The crazy thing as well is that especially after COVID people will use the isolation of cars as a positive. You have people who don't like transit cause they would have to be near other people. Which just shows how crazy isolated and disconnected from our communities we are in the US atleast.

I mean I think the argument is they've always served as a gestapo. It's ramping up a little more recently but I'm pretty sure even in the 2000s and 2010s they were still infiltrating "radical" environmental groups.

I mean let's assume he does support Hamas (he doesn't, the furthest I've really seen him go is saying their resistance is justified in the face of genocide). But if we assume he does personally like them, should that put you in prison? It's clear they were trying to get him to say something that they could detain him for, which is then pretty understandable why he "wimped out" in that situation. The fact that they were asking him about that to potentially detain him over it is insane and clearly a first amendment violation.

Something something a lot of people falling for talking points put forward by people invested in commercial real estate because if companies start going fully remote the value of commercial real estate will collapse. Combine that with a mix of people who own these companies also being invested in commercial real estate so it's self serving and companies just in general wanting to have more control over employees.

If we ever get another president after Trump they need to abolish ICE. It's pretty clear at this point that the organizations vague ability to skirt the Constitution is a loaded gun for authoritarians to use to go after their enemies.

I mean I imagine that comes down to the fact that Ori was published by Microsoft while this game was self published. Someone like Microsoft is gonna have a lot more resources for advertising a game versus trying to self publish it.

Yeah but there probably aren't any other realistic ways to get change any faster unless you luck out and somehow manage to get a Teddy Roosevelt situation where they made him vice president to appease progressives then the president dies. But I feel like they've learned from that and don't choose anyone who is actually progressive for that anymore, instead just go for someone who can market themselves as progressive but is happy to do whatever the corporate donors and mainstream dem leadership wants.

Then that's yet another reason it should be built from the bottom up. If you win state races and gain power there you can start passing reforms to fix a number of those issues since the way our elections work is basically just a bunch of individual elections organized by the states and following some federal rules. We've already seen some states pass ranked choice voting for local and federal races or changing electoral college votes to be proportional. Building a third party and gaining power from the ground up is realistically the only way election reform will happen and it also has the benefit of helping those third parties be more viable.

The thing is billionaires are happy to keep putting money into the Democrats even if they're losing as long as it keeps them from turning into a progressive party. I don't see a path where the Democratic party can break free from the corporate money that is fine with the Dems being the lame pony party since they're giving money to both sides anyways. At this point a third party is needed, and it needs to slowly build support from the bottom up, winning power at the state level first. Efforts to primary corporate Democrats should definitely be done in conjunction with that but we've seen how hard they push back against any progressive candidates for important positions so I very much doubt that the party will ever shift to be more progressive.

I think doing all of those things is good but none of them really constitutes the people actually fighting back.

The first point focuses more on people in government using the amount of power they can to oppose this stuff which is good but isn't really the people fighting back against this.

The massive amounts of protests aren't going to do anything by themselves as Trump can continue to ignore them and keep blazing ahead as he's already doing so. Especially considering the major force behind this, 50501, is having some pretty major internal problems right now the last time I looked that will probably splinter and hamper their ability to keep doing events.

In terms of violence I do generally support non-violent action, I just think it needs to be directed in ways that actually accomplish something rather then just allowing people to feel like they did something by going out to a protest for a couple hours. We need people to join organizations and actually start organizing and building community with people. That way people can begin to work towards creating whatever protections they can at the local level whether that be through local legislation or through organizing groups to protect people in the community directly from attacks. Protests can work towards this but we seriously need to hammer it into people that just showing up to a protest isn't enough by itself and we need more protests that aren't just nebulously targeted at Trump but have specific goals and demands.

I mean what do you define as fighting? Cause the most I've seen is protests and I don't really count just going outside for a couple of hours on the weekend to wave a sign around and chant as fighting.

Would love that if it was an option.

But what reason would they have to go after you on foreign soil? Unless you're like actively causing problems for China they're not gonna spend the effort to go after you for saying "China bad" on one of their phones. That only matters if you're in China at which point it's silencing internal discontent. The much bigger likelihood is the American government seeing you, through data Google gathers, organize against US support of Israel or any other position they start abducting people for and grabbing you off the street for it.

I mean judging by the current American government id much rather my data is going to the CCP then the American Government via Google as a proxy.

But making something new comes with the risk of it not working, much easier to just keep milking the same thing infinitely.

I mean I feel like it's less conservatives in general not having media literacy and just people in general not having media literacy. Even liberals will watch stuff like Andor and still not understand the deeper messages it has about resistance. At the end of the day it's just a general lack of education especially in America.

Yeah I agree I don't think it's a good long term strategy, losing the dominant position is gonna make it easier for businesses to seriously consider switching to Mac, Chrome OS, or Linux. And when more people start to switch the OEMs will follow. It's the classic short term profit over long term success approach that companies will always fall into. For now it provides a nice bump in sales through mainly OEMs selling new computers to people and down the line through the businesses who don't want to make the switch or can't make the switch so are forced to buy new windows computers. But yeah it's probably gonna continue to sink their market share if average people can't use the new OS and are smart enough to switch to something else. Although I've seen people still using Windows XP while connected to the internet so who knows if it'll even be a big impact or not. It will really just depend on if enough people switch that more programs get ported to other OSes and then businesses can actually make the switch more easily. And if that ball gets rolling Microsoft's market share will keep tumbling down, but again it's hard to say if that's gonna start or if Microsoft is gonna have to do a lot more bad things first to get there.

That's a fair strategy if you actually can organize with other people at your work to do things like that. But it still does rely on having enough stability to get fired and not end up homeless while getting a new job or trying to sue. Crowdfunding can work if you happen to get lucky and your story gets picked up by lots of people, but it can also reach no one and leave you with nothing. So at the end of the day it's gonna come down to organizing, if only there was some kind of organized body of workers you could form to fight policies that are bad for people in general along with being bad for the workers.

I have to imagine it's because most of their money comes from business customers who rely on windows and would have to spend tons of money to switch to something else or OEMs who are making new computers anyways who this won't affect. There's a reason windows upgrades have been free for a while, I don't think they really care about getting money from people anymore, they're just after money from businesses and OEMs.

I mean I feel like it depends on their role in the company. Not everyone has the luxury of choosing the work they do. I know at least a few people who work in billing for a healthcare company that don't want to do that work and understand it's bad but don't really have another choice as they couldn't get any other jobs. I'm not gonna blame someone for working at a bad company unless they're like an executive or other high up person who could take their skills to a different industry.