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It’s easy to avoid buying things from Amazon

I mean… Yes but also no.

Amazon have gone to crap in recent years and has become a more upmarket Wish or Temu. Much of their storefront is full of Chinese knock-off brands these days.

What Amazon does offer is somewhat reliable next (and sometimes same) day delivery. The only way you can get something faster is by travelling to a brick & mortar shop and buying in person.

As for AWS, aren’t we forgetting that Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Google, even Alibaba and Huawei have their own cloud solutions?

I’m in the first camp. Instagram is flooded with spam accounts posting links to illicit Telegram channels where actual CSAM is being distributed. The owner of Telegram was also arrested recently for failing to safeguard his platform from such highly illegal activity. Children having easy and often unrestricted access to social media is probably the reason why things have gotten so bad.

Every major social network should be asking for ID verification, but there should be strict safeguards on how that information is used and stored, with hefty fines for failures to safeguard.

Gab tried to pull the same thing with their Dissenter plugin. It was such a bad idea that Mozilla and Google banded together to remove the extensions from their stores for ToS violations.

Now imagine what a nightmare it would be to moderate the ability to comment on anything online with actual standards and decency.

Actually, the screenshots of the ban messages were found via a Google image search and are not me.

But yeah, Reddit has a problem with rude power mods swinging their banhammer. It’s been documented for years.

This is actually a very good and nuanced reply.

We’re going through similar problems in Britain. There are a lot of people from deprived communities that suffered during the seventies (Winter of Discontent, high inflation), had their manufacturing/mining jobs and access to social housing dismantled under Margaret Thatcher during the eighties, were ignored by successive leaders (John Major, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown), then suffered through austerity at the hands of David Cameron.

Meanwhile, the media had been pushing tonnes of hatred towards immigrants and to nobody’s surprise, hate crimes against Muslims and Eastern Europeans have skyrocketed. Things are so bad that we voted to leave the European Union in 2016, voted in a corrupt Tory government that pulled us out of the bloc in 2020, and given the trend of our most recent election, it’s becoming increasingly likely that we are going to vote in a far-right government by 2029 or earlier.

Anybody who legitimately gets giddy-as-fuck over the thought of a Muslim woman being stoned to death for adultery should not be trusted with dating advice. Yet somehow this asshole has a social media following of millions, has indoctornated a lot of young people into misogynistic views (I know secondary school teachers who have seen pupils gobble up lots of Andrew Tate content), has eluded bans from mainstream social media (his shit is still all over YouTube), and still has a following despite facing rape and human trafficking charges and being on EUROPOL’s wanted list.

Isn’t this at all concerning, and a big sign that society is failing men?

He looks like the Stonks meme guy. No seriously…

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Online dating apps. I’d:

1. Break up the monopoly that Match Group and Bumble Inc hold on the market, by working with the Federal Trade Commission and UK Competitions & Markets Authority.

2. Introduce caps on what apps can charge for Premium features. Charging the same price as several World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy XIV subscriptions just to see likes is scummy as fuck.

3. Introduce mandatory ID verification to dissuade fake users, and have very strict regulations on how said data is processed and stored, with massive fines for data breaches that could easily have been avoided.

4. Have a correct appeals process towards account penalties/closure and outlaw the use of shadowbanning.

Facebook listening in on your microphone is one of those things that I actually believe to be true. Ever had conversations with people to then realize that you’re being served targeted ads based on these conversations? Seems very coincidental.

Off is the direction in which I would like Microsoft to fuck if they think I’m gonna have a deep learning AI spy on my computer activity.

This just makes me want to switch to Linux.

Genuine question, is Bluesky worth using in its current state? Can it hold a candle to pre-Musk Twitter?

I’m asking because I feel incredibly burned by the barebones state of Threads and I don’t really want to commit to another platform that doesn’t have its shit together. Threads still doesn’t have trending topics and functional hashtags over a year into its launch, and this is is shit that Mastodon had for years, despite Meta expecting to piggyback off of the ActivityPub protocol and be welcomed into the Fediverse with open arms.

Some good examples:

• Fat acceptance and body positivity. Obesity is glorified (even fetishized) when it’s a woman, whereas obese men are shunned. Have you noticed that nobody in the fat acceptance movement is vouching for the 300lb basement dwellers?

