That’s where I’m at. If in an alternate universe Congress did something like banning the distribution of harvested data, even just to foreign entities, and TikTok then refused to comply, then I’d be fully in support with them getting banned for it.

Here in the real world though, Congress apparently doesn’t have the balls to pass blanket privacy rights like that, because you see, that’d catch some of the wrong fish. I think it says a lot about the state of modern social media that all they were willing to go after TikTok for was something as nebulous as “national security risk”.

Preach

I have lots of issues with modern cars. Horsepower is not one of them. Idk if you can right now, but pretty recently you could spec a 300hp minivan from most major automakers.

I’m not convinced that it’s even warm

Right? If logging keystrokes is “wrong”, then ban that! I’ve never downloaded TikTok in my life but this entire thing is so transparently manufactured.

No you removed!

I’ve dailyed six manual cars and two of them didn’t have a tach (both Fords?), and one of those was too old to even have a shift light. Honestly, even when I was new I barely looked at the tach when I had one anyway, and I didn’t really start to look at until I learned how to really get good at rev-matching for heal-toe and dropping gears. I just shift by ear and ass like 90% of the time.

Rad

Chaotic good and neutral evil. Don’t do neutral evil

Not that long ago, I only graduated last year. I’ve definitely noticed the tweaks-between-editions bs, so I always try to match up the isbn. I was also lucky in that I only had to deal with the online course/book bundle for general math courses, most of which I took care of in highschool and were paid for by the school, but yeah I did have to cough up one to two hundred bucks for a few of those.

I wouldn’t be too hard on yourself, kids are weird in that they can have huge blindspots in their empathy because they’re too young to have had to wear another person’s shoes, so to speak. By the time you’re an adult, either you’ve gone through enough shoes to become a well-adjusted, empathetic person, …or not. But even then, we all have blind spots we can improve on.

So if anything, putting yourself in another person’s/bug’s shoes like you describe in the comment is proactive and should be lauded if you ask me. Lots of people don’t seem to gain empathy until they’re the ones on the other end. Hell, I don’t know you, but consider that maybe you being self-conscious about your capacity for empathy is ironically out of your empathy for the people you interact with. If you really had no empathy, then why would you care?

I always pirated PDFs of my textbooks, but in the few cases where I couldn’t find anything online (typically when the book is niche and very new), I would always wait until I knew that I actually needed the book, because it was frustrating how often this meme came true.

I had this one professor I was really grateful for though. He was a big open-source guy, apparently used to contribute to freebsd and postgres, and he went out of his way to find open-source textbooks for all of his classes.

I don’t use tiktok because I don’t want to get addicted personally, and I know a few people who borderline are.

That’s not the point though, not the real one anyway. Even if this ban was going through with good intentions, it doesn’t actually solve anything. Everyone will just find a new PRISM-compatable app to get addicted to. The government’s “action/statement itself” is precisely the problem. If they passed a law that forbid certain addicting behaviors, and TikTok ran afoul of that law, then I’d likely be in support, because it bans those behaviors in general. But that’s not what’s happening here, instead the government is targeting the individual company, so it’s pretty clear to me that the cited privacy and addiction concerns are only an excuse. Don’t take this combatively, I just think this is important, but I think that ironically you’re the one who needs to separate the action from the actors. I think you’re underestimating how dangerous a precedence this sets.

Most of my immediate family just does sms group chats. I don’t keep up with the extended family, seeing them every other holiday is enough

I mean it kinda has. It wasn’t an insta-kill but users have dropped dramatically and it’s still dropping

Lol, I guess we all make different connections, but to me “mastodon” doesn’t sound like “masterbate” any more than “blue sky” sounds like “blue balls” ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

Not to mention meta. They’ll do all of the above and when they’re done sell the data to the highest bidder.

The problem is they aren’t both getting banned/regulated, making the reasoning behind the tiktok ban extremely suspect

Edit: a word

Crept up the cloaca smh

More like trauma foam