gr522x

Libertarianism is a broad ideology that means different things depending on who you ask. The notion that an authoritarian government can be controlled by billionaires and corporations is certainly viable. Undermining those forces and resisting their control by by not paying for content and controlling your access to said content by having your media library is exercising personal liberty.

The comment I made was quite nuanced and I mentioned that I'm personally more inclined to socialism and liberal views, but hopefully not too ideological that I can't see value in different ideas.

If you care so much about avoiding analytics and advertising why on earth are you "googling" your questions on the world's largest advertising and analytics website?

Piracy is being proliferated by government's inability to enforce anti-trust laws and protect consumers. We need another Roosevelt to come in and break up the monopolies corrupted by power and greed. When the government is too weak and corrupt to represent people's interest they find another way to take care of themselves. I'm personally quite liberal and inclined to socialism, but I as write this comment I can feel some connection to the libertarian creed of not depending on a centralized authority to take care of things that could be handled more effectively at the individual or community level.

Sometimes moneygrubbing shareholders do us a favor by steering companies into implementing terrible policies. If Reddit wouldn't have been so greedy with it's treatment of third-party app developers most of use wouldn't be on Lemmy right now. If Microsoft forces Windows users to pay a subscription I think it sends more people away from closed-source garbage and into the arms of the open source community. I've enjoyed watching Reddit implode, hopefully I get to watch a similar show from our friends at Microsoft.

In my experience the suffering of losing a romantic love is less intense the second time, but the falling in love and passion can also be less intense and take longer to build up as you're more guarded with your heart after being heartbroken before.

If the choice is paying unreasonable prices for Apple's overpriced proprietary nonsense or reducing my yield as another data cow in Alphabet's surveillance capitalism human farming machine, I begrudgingly pick the former.

I think it's safe to assume all corporations publicly traded are equally greedy, regardless of how much their marketing department assures us that they exist for altruism.

Shareholders don't by stock to make the world a better place, they invest in the companies sending the largest dividend checks. Apple and Alphabet are equally covetous of our money (money and data for Alphabet), but I trust the old business model of selling hardware more than giving up my data forever to be used for anything in the future.

GrapheneOS is my true preference currently for personal use and it feels good to leave a corporation in favor of a community, much like my switch from Reddit to Lemmy. As the techie in my family and friend group I'm still going to have to recommend iOS to most people since using GrapheneOS as a daily driver is a big ask for my grandmother.

Using an advertising company for anything and expecting objective results is a bit ridiculous. Use DuckDuckGo, Brave Search, MetaGer, anything but Google.

Sorry for the n00b question, but what does the =n,b stand for in the variable?

Thank you. I really appreciate you sharing, this helps a lot!

Pirating gives me the option not to support shit corporations that fuck over consumers with no business ethics. I can pirate the content I choose and pay for it when I want to support creators.

Historically, pirating and underground markets for good and services begin to proliferate in a society as a sign that their economic system is failing. IMHO, unbridled capitalism and corporate shitification in the US is turning the Internet into a hellscape with 5 companies basically controlling the entire Internet with so much lobbying muscle behind them they remain untouchable through what remains of the democratic system.

Please don't recommend Google DNS 8.8.8.8 in the DeGoogle community. This would be the last service I'd use for privacy and security. Cloudflare isn't much better for privacy. Mullvad's public DNS offering is the best I've found that appears committed to privacy and supporting libre projects.

https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls/

Thanks for the tips in this post, very helpful!