Voting helped install people who at least rendered some degree of aid, which again is better than the literally nothing that refusing to vote accomplishes.

I sure hope you’re not referring to USAID here. It was a weapon, not a charity organization.

Honestly, that’s probably even more cringe than being a fed.

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Indeed. It’s all a shell game to crush the power of labor (particularly in the tech industry) and pump up stock prices. It’s definitely enshittifying work for a lot of people, but an apocalypse it is not. All the nigh-eschatological talk comes from the mouths of specious tech CEOs trying to keep the scam going.

Posteo markets itself on being green, if that’s important to you.

I think that’s more or less correct. A law is the what, something that can be directly observed and calculated, while a theory is the why. I honestly think if it weren’t so counter to the interests of capital, that we’d hold Marx up there with Newton or Darwin.

If their website doesn’t work, start calling and sending letters, too. When it starts affecting more than the IT staff, things might change.

For whatever it’s worth, I have no alts and have been trying to engage in good faith. But no harm, no foul - you go your way and I’ll go mine.

Oh, for sure, but I do like to qualify my statements when I’m speculating without evidence. It is wild, though, once the you start seeing how much reality doesn’t align with the endorsed narrative.

I’d say that dialectical materialism is a “theory” in the same vein as gravity or other scientific theories rather than the colloquial usage of the term. I’m still studying it myself and don’t feel I’ve read enough to explicate in detail - others are more learned than I am on the subject. That said, my personal feelings on the subject are just that - feelings, not facts, and can no more impact dialectical materialism than my feelings on gravity can allow me to fly.

That said, certainly people can disagree on how best to apply the theory to a given time or place. But if you’re unwilling to provide details and engage in the conversation, you come across as being either dismissive or defensive.

I almost wonder whether these regulations exist not to protect data, but to lull the public into a sense of complacency. Perhaps that’s a tad conspiratorial, but so many laws exist to make legislators look good rather than serve their purported raison d’etre - just look at that OS-based age verification nonsense. At the very least, the national security state has a use for such things, regardless.

On the contrary, it would take a lot to stretch my credulity with how little people understand security and how much they love convenience.

You’re probably right about fax. Telecom infrastructure in the US is notoriously insecure, as demonstrated by Salt Typhoon, and the only reason there has been little regulatory pressure to secure it is that the NSA et al love how easy it is to spy on us.

People think HIPAA is sancrosanct, but I’m willing to bet hospital IT departments aren’t thoroughly vetting their third-party contractors as much as one would hope.

You don’t hear about Monsanto anymore only because they were bought out by Bayer in 2018. You can be sure they’re up to the same garbage under new management.

I was skeptical of China myself until I started reading the arguments and trying to understand where they were coming from, and trying to read theory instead of being a socialist based on vibes. (Edit: not accusing you of being the same, I’m just poking fun at myself here.) I lurked a long time before making my account here, and I honestly think I was all the better for that.

I’d love it if we could eliminate all billionaires tomorrow, but I frankly don’t think that’s possible so long as imperialism exists. Imperialism is the primary contradiction at the moment, not the existence of billionaires, though I think resolving that contradiction would result in a redistribution of resources such that there would, at minimum, be far fewer billionaires.

I’d encourage you to read more about all the myriad ways the imperial core enforces its will on the third world. Vincent Bevins’ book The Jakarta Method is a good starting point if you haven’t read it or other books on the subject.

I cannot imagine being excited by advertisements. Sounds like something out of Fahrenheit 451 or Brave New World.

I have no idea what other instances are like, but you can join lemmy.ml without even giving an email. Unless you’re allergic to communism, I’m really not seeing the benefit of choosing one of those instances, let alone something like PieFed, as your home base. No captchas or VPN blocks, either.

This is just ID verification in another guise. The second I see one of these, I’ll stop using the website I see it on.

Neat. I wonder whether this technique would he effective against retained viral matter (a la long COVID), or whether it’s limited to active infection.

The average westerner has their entire concept of reality built upon the idea that capitalism is “as good as it gets” and that people are divided roughly 50/50 into two separate camps, therefore a government with broad approval is impossible. They can’t see that their culture wars are manufactured precisely to keep them from ever questioning that system. They throw aside any high approval rating as manufactured. (Nevermind the fact that those states that do have manufactured approval ratings are imperial puppets and China is obviously not one of those.)

To those libs who love to talk about the 99%, I posit the following: if a government actually were made by and for the 99%, wouldn’t you expect it to have high approval ratings?