The services of your local library. Sign up and use them, and get your friends & family on too because the more regular users and the more people aware of their services, the harder they are for politicians to take away or slash the budget of.

Common services offered:

• Kanopy, hoopla (free TV shows and movies, similar to Netflix)
• Local/national newspapers digital versions
• PressReader for various (usually subscription-only) magazines
• ebooks and audiobooks via OverDrive/Libby, BorrowBox, hoopla, etc.
• Educational resources like language learning apps

Very resonable (imo) response from Gargron (lead developer of Mastodon):

I’ve forwarded your question to our legal help and will provide an answer as soon as they give it to me. What you must understand is that our lawyers don’t have experience with federated platforms, and we don’t have experience with law, so we meet somewhere in the middle. Meta presumably has an in-house legal team that can really embed themselves in the problem area; our lawyers are external and pro-bono and rely on us to correctly explain the requirements and community feedback. The draft has been around for something like a year and none of the community members pointed out this issue until now. I’ll add one thing:

“My assumption, {… shortened for brevity …} is that when you post content it gets mirrored elsewhere, and this continues until a deletion notice is federated. So I’d assume if an instance somewhere mirrors my content they can’t get in trouble for it, and I’d also assume that if there is a deletion or maybe a block and a reasonable interpretation of the protocol would say that the content should be removed, I could send them a takedown and at that point they’d have to honor it.”

The goal of the terms is to make assumptions like this explicit, because assumptions are risky both sides. Just because luckily there were no frivolous lawsuits around this so far doesn’t mean there isn’t a risk of one.

Cory has had a much more calm response on a fediverse post, offering to reach out to the EFF’s lawyers for assistance in drafting a better ToS for Mastodon, and other experienced lawyers have offered help also. Amongst the usual negativity from some users.

I’ll be keeping my eye on the outcome but so far it looks positive.

Its just as risky for a non-American buying from a US company. And despite what others have said, customs can be a point of interception. But it’s not customs you need to worry about, they hand-off to the spy agencies to do their thing when they get a valid order to do so. Example program:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/photos-of-an-nsa-upgrade-factory-show-cisco-router-getting-implant/

Like others have said though, your threat model is what’s important. And if you are a person of interest to security agencies eg a whistleblower or journalist then you’d be wise to have someone you know make the purchase instead of you.

I’d be more concerned about Chinese products in general, as they have been caught again and again with pre-embedded untargeted malware. Meaning, everyone who ordered that model got a helping of malware, not just those under active surveillance by three letter agencies.

A few examples in this blog entry: https://georgetownsecuritystudiesreview.org/2018/05/23/flawed-by-design-electronics-with-pre-installed-malware/

If you’re not a person of interest though then you are 99.99% safe. You could always reinstall the OS when you get it and ensure the bootloader is locked. Again that would keep everyone except state security agencies out.

I think I’ll just keep using tailscale until they start enshittifying, and then set up a Headscale instance on a VPS - no need to take this step ahead of time, right?

I mean, all the people saying they can avoid any issues by doing the above - what’s to stop Tailscale dropping support for Headscale in future if they’re serious about enshitification? Their Linux & Android clients are open source, but not IOS or Windows so they could easily block access for them.

My point being - I’ll worry when there is something substantial to worry about, til then they can know I’m using like 3 devices and a github account to authenticate. MagicDNS and the reliability of the clients is just too good for me to switch over mild funding concerns.

I’m onto you’re plan

Meta don’t need to see your chats to get a lot of value out of WhatsApp.

They can see who you message (the phone number) and from there they can probably ~90% of the time identify who that person is via Facebook/Instagram databases. They can see who you message when, and how often you message them, and what time of day you send and recieve messages - all of that is very valuable to help them create an advertising profile for you.

Religious Jews believe in Jesus as a person that existed. Opinions on him range from very negative to very positive, it’s complex and varied - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_views_on_Jesus

Possible this guy’s family has a very positive view of Jesus.

Neat, but like others have mentioned, it’s proprietary.

