Dang. Does meetup work? I know it’s pretty decent for tech meetups, not so sure about the others.

Exactly. We should make rules about scary prompts and whatnot, I’m just hesitant about requiring an app store to distribute apps it doesn’t want to for whatever reason, whether that’s an ideological, technical, or competitive reason.

I suppose that’s fair, I’m just concerned that smaller orgs will be caught in the crosshairs, while larger, better funded orgs find the loopholes. In general, my opinion is that the simpler the rules are, the less likely for your average small org to get screwed, because they’re playing by the same, simple rules as the larger orgs.

In this case, if I create an Android competitor and my income stream depends on revenue from my app store, would I be expected to support the Play Store if it can run it? I think Google would have a valid argument here if they’re forced to support my store on their platform. Or maybe I can start w/o it, but if I get past a certain amount of sales, I would have to, which could mean that I still get screwed once I hit that threshold.

So I’m skeptical and would need to see the law first. I just think, in general, we shouldn’t be making policy as a knee-jerk reaction to orgs we don’t like. For example, I think the TikTok ban is dangerous precedent, despite loathing TikTok.

Does buying BAT compensate websites? AFAIK, no sites actually signed up to be compensated that way, so it just ended up being a random cryptocurrency. Brave went crypto first, websites second, and that obviously didn’t work.

Mozilla should do the opposite IMO. Go out and make agreements with major sites to make their content available w/o ads for compensation, and then get users to start using that service. What they use for payment isn’t particularly important to me, but it should be stable and low-cost. I think GNU Taler is a good start to keep costs really low (no money is actually changing hands), and Mozilla can settle up with websites monthly, quarterly, etc.

It should be Brave collaborating w/ Mozilla, not the other way around, because Brave obviously has weird motivations. Brave can keep BAT to reward watching ads, I just don’t think they should use the same system for rewarding ads vs compensating websites for not showing ads.

It’s just playing by the rules as stated, and we have decided that limiting the liability of corporations is desired.

If you start a business, banks loan a lot to that business, and then the business goes under, you don’t lose your house. That’s the way it’s supposed to work, and the intention is to help small business owners not lose their shirts if things go sideways.

But it also ends up benefiting wealthy people because they can use these legal entities to shelter funds. A common real estate strategy is to have a corporation own your properties, leverage them like crazy, then if the market drops and you’re underwater, bankrupt the company. You’ll lose the properties, sure, but you’ll also lose the debt, so you can end up net-positive.

I think we absolutely need to reform how corporations work and remove liability as the value of the company increases. But in most cases, these wealthy people are just playing by the rules that have been agreed upon. IMO, the solution here is generally fewer rules to let things like fraud laws work, not to create more and more exceptions (because who has the resources to find loopholes? The uber-rich).

Exactly. I don’t want to have a dozen small subscriptions, I want one pot of money that handles all of my online stuff, with no recurring monthly obligations. If they continue to produce good content, they’ll continue to get my money, and that’s how it should be.

Look at his history. He started out selling gum and candy to kids at school, then took increasingly demanding jobs (delivered newspapers and whatnot) until he went to college, after which he worked for his professor (IIRC, I don’t recall specifics).

And he never was a day trader, so he’s not the type that’s making money on the margins off other traders, he’s actually investing and sometimes buying a controlling stake in companies that he believes in. If you look at his lifestyle, he very much doesn’t look like your typical billionaire, he lives in the same house he bought in his 20s, and generally lives a pretty modest life, especially given his wealth. Yeah, he makes a ton at his job, but he seems to be doing it because he loves his work, not because he loves money.

In my mind, he’s basically the best possible example of a billionaire. He didn’t do much of anything shady to get rich, he worked hard in his youth and invested wisely the rest of his life. And he started a pledge for other billionaires to donate the vast majority of their wealth, leading by example by giving away half of his wealth to drop from #1 to #2, and now to #10 or so.

If you’re going to criticize billionaires, start with Gates, Bezos, Musk, Trump, or Zuckerberg, not Buffett. Buffett is about as ethical of a billionaire as you can get, and while there’s room to criticize him, he should be nowhere near the top of the list.

In the US, sales tax varies by jurisdiction, even within a state. If I buy something in my city, it could be 0.10-0.25% difference than the city next door, because our cities will have different tax needs. In my state, sales tax ranges from 7.5-8.5%, depending on where the purchase is made, and the city portion is generally around 1% (state portion is fixed).

