Have another downvote :)

Preemptive, since I figured you’d not actually have a response, but was very much hoping you would. Lo and behold, you didn’t. Shocking.

What’s your suggestion? Genuine question.

I know we’re meant to be discussing this from a privacy perspective, but my first thought whenever the topic of eliminating cash comes up is that, at least where I am in the US, it’s tantamount to euthanizing the homeless. The vast majority of unhoused folks I know (which is a lot, including myself for a terrible but thankfully short period of my life) get most of their necessities (particularly food) by buying them with cash they’ve earned through various means, rather than charities, food banks, soup kitchens, etc. And only a very small percentage of them has any sort of bank account and/or a device to manage digital currency.

But also privacy, yes. Cash is king.

Reading comprehension issue, I’m afraid.

I think the appeal to companies is the control

This part. Rich people never stopped jerking off over the idea of owning slaves.

Not a lawyer, but if you’ve already paid for something (i.e. “bought” an eBook on Amazon), then you’ve done your part to ensure the creator eats tonight. Pirating a digital copy of it that you can read/move/engage with wherever you want is no longer even slightly morally questionable at that point.

I live on kinda the outskirts of the ghetto, drive through it everyday to get to town, and there’s this one house, dilapidated af, looks like it should be condemned, busted ass Ford Explorer non-opped on the dogshit-encrusted gravel path—and it’s had Trump signs all over the front fence for ten damn years now.

Idk how to make people like this understand that Donny John literally would not piss on you if you were on fire. He’d just call you white trash, then rape your daughter on his way out.

Glad yours took their signs down, but damn. Lotta people have decided to die on this garbage ass hill.

It’s because we were a nation founded by violence and oppression and built on the backs of a slave race, none of which are practices we ever truly abandoned.

You have healthcare, affordable schooling, and labor unions because, wherever you are, your populace is considered a workforce, not a slave race. When your society relies on a workforce, you want them healthy so they can work longer, you want them educated so they can work smarter, and you want them comfortable enough with their salaries and their hours to feel they can afford to have kids, who will one day join the workforce.

Governing bodies in the US don’t need us healthy, smart, or comfortable. They just need us to 1) work (hence tying our healthcare to our work hours), and 2) breed (hence minimal sex education, poor access to contraception, abortion bans, etc).

They don’t need to give us healthcare (or education, or basic human necessities or rights), because as long as we’re breeding, it’s cheaper if we just die. And if that ever bothers us enough to take to the streets (which it has, many times), our local police forces are highly militarized and have no qualms about doing to us what their white ancestors did to my native and black ones (which they have, many times).

And to be clear, this isn’t meant to be a woe-is-America spiel. These are problems that we’ve had many opportunities to address over the years, but let hubris, bigotry, and plain old stupidity get in the way. This is very much a mess of our own making, so I’m not trying to throw a pity party, just addressing your confusion.

TL;DR: Violence, oppression, and slavery. The tried and true American way.

I did not know that. But I’m also an American, so…

“But isn’t Albany in New York?” - Average American

This part. I live in a rural area near a city; lots of people commute into town, and the main road there is flat, wide, straight, not residential, not even any livestock near the road, just open fields. The limit is 35, and half the people I know have gotten at least one $375 ticket for doing 40. It’s literally just a cash grab designed to take money from poor people trying to get to work.

Hate to tell you this, but seems like less a gender issue and more a you issue.

My dumb optimistic ass scrolling to the comments under this post thinking “maybe this time iT wOn’T bE sO bAd” lmao

… You good buddy?

If you thought USians were stupid already, give it a few more years of AI usage! You can just see people’s eyes glassing over when you try to discuss anything of import.

Yuuuup. I’m an American, and I’m particularly scared for Gen Alpha. The amount of times I’ve seen my nieces and nephews stop mid-sentence, pull out their phone and have ChatGPT complete their thought is… Idk man. I’m a millennial, and a significant part of this is my generation’s fault, cuz we’re the “hand them an iPad so they’ll leave you alone” parents (though not me personally because I have zero interest in bearing any crotchfruit). But damn, it’s scary. And sad.

I do like videogames, including ones with NPCs, but the difference there is that an NPC isn’t pretending to be a person, it’s pretending to be a character in a fiction that was definitively written by a person. And even so, I very much don’t like hyper-realism in games, much prefer stylized and/or cartoony.

And yeah the fake person at a drive thru thing started up where I am in California sometime last year (or at least that I first noticed). The irritatingly realistic voice is bad enough, but it’s really the obsequious responses that bug me there. A lot of, “great choice! The orange chicken is really tasty”, like bitch you literally don’t have a mouth, please stop.

Yeah but see that freaks me tf out too. A few nights ago, the moon was shining through the leaves of the oak tree in my backyard in such a way that it vaguely looked like a little kid’s face, and I literally said out loud “absolutely not” and went back inside.

Hanged. Ain’t no way this textbook case of overcompensating masculine fragility is hung, lbr.

+1 for GrapheneOS. I wasn’t particularly privacy conscious when I installed it; I was just super bothered by the Google/Apple duopoly in mobile OSes and wanted literally anything else. Came across GrapheneOS and a few others, but Graphene looked the easiest to install (and it was!) so I went with that. Barely a year later, Google’s out here trying to lock Android down and harvest literally every piece of personal data they can find, and I feel like I dodged a bullet.