• Older ladies who date younger guys are called cougars, whereas if you flip the gender roles, an older man dating a younger lady half his age is going to be labelled a pedophile, even if she’s of-age. Just look at at the anger surrounding Tobey Maguire (48 years old) dating a 20 year old actress. There are people who legitimately think men like him should be hunted for sport.

• The amount of effort you have to put into your dating profile. Women have the opposite problem of being inundated with matches even with minimal effort.

So imagine you’re on PornHub and then out of nowhere, Clippy shows up and says “hmmm looks like you need some help pleasuring yourself”, then starts flicking through similar nude pictures and videos to what you’ve been looking at before. The idle animation of the AI assistant even changes to Clippy morphing into the shape of a penis and shagging a rolled up piece of lined paper is if it were a fleshlight. You can’t tell if Microsoft are mocking you for being a coomer, nor can you tell whether to find Clippy’s sexual deviancy funny or creepy.

Somehow that hypothetical dystopia of Clippy watching you masturbate is only slightly worse than what Microsoft plan to do with Recall. If the mere thought of a machine learning AI taking screenshots of your desktop every few seconds and learning from your computer usage habits isn’t absolutely fucking terrifying… Then imagine that these are likely being uploaded to a server for the perusal of advertisers, intelligence agencies and any hackers skilled enough to break into Microsoft’s servers.

Even if it was stored locally, all it takes is one dodgy web link for you to inadvertently send all your Recall data to a hacker and have it ransomed.

Negotiate a peace agreement between NATO, the European Union, Ukraine and Russia, with the aim of:

• Keeping control of Crimea and small parts of the Donbas in exchange for the land Ukraine gained in their Kursk incursion. This would give Russia access to a second sea port that can be used all year round, and unlike Kaliningrad, isn’t an exclave sandwiched between NATO powers.

• Negotiating the immediate release of all POWs on both sides.

• Obtaining a neutrality agreement to ensure Ukraine will not join NATO (EU or EFTA membership is fine.) Not really anything we can do about Finland or Sweden joining.

• Joint Russian and Western aid in rebuilding Ukraine.

• Lifting all economic sanctions (including those placed on Russia before 2022), travel restrictions and readmission back into the G7, Council of Europe, FIFA, IOC, etc.

I used to be hugely into World of Warcraft.

The more I think about it, what ruined the game for me wasn’t a particular update or new game feature. It was the community, or rather how much it has degraded into a hotbed of elitism, toxicity and greed.

WoW is the kind of community where you’ll be ostracized from joining groups unless you already have a high ranking. And even if you get into a group, people will abandon the group or boot you out and call you a “boosted retard” in the process over a minor error, like dying to a boss mechanic or not pressing the Bloodlust/Time Warp/Heroism button in time.

Blizzard doesn’t do anything, because Activision and Microsoft have spent years gutting out their customer support teams and installing automated systems in their place.

Not current workplace but previous ones.

• Used to work with a guy who had no filter whatsoever and would openly brag about how efficiently and quickly he’d work and multitask, and about the 9/10 models he used to shag back when he lived in South East Asia. He was fired from my workplace after a string of incidents where he growled at a female colleague, bullied several other colleagues over bad quality monitors and openly used racial slurs in the office.

• That same guy went to work for an energy company that I had other friends work at. I learned he was fired and escorted out by security within minutes after being reprimanded by a team leader. He went into a company-wide Slack channel and openly called her a “fucking bitch.”

• Two people got fired for taking dick pics in the office whilst on an evening shift and posting them on their socials.

Everyone would likely defederate from them, much in the same way that you all rushed to close the shutters upon Threads.

I also don’t ever see this happening, unless Spez fucks up with Reddit so badly that it sparks a mass user exodus, much in the same way that Digg v4 sank any hopes of Kevin Rose remaining a successful tech entrepreneur.

I don’t think the “decentralize and federate everything” strategy is a good idea when it comes to online marketplaces.

We’ve seen how quickly bad actors can wreak havoc on the Fediverse like that one time when Lemmy Shitpost was closed for weeks due to people creating new instances of their own and spamming the community with CSAM. Imagine how much you open the community up to scams or criminal activity when money gets involved.