That ruling does not affect the ability of the president to put someone else in jail, unilaterally, of their own decision.

SBF’s case was completely different, since the legality of his actions was much more easily provable as a crime. Not only was every transaction on the actual blockchain, which is immutable and couldn’t have possibly been faked, but his actions didn’t exactly have any nuance that could be argued in court. There were funds, they weren’t his, but he used them. Case closed.

Trump’s case involves not only a lot more possible statutes he could have violated, but also a lot of arbitrary actions that don’t perfectly fall into a rigid box of “this is legal” or “this is illegal.”

Plus, if you have more money to draw out legal fights, you can keep them going for longer, regardless of your case. SBF had most of his assets confiscated since they were almost entirely from the fraud, so he didn’t have the same luxuries.

Biden spent four years not putting his ass in jail.

The president cannot escape the systems of checks & balances we have to unilaterally imprison someone.

I completely get your point, and to an extent I agree, but I do think there’s still an argument to be made.

For instance, if a theme park was charging an ungodly amount for admission, or maybe, say, charged you on a per-ride basis after you paid admission, slowly adding more and more charges to every activity until half your time was spent just handing over the money to do things, if everyone were to stop going in, the theme park would close down, because they did something that turned users away.

Websites have continually added more and more ads, to the point that reading a news article feels like reading 50% ads, and 50% content. If they never see any pushback, then they’ll just keep heaping on more and more ads until it’s physically impossible to cram any more in.

I feel like this is less of a dunk on the site by not using it in that moment, and more a justifiable way to show that you won’t tolerate the rapidly enshittified landscape of digital advertising, and so these sites will never even have a chance of getting your business in the future.

If something like this happens enough, advertisers might start finding alternative ways to fund their content, (i.e. donation model, subscription, limited free articles then paywall) or ad networks might actually engage with user demands and make their systems less intrusive, or more private. (which can be seen to some degree with, for instance, Mozilla’s acquisition of Anonym)

Even citing Google’s own research, 63% of users use ad blockers because of too many ads, and 48% use it because of annoying ads. The majority of these sites that instantly hit you with a block are often using highly intrusive ads that keep popping up, getting in the way, and taking up way too much space. The exact thing we know makes users not want to come back. It’s their fault users don’t want to see their deliberately maliciously placed ads.

A lot of users (myself most definitely included) use ad blockers primarily for privacy reasons. Ad networks bundle massive amounts of surveillance technology with their ads, which isn’t just intrusive, but it also slows down every single site you go to, across the entire internet. Refusing that practice increases the chance that sites more broadly could shift to more privacy-focused advertising methods.

Google recommends to “Treat your visitors with respect,” but these sites that just instantly slap up an ad blocker removal request before you’ve even seen the content don’t actually respect you, they just hope you’re willing to sacrifice your privacy, and overwhelm yourself with ads, to see content you don’t even know anything about yet. Why should I watch your ads and give up my privacy if you haven’t given me good reason to even care about your content yet?

This is why sites with soft paywalls, those that say you have “x number of free articles remaining,” or those that say “you’ve read x articles this month, would you consider supporting us?” get a higher rate of users disabling adblockers or paying than those that just slap these popups in your face the moment you open the site.

“1 in 10 people believe they are not at risk when using illicit sources to watch TV, film or sports.”

ONE in ten? Man, they’re even bad at cherry picking statistics 😂

They even cite a study with only 1,000 participants for their statistic that “32% OF PEOPLE HAVE BEEN VICTIMS OF FRAUD”

In the title, at least. The body of that claim’s card says that it’s the people, or someone they know that have been victims of fraud.

Gosh, I hate dishonest scare marketing campaigns.

Just keep in mind the possible cons of using AdNauseam.

With traditional adblockers like uBO, the ad content never gets loaded. With AdNauseam, it does, it’s just not shown to you.

That means the ad network is likely to get:

• Your IP
• Your Browser Header
• Possibly the site you’re on

And it also makes you heavily identifiable, because to any ad server, a single user mass-clicking their advertisements by the thousands is going to make you very easy to track across sites, just by behavior alone.

