don’t let them slowly re-consolidate in the following 20 years

I too remember how AT&T was broken up only for most of its Baby Bells to remerge back into Ma Bell.

To prevent this for future breakups, I say the content and services sold by big tech should be made competitively compatible and interoperable via nullification of DRM laws; people buy music and movies and cloud storage; let them legally move their purchases to any competitor and big tech companies will break up naturally as local competitors emerge from people who dislike big tech for their own reasons. Monopolies cannot be trusted to lower prices for content and services. Legally nullifying DRM is like the FCC telling customers in 1968 that it was finally okay to ignore the “Bell equipment only” legal warning that had kept them locked into leasing their telephone sets for usurious amounts from AT&T for decades. A few years later, in 1982, AT&T was broken up. AT&T is almost a total monopoly again, but phones remain interoperable.

I used to think “chaos” had the same “ch” as “church” when I was a kid.

The chao of Sonic Adventure (1998)?

The one that wakes me up in the middle of the night is albeït. I thought it was fancy foreign speak pronounced “all bait”, but it is just a short form of “all be it”, is pronounced exactly like that, and is a synonym for “all though it be”.

Amazon Prime is meant to invoke the sunk cost fallacy in your mind. Why shop around when you’ve already sunk over 100 USD per year into “free” shipping? This mental bias towards shopping with Amazon is the cost and is part of an overall anti-competitive strategy. See “The making of Amazon Prime, the internet’s most successful and devastating membership program”. Jeff Bezos has been explicitly anti-competitive on this point:

“I want to draw a moat around our best customers.”

You don’t leave a moated walled garden unless the Lord who maintains the moat permits you. And even then, they’ll strip you of your DRM’d digital goods (TV shows, movies, audiobooks, ebooks) as soon as you cross the drawbridge. The strongest supporters of Amazon are the ones who have thousands of USD of such digital goods locked up with them since they can’t leave without being stripped of things they bought.

“shunned” by their church

Take that as a compliment and move on.

Being shunned in Amish culture is VERY aggressive. You’re basically cut off from the community and family. You can’t get rides, you have to eat alone, etc. It’s pretty fucked up.

Mormons also have versions of this that are notoriously fucked up. Stay in line or lose contact with everyone you love.

(Comment by squaresinger removed by mod: “reason: Part of a white nationalist cult, defending said cult”. Comment summary: A Mormon clarifies that excommunication doesn’t ban attending church activities, but tensions arise when ex-members aggressively try to convert others away from the faith, citing their ex-Mormon returned missionary best friend as an example of someone who isnʼt hostile towards Mormon Church members.)

I also was raised in the Church, served a mission, but left (you can too)!, despite Church roadblocks. To illustrate why I left, let me provide you with what my self-righteous past self would have written for an audience of priesthood holders regarding the apostasy of a best friend:

Your best friend knew the truth, got their endowment, yet apostatized anyway. Better that your best friend had never been born (D&C 76:32). You shouldn’t associate with them because Satan will find a way to weaken your testimony through your sympathy for them. Instead, unfaithful such as your friend should be cast out from your community as salt that has lost its flavor (Matthew 5:14; see the 1838-06-17 Salt Sermon). Since they committed the unpardonable sin of denying the Holy Ghost, the best case scenario for building the Kingdom of God is that they don’t corrupt anyone else or die early (side note: killing an apostate in order to save their soul even from an Unpardonable Sin was a loophole called “Blood Atonement which was used by the Danites to justify murdering enemies of the Church; the idea being that Christ couldn’t spill their own blood to atone for someone who denied the Holy Ghost but someone could atone for their own sins by being their own blood sacrifice; the requirement to physically spill blood in order to effect the ritual is a plausible explanation for why Utah still permits capital punishment by firing squad). Better to dedicate your time and efforts towards sharing the Gospel with people who haven’t had a chance to properly hear it in this Second Estate than with someone who heard it, lived it, yet rejected it.

The above text would not be found out of place in a Sunday talk, especially one given by an Area Authority, although many in the congregation would likely feel uncomfortable. Church leadership would likely minimize such discomfort by restricting such fierce and arguably cruel teachings to private Priesthood Sessions of unbroadcasted Stake Conferences or missionary Zone Conferences. If it makes you feel uncomfortable, I hope you reconsider your membership to an organization in which such cruel and inhumane talk is considered acceptable.

• Edit(2023-10-10T20:05+00): Include context.
• Edit(2023-10-10T20:13+00): Remove some context that was removed by mod. Summarize the offending comment for context.
• Edit(2023-10-10T20:29+00): Add statement explaining the example of cult rhetoric is meant to explain the cruelty, not to promote it.

deleted by creator

FreedomBox facilities installation of a end-to-end encryption chat server Matrix which is compatible with Element.

FreedomBox is Debian FOSS that also supports Let’s Encrypt for HTTPS encryption. The goal of FreedomBox is to permit setup via only the webUI which it mostly gets right.

Chatting via Element this way is nice since you’re self-hosting the service and not relying upon a centralized server that could required a backdoor. I highly recommend it.

Trump Indicted in Georgia. Prosecutors Accuse Trump of ‘Criminal Enterprise’ to Overturn Election (gift article) (consider sharing other articles here).

Sometimes I think I might have spent too much for my FLOSS System76 Launch keyboard but seeing this kind of monopoly moat-building chicanery makes me feel better.

I imagine more people would use Tor if they could get paid to provide bandwidth (like Orchid as described on FLOSS Weekly 633).