Not since 3 October 2002 (81 years after Mongolia’s first declaration of independence)

Billionaire-owned mass media is a hell of a drug. It’s easy to forget just how much selective news reporting can distort a person’s worldview.

Except this isn’t a war, congress hasn’t declared authorized it.

What difference does that make?

I think we’re used to the USA and its mass media not bothering to declare war, and simply starting war (bonus points for claiming the other side started the war once they counterattack, as is tradition)

The USA has started a direct military conflict with Venezuela, the state.

I budget my donations so I make an effort to see who I think need it the most. For example, I use Tor daily, but they have huge institutional funding. My to-do list app doesn’t.

There are also some worthy candidates who simply reject donations, like Handbrake.

A few I haven’t seen mentioned:

• Small websites anyone can use for FOSS services, like (e.g. Private.coffee, Disroot, Nadeko, Riseup)
• Any of the 5 remaining Invidious instances, Google has put effort into killing off other instances. Same with other social media alternative frontends.
• Someone mentioned F-Droid, I don’t know what I’d do without the Google Store alternatives like Aurora.
• yt-dlp devs
• Lemmy and various instances
• Your operating systems, incl phones and servers if relevant
• Codeberg
• A few FOSS softwares used for non-fediverse sites I use. Look at all the sites you use and think about which ones are probably underfunded. Don’t be afraid to ask if they haven’t said anything.

Don’t be silly. They posted a list supporting their claim before you made this reply.

Huh, starting a war on Christmas, are we?

Not sure where the number 13 is coming from, but I’m aware of 7, plus the whole doozy of Obama’s regime bombing another recipient of the Nobel Peace prize (Doctors without Borders), a war crime airstrike on a hospital.

Wait, did we all miss a memo?

Speak for yourself. Those who have been on the streets have been seeing police suppression for decades, over a century even. Protest laws have been encroaching all that time.

If there’s no specific use-case (this is a general introduction, not Intro to Operating System Design) and this isn’t academic Computer Science teaching, then certainly a scripting language.

Easy to learn, easy to use, and much more applicable for simple automation that benefits the people learning.

C is dangerous if someone doesn’t take care. Java is verbose and personally I didn’t enjoy it one bit. You said this is a non-technical crowd and you expect them to follow at home.

An end result of liberalist idealism. (plus what others have said)

Some options:

• Hypothetically, […]
• Theoretically, […]
• It’s hypothetically possible
• It’s theoretically possible
• It could be possible
• It’s not impossible

• It’s not mandatory
• It’s optional (only applies to the first example)
• You don’t always need to
• It’s not always necessary
• It might not be necessary

I’m not thinking too hard on this, but since you say each of the words convey distinct meanings, maybe try and find a synonym for each meaning of that word. That could work.

I’m picturing “Affirmative. Dollar 1299 now proceeding to window, over.”

Hold the wealthy accountable and stop letting people get that rich.

Governance is one of the tools we can use to hold the wealthy accountable and stop letting them get that rich. Not the only tool we have, but a powerful one.

The concerning thing is how many people seem to appeal to the same system that enabled this to happen. It’s a liberalist attitude of looking for legal loopholes, technicalities and abstract contradictions of ideas instead of recognizing real power and fighting it directly.

Recall Trump’s first term, all the comments of endless smug “gotchas” and lists of laws and constitutional laws broken by Trump. How’d that impeachment end up?

Now we see the same nonsense again, people implying that ICE can be defeated by suing them, thinking that the police assisting ICE will be leashed by the mayor, thinking that this time the Democrat Party will do what Biden didn’t and reverse the slide into fascism.

No, the sad fact is that you can’t just let The System solve this one. You can’t vote fascism away at this point. It requires mass community-led solutions, and the sooner that’s organized, the less people die.

Admittedly I often see this discussion through the lens of Internet comment sections so hopefully that’s making this seem worse than it truly is.

I play sport near-daily but I don’t follow professional sports, and I honestly think ideally it should be abolished. It’s exploitative entertainment.

• Athletes often end up with horrible overwork injuries. I remember an interview where a range of former Olympians were asked “Was it worth it?” and the overwhelming answer was no, they now had life-long injury from training.
• Sport doesn’t need to be professional to be enjoyable to play and watch at a high-level.
• Like OP has said, it’s a business. They are parasocial and don’t care to truly involve you. They will platform advertisers who foster addiction, to make money. And I feel disgust every time I see a stadium absolutely covered with ads and uniforms covered in sponsorships. It might as well be a billboard with a patch of grass on it.

I’m obviously not against either sports or high-level competition, but as a profession? No way.

While many existing sports develop some useful life skills (physical skills, communication, decision making, strategy, … ) I have an interest in alternative games that emphasise these. Two of my favorites at the moment are Firefigher’s Olympics and Three-Sided Football.

“as bad”… not quite, and not in the same way. As other people have said, there’s no conscience to AI and I doubt there will be any financial incentive to develop one capable of “being evil” or doing some doomsday takeover. It’s a tool, it will continue to be abused by malicious actors, idiots will continue to trust it for things it can’t do properly, but this isn’t like the movies where it is malicious or murderous.

It’s perfectly capable of, say, being used to push people into personalized hyperrealities (consider how political advertising was microtargeted in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and consider how convincing fake AI imagery can be at a glance). It’s a more boring dystopia, but a powerful bad one nonetheless, capable of deconstructing societies to a large degree.

As far as financial scams go, my parents and uncles handled my grandparents’ finances for their last decade. If they were targeted then there would be an upper limit to how much money they could lose in one scam. They also weren’t paying for things online.

As for younger elderly people, if they’re still smart enough for it then I’d try educating them. Practically, not just talking about it. There are plenty of good public interactive resources for phishing training, so I’d be surprised if there weren’t any for AI. Also simple things like “never pay for anything in gift cards, ever” are some easy wins.

Reminds me of US COVID hospital workers begging not to be labeled as heroes, for a variety of reasons.

If you’re not doing something material to further the movement, you’re complicit in the status quo. I know we all have our own conditions and circumstances, but even small actions are important. Praiseworthy resistance shouldn’t be heroic, it should be normalized.

I’ve looked briefly into the equivalent of antifascist projects, and former neo-Nazis talking about how their minds were changed. From what I’ve seen:

• People can and do leave political cults
• There’s no universal recipe. A common factor among former neo-Nazis seems to be having someone close to them who doesn’t tolerate the bullshit, so to me it seems the best approach is to stand firm, but leave a door open in the rare case that they have a revelation on their own. (Historically, this sometimes happens if/when their own personal reality begins to clearly contradict the propaganda.)
• Many people simply don’t leave, so it’s unfair to demand those around them spend so much time and effort trying to make it happen. It can be a waste of time. It’s a gamble, really, so again that’s why I say leave a door open, as long as it’s safe.

Obviously these are just second-hand observations, I don’t have much personal experience with this, so if any of it sounds wrong then I’d like to know.