Honestly, you’re getting a bad bias from the kinds of Americans that currently are immigrating there. The important thing to understand is you don’t want the Americans with money, you want the Americans without any money that are willing to work and help other people out. Lol. See, what you’ve got right now are all of the rich assholes that don’t care about the culture or people of where they’re moving to - they just want to live like kings in a cheap city that they can turn into an asshole bubble that prices all of the normal people out. Rich people are leeches. Ultimately, the world would be a better place with open borders everywhere, but no rich assholes. Think about why borders even exist. In what world does it matter? The only reason is ultimately just rich assholes not wanting to dilute their wealth. The best thing we can do at this point is to convince them to go to Mars and leave them there.

It won’t be a huge number, though. Capitalism still works to consolidate wealth. While there never has been any private individual with that much wealth before in human history, that kind of wealth is not unprecedented. The main reason is that people with that kind of wealth have historically been emperors. And make no mistake, anyone with that kind of wealth carries with them the threat of becoming an emperor. After someone becomes an emperor or a dictator, they gain absolute control over the GDP of whatever they control. But even now, Musk’s wealth is not even 1% of the world’s GDP. Someone like Augustus Caesar would have had several times more wealth, and direct control over something like 25% of the world’s GDP. Musk having this much wealth is disgusting - nobody should even be a billionaire. But, at the same time, in the grand scheme of things, he will be nothing more than a footnote in history. He has never done anything actually memorable. People only know him now because he’s a cunt with a lot of power. But power fades, and the world has had countless cunts. In the end, he’s not anyone special. In 100 years, the average person will likely have no clue who he was. Nor will they care.

Of course, but someone should keep it going anyway by making an actual fork of arch called arch btw.

While I fully agree that everyone should vote, the “voting is easy” bit you’re saying is complete BS. Every single early voting day in both the 2016 and 2020 election still involved 2-4 hour lines. Not just for the November election, but even the primaries. In one of the elections, I had to stand in line outside in 90° F heat for 4 hours. A huge number of people in front of me gave up after standing in line for hours, either because they had to pick up their kids or go to work. There was no way around the long lines, otherwise I would have taken the steps to avoid it.

Not only that, but it’s hard for a lot of people to register to vote. If you don’t have a driver’s license, getting an appointment for a photo ID takes MONTHS. To put things into perspective, I have a friend that lives in San Antonio that needed one. We looked, and there was a single location for the entire metropolitan area of over 2.6 million people. The earliest opening for an appointment was 3 months out. Then, after getting an ID, it’s still necessary to register to vote at least a month before an election. Don’t think for a minute that voter suppression isn’t a thing. Just because you live in an area where it’s easy to vote and there are no lines doesn’t mean it’s that way for everyone.

I personally will stand in line for over 6 hours if that’s what it takes. But a lot of people simply can’t. It frustrates me, but I don’t really blame them. A lot of people have multiple jobs and can’t afford to miss work or get fired. These methods of suppression are used because they are very effective.

It’s way less than that. In 2013, you could still get a $2 meal deal from Taco Bell that came with a burrito, bag of Doritos, and a drink. That’s $2.80 in today’s money. Then, I remember some dinner prices from places my parents took me when I was a kid. They’re boomers so they love going to all you can eat buffets. Using that calculator, the adult price for an all you can eat pizza buffet at a CiCi’s in 2000 would be $5.69 in today’s money. In 2005, the adult dinner price for an all you can eat buffet at Furr’s Cafeteria would be $8.39 in today’s money. Even in 2013, there was an AYCE Chinese buffet that would be $7 in today’s money. Those are dinner prices. And if you didn’t want to eat like a boomer, there were plenty of cheaper options. But just to put things into perspective a lot of those same things don’t cost $6-9 today. They cost $20+.

I don’t think Reddit would have that. They likely just use your browser fingerprint. Check this out: https://amiunique.org/fingerprint

It’s a small step out of many. And there’s enough steps now that an average person is pretty much never going to have it, unfortunately. But there is more and less exposed. There’s untraceable, and there’s traceable with more effort than anyone will likely bother. Considering countries like russia have tried and failed to block VPNs, they’re certainly worth something.

