I think the point is that they can’t easilly track back to a specific client of a specific ISP instances of unlicensed downloading of copyrighted materials if they’re done behind a VPN.

Mind you, they can still easilly track it back to the VPN, so make sure you’re using a provider that puts privacy above all an is not based in countries like the US or UK.

That said, if they just throw an unsupported accusation at you and the ISP cuts you out, using a VPN or not makes no difference.

I had the exact same experience: been doing Linux since the 90s, both for fun and professionaly - the latter mainly in pure server configurations - finaly got around to moving my home PC (which is mainly for gaming) to Linux (using Pop!OS, since I have a Nvidia graphics card and it just supports it out of the box) and it just worked.

Only problem I have with it is that on startup of X I usually get a blank screen and have to switch my monitor OFF and back ON again.

Oh, and startup times are a fraction of Windows startup times (my Windows 10 work machine literally takes longer to wake up from hybernation than my home Linux PC takes to cold boot, and they have equivalent SSDs.

I think I got more hassle with Windows than I do with Linux.

I mean, just from looking at History, we should’ve expected that the Dystopia we would get was one were things are shit for most people but we’re constantly fed fables that “actually it’s all good”, “for you it’s going to be fine (trust me)” or that “it’s all the fault of the poor and foreigners” (or all three, in sequence, as things get more undeniably bad).

That said, at least looking back at teenage me, I don’t think that at that age one is worldly or wise enough (and many people never are) to figure out that the most likely way for us to be screwed would involve some grand scale variant of the “one hand in our pockets whilst the other is waving in front of our faces to distract us” strategy.

That’s a perfect example of a typical interaction between a Technology Management Consultant and somebody from a STEM area.

Techies with an Engineering background who are in Tech and Tech-adjacent companies are often in the receiving end of similar techno-bollocks which makes no sense from such “Technology” Management Consultants, but it’s seldom quite as public as this one.

Funnily, sometimes the pirate version of a game works whilst the official one does not…

Peace of the grave.

If we want to be realistic, then if there was a nuclear explosion that big on planet Earth all the nations around it would be nuclear wastelands from the shockwave and fallout and the rest of the planet would probably be covered in ice from the nuclear winter.

Most nation states on that side of the planet would be gone and the ones on the other side of the planet would at the very least be collapsing from the fall in agricultural production and subsequent wars of desperation.

The toddlers were terrifying the poor IDF soldiers, hence they were terrorists.

If people are drowning, anybody who promises to throw them a life bouy looks like a fucking heroe to them.

Far-Right Populists are riding this effect all over the World all the while mainstream “moderates” entreched in and winning from the current system see nothing wrong with it and persist in trying to sell “steady as she goes” as policy (after all, that’s what’s best for them personally), something which ressonates with the people who haven’t yet been affected by the pillaging of the Economy by the ultra-wealthy - the well-off middle class - but not with those below who are suffering, and as the effects of the pillaging climb higher and higher up the economic ladder, the number of those suffering keeps increasing and so does the appeal of the far-right promises.

I’m actually a member of a small leftwing party in my own country and the current leadership totally fucked the party up in the last decade or so (falling from almost 20 parliamentary representatives to 1) exactly because the new and younger leadership whom the old guard moved over to give room to, were out of touch well-off middle class types who were born with a silver spoon in their mouths and never really had to fight for making a living, and hence started parroting liberal talking points from the anglo-saxon world (because all they know besides the local language is English, and they saw that shit on Twitter and though it was “leftwing”) all the while most of the people in the country were feeling the pain and it wasn’t related to the political slogans that these people were parroting and the unfairnesses they obcessed about.

The out of touch leftwing-cosplayer crowd will never beat the far-right populists because the latter actually pitch radical solutions for the problems of the many (all complete total bullshit, but many people can’t tell so go for it) whilst the former pitch “steady as she goes with a few tweaks” which works only for the “I’m alright” well-off middle class and above, not the many, so won’t really appeal to the bulk of voters.

I’m not saying that voting for the far-right populists is right or will actually solve the problems of the many, I’m saying it’s understandable that so many end up grabbing what looks like the only lifebouy in front of them.

