Ethics are very important to me so I say always support worker owned companies/ small indie teams, always support books, but never support evil mega corps like Amazon, Disney, EA, Activision, etc.
Also, any company that has donated to the Republican neo-fascist party? Fuck them. If you wouldn’t give money to Putin then you should never ever give money to anyone who will give that money to Putin’s puppets (conservatives)
Public ownership of companies for the benefit of the public is a form of socialism, but Trump’s fascist oligarchy serves only the wealthy elites. Oligarchs hijacking democracy for their own benefit isn’t socialism.
It’s like most things in America - if you’re doing ok then it’s great, and if you’re not then the rest of the country just pretends you don’t exist.
That truly is the US in a nutshell. The US is fantastic if you are in the top 20% (and you have zero empathy for people you don’t know), otherwise this country sucks.
Define better. They eat healthier (lower rates of diabetes and obesity), but they also spend less money on cosmetics.
Jokes aside, as an American, I wish the US had lost the revolutionary war. Commonwealth territories ended up with socialized healthcare, a far better democracy, and far better labor rights, while the US ended up with fascist oligarchy. No thanks. I’d gladly trade my coffee for tea if it means I get a real democracy instead of a fascist oligarchy
Yeah, so anyway, what can’t I get in the Play Store or the App Store that I actually want?
When I upgraded my Samsung to a OnePlus13, Samsung’s app that manages the tag device flat out had an error message telling me that it could only work on Samsung phones. 5 minutes later I found an open source app allowed me to use the Galaxy tag that I paid for on my new phone. Samsung has some of the best engineers in the world so they were 100% lying or intentionally trying to brick my tag device to either force me to buy their overpriced phones…
And that is just one example. I use tons of open source apps. For almost any useful app you can think of, there is a free open source version. Premium-YouTube? Newpipe is ad-free with all the premium features for free.
I am very happy with my One Plus 13 phone. It has better hardware and was at a better price than Samsung’s S25.
Driving is inherently stressful. Hell, merely being around cars is proven to negatively impact your health: https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/newsroom/editorial/are-you-noticing-the-harmful-noise
Worse, too often these laws are selectively enforced only when cops are looking for an excuse to profile minorities and poorer drivers.
I would fully agree that confronting a lunatic face to face is dangerous, but the chances of getting shot for driving slow is next to zero.
I believe there are three reasons our broken two party system stagnates and rots:
Our slavery founders intended for our system to be a plutocratic republic that would resist change, not a democracy
The purpose of every state is to maintain order which requires preserving itself
Fixing our system would require our politicians to vote against their own interests, to risk their own power and status… This goes against every ideal that capitalists believe in. Capitalists believe that as long as they follow the rules, they are entitled to everything they can take. The fact that the rules were written by the rich to favor the rich is of no concern to them.
Aye, too true. Trump was the greater evil, but it is hard to see the US as being a democracy when our only two choices were genocide + an aggressive regression to oligarchy VS genocide + a slower LGBT-friendly regression to oligarchy,
The bus analogy would have been better if the only two choices were 1. to run over a bunch of poor brown kids (Israel’s genocide) and being pissed on by billionaires before driving off a cliff OR 2. run over slightly fewer brown kids while being given moldy bread to eat.
If liberal democrats truly believed in democracy than they would fight to give us a multiparty system where people don’t have to vote for genocide just to prevent a more evil tyrant from taking power.
Remember when Fox News called workers “dogs” that need to be starved to make us obedient? Never forget, never forgive
God I hate to use this word but it’s the only one that works… cucked.
Owned is a great word for this. Nearly all our news outlets are owned by billionaires which leaves journalists next to zero ownership over what they are allowed to write and how they are allowed to frame things.
Capitalism is bad at pricing in externalities. It’s pretty good at using price signals to allocate finite resources to more productive uses.
Markets do not equal capitalism. You can have the efficiencies of free markets (worker owned co-ops which are market socialist) without the all consuming greed of capitalism.
It is unusual and I don’t like it, but I wouldn’t say it is bad. If I liked the person I would probably come to like the name.
Like farmers who refuse to let the government plant shelter belts to preserve our top soil all because they don’t want to take a 5% hit on their yields… So instead we’re going to deplete our top soil in 50 years and future generations will be completely fucked because creating 1 inch of top soil takes 500 years.
Without disinformation, people will naturally work to improve democracy which will eventually expand it to the economy (socialism), so disinformation is arguably a necessary evil to protect the capital class from democracy