So while it’s good if you just want no ads and to do a little monetary harm to surveillance advertising, it’s not good if you want privacy. (Unless you set it to show ads, but still click on all of them, and you’re the type that does sometimes click on ads, then it does become good for obfuscation)

I’d definitely recommend the same team’s other work: TrackMeNot, as it does a decent job of obfuscating your search queries. (Just make sure that if you use a privacy-focused search engine like DuckDuckGo, you disable any auto-searching on Google, since that just gives them your IP, without obfuscating the searches you aren’t making there anyways)

Always demand a human support representative until it gives you the option to, then the actual human will usually manually process your refund if you complain about how the initial refund never happened.

Bonus chance of success if you’re a Prime member and say you’re thinking about cancelling.

The train also only runs between Erkner Station, and Tesla Sud, which is literally just the station right at the Tesla manufacturing facility in the area.

“It’s also free to not just Tesla employees, but regular passengers as well.”

That’s great and all, but are everyday people taking trains to go see the outside of a Tesla factory, then leaving again?

How have I never heard of this before!? I’ve been looking for exactly this for ages now.

Already spinning up a docker container!

I completely get that.

I mostly have just thought of housing as a different kind of beast, since unlike working a job, I don’t have to invest in real estate to save for a house or retirement, but doing so might make it easier to accomplish that.

The biggest problem is definitely going to be full on landlords and private corporate investors, but I don’t want to add any more to that problem, no matter how small my impact might be.

TLDR; I want to protect against systemic risk factors, as most of my net worth will be in the market, unable to support me during a financial emergency. It could also carry possible tax benefits, and make it easier to sustain mortgage payments on a home.

I’m mostly trying to ensure that if, for instance, my entire emergency fund is drained from a major medical emergency (or something similar) during that time, I have something I can rely on that is generally more stable to sell during that time, which will overall carry lower tax implications on sale than stocks that have already appreciated significantly more.

Plus, once I get to the point of being close to owning a home, I want to ensure no major financial event could potentially significantly impact my ability to afford mortgage payments.

I plan on investing as much of my income as I can to retire as early as possible, which means the majority of my liquid cash net worth will just be in my emergency fund, with a smaller additional amount in savings. I would prefer some level of extended, more stable assets, that will still grow at least a bit over time to meet my financial goals, but won’t be subject to as large drops as the whole market.

I don’t plan on investing much of my portfolio into real estate if I do decide to go that route, only 5-10% total, more as a hedge than as a primary strategy. Most of my investing is still in comparatively high-growth index funds.

I appreciate that take.

I just don’t want to be yet another contributor of many to a problem, y’know? Like how even though corporations are by far the largest contributors to climate change, I still try to reduce the excess emissions I possibly produce whenever I can just to help a tiny bit more.

I’m still investing in the stock market regardless, I just want to make sure that diversifying my portfolio won’t have an outsized negative impact on others since, well, that would suck. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Not sure if it adds any more clarity, but to be fair, this question was about morals, which is entirely subjective based on personal opinion.

Thanks for your addition to the conversation though, I appreciate it!

To be clear, I wasn’t talking about liquidations, I was talking about actual market performance. Housing is necessary, even during a financial crisis, whereas unnecessary purchases of goods from corporations become secondary. Thus, housing can stay more stable while stocks crash.

While the market does always go back up, to some degree, I want to be at least slightly more resistant to the possibility of a major failure, (i.e. multiple major tech companies going under from some highly unforseen event) that could lead to entire stocks not existing to go back up again in the future.

I would also theoretically be investing via publicly-traded REIT funds, which could be liquidated in the same manner as stocks.

Wouldn’t that then mean that there would be no rental apartments available and everyone would be forced to take a loan and buy a home?

Not exactly, first off, I mostly mean real estate that is required for survival. Housing, not including the types of places you’d use for a quick vacation stay like hotels, corporate office real estate, etc.

If there weren’t landlords, there would be a significant decrease in housing prices, due to a few factors, namely banks now offering lower-rate loans (since the higher-paying institutional investors are out of the picture), higher supply availability (instead of investor hoarding of empty rentals for property value over use by humans), and generally larger amounts of capital available to spend on new homes, rather than rent payments going to alternative asset classes in wealthy investor portfolios.

