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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: December 16th, 2023

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  • Cars are expensive and necessary in areas without good public transit (read: basically everywhere except a couple of areas in specific cities). Most of us don’t have a year’s salary just sitting in the bank, especially when you’re young.

    If you need a car to get to work, you’ll pay what you have to because the alternative is no job which means no home, no healthcare, and no food.









  • Oh legality absolutely does not equate morality, although we obviously work to correlate them as much as possible.

    I will admit, much of my reasoning here is driven by the fact that I live in suburban America, and if I expect to buy literally anything, I buy it from or using a company that does something horrific. It isn’t reasonable to boycott based on even something as simple as “don’t kill people”, because…well I don’t have an alternative.


  • This is probably a hot take in many circles, but I do not boycott companies.

    The purpose of a business is to make money. I do not fault a business for doing something in pursuit of maximizing their money any more than I fault a goat for eating a tin can or a stove for burning my dinner.

    I fault our government for not protecting the human rights of the people that business harmed, and I fault the individuals who work in that business for knowingly helping to cause human misery.

    The sole exception to this is companies like meta, who have intentionally worked with foreign actors to subvert our democracy. That is treason, and by extension they have made their company an instrument of a foreign power. That entity should be forcibly dissolved and the people in power should be prosecuted under the relevant statutes.



  • Consult privacyguides.org for guidance regarding new messaging and email solutions. I imagine you’ll probably want to ask your family to sign up for signal.

    The only alternative to social media is the fediverse. The bad news is that the fediverse is not private. The good news is that frankly social media as a concept just isn’t mandatory, so if you need privacy, you can just…not. Once you break the addiction, you realize how unnecessary it all was.




  • Ok, so serious answer for our friends who don’t live in places without an active culture of protest:

    1. Vote. No, really. If people actually fucking voted, we wouldn’t be in this mess.

    2. Give money to advocacy organizations

    3. Give your time and money to mutual aid organizations

    4. Read the news (not just on lemmy either)

    5. CALL your congresspeople. Emails and letters are better than nothing, but do not have the same impact.

    6. Try to get your friends to do #1-5




  • Reddit has an absolutely massive wealth of community knowledge. If you want to find a community for $thing or gain obscure knowledge on $thing, that’s where you go (assuming there isn’t an old forum post from before Reddit killed forums).

    Twitter is where a lot of people still are. If you’re the kind of person to care what a particular person says, that’s where you probably want to be.

    Instagram is used by young people who have friends on Instagram.

    It isn’t a great system, but it is the system that we have today. This is why legislation compelling Meta/Twitter/whothefuckever to act in an ethical manner is important. Social media is to some extent a natural oligopoly, and unless we get extremely, extremely lucky, the fediverse will always be a niche community.