• 20 Posts
  • 562 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: April 1st, 2022

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  • I haven’t been around these communities in a while, so I can’t really speak for /c/privacy as much as /r/privacy and other communities, but I’ve noticed far far far far too many posts which are blindly perfectionist, with no consideration of threat capabilities or their motivations. Privacy is futile without a realistic threat model, that’s how you get burned out solving non-problems and neglecting actual problems.

    My threat model is largely just minimizing surveillance capitalism and avoiding basement-dweller neo-nazi stalkers from connecting any dots between my online personas and real life identity. Even for that, my measures are a bit excessive, but not to the point where I’m wasting much time or effort.

    Daily reminder: “more private” and “more secure” are red flags. If you see or say these, without a very specific context, it’s the wrong attitude towards privacy and security. They’re not linear scales, they’re complex concepts. That’s why Tor Browser is excellent for my anonymity situation but atrociously insecure to anyone who is being personally targeted by malware (tl;dr monoculture ESR Firefox[1]). That’s why Graphene is not automatically anti-privacy simply because it runs on a Google Pixel and Android-based OS. (Google is one of my main adversaries.) And I think this simplistic ‘broscience’ style of “[x] is better than [y], [z] is bad” discourse is harmful and leads people into ineffective approaches.







  • It’s a vibe, not an actual analysis of political economy.

    People don’t magically change their worldview because they have more money, but a person’s economic relationship (e.g. owning a business, or being an employee) will guide their class interests - someone like Rowling who primarily makes money from ownership rather than work will materially benefit from conservative economic interests. And since capitalism rewards profit over social contribution, those of the business owners who don’t care about other people enough to sacrifice profitability are (generally) more able to build wealth, so there are more right-wing types in mega-wealthy circles, not simply because they have wealth (this also includes those feigning left-wing ideals, like rainbow capitalism and philanthrocapitalism, to exploit real social movements for reputation and profit).

    This Wikipedia page gives a quick rundown of how a person’s politics and their role in the economy intertwine, although it’s probably more useful to learn the concept through pamphlets or books which provide historical evidence, examples and related concepts. My recommendation - Not pointlessly academic or dated, relatively general, has nice and neat chapters for specific questions.







  • I care more about where they are spent. My local government is spending it far better than my federal government. If it was half my income and was spent in ways that lower the cost of living and improve quality of life, then I’d have no problem with that.

    If I get a tax cut, I think, cool, at least I choose where this money goes, because I actually do give some to non-profits that benefit society. Tax amounts are not something which determines how I vote, I gloss over it in the news, it’s just incidental that the anti-worker parties want to raise my taxes and spend them in worse ways.