To be clear, a VPN provider effectively works the same way as an ISP. If you use a Dutch VPN, it will follow the exact same rules as a Dutch ISP. Given, you should verify that it actually is based out of that location and not just incorporated there with no office and a PO box. In a DMCA situation, the DMCA agents generally are never told the identities of anyone by an ISP or VPN provider. But the ISP or VPN provider forwards the notice to the user with the associated account as they’re legally required to do. If the worst case scenario happens and you get your VPN service cut, you’ve still got your ISP and can just move to a different VPN provider. Having your ISP service cut, on the other hand, may leave you with no service options at all. You don’t get privacy with a VPN, but you do get a stopgap like that.

Edit: Also signing up for VPNs that don’t record your personal information is probably a good practice as well.

Most likely, the logs consist of what IPs are leased to what users, when the connections start and end, and what IPs those users are connecting from. A VPN company may keep the logs for something like 2 days.

Let’s say you torrent something while connected to a VPN and one of the peers in the torrent pool is actually a DMCA agent associated with IP-Echelon. The DMCA agent will record the IP address you have at the time and generate a DMCA notice. It will then look up who owns the IP address to determine where to send the DMCA notice. When the VPN company receives the DMCA notice, it will use the logs to determine who was leasing the IP address at the time in question. If the logs no longer exist, the notice effectively gets tossed because the VPN company has no way of knowing what account was downloading the torrent. But if the notice was sent quickly enough for the logs to still exist, the VPN company will forward the DMCA notice to the user that was using the IP at the time. In that case, it will work the same way as a normal ISP. You’ll probably get a warning with something like a 3 strike policy. In such a case, the VPN will cut your VPN service on the third strike.

Presumably, it could work the same way for anything. I used to work for a VPN company a decade ago, and this was pretty much the industry standard. It, like all VPN companies, advertised itself as having no logging.

I worked for a VPN company a decade ago that advertised no logging. It was all BS. They absolutely logged. Maybe they only kept the logs for something like 48 hours, but I’m pretty sure all VPNs have some kind of logging going on. Anyway, a VPN by itself does not give you any privacy. Websites have a billion ways to fingerprint you, and they don’t even need cookies to do it.

Superman was created in Cleveland.

That explains everything. That’s literally one place on the planet that would have been so boring, finding a bird in the sky would be the highlight of the week. Thankfully, I’ve heard it’s gotten better over the past few decades. But the reputation still lingers.

Even if you look at the pure definition, it can be fuzzy. Who should control the means of production is the great debate among leftists. The problem is “social ownership” can take many forms, and how well they represent society widely varies. If a government is corrupt, government ownership certainly will not represent the people. I’ve come to the conclusion that a variety of approaches is probably necessary as each has its own weaknesses. Natural resources need to be protected from exploitation by even local communities. But people are also right to not trust governments to continuously maintain their best interests. Generally speaking, keeping stuff as close to the people as possible is ideal. Workers, and not investors or government officials, should control the means of production in a business. At the same time, there should be a low barrier of entry for people to come together and form competing businesses. Investment may be necessary, but at the very least, investment should be a one time thing with a limited return on that investment. It should exist to lower barriers of entry, not raise them. And people certainly shouldn’t be able to make a living off of loaning money. While the answers aren’t always clear, there are some fundamental things all leftists should be able to agree on, though.

What feelgood story? $35k isn’t even enough for one month of treatment.

Are you suggesting that being put into a jail or concentration camp with abyssal living conditions and then getting forced to do slave labor might not be the best thing for mental health?

Every single country on the planet has the same shitty people that vote shitty. There are lots of really stupid people. At the end of the day, people can be seriously disappointing. This is the same all over the planet. American voters aren’t any worse than the voters of any other country. So then, if 40% of the voters in any country would be willing to put someone like Trump into power over a more sane candidate, what does that mean?

Well, first off, it means no place is truly safe from the most batshit crazy people getting into power. Italy has Giorgia Meloni, France almost had Marine Le Pen, the AfD is getting a lot of support in Germany, etc.