It’s incredibly dumb, and I wish physical stores were required to display price after factoring in taxes. However, for websites, I don’t expect that, simply due to the variability between jurisdictions (makes advertising prices ridiculous), and because it’s trivial to see the final figure in the cart after I input shipping information.

So if Brazil includes taxes in online quotes like the EU, the gaps is even narrower. My local tax rate is around 8%, so for me, that $600-700 item would be $650-750, which is still cheaper than Brazil, but Brazil may very well have higher sales tax than here. Ideally, we’d compare w/ pre-tax values for a more apples-to-apples figure.

Yup, and that’s generally what I do.

I honestly just want to put $20 in a pool or something and have the browser deduct from that balance when I visit a site. The sites I visit more get more of my money, and I’ll get a record of how much each site changes per visitor to decide whether I want to keep going there. If they use something like GNU Taler for the accounting, the sites can’t track me at all, they’ll just get micropayments and settle up with Mozilla at some interval.

Yet Mozilla seems to not consider this at all. Their entire messaging is “better ads,” not “alternatives to ads.”

card counters

Yup, but these systems are a lot less sophisticated than many people make them out to be. It’s also not illegal to count cards, the casinos just aren’t big fans of losing money, so they’ll enforce their right to refuse service to anyone if they suspect you of counting cards.

police obviously won’t care

Unless you’re taking pictures of police vehicles, in which case they definitely care. Still not illegal, but they’ll most likely harass you for it.

But hey, you can make a living suing police departments, there are worse things to spend your time on.

Exactly. Cops hate plate obfuscation and will probably pull you over on that alone. Having a bike rack? They’ll probably let it slide.

Ours apparently does, but nobody follows that law, and I’ve never seen it enforced.

• a - easy fix, drive a beater
• b - the only tolls in my area use a sensor

If you didn’t want to use a tracking sensor for tolls, can’t you just pay cash? Whenever I visit Florida, that’s what I do. It sucks when the machine is busted, but then I just chuck my change at it and go.

But is it illegal to intentionally always be ready to carry bikes?

Yup, CGNAT sucks. But STUN works fine for me, and most games support it, so it’s not a huge issue.

I could pay extra for a public IP, but for the same price I can get a VPS and do other cool stuff, so I just went the WireGuard VPN route. Same end result with a little more latency, but also more flexibility. I host a few static sites directly on the VPS, with everything else going through the VPN, so that’s nice.

It is if that charity uses the money to help people. So any accusation needs to actually look at the financials of those orgs to see where the money is going.

I’m completely fine with anonymized ads being an option in theory, but there needs to be a way to compensate services w/o resorting to advertising. I think Mozilla should provide a way for users to pay to opt-out of ads, and get websites on board that way.

Websites want to get paid for their work, and advertising is the easiest way to do that. The solution isn’t better ads, but alternative revenue streams for websites, and I’m 100% fine with Mozilla taking a cut of that alternative revenue stream. But I will not tolerate ads on my browser.

I hoped Brave would’ve solved this problem by letting users pay to remove ads, but instead they went to crypto to reward viewing ads. That’s the opposite of what I want, and I really hope Mozilla has someone still working there in a position that matters that understands that.

Yup, I’ve tried Twitter and hated it. I remember when Mastodon launched, and it was described as “federated Facebook” IIRC, and now people are claiming that it’s more like “federated Twitter.” I hate both Facebook and Twitter, so I use neither.

So honestly, I don’t really care about Twitter/X vs BlueSky vs Mastodon, because I don’t want to use any of them. Reddit/Lemmy is a much more interesting format to me TBH.

I’m not OP, but yes, that’s why I don’t use Mastodon or Twitter/X. I really don’t like the format.

I tried to give Twitter a fair shake several years ago, and I found it to be a complete waste of my time. So I don’t use it, or anything like it. That’s also around when I found Reddit, which I found to not be a complete waste of time, and that’s why I’m on Lemmy instead of Mastodon. I like following communities, not topics or people.

even if it’s a tad unfair.

I’m not shedding any tears for Google, but we shouldn’t be doing things just because we don’t like the person or group being impacted.

I absolutely hate Google and have spent a lot of time de-Googling my life. But when it comes to legal precedent, I think we should be very careful.