It also doesn’t mean no rentals would exist at all, but that properties wouldn’t exist solely for the purpose of being rented. (think someone renting a portion of their existing house, or adding an ADU, instead of buying an entire single-family home solely for the purpose of renting it as an investment.)

Landlording is only a problem because it reduces the supply of housing available for people to own directly, and by the extent of it existing, increases housing values. If existing properties are partially used as rentals by those who have extra space to spare, any of the issues I mentioned functionally don’t exist.

it’s getting so hard nowadays

It’s definitely not easy, but sometimes we just do the best we can, even if it’s not the most that could be done.

Everyone has their own unique threat model. A random everyday person will have less need for personal privacy than, say, a government employee that works for an intelligence agency. Do what you can to protect what matters most to you, but don’t stress if you can’t upend your entire life to improve your privacy.

there are so many more important problems

You can support multiple solutions to world issues at the same time, without needing to make any individual one the most important one, or completely throwing out your other beliefs.

Privacy protects you from anything ranging from annoying ads, to targeted election misinformation, is key to dismantling the surveillance state that is regularly used to silence opposition to current political powers, and protects your right to free speech in a world where every government wishes they could control you just a bit more.

Privacy protects you from self-censorship. It keeps you safe from people who might want to harm you or your family for your views. It lets you protest oppressive policy.

Companies make money off your data. And what are these companies contributing to? Global warming through ever-expanding datacenters running AI models you didn’t ask for. Political campaigns that endorse monopolies. The exploitation of third-world countries.

By taking away their ability to sell you for profit, you indirectly reduce numerous other harms.

I just can’t remember why I thought it was something worth fighting for

The world is crazy. It’s not weird to let things like privacy fall to the wayside when seemingly larger problems pop up, but privacy doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Everything is interconnected, and privacy directly impacts these other issues.

It’s okay to just do what you can. the world isn’t perfect, and neither are we.

Privacy directly helps dismantle systems of power, surveillance, advertising, and manipulation. So if that’s worth it to you, then keep fighting.

And recently, Mozilla has been trying to develop a privacy-preserving ads business.

I’m not a big fan of ads, but if Mozilla can actually make ads that don’t track users, and are uninvasive, they might be able to garner some market share in the ad space, and distance their revenue from Google even further.

I was happy when they used an entirely on-device AI to generate alt text for photos, but this is just ridiculous. They quite literally already have an extension that does the exact same thing this new “feature” offers.

Firefox was supposed to be a less bloated than chrome, but all they’ve done now is continued to add more and more to the browser that nobody actually asked for.

Give me bug fixes, UX and performance improvements, not entire sidebar popups for review checking that only works on 3 stores on the entire internet.

I think we’ll probably see a phone comparable to at least 2022 specs in the coming years, since they seem to release a new model every 2-3 years, with pretty decent improvements each time. Especially with their growing partnerships with chip manufacturers, it might even be possible to keep prices more reasonable too.

I currently use a phone released in 2022, and it’s perfectly functional for all my needs. Would more performance be nice? Sure, but yeah, I don’t actually need more than that.

If Fairphone could reach that mark, I would consider my next replacement phone being a Fairphone, although the lack of GrapheneOS support is kind of a deal-breaker for any phone purchase for me right now.

Even if you buy a phone that isn’t a pixel, then you just end up giving money to a different privacy-invasive corporation that will continue to partner with Google for search deals and surveillance advertising.

Pixels have wide aftermarket repair parts available, relatively reasonable pricing, and the largest support from custom roms since they all test on Pixels as a standard device. (same with app developers)

Pixels often have longer update periods than other brands, and many custom roms provide extended security updates on top of that.

Android development is guaranteed to continue supporting at least the Pixel phones over all others, it’ll be easier to repair down the line, and the money Google makes from the sale is nothing compared to the money they’ll lose by having less power to surveil you.

And as much as I like Fairphone, the specs just aren’t worth the cost currently, although they are catching up as time goes on.

I personally use a Pixel with GrapheneOS, and it works better than any phone from Samsung I’ve owned in the past. (plus it’s usually a bit easier to unlock the bootloader)

Just make sure that, no matter what phone you buy, you don’t buy it through your carrier, as that will make your bootloader un-unlockable unless you pay off the full payment plan and have a carrier that supports unlocking the bootloader in the first place.

Both jokes can be true 😅