Any genuine half-way competent leftwing politicians from a priviledged background should realise that their life experience is not representative and that the “inequalities” that are of concern to the upper middle class (a typical example: the “glass ceiling for women to become CEOs”) aren’t at all the biggest and most painful inequalities out there (they only affect a tiny proportion of people, who are already priviledged compared to most of the population and are not at all in pain) and actually fight against the pains that affect the many even if that requires breaking the very system that made them “winners” the day they were born.

Anyways, now in America we’re seeing what far-right populists really are when they have power, similarly to what happened in Brexit Britain some years ago (and the “moderate” politicians there don’t seem to have so far learned the lesson and keep on relying on the mathematical rigging of FPTP to get power less and less votes) and of course all their promises were bullshit and their “solutions” only make things worse.

Avoiding the shit from enshittification isn’t hardcore, it’s just the normal adult thing to do.

Portraying this as a trolley problem is misleading and manipulative.

This is not a trolley problem because:

• It’s not a single decision after which there is no walking back on it, rather it’s a cyclical choice which happens every 4 years and a lot of what was done by the candidate elected in once cycle can be undone in the next (as the Republicans frequently demonstrate when one of theirs gets elected after a Democrat).
• It’s not a single person making a decision, it’s millions of people all at the same time and it’s not even the average of their choices that gets executed (that would require Proportional Vote) but it’s done using a weird mathematical formula, so there are tons of situations were no matter what one’s choice is (or even not choosing at all) it makes no difference whatsoever.
• Voters don’t actually know upfront what either choice will deliver. Politicians often promise one thing and do something else.

The closest philosophical or game theory example to an election is a cyclical “Ultimatum Game” between voters and politicians only it’s in the best interest of politicians that people don’t see it that way (because they would be aware that they can punishing politicians in one cycle to get them to do a different split the next one, or specifically in American politics they can Punish the DNC in one cycle for fielding a too rightwing candidate to get them to field a less rightwing candidate the next cycle) so instead their propaganda has pushed for decades this falacy that it’s an “trolley problem” and it’s companion: the idea that people must “chose the lesser evil”.

Those 17 pages worth of babies they murdered in the first 6 months of the Gaza Genocide were all Hamas!!!

Which generally comes with “I am more important than those forigners and hence should be treated better than them” which is just another form of “what’s in it for me”.

Certainly my experience from living in Brexit Britain is that the kind of people who couldn’t accept criticism of Britain were also the kind who though they were superior to foreigners because of being Britons and expected to be better treated than foreigners for it, and that wasn’t just in their own country but also for example when on vacations abroad.

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Yeah, I think I get what you mean.

My own country, Portugal, has issues and around here there is a big tendency to look to Britain for inspiration, yet Britain in many ways is even more broken than my own country (certainly it’s a far less fair society, more stratified, way more violent amongst the lower classes and more fake amongst the upper classes, plus significantly more calcified and less daring in many ways) and which wealth-wise is mainly is just using the pile (of both money and infrastructure) accumulated during their time not that long ago when it was an Empire, rather than in the present day being a more productive country,

People look up to Britain, copy what’s done there under the impression that it works, and then end up with similar problems but none of the good things because the “success” of Britain isn’t the product of what they do now, it’s just accumulated wealth and structures from almost a century ago.

That said, I think the circus that was Brexit has taken the shine out of Britain in most of Europe, including Portugal, maybe more strongly so here because Portugal used to send a lot of emigrants over there and many came back following Brexit and the consequences of Brexit with a far worse opinion of Britain than they went there with, and they certainly shared that opinion with family and friends.

Yeah, that’s a good point.

Oh, I don’t at all think that Brits themselves see any of that as ghoulish.

In fact the local culture has a huge thing with a heavilly classist social hierarchy, “knowing your place” in the social hierarchy and looking up to the upper classes and seing them as more capable.