If you want an open source alternative, I believe the best option currently is Open Voice OS - which arose from the ashes of Mycroft.

https://www.openvoiceos.org/
https://github.com/openVoiceOS/

I don’t understand your comment, the war started in 1939, Great Britain joined the war 3 days after Hitler invaded Poland. The famine occured in 1943.

Your maths is terrible?

If your younger brother watches a lot of right wing rabbithole type content it’s entirely possible that he’s on the same pipeline, yes.

Not really. That was primarily because the king of England at the time (Henry VIII) wanted the freedom to divorce his wives and take new ones repeatedly - he literally asked the pope to annul his marriage and the pope told him no.

Well, he took that personally.

Those plastic dog toys are kinda part of the problem. They don’t last long before they’re off to the dump, and a lot of small bits that break off get swallowed by the pooch.

My dogs (rip) always loved bones, dry pigs ears, goat horns - natural items. We don’t need the consumerist plastic crap they push on us.

Did he hit you with a classic dad line like, “hey hold this, a pin thing just fell out of it” while scouring at the floor as he threw it?

Dude that is rough, no wonder it still hits you from time to time. Those poor parents.

I know you are probably just repeating the terms you were given at the time, but I would classify that ‘freak accident’ of a kid finding a live hand grenade left behind by an arms collector selling his house instead as ‘wreckless negligence’. The grenade did exactly what it was supposed to do, the responsible adult(s) failed enormously.

Aside - I’m absolutely not trying to chide you, I just don’t know how else to get my point across that we pass along these stories sometimes without questioning the framing of the story (I catch myself doing it).

I hated him. No character development, same asshole from start to finish. Whenever I had to do Trevor missions I often walked away from the game for the day, resulting in taking many months to actually finish the kind of game I usually enjoy.

Franklin was boring too, sterotype with no strong opinions on much - just went with the flow on everything. The only character I kind of enjoyed playing was Michael, and that’s because he was aware that he was a piece of shit and decided to try to change. His approach to mending his relationship with his family was terrible and often put them in riskier/worse situations, but hey it’s GTA it’s not meant to be entirely realistic.

I remember being a lot more invested in GTA4 and thoroughly enjoyed that narrative, but maybe it’s rose tinted glasses?

Agreed, except for in the only place that really matters - because it has lifetime terms and deteines how all law is interpreted by the courts - the supreme court.

I say this is the only place that matters because laws passed by congress can easily be undone by the next congress, however a two thirds majority is needed to make constitutional amendments (and other major changes) - so in other words, it all just swings back and forth between Super Shit (R’s) and Shit Lite (D’s), and the only time who’s in charge is very important is when there’s supreme court nominations up - because they can set the course for the country for 40 years.

And Trump nominated four of them.

Sorry but that is wrong. You are using the textbook definition of confirmation bias.

Critical thinking “is the process of analyzing available facts, evidence, observations, and arguments to make sound conclusions or informed choices. It involves recognizing underlying assumptions, providing justifications for ideas and actions, evaluating these justifications through comparisons with varying perspectives, and assessing their rationality and potential consequences.”

I’ll only list stuff I haven’t seen others mention:

• Hot Rod (2007)
• Dude, Where’s My Car (2000)
• Step Brothers (2008)
• Nacho Libre (2006)
• Grimsby (2016)
• Swiss Army Man (2016)
• This is the End (2013)
• Tim And Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie (2012)

I found it 10-20% funny, 80%+ cringe

As has been shown time and time again, the 2A people only want the freedom to own guns so they can shoot up a carpark or nightclub full of unarmed brown people or school full of unarmed children and teachers on minimum wage.

They don’t actually have the balls or follow-through to, ya know… form a well regulated militia and bear arms to oppose tyranny. Even while the oppressors are stealing from them right out in the open every day of their lives, shooting and imprisoning their friends and family, and laughing about it to their faces. So long as they have their cosplay 1911 and AR15 to pose with in the mirror at night… all is well.