CIWS-30

Always, but things like unfettered worldwide capitalism and the concentration of wealth and power just makes it easier to do and cover up.

Inequality and lack of competition (not just economic competition, but also things like political party alternatives) lead to concentration of power, which leads to corruption.

Diversifying power and providing people with alternatives, checks and balances, and separation of powers leads to reduced corruption that groups of average people can fight back against.

Hence things like the 2nd Amendment and the Founding Fathers believing that Citizens should be armed to resist even tyrannical overreach from corrupt elements of their own government for instance.

No I’m not a Republican by the way, I just find it ironic that the people that started the USA actually had some good ideas that their successors have unfortunately just thrown out the window.

Not so sure about that, I feel like average people are waking up to technological bullshit like this more and more every year. Yeah there’ll still be an overly high amount of idiots, but I’ve learned that even older people can change and question things like this.

You can only get so many “We’re giving you 2 free years of identity theft protection because we got hacked and your personal information got stolen.” from big companies like your cell phone company, credit check company, etc. before you’re like “Hey, anything I put online can get stolen by criminals…”

Even if you’re a tech-unsavvy type. At some point the light bulbs turns on and you put 2 and 2 together.

Shit like this is why monopolies and oliglopolies don’t work. I hope people complain AND jump ship in big enough droves for this to change. Self-hosting and the old fashioned “buy your own music permanently” option are good too.

I don’t use streaming services, I just buy MP3’s (or AAC’s on iTunes or whatever they’re using nowadays, it’s been a while) and keep them locally and on the cloud. Never liked most Streaming Services’ recommendations anyway.

“Are you kidding me? Just LOOK at these nerds!”

/no self awareness
/selfown

Ironically, for old stuff at least, Piracy is the only way it’s reliably preserved. Even if you do want to buy it new to support the creators, oft-times you can’t. It’s because I can’t buy it that I turn to piracy. Not just for old games, but sometimes old comics and manga too. Occasionally Anime that’s no longer licensed or available.

Plus, it’s only going to get worse now, with Streaming services and online platforms delisting anything even that might not make a profit because they don’t want to pay residuals. I’m not big on pirating new releases, but that’s because I think we should support artists. I also think we should call for the creators to be paid more of the profit share vs. the money people at the top who seem to do nothing but fire people and shoot down good ideas to try to make everything the same carbon copy live service.

I also don’t have to pirate new stuff, because it’ll old stuff on sale at half price (or less) soon enough, and with all the bugs fixed and the features added the way it should have been at launch. My backlog is so huge that I won’t have time to go through it anyway before I die. So there’s another reason I don’t care much about new games. If I’m still interested in them a year or more later when they’re on sale and fixed up, I’ll buy it then.

As for stuff like Anime and Manga. Anime subscriptions are surprisingly cheap, and so are monthly manga subs if you know where to look. Viz’s Shounen Jump ($3) Vizmanga ($2), Azuki.co ($5), Mangamo (also $5 last I checked)… so long as you only subscribe to one at a time and rotate, you’ll probably never run out, and it’s a lot cheaper than buying it one volume at a time $10 each or whatever.

He almost certainly won’t be able to make that happen, but it’d be a terrible idea. If birthright citizenship were ended, the first thing the corpos would do is replace as many US Citizen workers as they could with Immigrants, and increase the amount of immigrants until they could get a workforce of permanent non-citizens who cannot ever vote.

Smart people who hate immigration or who love democracy would realize that getting rid of birthright citizenship is a VERY bad thing. Our oligarchy would weaponize it real quick. The first people to be made obsolete would be the working class, including the White working class, ironically.

She’s not really a good public speaker for one. Not a lot of charm or charisma. She’s not good at schmoozing like Bill Clinton or Obama. A good presidential candidate needs that, and I think it’s a big part of why Al Gore and Hillary Clinton lost. She can speak well in public sometimes, but at others she sounds flat, boring, and artificial.

Charisma is a big deal. Think about Reagan Democrats and how people to this day love Reagan even though facts and hindsight analysis show that he was a terrible president who was arguably the start of America’s modern decline into horrendous oligarchy.