It’s still possible, but only with a physical Kindle device and I believe only one of the older ones. You can copy files off those devices to your PC and crack them that way.
Otherwise I’m not aware of any other method. It really sucks too as my favorite genre literally only exists in the Amazon ecosystem (small indie authors that rely on KU and so don’t publish anywhere else)
Parents signed up for one of those porn blocker services. I didn’t have the password to the service, but I did have the password to my dad’s user account (shared PC back then). Managed to figure out how to copy his active session cookie to my own user account and was able to freely turn on and off the service.
Ordered food at Sonic on their app. After I ordered, it popped up with ads for travel, various credit cards, etc. Completely crazy to me that they’re triple dipping on monetization now (sell me food, sell my data and then sell me other shit while trying to sell me food.)
You’re specifically paying for an agreed upon amount of time with the product. The negotiated price reflects this limited access to the product.
‘Licensing’ something with no stated time frame that one side can arbitrarily choose to end at any time makes little sense and they know it. They were perfectly happy with leveraging the assumption that you owned a copy of the product up until it became inconvenient to them.
You’re making assumptions that I’m some young kid, naively thinking I can change the world with overly simplistic ‘solutions’.
I’ve been in this career for a decent chunk of time, and, more importantly discussed these issues with others that have been here 40+ years (my company has been around for 100+ years). They feel the same.
You see it over and over again, management makes a short term cost saving decision, gets promoted or leaves to a new company and the rest of the people spend the next 3 years dealing with that decision. Things that used to be fixed in 2-3 days now takes 2-3 weeks. Projects that used to be completed in 4-6 weeks now take 4-6 months, etc.
These are things that I’ve noticed after 15+ years in the job and things that my 40+ year co-workers agree with and things the next two levels of my own management agree with (both 30+ years at the company). Hell, these are things executives I’ve been on better terms with have agreed with in the past (only to get let go after failing to implement culture changes).
My experience with executives is that they don’t necessarily want yes men, but there’s a range of acceptable criticism or feedback that they’ll accept. As long as you’re within that range, it’s fine.
If you try to address fundamental problems that might require real change… well those people tend to get suppressed.
They’ll happily take feedback on meeting structure or project planning or whatever. But try to do a retrospective on what the true longterm costs of their decision to go with the cheap, but unreliable solution and they’ll blackball you.
Maga efforts assisted by Democratic leaders that also focus on everything else but class issues as well.
Yes, but actually managing to use crypto for commerce is pretty tricky.
Not sure of the state of things currently, but back in the day it was so volatile that you had to buy more than you need because it might lose value before you could pay with it. And the company also couldn’t cash out with the same value either. That’s why Valve stopped accepting crypto if I remember correctly.
It would be nice if it actually worked well for that, but I expect if it ever did approach broad adoption the powers that be would come down hard on it to prevent losing their control.
You were saying they were motivated by advertisers. That these websites can exist if only they chose not to use ads.
But hosting a website of any decent size takes money. So to pay for it you need ads OR payments from your users. Either a subscription or donation.
So if the websites, like you suggest, avoid advertisers to get away from advertiser sensibilities, they’re still subject to payment processors. Which have many of the same kind of hang ups.
Patreon has had several crackdowns on content solely because of payment processors getting upset. Patreon doesn’t care. The patreon creators are happy and their fans are happy. Everyone involved in the commerce was happy with the business. But PayPal was unhappy and the fans couldn’t send money to the people they were supporting without that middle man. So a company almost entirely unrelated gets to dictate what can and can’t be hosted on Patreon. And this has happened multiple times on multiple sites.
Primarily right now it happens to NSFW content, but there’s zero protections from PayPal and visa doing the same for LGBT content, content critical of China, etc. They’re a private company so all our rights and protections don’t apply.
Theoretically there’s an alternative. You could always make your own banking system and your own Internet (good old ‘free market’ at work) just so you can pay for your website hosting costs. Since that’s technically an option, then they aren’t legally interfering. It’s just business and they can choose not to do business with you if they want. Just as easy as building your own power grid and water system. (Though even if you did try to make your own, they’d heavily interfere to stop you).
So yes, avoiding ads will free you from their control, but it will also limit you to only the size of website that can be hosted for free. Anything of a size that would need funding is subject to these company’s morality rules. Which also makes these communities small, isolated and easily dismantled if they prove to be a problem.
