Fun fact: if you’re an artist on Spotify receiving less than 1000 streams in a year, they won’t even bother paying you. You also need a minimum number of unique listeners. That number is secret.

Spotify is good for those already rich, and bad for those who isn’t.

They also have Joe Rogan and Gwyneth Paltrow on their payroll, and they actively lobby for more relaxed AI legislatiolegislation in the EU.

If you have a subscription, the best thing you van do is to cancel it, get your music from the high seas, and instead donate $12 per month or however much it costs directly to artists you enjoy by buying their music or merch online.

AntennaPod is good for podcasts.

Yeah, generally people need quite a bit of nudging before they get off their asses.

So now seems like a good time to start - no reason to wait for things to get even worse. This is why I stress the community building - it only really requires people to fight back, but it does require people to fight back.

She’ll be happy to hear that it has worked on numerous occasions throughout history! After the fall of Fascism in Europe, people in many countries got together and created strong welfare states in the post war period. Some were more successful than others, but even in the ultraconservative UK they managed to create a national health service that hs proven difficult to kill off.

Sadly, I’ll have to break to her that the fight never ends. The second you stop fighting for progress, some asshole will pop up and try to instill feudalism again. After a generation or two people tend to forget the ongoing nature of this threat, and it seems we haven’t managed to come up with ways to permanently get rid of it, despite our best efforts following the French and American revolutions.

Maybe the time has come to go back to the drawing board, and rethink some of the decisions that were made back then. Jefferson said every generation should have its own constitution. Maybe he was right.

If your friend is willing to make the effort to combat this, she should get organized. She should find like-minded people, act locally to gain political power, and create a stronghold where the illegitimate government will face resistance. She should base this around ideological lines, rather than willingly subscribing to what experienced members in established political elites in her country are trying to make her say or do. She should write down whether values are and make sure to keep them close at all times, knowing that she just might be successful and that power corrupts.

She should not give up hope, but she should give up the belief that others will change anything for her. She needs recognize that her country is already broken, and she needs to act to be the change.

She needs to recognize that she’s not powerless. She can make a difference.

Likewise, she needs to recognize that it’s a long and painful process. It needs to start locally, and it might always stay local. But that is fine.

She needs to realize strength is in the community. Building the community of like minded people working for local action is crucial. She’ll be disappointed in them at times, but she’ll just have to keep going. There’s power in community.

At least that’s what I think I’d advice her. But I don’t know your friend or her situation, obviously.

American capitalists are really, really good at cracking down on any civil attempt at unionising and/or improving society at the cost of the ultra rich.

You could recite the extensive history of violence, but honestly the greatest achievement is in the propaganda. Solidarity seems to be commonly understood - by all classes - as having to take the bill for somebody even poorer than yourself, and nobody seems to be comfortable with the idea that they might themselves one day benefit.

Americans can’t have good things before they start fighting back. Read up on union history. Organize. Educate. Teach people what solidarity is and what the Battle of Blair Mountain was. Learn what was taken away from you, and help others understand as well. Begin locally.

Either that, or keep watching the fascists take over day by day, as they have been doing for decades.

My impression is that karma matters less here. But I never used reddit much and I have never used Lemmy either, so I’m a bit of an anti-expert.

I think the bots are set up by people who simply wanted to see the content. I don’t think anyone is trying to farm anything here.

Ideally they should all be tagged as bots, which would make them less problematic.

Where are you based? US? If so, which state? Which field? Are you willing to travel far?

There are huge differences in costs (from free to insanely expensive) and quality (not necessarily correlated with costs). But if you want to do a PhD, it could be a good idea to search out a research environment right away and to use the Master’s as an opportunity to familiarize yourself with their work.

Edit: Oh, and be ready to change plans. Maybe it’s not so fun after all, and you redecide on the whole PhD thing. Or maybe you change your topic. That’s fine. Don’t force yourself to write a PhD you’re not interested in.

Yup. Huge selection bias.

The people bothering to post random negative comments arealso likely to have too much time om their hands, leading them to post a lot inn general. But there are also plenty of nice people woth too much time on their hands.

Considering this is the problem, I struggle to believe “more nukes” is the solution. No matter how much American political realists enjoy jerking off to their doomsday scenarios.

We should be hesitant to accept too many lessons from the American realist school of thought. Their great legacy is to narrowly steer clear of a nuclear holocaust, on several instances out of sheer luck, while repeatedly fucking up huge parts of the world beyond recognition.

