I don’t know why you’re being downvoted. Safety is my number 1 concern. The amount of times I’ve had to avoid dodgy / unsafe situations on public transport is crazy. Finally getting a car was the best decision ever. Until they make public transport safe, I’m not on it.
That seems like good news. Interesting to see US drug policy being more lenient than the UK in many instances.
Short and kind of pointless blog spam. Vanilla JS is faster than React. There, saved you a click.
This person titles their book “do not move to Canada”, then immediately goes on to say that the book isn’t about telling you not to move to Canada, but about the problems he had living there.
The first two available chapters of the book are full of grammatical and spelling mistakes…fine, the author is russian, but how about having someone proof read the book first?
It’s 9.99 but the author states it can be read in one to two hours. That price is bonkers. Supposedly YouTube comments by people claiming to have made the same or similar experiences are why reading the book is worth it.
There is an overarching message here, which I can agree with: never romanticise another country as some utopian paradise. It’s highly unlikely that such a place even exists. The world is a neoliberal, capitalist hellscape, where some places suck ever so slightly less because rich people have been somewhat reigned in by the rule of law, but the differences between countries are minor at best.
Just do your own research, for free.
This is dystopian as hell and basically an ad. Could we filter this kind of content pls?
Amazon’s fucking spyware is cheap because it’s spyware.
Excellent point. I completely agree and should have perhaps put more emphasis on the fact that these practices are of course egregious and the onus should not just be on the user. There should be more public awareness of these privacy nightmares, however. Somehow people need to learn to start caring about this stuff, because if nobody uses Facebook, Facebook doesn’t have the power to act the way it does.
I’ve worked in advertising for a decade and, while on the one hand, the industry indeed tries to track your every move, it’s rarely done well or in a coordinated fashion. Ever wonder why it’s still not possible to switch off ads for products you’ve already bought? Online advertising is mostly blind spam, which is why you will be advertised the thing you’ve just bought ad nauseam. If they had these ultra-accurate profiles of everyone, they’d advertise you something you haven’t bought. Using a basic adblocker instantly kills 99% of an advertiser’s ability to publicly gather your data. It gets more complicated in the walled gardens: Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft etc. have an unbelievable amount of information about you, but they don’t willingly share this. They use it to milk you within their walled gardens (do note, that in order to avoid Meta, you cannot use Threads, Instagram, any of their hardware, Facebook or WhatsApp).
Ultimately, it’s still your choice whether you let them surveil you and it turns out people give these rights up willingly.
If you have an Alexa, it’s your fault that Amazon can spy on everything your family says. If you’ve given WhatsApp your mobile number, then it’s your fault that Facebook can read and analyse everything you’ve said to anyone on WhatsApp, connected to a near-perfectly unique ID against your name.
It is up to the users to not willingly provide this information. Trying to do this the regulatory way is all well and good, but it takes decades and the industry moves faster than that. And many countries don’t care at all anyway.
You simply have to give up this dream of corporate ultra-convenience. You have to decide to live a slightly harder life: Linux instead of windows, open source instead of proprietary. Mastodon instead of Twitter, Lemmy instead of Reddit, etc etc
(Some reasons) Why people vote for right wing populists:
(I’m well aware that other things can be reasons, too, like perceived loss of living standards, increased political corruption etc. But honestly, I think it’s all down to rich people fucking things up…see below for some proposed fixes)
Approaches that could fix this (good luck trying that in the arch-neoliberal EU):
The above and the fallout from it, would instantly free up money for public services, free education and healthcare and eradicate homelessnes. You wouldn’t need a UBI, if public services were good enough and well funded.
Technically I’m far more radical in my opinions and think that housing should be declared a human right and all drugs legalised and all those fancy things, but honestly, it feels we have more pressing matters at hand, namely, inequality. Until that gets fixed, we can’t really progress as a society.
My main worry here being that it can’t be done. I simply don’t see how, as a society, we will ever gain the cohesion to implement decisive action against the ruling classes. They have become untouchable and would rather burn the whole thing down than give an inch.
Delightful read. I know nothing about assembly, but could still somewhat follow it using C syntax.
Are you on Firefox? I use an extension called PagezoomWE or something like that. It remembers the zoom level for you.