Again.

Absolutely. Between Ticketmaster and LiveNation, almost every performing venue in the United States is completely dominated.

We desperately, desperately need legitimate anti-trust actions in the United States; we need something that will reintroduce some actual competition into the market.

The first failure of the federal government that led to this path was in the 1990s and the Microsoft Antitrust Trials. That was the point at which there really could have been another way–but the billionaires, at that point, had all the inroads to government that the Reagan Administration made possible. Because Microsoft could buy politicians, the vast majority of people on the planet have never used any operating system other than Windows, and the Microsoft company gets billions upon billions of dollars from state/federal/municipal contracts.

Google and Apple, then, just followed the path that Microsoft bought and paved through government regulations. And that made it easy for other billion dollar companies like Ticketmaster and LiveNation to do the same thing in other realms–simply buy the laws, buy the politicians, buy the system that’s supposed to regulate them, and then use that system to remove all competition.

Yes.

The answer is that this is all a bunch of stupid bullshit and that the Trumplicans truly don’t give a damn about laws that no one can force them to follow.

At this point, there’s really no point in trying to look for consistency or rational justification for anything these people do.

The article makes me wonder if Waltz is intentionally countering the counter-revolution.

Either that, or he’s just stupid as fuck.

Maybe both.

Article littered with affiliate links.

And it also doesn’t make sense.

Yeah, I think they’re banning/blocking using AI right now. Either that, or they literally have the moderators fully on board with their Right-wing campaign.

If you really want to see what things like banning/suspension do, check out your Contributor Quality Score (CQS) here when you can: https://old.reddit.com/r/cqs/

I went from ‘Highest’ to ‘Lowest’ with one ban, and as far as I can tell, your CQS has an impact on the visibility of your posts.

I don’t trust any of these polls.

Things aren’t bad for him yet, and that’s the only way he knows if things are bad.

Investigators were alerted to his accounts after finding an unusually high number of log-ins and failed log-ins from an unfamiliar devices, locations, or networks. That information is tracked by Google, per the affidavit. Other unusual activity was traced through Payne’s VPN or network provider.

So, Google stopped him, and his VPN provider. I’d like to know who his VPN provider was.

I’d love to see a user-friendly, easily-implemented FOSS alternative to the entire Android system.

The options that exist now often can’t get past all the defenses that Android and phone manufacturers put into systems to secure their own data collection/revenue. I have an older Motorola phone that I literally can’t install another operating system on.

We desperately need a stable, user-friendly, and hardware-adaptive replacement for Android. I don’t want that shit on my phones any longer.

I don’t think things like greed are endemic to our species, and particularly not like the greed that is so all-consuming that you take necessary things for life from less powerful people.

I do think, however, that without a massive change in mindset, that this capitalist viewpoint, the viewpoint that says I can take whatever I want from whomever I want, will persist. We might not be hardwired for greed, but we are hardwired for hierarchy.

And, if that hierarchy is one that valorizes this poisonous type of greed, that the lower primates will mimic it to rise in the hierarchy.

But, we have so many other available hierarchies. The capitalist one is dominant now, but we can change that.

Yep. A Linux build + Firefox (with Privacy Badger and ublock origin plugins)

I hope so.

Fuck Android.

I hope a consistent, user-friendly alternative that works on all Android phones arrives soon. I’ve tried so many with an old phone and they’re always a pain to install and then don’t work quite right. I also don’t want to spend $500USD for a phone designed specifically to sidestep Android.

It would help if Android/Google didn’t consistently try to block every single thing that would allow you to get rid of Android, but they’re never going to allow that.

I hope that something user-friendly and consistent arrives soon. I will ditch Android in a second when that happens.

Yeah, I have an older Motorola phone that I’ve used to try and get Android alternatives, and none of those three systems will work on my phone. It doesn’t look like any of them will work on my new phone either, but that might just mean I have to try it.

Google/Android also seems to make it as difficult as possible to install any alternative system. The easiest I saw was /e/OS because it was all automated, but after about 10 minutes it informed me that my Motorola phone just wasn’t supported.

There’s such a long ways to go with this sort of thing, but I think it’s pretty clear that the world desperately needs a user-friendly, non-corporate alternative to Android/iOS.

It’s really a bummer that we’re all carrying around powerful little computers with us but the corporate operating systems for them use much of that processing power for their own data collection/profits/purposes and tries to prevent us, those of us who own the phones, from using that power for our own purposes.

There’s a lot of good stuff on F-Droid, and it’s nice to see a university doing a project like this.

I’m still waiting on a solid, consistent alternative to Android. It seems we might be getting there with tiny steps.

Leon dying would help.

The world is toxic because of people like Leon.

It’s not ‘someone’ I’m talking about. It’s a very specific person, and Leon barely qualifies as a person. He’s like a disease of culture/society that needs to be eradicated before culture/society dies.

The Zionists are carrying out a genocide.