As a Canadian living north of the nut-hatch, I wish I had the money to excercise my dual citizenship and get out of here to Portugal, or anywhere else in the EU.

As far as I’m concerned, unionization should be government mandated for every company everywhere in every industry.

But unfortunately we live in hell.

Call me when someone puts GrapheneOS onto old unsold Blackberry Passports. I’d be all over that. I think I’m one of the few who LOVED that design swing-and-a-miss.

“Here’s a dumb phone to take with you so that you can leave your smart phone at home and not be constantly addicted to it.”

Ummmm…have they forgotten that tablet’s exist? Just get a dumb phone and use your tablet when you’re at home. You don’t need another fucking device.

My smartphone has nothing on it as far as games, social media, etc… It’s got calendar, phone, email, etc…

The fun stuff in on my tablet at home.

Why the fuck would I need another device so that I can keep TWO devices at home?

This is just idiot marketing departments trying to wriggle their greedy little dicks into a population that is waking up to their own technology addiction. Here…fight your technology addiction with…more technology.

Humanity is fucking doomed.

After literally decades of sending manufacturing overseas, there is NO WAY Trumpistan pivots back to domestic production in time to prevent complete anarchy in its streets.

At this point, every single country should be embargoing the US. It’s well past that point that we cut them off from the world stage entirely economically.

They’d make for some mighty fine eatin’.

I see what you’re saying. But to me it’s very much a “You can’t swim in the sewer without getting covered in shit” morality-play.

The very act of providing a service that earns more than a billion dollars by necessity requires the cooperation of a number of different entities. As you described, Ticket Master, Publishers, Distributors, etc… So while they themselves might not be directly exploiting people, they have to interact and make use of partners that do if they want to play in that billionaire paddling pool.

To me, exploitation by association is still exploitation.

But that’s me. Everyone is welcome to their own opinion.

Cant we outlaw corporations and continue as we are? Sure would be nice.

I think the world would do better if all of us shrank a bit to be more mindful of a community economy.

If my neighbour down the street woodworks in his spare time and makes bespoke tables and chairs, I’ll do everything I can to go buy from him rather than a corporation (for example)

Growing up on an Acreage, it was more common for us to buy a half a side of beef or pork from the farmer next door than to go to the grocery store. Same for vegetables from farmer’s markets or similar community markets.

It’s less about criminalizing corporations and more about refusing to reward them for making their profits off the backs of poverty wages and government subsidies…

Let me put it this way.

It’s possible to become a millionaire through a combination of hardwork, brains, luck and timing.

It’s impossible to become a billionaire after that without exploiting others, whether that is workers, employees, investors…whoever.

In other words, it’s possible to be an honest millionaire, but not an honest billionaire.

So the amount of wealth a person is entitled to is the amount that they can earn with their own labour without exploiting others in order to do so.

So if you own a furniture store, and you pay your employees a living wage, give benefits, etc… and after that you’re successful enough to be a millionaire…great. You deserve it. If you’re an employer and you own a furniture store, and in order to become a millionaire you have to pay your workers minimum wage and rely on unfair labour practices to inflate your profits…you don’t deserve it.

I use the furniture store example because I worked for just such a guy. Family run business. Paid us all well enough. Gave us benefits. Made sure we were taken care of. Treated us like family. And he was financially very successful while managing to do so. Could he have made even MORE if he had taken it from wages and benefits…sure. But that wasn’t the type of person he was.

To me, THAT example is capitalism working as it should in it’s purest form. Corporatization is just a bastardization of the concept created by venture capitalists and shareholders.

Mine was the laser as well. Unfortunately it was years and years ago and I just tossed it away like an idiot. My collection from then on began collecting dust until last year when I decided to take one of my old Android Phones and a Razer Kishi and turn it into a handheld emulator.

Yeah. I guess I’m too old to understand the drive for better and better graphics.

To me, you don’t repaint a new version of the Mona Lisa just because we have better paints available today.

Graphics (for me) peaked in the 360/PS3 era when games started to nail smooth “movement”. After that it was just about making things more and more photorealistic, which is so completely uninteresting to me because I’m playing a game.

For the last little while now, I’ve been finding that my most played games have been on my old 360 that I decided to plug in again, and my old old PS2 collection that I ripped and loaded to an emulator because the old hardware broke a long time ago.

Third place is “new to me” games that I finally buy when they go on a good sale years after they were “new” (is. RDR2 and Cyberpunk)

I haven’t bought a new AAA title in years on console because I can’t justify the cost.

Literally everything that punk and grunge tried to warn us about in the 80s and 90s regarding corporatism becoming reality and everyone being okay with it as long as they have shiny new toys to play with every year.

The reason the “kill-switch” wasn’t made clear originally was because it literally didn’t exist until users very vocally tool them where to shove their AI crap.

It was added on afterwards.

Oh shit! That’s what we were missing all along! That’s what has, all this time, been keeping adoption down and preventing the year of the linux desktop! A condescending prick talking down to people! We should have figured this out a long time ago! Thanks OP for setting us straight! Now our numbers are sure to skyrocket!

It’s only a matter of time. I want nothing to do with any company that is giving so called “A.I” the time of day.

Well…fuck Udemy I guess.

One of my old employers used to pay out small bonus incentives onto a prepaid credit card for each staff member, and I called it my “fun money” that I would invariably spend on Udemy enrolling in whatever seemed interesting to me. It was truly enjoyable and I feel like I’m a more well rounded person because of it.

And now AI is going to fuck all of that. I want to learn from PEOPLE, not LLM’s cosplaying as A.I.

Did Robotaxi just flat out steal the Cyberpunk font in order to try to look cool? It seems like a very Musk thing to do.

It’s never a bad idea to learn another language.

It’s never a bad idea to learn. period…full stop.

The act of learning anything wires our brains in a thousand different ways; increases our critical thinking skills. Increases our verbosity and our ability to communicate our own ideas more effectively. It increases problem solving skills, etc…

The very act of learning is something that should be practiced every day with something, whether that’s a new language, or a hobby, or being a history buff…it doesn’t matter. What matters is the learning itself.

So if Russian is what is giving you that interest right now, do it. At the very least, chicks dig polyglots.