But it also means that the system itself has problems. That’s what ultimately allowed Trump to get into power. We have a government by the billionaires, for the billionaires. The wealth of billionaires in itself has grown out of control. It is impossible to successfully run for a major office without being insanely wealthy. Bribery is a central part of US politics. Corporations can make unlimited donations to political candidates. All of the safeguards against crazy have been dismantled. Party leadership silences anyone that tries to make a positive change. The media is filled with propaganda. AI has figured out how to manipulate people on a personal level. The list keeps going on. People will vote for the worst candidates all over the world. But in the US, at this point, the system is broken in a way that has enabled the worst candidate to not only be moderately bad, but some of the worst people on the planet.

Edit: I shouldn’t say 40% of the country - when the system fails to the extent it has in the US, it makes it difficult for people to vote. The number of Trump supporters is nowhere near 40% of the country. But there’s enough people anywhere for it to happen under the right circumstances.

It will take a while for a full on replacement to be viable. People need move to this kind of stuff with friends and small groups for now. As time goes on, the infrastructure and community momentum will build out and make moving feasible for larger groups, though. That’s to say, if you’ve got a massive Discord server with 10 thousand people, 100 different channels, and complex bots, you can’t simply knee jerk move it overnight without destroying the community. Number one, the community has to want to move. A switch of that nature starts with people using other options alongside Discord. When there’s enough people using something else, there needs to be a good plan laid out for how to build out the new server and make the switch seamless for the users.

Nobody is lost. People lead lives that make sense to them. It’s not your job or any government’s job to impose your beliefs onto others. Because we have different philosophies and beliefs, separation of church and state is a thing.

Some people follow the Nobel Eightfold Path. Some follow the Ten Precepts of Taoism. Some follow the Seven Tenants of the Satanic Temple. Some follow the 52 Hukams of Guru Gobind Singh. No matter how strongly you feel about your beliefs, nothing makes them any more special than the beliefs of other people. They feel just as strongly about theirs. People having different norths as you call it isn’t a bad thing. That’s called diversity. There’s only a problem when people are bigots that don’t accept others for who they are and feel the need to “fix” them. Whether it’s militant Christianity or militant atheism, we don’t need that. Keep it to yourself. Countless societies have flourished without your 10 commandments.

All of it. The entire thing is complete garbage.

You already acknowledge that commandments 1-4 are things with which non-Christians in general strongly disagree.

5 - What if your father was Josef Mengele? The silence of his son is what allowed him to successfully hide in South America. Was that a good thing? Did he deserve any honor?

6 is written by the state of Texas as “Thou shall not kill.” Is killing in self defense wrong? If someone broke into your house with assault rifles and the intention of killing your children, would it be wrong to shoot at them to stop them? If a fighter jet was coming to bomb your city with a nuke, but you were able to intercept it with a missile, killing the pilot in the process, would that be wrong?

7 - In the context of the Bible, “adultery” can mean not only cheating, but also any sex outside of marriage. Tons of people do not see anything wrong with consensual sex outside of marriage.

8 - What is considered stealing? Is copying that floppy stealing? If a starving homeless orphan steals a loaf of bread from a billionaire to survive another day, is that wrong? A state may define theft however it wants. Personally, I consider the mere existence of private property as theft.

9 - If it was WW2 and Nazi officials came to your house asking if you had seen any Jews, would it be morally wrong to lie to them if you knew about some hiding in your attic?

10 - Is it wrong for workers to desire the means of production?

Every single one of the 10 commandments throws away the nuance of defining morality through critical thinking. As such, I would argue that it is incredibly immoral to follow any one of them.

While there’s maybe an 85% chance of that, the other 15% chance really needs to be considered as well. What if it’s not rabies and by opening the door, you get to hang out and become best friends forever? Maybe next week, the raccoon will invite you to its den, introduce you to its family, and fix you a nice meal? Maybe some apple-berry-grasshopper salad. Have you ever considered that?

Eesh. Guess the rainbow isn’t anywhere in America, huh? I mean, it was at one time, but that was pre-1492. Hopefully some day it will change for the better.