required to handle the increased size and weight of the machines. The streets are basically filled with cars and spaces for cars, with less and less space for people to do people things.
• Half-decent AI has finally been created. It’s a long-held dream come true… except that the outcome isn’t quite what we hoped. There’s a lot to say on this topic, but just to keep it snappy, I’ll oversimplify it by saying that people are not using it to do better. They are instead outsourcing their own thoughts and imagination.

Our silky-smooth hyper-connected ultra-convenient world is not leading people to be happier, or smarter, or kinder. And it certainly isn’t helping humanity survive longer. We’re burning out fast.

A lot of what we have superficially looks like ‘progress’, but in full description it looks more like a dystopia. Things are easier, but perhaps the good things were already easy enough; and so the main effect is that exploitation and manipulation got easier. Even when we agree that we’re going in the wrong direction, the messages are still muddied enough that we accelerate rather than change course.

Anyway… I don’t agree with my younger self. I no longer think that technological advances are intrinsically good. I think taking things a bit more slowly might have been more wise. I’ve thought about it a lot, and I think a core part of it is that money corrupts. Unfortunately, money is very tightly intertwined with most of what we do - so that’s a pretty difficult problem to fix. So I won’t go into more detail about that now!

I’d say mastodon is a better choice, mostly so that you’re not beholden to yet another profit-focused tech corporation. I’m sure Bluesky is fine right now, but once they have their userbase they will shift to monetization - and you may regret letting yourself become entrenched in the world they control. They’re not doing it for your benefit.

That said, I’ve come to understand that a lot of people kind of like having their content feed controlled by others. When they only see what they ask for, they get bored. So I’m expecting Bluesky to always be bigger than Mastodon.

And this is why it is ludicrous to believe that ultra-rich people earn their fortune with hard work or good ideas. Being rich generates its own money. Being poor is expensive. There should be no billionaires, for any reason. Such concentrated wealth is very bad.