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)

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.

Or China! Open source is basically digital communism so maybe they’ll step in and support it like they did with the World Health Organization

Jokes aside, all of my favorite IDEs have an option to use VIM key bindings so learning VIM makes it easier to learn other IDEs.

That alone was enough to convince me to learn VIM

Flatpaks work great on my laptop, but they have can have issues if you use multiple hard-drives or partitions. Especially for gaming.

When did the french become such insatiable bootlickers? As long as billion dollar corporations are still making billions then they should be told to kindly fuck off.

Yeah, it probably wasn’t murder, but considering that the US is quickly becoming a fascist oligarcny just like Russia is, and more and more American whistle blowers seem to be mysteriously dying… I wouldn’t be surprised to learn he was murdered. The oligarchs are evil af and any government that can aggressively fund a baby killing genocide is also evil enough to kill people for petty reasons

Most of Reagan’s agenda came from the heritage foundation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eeCPRD0Hgg&t=0

The capital class controls the heritage foundation and through their countless think tanks, lobbyist, donations, SuperPACs, etc they control the Republican party and even a large part of the Democratic party.

Marx was correct when he argued that economic democracy was necessary for political democracy. When the wealthy get to own the economy they have the entire country by the balls.

Yes, but it is also a bit scary / dystopian that a $62 billion company would go to such great lengths to have one of their own customers thrown in jail for using the product that he paid for in a way that wasn’t hurting anyone.

I sincerely hope that goes well for you. I doubt Trump will let it happen, he has vowed to deport all the foreigners, but I hope things work out for you

I disagree. Sure, companies have a moral right to recoup their R&D costs on a console, but I fully reject the Divine Right of Shareholders. As long as the emulators aren’t sold for profit and no one is hurt, a multibillion dollar company like Nintendo has zero moral ground to tell us that we cannot emulate consoles that we have bought to play games that we also bought.

I grew up with ads in cable tv, but I never got used to them and I deep resent the emotional manipulation that ads attempt so I will turn a show / movie off if I can’t skip the ads. No show is worth being mind flayed by ads.

Oh, I like that. The strikethough is a nice touch

US northern midwest. That was the first time we had a drone just silently recording us so I am not sure what to make of it.

Just last week, my partner and I were on a long hike. No one was around us so to loosen our muscles we started dancing like goofballs on the trail only to look up and find a drone hovering in the shadows recording us. I was embarrassed, but my partner is a very private person and was really upset. Surveillance is seriously getting out of hand. If things continue in this direction then I wouldn’t be surprised if people find a way to use powerful Lazer pointers to burn out cameras.

I just read a story where a cop visited someone based on a noise complaint and ended up gunning the young Airman down while he was on a video call with his mother and gf… So from my perspective, cops are the danger.

These days, profits growing slower than anticipated (but still growing) is framed as losing money.

Maybe, but I am boycotting all capitalist entities the best I can. If I need something I try to buy used or from worker co-ops or to check it out from a library or pirate it.

The global medical community had to beg the US to ban lead from consumer products like paint and gasoline for close to 80 years and our politicians kept taking bribes from lobbyists to ignore medical science… But did we learn from that and ban lobbying? Nope, lobbyists are now bribing politicians to ignore the plastic epidemic and global warming