Somehow we celebrate this clown parade for the one disaster they nearly brought upon us, but we narrowly escaped. There’s no lessons to be learned from the Americans, except as a cautionary tale.

Sure, MAD worked; we only came closer to our own extinction than we ever have in the process.

Build up defence, and a plausible threat using other less awful weapons.

Nuclear threatens the civil population. Despots like Putin might not even care all that much about that. What we need is targeted weapons and intelligence. Putin should expect that, if he launches a nuke, it might not mean that Moscow will be transformed to ashes, but we’ll take out him and his crooks with targeted strikes wherever they may hide.

The Russians have a history of burning their cities to the ground, and of sacrificing their population for strategic reasons. Targeting the civilian population is pointless. We can do a lot better with targeted strikes, and with modern technology it should be possible.

Nuclear war is not a stick battle, it’s a knife fight. You’ll both end up bleeding out. Best thing you can do is to not participate.

People should watch Doctor Strangelove as a fucking case study.

This comment section seems to assume that just because the cold war never went nuclear, it never could have. It also seems to forget the stress of living under constant threat of nuclear war.

We need to get rid of nukes, not build new ones. One of our core projects as humanity should be to get rid of nuclear weapons. Our failure to do so is the fault of the Americans as much as the Russians, if not more. You guys sure love your bombs.

So to answer the question: Nah, fuck that.

I feel like I can download files to my newest laptop faster than I can move them around locally on my older ones. But maybe I’m just getting old, and my reference points are dates. Or maybe I just don’t know what I’m talking about, that’s also likely.

In either case, thanks for the explanation!

I get that it’s not very fun to talk about, but I wish women would tell men about these constant risk assessments more often. We live in parallel worlds and it seems most men are completely fucking oblivious - even many of the mostly well meaning ones. And even when they’re told about it they might initially dismiss it as crazy talk.

A new laptop, even the best in the world, won’t make your downloads any faster.

I struggle to make sense of this. Most obviously, network cards have gotten better with time. It obviously depends on what you’re coming from and what you’re changing to, but of course a laptop upgrade could make your downloads faster?

I have awful experience with recent T series ThinkPads.

My Ideapad 510S that I bought many many years ago is much more robust, and has lived through a lot of use and abuse. Meanwhile I treat my ThinkPads like precious relics, and they still keep breaking down on me for stupid-ass reasons. I bought ThinkPad because I thought it could last me at least a decade ­— that couldn’t be further from the truth. What a pile of trash. I guess they were good ten years ago.

Next time I’m gonna put good money into a laptop — and, as both charging ports on my T14s are currently failing, I’m afraid it won’t be long — I’ll get myself a Framework.

For the lower end of the price spectrum I sadly have no idea. I’m just here to warn everyone about ThinkPads. It has become my destiny in life.

If you’re alone and/or feeling potentially unsafe, you did the right thing no question. Prevent the situation from escalating, get away, leave him to his daily routine of making people feel uncomfortable.

If you have a greater audience and you’re in a safer setting, you could consider calling him out. Make eye contact, flip him off, make him know he is not being appreciated. That could be a learning moment, but it could also be the moment when he starts giving you extra attention as you have acknowledged his existence and/or hurt his ego. So it could go both ways and should never be attempted without bystanders.

In a setting where you’re in a mixed gender group, make a male friend aware of the situation and ask them if they could go tell the creep that they’re making you uncomfortable. Men are sadly more likely to believe that their behaviour is creepy when it’s coming from other men, in my experience.

Raising awareness of the issue in general is good, and judging by the comment section here so far there’s not all that much of it around. So that’s also something. I think this is really a question that should go out to men more than to women - what should we do when we observe men making women feel uncomfortable? How can we react in a constructive manner?

Strong disagree on the whole giving up part.

Looking over briefly and not as subtly as one would maybe have hoped is normal behaviour. Coming up and staring is not.

Sadly, if there was an easy solution to this problem we would all have been well aware of it by now. But giving the world up to the creeps is not the right way to go - they will keep going at it forever, shrinking in women’s freedoms little by little until there’s nothing left and women won’t be allowed to leave the fucking house without a man any more. We’ve seen it happen, anyone who thinks America is any better should take a second look at it.

Mastodon is non-proprietary software. So one person or company cannot own it in a meaningful sense.

His foundation might own the copyright on the name and logo, so that bad actors can’t pretend to be them. That’s pretty much it.