debanqued @ debanqued @beehaw.org

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29

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131

Joined

3 yr. ago

I installed Bisq a few years ago the 1st hurdle was buying cc required having some cc escrowed to start with. I’ve also heard that some banks are so hostile toward cryptocurrency they freeze accounts of people suspected of trading it. I got the impression Bisq transactions would be detectable by the bank but my memory is fuzzy on that. I suppose I need to use a burner bank account I don’t care about, and use a bitcoin ATM to get the escrow money. It’s a shame the Bisq escrow money can’t be in fiat money.

I would love to be using cryptocurrency in cashless situations instead of just nixing those options. I’ve reached a point where if it’s not sold locally for cash I don’t buy it. Cryptocurrency has failed me because most exchangers are in Cloudflare’s giant walled garden and I will not patronize a Cloudflare user. There are cryptocurrency ATMs but the fees are extortionate.

from the article:

Subject to the terms of this Agreement, You hereby grant to HP a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free right to use, copy, store, transmit, modify, create derivative works of and display Your non-personal data for its business purposes.

Holy shit. I wonder if HP is feeding customers’ data to an #AI machine to exploit in some way. It doesn’t even seem to be limited to what people print. HP’s software package is probably not just a printer driver. But even if it is, a driver runs in the kernel space, so IIUC there’s no limit to what data it can mine.

Glad to see mention of Oki! Oki is the single most ethical choice. But they pulled out of the US market, sadly enough. The US is no place for ethical products.

First and foremost, #HP is not an option for anyone who boycotts #Israel. And even neglecting that, HP is still the least ethical of all ink suppliers.

from the article:

Prices range from $6.99 per month for a plan that includes an HP Envy printer (the current model is the 6020e) and 20 printed pages. The priciest plan includes an HP OfficeJet Pro rental and 700 printed pages for $35.99 per month.

So the 20 page deal probably reflects the consumption of most households that print. That means the cost ranges from $7—35¢ per page. You must print 20 pages to reach 35¢ pp. A library would likely charge ~5—10¢ pp flat. Print shops tend to be cheaper than libraries.

The 700 page deal amounts to $36—5¢ pp. So you have to print exactly 700 pages to get a good price. Everyone who does not print exactly 700 pages every month for a span of 2 years will get screwed.

One of the most perturbing aspects of the subscription plan is that it requires subscribers to keep their printers connected to the Internet.

Bingo. It’s not a “smart” printer, it’s a dependent printer.

I never have to use PayPal. Goods and services my life depends on can all be bought without PayPal. If a hospital emergency room were to only accept PayPal/Zettle, they would treat me then I would simply refuse to pay the bill until they change their payment terms. It has been over a decade since I made a PayPal transaction. Exceptionally, PayPal may have processed some of my card transactions without my knowledge (before I knew what Zettle was), but if I knew I would have walked.

I spoke to a small cafe owner who only accepts Zettle, no cash. He was the owner and cashier. He said Zettle was the cheapest for him. But as an ethical consumer I have choices and price is low priority. I don’t have to buy my coffee from him. In some cases I have managed to compel a cashless shop to accept my cash. If I have exact change or their staff has change, the staff will use their own personal payment card and take cash from me. I normally boycott cashless brick and mortar shops, but sometimes I do an experiment of forcing cash on them. But in the case of Zettle that’s not an option because PayPal still profits from the transaction even if PayPal does not obtain or profit from my data.

I don’t know your situation with gas or how trapped you are, but if you must buy gas you can probably boycott Chevron and ExxonMobil and buy from one of the other lesser evils. Or if you have a diesel engine you can do what a friend does and collect waste oil and convert it to bio diesel.

#PayPal is one of the most evil:

https://git.disroot.org/cyberMonk/liberethos_paradigm/src/branch/master/rap_sheets/paypal.md

I got burnt personally by them but even if I hadn’t they are among the least ethical options. There are some vendors selling products I would like to buy but they accept paypal exclusively, so I walk.. and go without. Recently I have encountered some small brick and mortar shops/cafes that use “Zettle”. #Zettle is paypal. So if I see Zettle and they don’t take cash, I walk out. They share data with over 600 corporations so I will not allow Paypal to serve as a payment processor of my credit or debit card. Paypal are rotten to the core scumbags. They have some sneaky tricks for keeping people’s money under the guise of AML/KYC/anti-fraud, even though they are not a bank and escape those regulations anyway. It’s no surprise Elon Musk and Peter Thiel were involved with the founding of that company.

Glad to see CFPB might be growing their balls back after Trump neutered them. When Trump was in power the CFPB took no action on complaints of unlawful conduct and seemed quite inactive.. as if to just be managing their own office (like the EPA).

The thesis of the article works to fix anti-ebike attitudes. It makes some good points but it wasn’t intended to influence people on what suits them personally.

The shame of it is that a lot of people just read headlines. I sure as hell don’t have time to read every article I encounter. So those who just read the headline will walk away a bit misinformed. OTOH, the click bait actually works to get more people to read the article. It forced me to read it. So it’s hard to say if it does more damage or more benefit overall.

