This was so awkward I had to check if you were joking but nope, actual conservative who got his feelings hurt and retaliated with the two most generic right-wing insults there are.

I could teach your entire personality to a bird.

they can give millions in subsidies direct to corporations

That’s exactly why they’re fighting it – every dollar they give to poor people is a dollar less they can give to rich people.

Their initial investigation into him lasted 13 months.

Epstein died in 2019. If there’s any open cases it’s because they’re not making any effort to close them.

Nope. I know it’s hard for you to relate to, but I’m not remotely insecure enough to be “triggered” by a stranger who smells like a Magic: The Gathering tournament, hurling someone else’s insults like a parrot taught to swear, because there’s nothing else for him to do now that they teach teenagers to recognise emotional abuse.

Not nearly as absurd as resisting it by firing into crowds of innocent people and voting for someone who openly struggles to put basic sentences together.

If you want to play the “this person represents everyone I disagree with” game, you’re going to have to do better than one person, who may not even exist, being a dildo.

I won’t. He’s not a good person and doesn’t make even a token effort to pretend otherwise.

I also have to subscribe to and use Adobe software but suggesting it’s less buggy and less expensive than other apps is delusional.

The moment you try and do anything outside of basic image editing, Photoshop immediately shits the bed.

It’s riddled with features that were half developed or half removed. Tried using any of the 3D stuff? It pops up a box saying “We’ve abandoned this and it probably won’t work, but go ahead and try because we haven’t properly removed it”. Using artboards? Probably not, since half the app seems to break with them, including their brand new features like Live Gradients that rearrange themselves when you save.

Looking for a filter? Well there’s 2 places to look since they seem to have lost interest in the filter gallery half way through, then piled mediocre AI filters on top. It’ll be a slow search, since for some reason some popup windows take fully 3 seconds to open, probably due to their 4 different UI systems in various states of abandoned.

Photoshop is widely used today because it was good 15 years ago. If someone hasn’t already creating a leaner, more stable, better designed, more ambitious piece of software, it’s only a matter of time until they do.

Still better than being far-right dogshit.

It’s not even close.

Republicians are never going to go after a Democrat for sleazy, self-serving neoliberalism because they’re also sleazy, self-serving neoliberals.

It’s one of the unspoken rules of the rich – you can use unimportant bullshit to jostle for votes, viewers and market share but you’re never, ever to attack the system that makes them richer.

The moment someone does, watch them band together across “left-wing” and “right-wing” in a show of class solidarity and signal strength the rest of us can only dream of.

We also have no idea what measures they take to stop the system being manipulated (if any).

The far-right could be working to ensure they’re recommended as often as possible and if it just shows up as “engagement” or “impressions” on their stats, YouTube is unlikely to fight it with much enthusiasm.

It doesn’t seep in, it’s cultivated by far-right groups that intentionally target children and openly groom them for extremism.

I haven’t even gotten to ask what anti-drone measures they have.

The answer will be “none” because unless they’re ex-military, their entire contribution to any militia is usually “gun”.

Most of them wouldn’t pass fitness requirements nor take orders. Few of them have other skills such as first aid, communication tech or drone piloting.

Even when contributing their gun, you can’t assume they know how to safely and usefully handle a weapon, or that they’re mentally fit for combat, because none of that is a requirement for buying a gun.

It’s a hero fantasy they’ve literally never thought critically about, but it’s supposed to make all the mass shootings worth it.

Stupid it is then.

This has to be the shittest attempt to stay “mask on” in the history of this community right?

I don’t think anyone capable of typing could also be so deeply, obliviously stupid that they thought people would read the post, then read…

Nah, im a very nice person in real life, vut the anger has to go somewhere…

… and take it mean anything other than “people in my life also don’t know I’m racist dogshit but rather than grow as people, we should keep being racist dogshit on the internet”

Steam got to where it is by good will, good prices and good features.

Well, eventually.

When Steam was first released, the running joke was “steaming pile of shit”. It was slow, unreliable and only a couple of shades of green away from the worst color in the world. People complained about the birth of “always online” games and about paying full price but not even getting a box with it.

It’s not exactly unassailable now either. It’s my platform of choice as a user but for indie developers, the 30% cut is brutal and last I used it, the Steamworks SDK was pretty rough. The app itself also has a lot of legacy bloat like a built in MP3 player.

It’s ahead of the rest but I think “good will, good prices and good features” might be an overly romantic take on “it’s where all my games already are”.

The important part was that you got the far-right talking point out there.

Honestly don’t mean this as an insult, but you might want to consider being more concise, so that your point comes across better.

I’m cool with ranting. I enjoy the act of writing, blogs are long dead and it’s important to articulate why so many things in the world are fucking shit.

If we all work together, it’s been proven that it does turn things around

When?

The ones making Society horrible definitely win when no one pushes back.

They also win when people do push back, because thats how the game has been rigged. The extent of the public’s power is making them win slightly less.

The only way to stop companies doing unethical things is strict regulations, ruthlessly enforced. The only times “consumer advocacy” ever works is when the government steps in, which is why the ultra wealthy go to so much effort to ensure they never do.

One good person in politics, with power, is worth a million people boycotting.

Partly, this is because “the free market will solve it” is just a neoliberal lie. Sometimes, there’s simply no other choice as corporations race each other to the bottom.

So this streaming service might have gotten shitty, espensive or unethical, but you can move to another right? Oh no, looks like they’re shitty and unethical too, just slightly differently.

Then in six months time, they’ve each absorbed one another’s shitty, greedy practises anyway, ensuring consumers are fully exploited with nowhere else to go.

But the true power of neoliberalism lies in its giant book of premade excuses, so neoliberals (or neoliberals in disguise) will of course read from the next page:

“Oh that’s just because there isn’t enough competition. We just need to deregulate heavily and allow companies to do whatever the streaming equivalent of dumping toxic by-products in the river is!”

But of course, that won’t ever come true either. The companies that already exist will grow more profitable polluting the river and new entries into the market will be either stamped out, bought and stripped for parts or enshittified by the same greed over time.

Following the flowchart taught at exclusive, expensive schools the world over, the next excuse is to blame the consumers.

“Oh if people really cared, they’d simply stop buying things entirely. But they don’t, because these companies continue to bring in record profits. So secretly, consumers actually love their chocolate being picked by child slaves”.

While they do fight back with boycotts, public outcry and (in this case) things like password sharing and piracy, it’s nothing companies can’t crush if it looks like it might actually dent their profits.

At some point, consumers need to pick their misery and the choices are bleak but obvious.

They can accept the minor misery of advertising, even as they pay a subscription, just like the corporation knew they would.

They can escalate their own misery further by boycotting the entire platform or industry.

But the moral high ground doesn’t make spending your few hours of personal time each day staring at the wall suddenly as entertaining as whatever content you’re no longer watching.

Also, the company doesn’t care. That was part of their calculations and they’re still making even more money.

Or finally, they could maximise their misery and actually do something, like busting out the guillotines or becoming a politician that opposes neoliberalism yet is somehow allowed power.

So anyway, people are tired. The fight never ends and some people have fought it for 50 years already. Encourage them to take the third option by all means, but don’t shame them for taking the first option.

They might already be miserable enough.

A place not far from where I live had a chemical plant which just dumped loads of chemicals on a meadow for years.

Sounds cheap.