Vinegar

Vinegar, 10 months ago

Whithout hope there is no hope.

Vinegar, 10 months ago

Minor UI tweaks would have been sufficient, like dark patterns to encourage sending secure messages to other signal users by default. Instead, they removed a stand-out feature that made new-user adoption so much easier than other apps. Now, they're just one of many secure messaging apps, and they're not the best one in any way.

I recently switched back to android, i was excited to use signal as my SMS client and then encourage my friends to use it as well. Now there's no reason to choose Signal at all.

They can pat themselves on the back all they want, but im convinced they made the change for the same reason causing so much enshitification of the internet these days: they want to lock-in their users.

Vinegar, 10 months ago

If your contacts use Signal, and you don't want to use signal anymore, you'll need to convince your contacts to switch to another messenger now. You used to be able to stop using signal if you wanted without inconveniencing your friends, now you're locked in.

Vinegar, 10 months ago

Just chiming in to reaffirm what everyone else has said: KDE Neon is specifically built be the best KDE distro. The development branch is what KDE devs use to build & test all their software, so no distro is designed to work better with KDE software than KDE Neon.

Vinegar, 10 months ago

This is an old argument that's long dead. The bottom line is it's a big deal to uproot your entire life / entire company just to exploit tax loopholes, and the use of tax havens is already so common place that it is unlikely to be exacerbated by additional scrutiny.

The book Taxing the Rich: A History of Fiscal Fairness in the United States and Europe talks a lot on this topic. The authors Kenneth Scheve and David Stasavage defend progressive taxation, and state that the only historically-successful argument for raising taxes on the ultra wealthy has been "conscription of wealth" - The working class were conscripted to fight and die in war while the propertied class were not, so the property of the ultra wealthy was taxed very highly (conscripted) for war efforts.

Today, the world faces numerous crisis, and it is the lower class that will work the hardest and be forced to suffer the most while resolving them. It seems reasonable to me that the wealth of the upper class should likewise be put to use solving these crisis rather than exacerbating them. That's a conscription of wealth I can get behind.

Vinegar, 10 months ago

If you earn 45000€ or more per year (post-tax) you are in the 1%. (According to this)

€45,000/yr is in top 1% globally, but not the top 1% for the EU. Either way, the article is discussing a tax on wealth, not income. Even if €45,000/yr was in the top 1% income for the EU, someone making that salary is extremely unlikely to have accumulated enough assets to place them in the top 1% for wealth.

Vinegar, 11 months ago

"good" "selfish idiots"

Such disregard for life is unjustifiable and inexcusable - I don't know what values you aspire to live by, but celebrating death or wishing punitive suffering on anyone is certain to perpetuate harm.

It's tragic that people died regardless of the lives they lead. I have no love for the ultra wealthy, and this event overshadowing the capsized migrant boat highlights our collective hypocrisy, but celebrating death & suffering is a self-destructive and socially regressive action that I hope fewer people do. Instead of directing your ire towards the individuals who died I hope that you and other readers direct that frustration towards the systemic failures those individuals embodied, and I hope you find a way use that anger for constructive action towards a better world.

Vinegar, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

I expect to see further erosion of Net Neutrality if big tech firms are required to pay for internet infrastructure. I have no love for big tech, but if they are required to pay for infrastructure, then how long until smaller companies and hosts are required to pay? The Biden administration seems to agree: "[it] is difficult to understand how a system of mandatory payments imposed on only a subset of content providers could be enforced without undermining net neutrality." I have no love for ISPs either - ISPs should be run as public utilities, not as for-profit private corporate conglomerates.

As others have already pointed out the US government (and Comcast, Verizon, & Century Link customers) have been defrauded by the major telecom companies for nearly 30 years worth at least $400 billion dollars (data from 2014, the current total is likely over $700 billion). They've been pocketing obscene amounts of money instead of investing in infrastructure for decades, at this point additional infrastructure should be publicly funded, owned & operated and the telecommunications companies should be forced to sell the internet infrastructure to local public utilities.