Indeed as someone who straddles two places of living I can attest to that. When living in a relatively flat city I’m cycling everywhere (on e-bike until it was stolen, then on cheap muscle bike thereafter). My other place of living is extremely hilly. Used a muscle bike and quickly said “fuck this, I’m done”. Just like the article said about hills on the trails. And since I cannot justify the cost of an e-bike in that particular place/situation, I do not cycle at all when living there. But if an e-bike had been cost effective I would be getting more exercise in that area.

That’s a great move. Instead of trying to regulate the baddies just offer a more honest, transparent consumer-respecting option from a public service that respects people’s privacy (CFPB does not block Tor, unlike #CreditKarma and #LendingTree).

I would love it even more if they would also enable people to deselect banks they want to avoid, such as the shit banks on this list:

https://git.disroot.org/cyberMonk/liberethos_paradigm/src/branch/master/usa_banks.md

Thanks for pointing that out. I added your link to the post.

I appreciate the background & history.. and the workaround sounds quite useful until Lemmy evolves more.

If you want to contribute some code

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I would have to fork it just to get it out of MS Github and into an ethical work environment. And from there I would have to learn 2 or 3 new languages IIUC. I’m merely a user, or tester at best, trying to just get an understanding of the problems.. not even yet at the stage of digging through existing bug reports. When I wrote what you quoted, I did not even know yet if the tool was limited or if it’s malconfigured, or if a mod wasn’t making full use of the software. PenguinCoder hinted in another thread there is a thread hiding option in one of the Lemmy forks but did not elaborate. Superficially that sounds like a more appropriate mechanism for an off topic thread if it works the way it sounds.

Thus the item was removed from that community. What is the problem here?

You may be talking from the confines of the software’s capability. But in effect the thread was more than removed from the community. The only meaningful tie a thread has to a community is the link appearing in the timeline. The URL in fact excludes the community name. If you simply remove the timeline link there is theoretically no technical or social reason a civil sitewide-rules-compliant conversation cannot continue. And no reason it should not continue.

There is likely a code limitation here. Lemmy was designed by folks who are overly gung ho on suppression (judging from how they ran dev.lemmy.ml, the deliberately hard-coding of the slur filter, their reputation, etc). I’ve not kept track of Lenny and other forks so it’s unclear if any of them offer more graceful functionality without the overbearing interventionalism for handling off topic posts. It certainly needs to evolve more in this regard because I’ve yet to see any Lemmy et al instances that enable a mod to move a thread to a more fitting community.

Anonymity is part of privacy.

Specifically, anonymity is confidentiality of identity. Confidentiality is part of privacy, which is a broad concept. So when a tool or mechanism works against anonymity, it works against privacy. It may not work against a privacy aspect that you care about, but it’s privacy nonetheless.

You’re referring to anonymity, not privacy.

Anonymity is part of privacy; not a dichotomy.

Sign-up still requires a phone number… -.-"

Thanks for the warning -- that was my first question. It is my top reason (among many other reasons) for avoiding Signal.

Checkout Matrix/Element or Session,

All 3 of the sites you linked are Cloudflare sites (thus antithetical to privacy). Yes, I know you can use some of that tech without touching CF, but when they run CF websites it reveals hypocrisy & not understanding the goals of their audience.

Difference between hidden and removed and even deleted.

Does Lemmy give those three different actions?

I can imagine that something that’s illegal would be deleted in the fullest extent to support legal compliance. I can imagine that an uncivil shitshow would be removed, whereby the content is still reachable to admins but not to users. And I would expect something that is off topic for a community would be hidden, assuming that means just not visible in the timeline but still accessible by users who have the link.

Is my understanding of the 3 actions correct? Why would an off topic post be removed and not hidden?

The point is in removing said ‘discussion’ from the platform.

Does that mean a site-wide rule was broken? Because in the case at hand, it’s simply a matter of a civil conversation that was started in the wrong community.

Who benefits from the disruptive suppression of a conversation when the conversation is no longer cluttering the community where it was off topic? I can only see this making sense if the discussion were breaking sitewide rules independent of the community it started in.

The transparency problem can be seen in the foss modlog. Before subscribing and investing effort into a community, I take a gander at the modlog to see whether the mod is overly energetic and eager to control. Some people like that mod style but some users prefer to avoid it. So if you look at the latest entry in the foss modlog, users should be able to visit the post to determine whether it was a sensible moderation move. They should be able to confirm “yes, this is off topic, so I am happy to participate in this community”, or “no, I will move along”. It’s not about payroll. It’s about users having transparency on moderators.

In the case at hand, an apparently off topic post was removed from the timeline (fair enough, if truly off topic). Yet it was civil and in line with beehaw site rules, so there is no sensible reason to be as disruptive as to suppress conversation in that thread. When something is off topic for the community timeline, it’s merely an organizational problem of clutter. Action beyond removing the link from the timeline is over interventionalist. What’s the point? It’s bad faith to suppress a civil discussion.

I don’t know if I’m hitting on a beehaw problem or a lemmy problem. If Lemmy only gives blunt instruments that lack the capability I describe, then the lack of transparency is a #lemmyBug.

The nuclear: destruction of all traces of a post/comment is probably only useful in extreme cases like CSAM. Otherwise it’s useful for users to be able to evaluate mods to verify there are no shenanigans to establish trust. A user should be able to see the modlog and then see most removed content from a transparency PoV, one hopes.

And I think lack of transparency is an issue. I just raised an issue about that.