As soon as any one instance gets big enough and needs to get funding, the payment processors will crack down on allowed content. Don’t like it? Tough luck in receiving the money people are trying to send you.
No it’s really payment processors.
There have been multiple successful ad-free websites in the past. But they still need revenue to function. Revenue their users happily pay.
But then Visa or PayPal or whoever is handling the transactions starts to pay attention and then all the sudden there’s new rules in place or else they hike fees or just stop processing payments altogether.
And on the Internet, there is no true alternative methods of payment (hint: any viable methods are quickly suppressed by those same payment processors).
So the only way any website gets big is left to the whims of advertisers or payment processors (usually both).
I have no idea why we as a people are somehow fine with private companies having a complete stranglehold on all significant online business. Why we’ve allowed the government to privatize digital transactions, subject to very little rights or protections. It’s allowing private corporations to massively suppress free speech, commerce, and social gatherings in the digital sphere.
Honestly our supposed freedoms are more and more limited these days because they only apply to public spaces, but there’s been a continual erosion of ‘public’. Where is the modern town square? If the only place you can practice your ‘rights’ is almost nowhere, do you really have those rights at all?
The government should be mandating that ‘digital infrastructure’ (ISPs, data centers, payment processors, etc) are neutral and can’t be utilized to bully others out of business. That their privileged position also comes with extra responsibilities and restrictions so you don’t have the digital equivalent of cutting off water to an abortion clinic because the water utility is pro-life.
And then gives him a ‘replacement’ family in compensation and somehow we’re supposed to believe it’s all better.
I remember sitting in Sunday School as a kid and everyone around me is talking about how good a story this is and how Job ended up even better off than he was before, but all I could think about is God deciding to murder my family and then thinking that some strangers would just replace them.
It’s just so… alien. Creepy Eldritch being playing with humans like we’re dolls. It was terrifying to me and I couldn’t understand why the people around me didn’t see it that way.
Quiet yes. They’ve gone quiet several times before. But it never results in different actions. They don’t change, they only ever become more circumspect.
It’s how Democrats deluded ourselves that things were turning around and then were so surprised to lose everything. All of the words in the world aren’t going to affect any real change.
I honestly don’t think there’s anything anyone can do to reach these people. I think something is deeply broken in a huge majority of Americans. Either they’re voting for this or they’re too checked out, self absorbed or hopeless to bother to do anything to try to fix it. 2024 revealed just how broken we are.
I also think that, after getting up to speed, they’d fight pretty hard against measures that are meant to backslide us to that point again.
I’m struggling to believe these articles are anything but pandering to the left. I struggle to believe there’s any significant number of conservatives actually having real second thoughts.
I mean during COVID you had conservatives literally claiming COVID was no big deal as they died. I think that was when I understood just how far gone these people could be. They will happily drink the Kool aid no matter the personal cost to themselves.
So losing their jobs is questionable as to whether or not it’s going to actually result in a different mindset, rather than some fleeting complaints that are forgotten by the next election cycle.
Not a horse person, but I did look this up once. My understanding is basically what you were assuming.
There’s no way to tell the horse to not walk on the foot and the options they have to keep a horse off the leg can only be used for a limited time without causing death anyway. (You can’t put a horse in a suspension sling long enough to heal the leg as it supposedly does bad things to their organs)
So it’s feasible a centaur could recover as they’re smart enough to take things easy without needing to be physically restrained the whole time.
‘How to treat a sprained neck’
So not sure if I’m the one with the neck injury or if I managed to get killed treating someone else
I’ve spent an astronomical amount of effort trying to remove as much depressing and outrage content from my feeds as possible. It’s a sisyphian task with new things constantly slipping through the cracks. Which has made me mostly check out of all but a very small list of online spaces (and even then ads and other impossible to turn off ‘recommendations’ show up).
Outrage and depressing content fuels the web and it’s best to recognize that. I’ve been a lot happier in my ignorance so far and would recommend it to anyone who’s privileged enough to get away with it. It’s not like being informed and engaged did fuck all for me in the last decade except give me a variety of mental issues.
My ‘memories’ are random art asset files from a mod I downloaded.
I think current ‘lifestyle creep’ for many is getting used to things like ‘health insurance’ and ‘something other than beans and rice’. Hard to give up simple human dignity once you’ve had a taste of it.