Paper news subscription or any printed magazine

I’ve only bought printed local zines/papers as a form of donation to alternative media, the same material is published by them online for free anyway.

With the caveat that if it’s small and you pickle it, I’m down.

Good answer.

I gather the hatred some people like me carry for pukecumber has a genetic root.

not g••gling something

If you’re censoring because it’s a horrible company name, I just say “searching”.

Television. It’s like paying to see ads.

+. And the only couple of local channels I’d even consider watching can be viewed online for free anyway.

At some point if you decide you want a significantly newer or more powerful CPU or GPU (for example), there’s a solid chance you’ll need to replace the motherboard or the power supply. At that point, we’re playing Theseus.

Then again, mine was a 10 year old budget build and my hobbies changed significantly, so you might not actually need to upgrade at all if your computing needs aren’t hungry.

A few people are saying “streaming services”, I go further and rarely-if-ever buy entertainment media. Music, videos, games, websites.

Not even pirating most of the time, there’s a whole world of good Creative Commons music, FOSS games and actual creative communities (not just parasocial fan communities) for me to be entertained for lifetimes. It’s just healthier to be outside the world of profit and addiction machines. (It amazes me that people can think ‘influencer’ is not a creepy ominous title)

Adding to this, anything where I’d be paying a publisher middleman. Avoid whenever possible, pay directly if you’re in a position to support the creator/s of smaller projects.

This also applies to other things, like food ordering and travel accommodation. Some places offer a significant discount if you go directly to them - both of you get a bigger cut.

I highly recommend the /c/piracy / /r/piracy wiki. Has guides, advice and links to the better public sites.

See the links on the sidebar of https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/piracy

And not to mention they were one of the other receivers of Hbomberguy’s famous plagarism video.

You were captured by GOP propaganda a year ago

Socialist criticism of liberalist parties isn’t a recent thing.

Here’s a short newspaper article by Lenin in 1913 writing about the left-wing Labour Party in Australia, a few years after it became the world’s first social democratic government at a national level (well, it was socdem at the time, it’s since drifted rightward): https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/jun/13.htm

[removed my post: someone else already mentioned Captain Crunch]

Money going online really changed the mood.

I recall a conference talk mentioning that the speaker (from a nordic country) told their friend to look at their online banking account, and then transferred them $-10. Either they were spotted or they disclosed it, I forget which, and luckily they were hired instead of jailed.

Some people on Reddit were talking about how only dictators would want to disarm people

“I don’t know why any individual should ever have a right to have a revolver in his house […] people should not have handguns.”

• Richard Nixon

Ronald Reagan and the NRA advocated for gun control once the Black Panthers started arming black communities. See: Mulford Act

Banning weapons is a problem if the government needs to be overthrown by its people. In places like the USA, this is increasingly obvious that traditional systems of government regulation are rapidly dissolving.

I think another important point to add is, I assume that your pro-socialism economic position is not independent of all those social positions. For an example, our economic structure affects whether we can fight climate change, or whether wealthy industries (including oil, mining, dairy) can maintain disproportionate political power and continue driving politics.

It’s not just that. What you mentioned is a real phenomenon, but not always the case.

One other reason is when right-wing parties don’t realize that their policies are contradictory in practice. This is common in syncretic politics, like Classical Fascism, which has strong roots in both Syndicalism and Nationalism. Mussolini’s class collaborative corporatism [as in corpus, ‘body’] is a policy which sounded progressive on paper but in reality did not prevent the worker exploitation it aimed to lessen.

Another is that even reactionaries can recognize some good ideas, as long as it doesn’t contradict their personal values. I personally know conservatives with pro-environmental policies, because they appreciate and care about the ecosystem and our food supply chain. I know another strong conservative who is anti-privatization but consistently votes for a pro-privatization party! Politics is complex, not a team sport where every voter toes a line.

Terms like “left” and “right” are subjective, and frankly, not a useful way to understand politics due to its idealistic nature. Ask ten people what “left” even means and you’ll get several answers.

This video is a useful overview.

“as bad”… not quite, and not in the same way. As other people have said, there’s no conscience to AI and I doubt there will be any financial incentive to develop one capable of “being evil” or doing some doomsday takeover. It’s a tool, it will continue to be abused by malicious actors, idiots will continue to trust it for things it can’t do properly, but this isn’t like the movies where it is malicious or murderous.

It’s perfectly capable of, say, being used to push people into personalized hyperrealities (consider how political advertising was microtargeted in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and consider how convincing fake AI imagery can be at a glance). It’s a more boring dystopia, but a powerful bad one nonetheless, capable of deconstructing societies to a large degree.

Hey, actually reading the article is cheating!

As far as financial scams go, my parents and uncles handled my grandparents’ finances for their last decade. If they were targeted then there would be an upper limit to how much money they could lose in one scam. They also weren’t paying for things online.

As for younger elderly people, if they’re still smart enough for it then I’d try educating them. Practically, not just talking about it. There are plenty of good public interactive resources for phishing training, so I’d be surprised if there weren’t any for AI. Also simple things like “never pay for anything in gift cards, ever” are some easy wins.

I’ve looked briefly into the equivalent of antifascist projects, and former neo-Nazis talking about how their minds were changed. From what I’ve seen:

• People can and do leave political cults
• There’s no universal recipe. A common factor among former neo-Nazis seems to be having someone close to them who doesn’t tolerate the bullshit, so to me it seems the best approach is to stand firm, but leave a door open in the rare case that they have a revelation on their own. (Historically, this sometimes happens if/when their own personal reality begins to clearly contradict the propaganda.)
• Many people simply don’t leave, so it’s unfair to demand those around them spend so much time and effort trying to make it happen. It can be a waste of time. It’s a gamble, really, so again that’s why I say leave a door open, as long as it’s safe.

Obviously these are just second-hand observations, I don’t have much personal experience with this, so if any of it sounds wrong then I’d like to know.