(Their Monarchy is the wealthiest and most powerful in Europe and you’ll find plenty of fawning coverage of them in the local media and a vast majority of Brits love the Monarchy)

In my experience people traditionally tend to see it as the natural order of things and there really was only this period between the post-War times and maybe the 80s when amongst the working class there was this idea that the working class was as much entitled to rule things as the upper classes and a lot of that has been crushed along with Labour Unions, Industry and Mining in Britain and as most of the workers became white collar workers (who see themselves as Middle Class and look down on the Working Class even though de facto they’re Working Class) rather than blue collar.

(Though I supposed some of it was transformed into support for the most extremist far right movements there of the present day, since they get a lot of support from retired working class people who feel themselves rich because the house they own is now worth a lot of money due to the massive house price bubble over there - in a way it’s funny that the most Fascist people of all are actually Working Class pensioners)

Most don’t really recognize that stuff as unusual or strange because that’s all that they’ve known, same as for everybody everywhere all over the World - mostly it’s only people who have actually lived and worked abroad and hence seen things done differently, who can spot the quirks and negative aspects of society they grew up in.

As far as I know, in the countries were Portugal set colonies up, mixed race kids were just Portuguese on account of having a Portuguese parent.

When the Revolution in Portugal happened in 1974, Fascism was brought down and most of the “colonized” countries became free (Brasil had been independent for over a century by then, so it was only nations in Africa) and any Portuguese national who wanted it was repatriated, quite independently of skin color, and many were mixed race hence why I think a large proportion of the mixed race offspring just got Portuguese nationality on account of having a Portuguese parent and was in a normal Portuguese family.

That said, I vaguelly remember that during the Fascist Dictatorship the authorities didn’t want mixed race people in Portugal, but after the Revolution nobody really cared.

I guess that during Fascism the Portuguese authorities were fine with people having mixed race kids as long as the whole thing happened in the “colonies” and stayed there.

Certainly the stories I’ve heard from that time don’t really include in the “colonies” the level of segregation I’ve heard about with for example the English in places like India, though in the “Homeland” it was different.

Not to say Portugal was or is some kind of Racism-free paradise. It’s probably culturally just a bit less elitist and relaxed about “enforcing rules” on people than many other European nations who had their own “colonization” projects.

And then of course there is the example of Brasil were there are all skin tones possible, so clearly for many generations a large percentage of people haven’t really cared about keeping races segregated since originally there were only white Portuguese, black African slaves and the natives, with the latter actually being the smaller fraction of the population. I see it as an indication that the dominant original culture (the Portuguese one of the XVI and XVII century), didn’t care much about stopping people from having sex across races.

Yeah, I’ve seen some Legal Acts were discrimination on nationality was defined as Racism.

I am very wary of using Racism for discrimination based on nationality because, having been victim of discrimination based on my Nationality whilst being an immigrant abroad and having the same “Race” as the people in that country (basically I look the same as they do) and also having seen the discrimination in that same country against acquaintances of mine with the same Nationality as me but not the same Race, the treatment I got was not the same as they got, prejudices against me were was far less frequent and those against them were far worse (though, this one time, negative culturally prejudiced expectations about me did snowball into something huge and highly damaging to me).

My experience - as a Southern European - having lived in various countries in Europe is that people did not see me as having a different race.

They saw me as a having a different Culture, but not actually race, and whilst on more than one occasion when living abroad people expressed prejudiced opinions about me when they didn’t knew me well as a person but knew where I came from (which they couldn’t tell from the way I looked or even my accent, since I looked like them and my accent was the product of living in multiple countries), when I mentioned that I had lived for almost a decade elsewhere, in Northern Europe, suddenly those prejudices would vanish, all of which leads me to believe it was about the dominant Culture in my life rather than any racial markers.

Further, those people I knew abroad who grew up in the same Culture as me (so, Portuguese) but had a race other than White got an entirelly different treamtment (significantly worse) than I did and which was pretty similar to other people of the same race and not to other Southern Europeans.

Hence why I think that there is Cultural Prejudice which is different from Racial Prejudice and what I read in these posts here sounds a lot more like the former than the latter, though I grant you that it’s unclear where one ends and the other starts.