That’s my point.

I use dawn foaming dish soap dispensers, with non-dawn soap. Suds on demand.

I feel even better replacing a new or old sponge with a brush that will never get that awful sponge smell

Soulseek is good for downloading albums and discographies, soundiiz, qobuz-dl and deemix-gui are good for that and also playlists of whatever. It’s also a good way to get FLACs. I download genre mixes, pitchfork’s top albums, it’s a good way to get 80gb of music in a night. It’s taken me 3 months to get that much off Soulseek. Sometimes you want to try out artists without downloading their whole discography.

Nicotine+ is OK, I upload about a tb a month on there and occasionally I find a missing track I can’t find on Deezer, Qobuz or Bandcamp. Turns out other people aren’t just imperfect versions of you.

2023 was absolutely the year I dove back into music piracy. I started with downloading youtube playlists but the real game changer was soundiiz, which allowed me to import text, m3u, csv, spotify, xspf playlists into qobuz and deezer so i can download whole playlists of FLAC with qobuz-dl and deemix-gui. My collection went from 20,000 to 100,000, downloading playlists from qobuz and deezer, xspf playlists from my remaining lossy music. I used streamripper on a few web radio stations just to get a list of songs to pull down this way. I only bought music for years and years, but that got me a narrow type of collection.

There was a programmer at my job, he put out the vibe of being a gung-ho guy and got promoted to team lead. The moment he had a scrap of power he started publicly berating the other devs, randomly, over nothing, leaving me wondering who he’d snap on on a given day. One day I got the message to shut off his access to the build server, which meant he was fired. It took way too long but it was delicious when it happened and my work satisfaction skyrocketed. An asshole can change a whole job.

To bring this back around to the NSA, they’re prevented by law to do data collection on American citizens who fall outside the exceptions like this FISA bill. The one loophole is that private companies have much more leeway in whose private information they can collect, and NSA can use American tax dollars to buy your personal information that’s illegal for them to collect themselves. Now NSA is a military intelligence organization and they’re not supposed to toss their intercepts over to US law enforcement like the FBI, but they do.

The usual. Journalists, democracy, threats to fascism and corporate profits at home and abroad.

Capitalism will bring out the worst in AI, to prevent it we’d need to overthrow capitalism.

Sure, here’s one that’s ongoing https://www.swazilandnews.co.za/fundza.php?nguyiphi=2264 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sB5Ybg5JzUo

Anyway, the Tienanmen Square protests happened before the white terror ended.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Terror_(Taiwan)

I don’t know who you’re talking about being anti-fascist. What if the enemy of my enemy is my enemy? What if you had to vote between two right-wingers? That’s the choice we’re talking about.

We don’t have fair elections now.

You’re presenting a false dichotomy. I’m saying voting between capitalist candidates in bourgeois elections is a nearly politically inert action. It could be worse than meaningless, in giving well-meaning people a feeling that they’ve contributed to positive change when they haven’t. Joining socialist organizations, organizing your workplace, socialist activism, those are actions that contribute directly to solving the biggest problem today. Why would a communist vote for an explicitly anti-communist politician? If you had to pick between a Republican and a fascist, which would you vote for?

These are bourgeois elections in the country that’s the hub of global capitalist imperialism. The Democratic party isn’t even obliged to go with the will of the people, and the popular vote doesn’t even decide the president.

They’re not powerlesss, they just lack motivation to not back the capitalist status quo.

I remember 2016. I put >$1000 on Bernie’s campaign, then it came out that DNC is a commercial organization that is not legally obligated to go with the will of the people. I actually voted for Hillary! In retrospect I wish i hadn’t. I voted for Obama’s drones, the wars in Syria, Libya, the troop surge in Afghanistan instead of ending the war. If it wasn’t for Trump i bet we’d still be in Afghanistan.

+0 for Trump, learn to count.

What’s the incentive for Biden to stop supporting proxy wars if he can count on people voting blue unconditionally? Trump didn’t have a hand in forcing Ukraine into war or arming any proxy war. Neither president supports universal health care. Both presidents are building the border wall. Neither president closed Camp X-Ray. Biden’s more of an idealist in that he unconditionally supports capital, whereas Trump will only support people who flatter, empower or pay him. Biden is actually worse than Trump on an international level, because of his neoliberal pro-war policy, and of course Trump is worse than Biden on a domestic level.

Worse, because democrats vote for them, there’s this sunk cost fallacy where people believe that because the person they voted for won the election, that everything’s cool and our country isn’t sinking into fascism. At least when Trump was president most of the people who believed they are left wing felt free to criticize their president. Nowadays in “left” spaces like lemmy.world you get crucified for going against the neoliberal line or disparaging our precious president.

If you vote for the lesser of two evils, you’re still voting for evil. It’s an endless treadmill. This election is the most important election! Hold your nose and vote for this pro-war pro-capitalism anticommunist strikebreaker. Just put aside your concern for hundreds of thousands of lives threatened by preventable illnesses and US foreign policy and perform your only political activity for the next 2/4 years. I see the US is looking to get involved in Haiti again.

If there’s someone actually good on the ballot, I’ll vote for them. I’ll vote PSL. The fact of the matter though, is that the people in power will not allow citizens to vote away their power, so we’re really left between two choices for people who uphold the racist classist bloodthirsty capitalist power structure. For the impact that voting has in solving the biggest problems facing the country and the world, the importance of voting must not be overstated and we need to focus our energy on meaningful avenues for change instead. If we get public health care and a foreign policy that’s not genocidal, it won’t be because we voted for it in a bourgeois election.