Libra00

I’ve been using DuckDuckGo’s browser, it’s pretty alright.

Depends on your definition of ‘difficult’. I can pull a motherboard and replace it, I can hand-edit the Windows registry to do some shit most people aren’t even aware is possible, etc. Are those things difficult? No, because I know how to do them. They are complex and technical and require a fair bit of knowledge and understanding to not screw it up though. Everything is difficult until you learn how to do it, then it’s not. Might be better to ask how hard it is to learn? Cause I can’t drive at all so I’m guessing it’s somewhere between multiplication tables and organic chemistry but that’s probably not helpful. :P

I’ve been on the internet for a long time and met lots of people from around the world, and one thing I hear a lot is that many of them learned English by watching American TV. Some of those folks speak better English than I do as a native, so maybe there’s something to it? Though they mostly did it as kids and for years and years, so maybe that’s not practical.

It’s pretty normal. There’s a graph that plots confidence as you gain new skills or knowledge, and it sounds like you’re on the down-slope of Mt Stupid and coming into the Valley of Despair.

I have spent my life learning for fun and if I can be said to have learned anything about the process it’s that the more you learn the better you understand just how vastly complex everything is, how many ways you could be wrong, and how insufficient your earlier simple assumptions were. Like yeah, maybe trans people are just mentally ill because there have been a few cases where that seems to be the case. But does that make it okay to deny all of them the agency and dignity of being able to decide who they want to be? Even if we define gender-affirming care as ‘harm’, we seem fine as a society with people harming themselves with stuff like cigarettes, why are we not fine with people ‘harming themselves’ with gender-affirming care?

At the end of the day the question you have to ask yourself is: would you rather never be made uncomfortable by this realization that things are more nuanced htan you thought, or would you rather have the most accurate information about the world that you can get? Because you can’t have both. Moral/intellectual certainty is a pipe dream, that way lies true evil, because no one cares less about others than someone who is absolutely convinced that they’re right/just.

And you’re so stupid as to not be able to understand that it’s your responsibility to decide what your kids should and should not have access to, not the government’s, especially when the only tools they have to do so just make it harder for the rest of us to get access to those things at best? ‘Won’t some one please think of the children’ has worn pretty goddamned thin: think of your own children, they’re your responsibility, not mine and not Congress’.

I dunno who it was who decided that legislation should parent their kids instead of them having to do it themselves, but if I ever find them I’m going to slap the shit out of them.

Concurrent: at the same time - if you eat two cookies at the same time you’re eating them concurrently. Cumulative: accumulating/growing over time - If you eat a cookie now and eat a cookie later you’ve cumulatively eaten 2 cookies. Bonus points: wouldn’t it have been a lot easier to google ‘define:<word>’ than to make a post here to get other people to answer for you? You’d get the answer a lot quicker the other way, too.

A spoofed one.

I hope you’ll understand why I’m not going to take my opinion on douches from the guy trying to pick apart my helpful comment with a flood of pedantic bullshit.

You ever notice how it sometimes helps to read the whole sentence to understand what some part of it means in context?

A VPN is a VPN, having a different IP address is equally effective against those things no matter which IP it is.

There’s a comma after that second VPN so obviously it’s related to what follows, which is the part where I describe exactly how a VPN is a VPN: in terms of getting a different IP address. This is twice now you’ve gone way out on a limb here trying to back the play of some fucking troll who didn’t bother to explain themselves and I’m not sure if that’s where you want to be. Picking through my comment and taking bits out of context to feed back to me as ‘evidence’ to back up your pedantry and assumption that the rest of the text of that same comment shows you to be wrong about is not a good look. If you’re going to nitpick my shit to death then you should at least try to read the whole thing and understand how each of the parts relate to each other first, otherwise people might mistake you for some fucking troll too (albeit a clearly slightly more intelligent one since you can actually elucidate what your issue is with what I said, regardless of whether or not it’s remotely accurate.)

If that’s the case then both of you failed to read the part of my comment where I explicitly addressed that:

The issue is whether or not anyone can associate that IP with yours, and what that comes down to is how willing they are to give up their records when the government asks nicely (or, even more importantly: not so nicely.)

I admit I didn’t include the possibility of the VPN operator themselves being malicious, but it seems weird to call me out for not addressing the issue of record security re:governments/LE when pretty much the entire point of my comment was to address that specific issue because no one else was, no?

lol, k, I definitely respect the opinion of someone who drops a half-assed comment like that without bothering to offer what they believe to be the correct information.

A VPN is a VPN, having a different IP address is equally effective against those things no matter which IP it is. The issue is whether or not anyone can associate that IP with yours, and what that comes down to is how willing they are to give up their records when the government asks nicely (or, even more importantly: not so nicely.) I’m not familiar enough with either service to be able to speak to that, but everyone else seems to be talking about features, prices, politics, etc when none of those directly address your questions.

Don’t. Even if it’s not a cult (it totally is) it’s a scam designed to extract money from people. If you just want to give up a significant portion of your money and feel like you belong you’re welcome to buy a shitload of weed and come hang out with my friends and I.

I mean I think it’s intentional that there’s not data on that sort of thing that is collected or made available. There are methods one could use to get a rough estimate; someone elsewhere in the comments suggested taking the reported yearly profit for the company and dividing it by the number of workers. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than what we’ve got right now which is just a big ol ‘shrug’.

But there is likely someone doing the math, even if they’'re just ballparking it and not making it public, because that’s how they justify paying everyone’s salary. It would not surprise me at all to learn that giant corporations have a pretty accurate accounting of the value created by each employee.

I wonder if that’s intentional…

That just sounds like yet another unequal way to divide power, so it’s still an oligarchy. Here’s a radical idea: why not give everyone who is affected by an entity equal control over it? Why does anyone need more control than everyone else? How could you possibly keep that from being abused to benefit the people in power more than everyone else? This is just capitalism with a little extra shell-game on the side to try to make the inequality seem more just despite being just as unequal.

Oh yes, please sign me all the way up for corporations pumping ads directly into my brain, that’s a great plan. :P

Seems like that’s a good time to go ‘Oh, maybe we should change it to say 11 then’.

Unless there are 3 of them hiding behind that machine, that looks like 11 to me?