I LOLed

AKA Geotargeting

They literally just answered your question. Rhetorical questions don’t really transfer well online.

Thanks for sharing, I am seriously considering it. I just have a hard time justifying the purchase to myself. I kinda worry that I am just acting on a somewhat emotional fear of being watched.

That’s an email client. Do you have a email provider you like that is compatible with it?

Yeah, I was referring to official forums for technical support or feature requests and the like. I don’t really think that everyday people were usually the ones who setup forums, it is website operators and other techies who set those up. The people who setup an independent forum are not the same people who setup a discord community. Discord has a much lower barrier to entry that usually results in a lower quality information and moderation than a forum would.

I mean, yeah, forums are harder, for sure. $20-35 monthly for a mail provider seems to high to me; I would expect that to be about the yearly cost. But, I don’t really have much experience with an email provider for that use case. Really the problem lies in that a website operator and a community maintainer are 2 very different types of people that rarely intersect.

Discourse is a forum software. Maybe you are mixing it up with something else like disqus?

what might everyday people use to set up forums as relatively easily and cheaply as their Discord servers, and not have them riddled with ads or other clunky elements?

Discourse is a clean open source forum software that is commonly used for application support and well suited for it.

Or if your a real die hard for the fediverse, you could set up a lemmy instance for application support. There’s even a phpBB frontend for an oldschool forum look and feel for it.

Usually everyday people don’t setup forums, that’s the responsibility of the application owner(s) or provider. In this case, the easy option is also the shitty option if measured by discoverability of the content.

Uh … Yes. Everyone has an innate survival instinct. Sure in what seems like a shitty situation, life might feel hopeless temporarily, but I’d bet you’ll eventually adapt and get over the initial shock. I’m not sure what you mean by proper, but to me it seems like proper is just shorthand for what is profitable, useful, or easy to people with power.

IMO trying to make execution humane is kinda pointless. It is really just done to ease the guilt of those who participate and watch in it. If you participate in killing someone, you should feel guilty. That applies equally no matter if your carrying out a state-sanctioned murder or a street murder.

Motorola’s pretty decent in this respect, ime.

Because they control the FTC and any other regulatory agencies. It’s called regulatory capture. The only other way they can be held accountable is through the pay to play court system which is biased towards them because they can drag it out until the other party gives up.

I would say you ideally have enough for about a month expenses in cash. Then maybe have 2 more months expense in two different bank accounts(1 in each account). That way any one bank blocking an account for a flagged transaction is just a minor inconvenience. Same thing with credit cards, have 2 different ones so 1 getting blocked is just a minor inconvenience. Anything beyond that I would probably put in a tax advantaged investing account like a roth ira invested in mutual funds.

I wouldn’t be opposed to holding some portion of long term investments in a well established blockchain like bitcoin or monero but I would hardly call it a necessity for most people. They are effectively out of the reach of governments if they are setup and used correctly. But I wouldn’t expect most people to have the know how and motivation to set them up and use them that way. Government can’t tell bitcoin to freeze your account. They can tell that to your bank.

The examples were never proven to be justified by the government or anyone else. In both cases the government essentially said freeze these people’s money and the banks did. No due process. No presumption of innocence.

That is the danger of a cashless society.

I never suggested keeping your life savings in cash. You brought that up. I ignored that bit as your financial decisions are your own. And they are just not relevant to the original point of a cashless society being bad.

Just because you haven’t heard of it doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. It is a big world and everyone only sees their small piece of it.

The Canadian government did recently it with the trucker protests. The US did it with operation Choke Point starting in 2013. It targeted 20+ categories of merchants including porn stars, cable box descramblers, and money transfer networks.

The government routinely misuses the ‘justice’ system to wrongfully imprison people. Is it so hard to believe they will do the same thing with money? The government is not a neutral arbitrator of who is innocent. No one is innocent. But the government allows some people to be treated as more innocent than others.

Cashless forces everyone to cede control of their money to the government through the banks. Do you want the government to be able to get a list of everyone who purchases abortion pills? Can you see how such an ability can be easily abused by government? Assuming the government will always be friendly to you is a false assumption.

Not allowing the government/banks the ability to freeze or seize your money because you did something they don’t approve of.

Not giving the government/big companies a log of how you spend your money.

totp.app should work for your use case without the trouble of emulation. It’s a web app instead of a mobile app.

For anyone who prefers to filter their own feed, instead of having it decided for them Lemm.ee is a good option.