Uh, yeah it does. Not to mention the US has killed more people through colonisation, direct and proxy wars, etc. than any other nation in human history.

Because the US is so much better?

This only really works in cases where people are making a free choice. But since people don’t live in a vacuum where consumerism, capitalism, advertising, greed, power imbalances, class divides, poverty, platform decay, planned obsolescence, geoblocking, price gouging, etc. don’t exist, a significant portion of piracy comes from either having little choice (I’m poor and I either pirate or I miss out) or making a choice based on ethical considerations (such as not giving money to a corporation that is known to engage in unethical behaviour). Or that we’ve had decades, if not hundreds of years of elites/corporate propaganda telling us that poor people are poor because they’re bad and we must listen with zero critical thinking to our capitalist overlords who are wealthy because they’re smart and know what’s best for us stupid plebs and here you go, have some bread and a circus so you can ignore your long work hours for pittance pay which is totally your fault for being dumb and not because the system is rigged against you, also don’t ever cross us because we control the politicians that make the laws that say piracy is worse than corporate fraud, even though corporate fraud and tax evasion costs countries and communities infinitely more than piracy ever did…

Yeah, piracy isn’t simple.

They also monitor outbound streaming. I’ve twice had a documentary movie I was watching at a theatre stopped because so one was supposedly live streaming the movie to the internet. The second time it happened they stopped the movie until the person doing it stopped, only it turned out they made a mistake and no one was live streaming it at all - they just interrupted the movie for fucking ages because of wanky attitudes. What made it even more stupid was that it was a special screening for a one off event AND a pretty niche documentary that most people wouldn’t give a fuck about let alone pirate 🙄

Maybe break down by gender could be related to how accessible technology is to genders based on barriers like sexism and gender-based hostility? A bit like how IT jobs have less women (despite things like the first programmers being women and it originally being a “woman’s job”), non-binary folk and tend to be male-dominated? You have to ask why something that shouldn’t have a gender bias is gendered. In this instance, I would be looking at why there’s a difference between Western/W.E.I.R.D. countries and Indonesia - what in Indonesia is making it more accessible to women when the reverse is true in countries known to be hostile to non-males in the technology world.

(Possibly I have way overcomplicated what I’m trying to say lol but I’m a bit sick at the moment so not easy to think through a woolly head).

I used to almost exclusively pirate because I couldn’t afford much of anything. Steam has actually enabled me to purchase most of the games I use since I can wait till they’re on special and cheap. There’s also a huge amount of indie games that would never have seen the light of day if they could only release on physical media or through their own website or whatever.
no Steam isn’t perfect, I would like Valve to take less of a cut but in terms of making games more accessible, I think they’ve done a decent job.
No shade on my fellow pirates who still exclusively pirate and don’t want to feed the corporate beast.

We’ve used a couple of different Pis and a couple of different Odroids. The Odroids have been excellent and trouble free, the Pis not so much. Initially we got a Pi because we thought with the bigger community and better software support it would be easier to troubleshoot issues. Except that they have been regular problems that we haven’t always been able to work around or fix. One of them got relegated to a retro game ‘console’ because it was more trouble than it was worth. We’ve had little issues with the Odroids that wasn’t easily sorted.

That sucks to hear. Back when I migrated to the Fediverse, I chose Kbin just simply because the interface suited me better. Frustrating when aholes ruin a good thing.

I might just be really tired and feeling dense this morning, but what do you mean about kbin.social?

If your TV is Android based then there’s the SmartTube app. YouTube without the ads and tracking.

Calibre Content Server
https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/server.html

Or Calibre-Web
https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web

There’s a big difference between a publicly published newspaper and shdy companies opaquely data mining people’s internet browser activity either completely secretly, burying it in a eula/tos or using shdy language to manipulate people into giving up their data.

Nissan Leafs are plenty DIY repairable. It was part of our decision making process when considering buying an EV. There’s also electric conversions if that’s your jam.

That’s already happened.

My spouse was just telling me about someone who got stuck waiting for an hour because their car decided to unexpectedly do an update

There’s also Betterbird, a fork of Thunderbird which retains some user-liked features that Mozilla removed as well as some bug fixes.

This didn’t age well. Not that Microsoft were above board back then either.

Enshittification :(

The Epic Games that ironically has monopolised exclusive titles on their platform? That Epic Games? The same Epic Games done for violating kids privacy rights? Epic Games that makes it hard to get refunds? The Epic Games partly owned by Tencent who are known to be in bed with the CCP? That one? Epic who my be selling user data to the CCP and broke GDPR laws? And the Epic Games CEO who actively shits on Linux gamers? Are we talking about that Epic Games?

Meh, they can go to hell along with Google.

Ghasts Gone Wild