Uh, yeah it does. Not to mention the US has killed more people through colonisation, direct and proxy wars, etc. than any other nation in human history.

Because the US is so much better?

My use case is probably a bit more niche but I have Memory Impairment and bookmarks don’t work that well for me. I’m a very organised person and did previously use things like bookmarks extensively. But since my memory has gotten really bad I need more visual representations. Visual bookmarks could kinda work for this but I am yet to find something that’s private, easy to set up (or just works out of the box) and isn’t fiddly to use. Bookmarks that aren’t visual, don’t stay in my memory so I forget about them. Search bar helps a bit but sometimes I also can’t think of the right words to use to get Firefox to bring up the right bookmark (even with extensive keywords - because I also can’t always think of the right keywords to set).

So I have heap of tabs open. I need things to stay in my recent memory and recent use, otherwise they just get forgotten. It does mean over time more and more tabs get left open. But I do fairly regular sort throughs where I go through each tab to make sure it’s something unimportant where I’ve just forgotten to close the tab or something I am actually using/working on.

It’s not ideal but it’s the only thing that works for me right now. I have so many things going on at once, it sucks that I have to remember so much at once when I have memory issues but such is life when disabled folks aren’t properly supported, lack of volunteers means I have to take more volunteer work that I should, western society sucks for supporting parents, and sexism means that I’m still default parent (mother) despite my husband being more progressive than most hsubands/dads are (he’s also woefully disorganised which is in part just him and also in part how boys and men are socialised). Anyway, this isn’t meant as a commentary on the differences in organisations levels and how that affects tab usage between mothers and fathers lol.

Ditto KDE

I think you may be way underestimating the number of people who have no idea the software they use is spying on them.

There’s a big difference between a publicly published newspaper and shdy companies opaquely data mining people’s internet browser activity either completely secretly, burying it in a eula/tos or using shdy language to manipulate people into giving up their data.

I’m so sad about Fisher & Paykel. It was a local (New Zealand) manufacturer that prided itself on quality. It had such a great reputation for quality it eventually took that great quality internationally. And then capitalism and enshittification got its grubby hands on it and turned it into another trash brand. Yet another quality local company disappearing off overseas, screwing over local workers and trashing the quality in favour of profit.

There’s also Betterbird, a fork of Thunderbird which retains some user-liked features that Mozilla removed as well as some bug fixes.

This didn’t age well. Not that Microsoft were above board back then either.

Probably because normally there’s a huge financial and social disparity between shoe shiners and the people getting their shoes done. Classism is a learned behaviour so it’s disconcerting and unpleasant seeing such young children who wouldn’t yet understand classism behaving in discriminatory or prejudiced/internalised oppression behaviours.

Additionally the shoes shining child has dark hair and is wearing what appears to be a fez/tarboush whereas the child getting their shoes shined is blonde - which brings to mind social disparaties between white people and POC/colonialism and could be seen as enforcing racist stereotypes, again in young children who wouldn’t normally have any sense of this sort discrimination.

Tl;DR: It provokes a juxtaposition of innocent children against adult behaviours that involve classism, racism and colonialism.

It’s like the Uncanny Valley of classis, racism and colonialism - it illicits feelings of discomfort but you can’t entirely put your finger on why.

I agree. I call myself a closet naturist because I’m all for the human body just being a human body and not ridiculously hyper-sexualised. But I’m also a sexual abuse survivor and that same hyper-sexualisation makes me very wary and anxious around people who are not also naturists.
I’ve been assaulted way too many times WITH clothes on to trust the general population who can’t comprehend that a naked body =/= sex and an open invitation.

I still have Silence installed on my phone because of that. It’s not being maintained any more though so it’s only a matter of time before Silence stops working or has some security vulnerability (if it’s doesn’t already.

I still feel really disappointed that Signal (and the apologists) don’t seem to understand that for many countries SMS is still the go to.

Obligatory, that’s not socialism, that’s Totalitarianism. Don’t work so well as a portmanteau but it’s a teeth grinding pet peeve of mine - like, if we’re going to mock greedy despotic corporates, let’s at least insult them using the correct words 😅

Google is supposed (SUPPOSED) to serve up closest to what you search for. SEO is the antithesis of this - it games the system to get a given website closer to or in front of your eyeballs even if it’s content is less relevant. And Google has allowed this to continue (or more likely encouraged it on the down low because businesses that are SEO obsessed are more likely to be send money Google’s way) because Google isn’t a search engine anymore - Google is an advertising company with some internet services slapped on. Google ‘search’ is just a clown face for one of their advertising strategies. It doesn’t serve up what’s relevant - it serves up as much results that generate it revenue as possible without being so obvious about it that users get pissed off and switch search engines.

I’ve already noticed this being a problem. I search for a specific issue that’s recent. Set the search as past year or month. See a search result that looks relevant and the date on it (according the search engine) is recent. Click on it only to find its a 5yo article.

I don’t think they’re necessarily so much the number of search engines that currently exist (there’s already currently several) but rather that not enough people use the alternatives that Google had the monopoly. (Also helped by Google actively railroading users into its products and suppressing the competition)

Thanks for introducing me to 12ft.io 😊 Nice to have something to use when I don’t necessarily have a browser extension to rely on.

And uBlock Origin. There’s some other decent privacy addons too like Privacy Badger, Decentraleyes and Chameleon.

I’ve found Jitsi to be a great replacement. The only shortfall I found is that most folk don’t know about it and can be resistent to trying it.

Sorry for confusion, I was having two different conversations going on at the same time and my brain was mixing them up a bit. I was referring to Duck Duck Go curating search results.

That said, Kagi does give me more relevant search results than Brave does. I know Brave Search says it doesn’t censor, curate (downrank), etc. And yet, I still find controversial topics lower in the search results of Brave than I do with Kagi. (Not saying I’m siding with any controversial ideas, but rather I use controversial topics to test search engines for curation and censorship.)

Again, sorry for confusion!