The Irregulators are a group of experts who have been fighting this fraud since 1999, and they have a couple books about this:

• The Book of Broken Promises- $400 Billion Broadband Scandal & Free the Net

• DISS-CONNECT - How America's Big Telecoms Stole Billions from the Public and Created the Digital Divide

Vinegar, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

As everyone else has confirmed - the title is incorrect, medical debt absolutely can be sent to collections

What OP likely misunderstood is the practice of validating a debt - this is not a loophole to get out of paying your debts, this is a basic legal protection to prevent collection agencies from fraudulently or mistakenly pursuing invalid debts. When you get a bill in the mail from a collections agency you can request that the agency validate the debt, and they will have to formally provide the following information before you are required to repay the debt:

A collector has to give you “validation information” about the debt either when they first communicate with you or within five days of the first contact. The collector has to include the following

• [collection agency's] name and mailing address
• the name of the creditor you owe it to
• how much money you owe, written out to include interest, fees, payments, and credits
• what to do if you don’t think it’s your debt
• your debt collection rights, including your right to get information about the original creditor if you ask for it within 30 days of getting validation information from the collector

Federal Trade Commission - Consumer Advice - Debt collection FAQ

Vinegar, 11 months ago

I live in an area with only 2 ISPs to choose from: AT&T or Comcast, and they both have data caps. The FCC has a publicly available Data Cap Experience Form on their site basically all you do is write a paragraph summarizing your experience with data caps.

If anyone wants help, fill out the form and let the FCC know much you hate data caps.

Vinegar, 11 months ago

I paid $200 for an iPhone SE about 5 years ago, then put the phatest case I could find and a tempered glass screen protector on it. It's practically in mint condition besides 3 battery replacements, and I can use it one handed!

Vinegar, 11 months ago

Amazon - Here's 20% off the 100% markup on something useless that we've determined you will like by analyzing every scrap of data we could collect on you.

Nestle - When you see our logo on pleasant things like candy or baby formula imagine wholesome thoughts and everything will be fine.

Starbucks - When we replace the local cafe in your community you're going to love the money you save on coffee by brewing your own.

Vinegar, 11 months ago

Your account is on Kbin.social which is running the kbin software. Anyone can run the kbin software to host their own kbin instance. There are other fediverse programs that can also talk to kbin like, Lemmy, Mastodon, PeerTube, etc. Any content posted to the "fediverse" is accessible across all programs.

It's sorta like being able to browse reddit and watch youtube videos from a facebook account.

Right now, Kbin's federation ability is turned off. It was working well, before the reddit blackout! All other federated programs are federating correctly with eachother right now, though! Check out Lemmy. to see a federated Reddit-like site.

Vinegar, 11 months ago

Rekdit

Vinegar, 11 months ago

I was raised in a conservative Christian family that belonged to a church denomination branching off of Mormonism - It took (is taking?) years to deconstruct and understand the hate that I participated in and supported.

I strongly recommend watching the movie Jesus Camp to get a better understanding how Christian youth groups/camps can brainwash kids so they grow up to become adults who are so ignorant of the world outside their small Christian community that they know little more than what church authorities tell them. In my case I hated the LGBTQ+ community because hating you was my identity. I was taught to be one of "god's chosen people" preserving the correct way to live. It was often preached that natural disasters were god's way of punishing non-believers and those whose faith was not strong enough. The congregation I attended literally believed that all the natural disasters, pollution, and systemic failings around the world were god's vengeance against gays, liberals, and socialists. - e.g. I attended a sermon where the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill was literally and explicitly blamed on Obama's support for gay marriage.

If you were raised in such an insular, dependent, and ignorant community it is most likely you would learn the hate too. When you believe you and your religion are literally the center of the universe (you are the "chosen people" in a supernatural power struggle between good and evil) you too would feel anxious, threatened, pressured and quick to resort to violence.

The conservative Christians I grew up around who hated the LGTBQ+ community were generally emotionally immature. Their personal development, like mine, stunted by the church from an early age. It takes years to unlearn the judgemental conformity, moral superiority, and cognitive dissonance that is so integral to many congregations and denominations today. Faced with the prospect of questioning your core-beliefs, leaving your friends and family behind, and abandoning so much of your identity it's totally understandable, yet horrible, that people will choose to double down on the only beliefs they really understand.

That's why I hated the LGBTQ+ community - Because I was taught that you were the root of so much supernatural evil in the world, but if I were asked "why do you hate gay people" I would have told you "I don't hate gay people, I hate their actions. I just don't like them, it's unnatural". Eventually I realized that people are their actions and you can't hate one without hating the other.