This is super dumb, it’s the same logic all those movie studios used to have the government crack down on piracy (destroying our rights in the process).

Absolutely. Adobe made billions. Even if they think they’re entitled to all our money, they aren’t. Being worth $140B when you want to be worth $200B is in NO way a loss of any money

Agreed, but technically Adobe didn’t lose any money. They’ve made billions. Could they have made more? Sure, that is always possible, but that isn’t the same as losing money

Without disinformation, people will naturally work to improve democracy which will eventually expand it to the economy (socialism), so disinformation is arguably a necessary evil to protect the capital class from democracy

It sounds ridiculous, yes, but there are US software engineers who basically work for minimum wage full time doing freelance work because that is all they can find

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)

I never understood why the US would educate people and then try to kick them out in a short time frame. You are basically making other countries better and gaining little from it.

I agree, but at the same time… this is the same country that gave their own citizens (3 entire generations!) lead poisoning and used to lobotomize women. So, I am afraid that expecting intelligence, humanity, and logic from the US can only lead to heartbreak and disappointment.

Public ownership of companies for the benefit of the public is a form of socialism, but Trump’s fascist oligarchy serves only the wealthy elites. Oligarchs hijacking democracy for their own benefit isn’t socialism.

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.

Nicht wahr. I failed my first Discrete Math exam trying to teach myself using only the provided resources (professor, text book, notes, etc). The only reason I passed with a C was because I was able to watch lectures from better professors on YouTube.

I have also used YouTube to fix my car and many other things. Old Reddit (corporate social media) was a very valuable resource of knowledge.

Every single human accomplishment of note was only made possible through social bonds and social collaboration. We need each other. We need tight knit communities, but since so much of the soul of our race has been eroded by capitalist zombie consumerism and the atomization of individuals through car dependent urban sprawl, we are sometimes forced to rely on social media to meet that need.

There is a 3rd type: people desperate for work / experience who are simply taking the best paying job they can find. It is actually the most common type of working in the US.

Capitalism is bad at pricing in externalities. It’s pretty good at using price signals to allocate finite resources to more productive uses.

Markets do not equal capitalism. You can have the efficiencies of free markets (worker owned co-ops which are market socialist) without the all consuming greed of capitalism.

Like farmers who refuse to let the government plant shelter belts to preserve our top soil all because they don’t want to take a 5% hit on their yields… So instead we’re going to deplete our top soil in 50 years and future generations will be completely fucked because creating 1 inch of top soil takes 500 years.

Basic dignity will always be at odds with profit motive. We need eternal vigilance and working class solidarity to keep capitalism in check

Sure, but in that case they need to make the server code open source so game owners can run their own servers.

Or they need to include a lan / offline mode

Ehh, I don’t like the tulip comparison because that situation had nothing to do with hating the working class. The AI craze can only be reasonably explained by a deep contempt and hatred for workers. The capital class is so desperate to replace us that they will jump on any opportunity to do so.

Meta and Tesla are proof that the market doesn’t cull unfit businesses. If anything, the opposite is true, large companies (effective monopolies) will sell at a loss to strangle thriving smaller companies and then will buy them out and dismantle them.

Reminder that the US arguably turned Russia into what it is today. The Soviets wanted peace after ww2, but the US threw everything it had at destroying communism. Putin was a Soviet intelligence officer during the cold war and he is convinced that the US and their western allies strangled the USSR to death with economic disruptions, sanctions, and relentless disinformation. So now Russia is doing to us what we did to the USSR

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

If Elon had said he loved PoE2 but he sucks at it because he rarely has time to play then that would have at least aligned with his claims that he works 60 to 80 hours a week. Elon pretending to work 80 hour weeks and also grind 16 hours a day on PoE2 was just insane. He is such an idiot