Thanks for spreading the word about this. I wasn’t aware. What an unfortunate development. I’ve never encountered mandatory FR in Canada, thank goodness

Great advice, thank you!! What you said applies to me quite a bit

What would a child say if they were asked whether they would steal a loaf of bread to feed their starving family if they had no other way of saving them? What would you say? Does context matter in moral judgements?

I think I’m more or less with @verdigris. I’d get behind the position that most large corporations have bent the rules of society so much to their favour and accrued so much wealth at the expense of ordinary people that we don’t owe them anything at this point. I got mad respect for the independent creators. But I feel there’s no moral transgression with streaming a pirated show vis-a-vis the corporations missing out on making a few bucks from that, to use a example. It’s not black and white; actors and others salaries are important and related. But those “you wouldn’t steal a car, so why are you trying to a CD/DVD?” ads were clearly corporate propaganda, as another example

Thanks for the info! I general sail the seven seas for that suff but thought it was a pretty good example of the larger trend.

I played guitar for 5+ years, never really learning properly, but being able to jam okay. I can’t do that any more, but I have a pretty good knowledge base to start from. It’s probably a matter of I should just do whatever’s fun until I’m picking up the guitar a few times a week regularly - then I can get more focused. For easy-starting fun, that’s probably strumming and singing through songs on a less ad and malware-bloated website. To get serious, I’d like to work with a metronome, maybe finally feel confident with a 12-bar blues, transcribe some solos perhaps. Very old school 😎. Do you play or want to learn?

It’s a little beyond me, but I was under the impression that the dictionary lookup feature is purely local. Saying that out loud I’m now not so sure lol

Thanks, Blisterexe - you too :)

I appreciate your comments and good points!

WHY DON’T YOU WANT PERSONALIZED ADVERTISEMENTS?

Lol. I prefer the terms user-preferred advertisements or user-centric advertisements /s. Whenever I see targeted ads, I just think it’s creepy

Thank you very much, kind Lemmy! I think it makes sense for me to postpone that a bit due to other things going on at the moment. But it was really helpful to vent and to hear words of empathy and support from people like you :)

Great points! Ownership, control, access, possession - these might apply differently to different things. I could see ownership being more relevant than other concepts in digital documentation of one’s genetic information, for example. I think a public library model (ie, access) would work pretty satisfactorily for entertainment media. Our language might have lagged behind the privacy, consumer, and legal concerns of today. My knowledge certainly has, but that can be changed ;)

I was under the impression that the second part of that saying was deliberately facetious or sarcastic lol

I might’ve misspoke about never paying for a video game again. I do like the look of gog. I’m really out of the loop when it comes to gaming. I like more privacy- and ownership-respecting platforms, and I would (do) pay for those. What I meant was I’d caught a glimpse of the direction of the mainstream gaming industry with WC3, and I realized it wouldn’t work for me and had to get off it. I use LibreOffice. I’ll check out the libre gaming software, thanks!

They’ll obviously win when we run away. We should take the fight to them.

I appreciate your point of view. The way I see it, I think maybe 95/100 people blindly trust big tech companies and 5 of us don’t (to the willing we’ll avoid mainstream social media, for example); the proportion is debatable, but I think it’s a very uneven divide. I don’t think we have enough power to “stick it” to big tech. I also don’t think we need to. I participated in the reddit blackout last summer and then I left it altogether for here (Lemmy), which I enjoy more and want to help grow more than I did the last place. I guess I do want some people to keep big tech in check and whistle-blow, at least to help spread awareness. I guess I’m just not the person for the job, and I think that’s okay. More tech savvy people would do well in those roles :)

I appreciate the rec’s! I did check out gog a bit a month or so ago and thought it did look refreshingly different

I understand your pause on purchasing the robot vacuum. So many of these devices seem designed to collect every bit of your data that they can get their hands on, ostensibly justified by some veneer of convenience to the customer (ie, data livestock) or their ‘safety’ or ‘privacy’ (lol). As someone with lesser tech knowledge than you do to manage such data siphoning, I think it’s safe to say I’ll never be interested in owning a robot vacuum

You are so right

Ah yes, neo-feudalism, I think

I appreciate you sharing that! Sounds like you got a good thing going

So true. As others have remarked on here, entshittification really changes the calculus of “is piracy worth it?”

Another problem caused by greedflation: companies want to collect both money and data for every usage (edit: I forgot to include “push ads in your face” as well)

FWIW: I’m always on VPN and I’ve never had an issue with lemmy.ca