Same thoughts over here, friend. The thing keeping me sane is that I started volunteering. Look for the helpers, an all that (Mr Rogers). Shit is fucked and food scarcity is a thing for a lot of people in our immediate vicinity. I found a weekly breakfast through a local political org, but find something that speaks to you. Mutual aid groups, or do a shoe drive with your parish, or hell - one lady just collects bags of clothes donations from offerup and shows up when we’re serving bfast with a folding table and people can grab what they need.

I carry a lot of rage at “the system” and helping my neighbors goes a very long way in keeping it focused where it might make some change for the better.

There are innumerable horror stories from cottage vendors bumping up against the money and strict gatekeeping of the nationally established conglomerates. This was in the US, but I know Canada also has, new, laws on the books to specifically prevent plant based cheeses from referring to their product as “cheese,” despite being the exact same process and a final product that you wouldn’t know side by side to the dairy version.

I’m not a vegan, but this is the just same ole regulatory capture bullshit that we’re seeing w ev cars, good imported rum, net neutrality and everything else

Sure, but that’s not the only article you read on the internet that morning. Every other site you hit took a similar fingerprint of you and soon those tiny “this profile/user likes rugby” data points start to add up. Swapped across 1700 (that we know about from this article) on a constant basis makes it easy to target you, specifically, when “this profile likes rugby” and “visits these sites from this network while that phone is at a certain geolocation during these hours” and “this device pinged this website every weeknight approx 20 min after that other device on the same network closed the Instagram app and started snoring.”

All pulled together into their model of you, as a digital pawn to be pushed whichever way they think will make them the most money that day.

Where’s the consent?

I give my name, age and weight to whatever health app, and yeah, I think it’s normal to expect a few marketing outreach attempts from them and their advertising partners down the line. But even that’s pushing it for me, and once it feels like spam, we all deserve an easy way to turn it the fuck off.

There’s no consent with this shit they’re pulling. It’s unacceptable. Fuck their feelings or considering their business model. It’s certainly not being reciprocated.

What a ridiculous way to measure books, I love it.

Grabbed the last 12 inches of (physical) books I read and added em up. Mix of very recent and older books (much thinner pages and smaller type/font), and now I want to see how much difference those variations make when comparing different stacks of books, but goddammit I know I had other things I was gonna do today

Yeah, for sure

1. download it to kindle 2: transfer azw/mobi file to computer 3: open calibre and install DeDRM 4: drag and drop books into calibre 5: calibre is auto de-drm’ing the books so you can now convert them to any format you want or just backup the books

Use calibre book converter. You might need a plugin if it’s a super specific drm that needs to be removed (like, say, a library book from the libby app), but calibre will let you pick any output you want and save it as a clean file.