Seems like it creates bills, but also has enough hype behind it to generate investment/donation interest.

On a certain level, privacy always was a luxury. Through most of human history, you lived bumcheek to jowl with othet people. The trick is, now it’s a different beast. Corporations have the ability to be much more powerful in their invasions. As for your specific situation, there are some VPNs that try to hide that you are using a VPN. I think proton has something like that. I forget what it’s called. And you could technically go VPN on VPS and get a much easier time but you’d have to switch it out all the time if you wanted anonymous-at-server browsing, and you’d have to pay for the privilege which comes back to privacy as luxury.

Almost no one does one thing to the exclusion of all else, so few, if any, people are getting their knowledge purely from memes, but it doesn’t have to be exclusive to have an effect. Someone who drinks a gallon of soda a day isn’t necessarily getting all of their nutritional intake from soda, and, to borrow the phrase, god help them if so, but it is going to have effects on their life. Treating politics as entertainment also has secondary effects. Just like drinking soda can train your tongue to expect that level of sweetness, which can lead to troubling dietary choices, political humor trains you expect a punchline in a discussion about policy, which can lead to bad political choices.

And notice there how you changed what I said to argue against a point I didn’t make. I talked about jokes as a substitute for sex ed. You talked about jokes after sex ed. There is no mandated political ed class after which to make jokes. The shallow coverage on things like Oliver, tiktok, or other comedy shows is often the deepest, or the only, examination of a political subject people actually ingest, maybe supplemented by a few headlines, a shallow newscast, and an article they didn’t finish. They aren’t making memes about the thing they learned during an in-depth intended-to-inform class. They are making memes based on the memes they laughed at because of the vague half-knowledge they got from the media atmosphere.

Jokes have their place. No one would argue for a life completely lacking in humor, but, just like your example of rape, a subject that is extremely serious because of the long lasting and possibly life-destroying effect it can have on people, politics is too serious to be joked about in the public sphere. Joking about it fails to take serious something that can leave someone alive, but utterly unable to live.

I get that humor is useful for making hard topics seem easier but some things should be hard. Would you consider dirty jokes an appropriate substitute for a sex ed class? Would drinking away your nervousness be a good way to prepare for a driving test? Serious matters need to be discussed frankly and honestly.

I used to kind of like Oliver sometimes, but then I saw the pattern and it ruined it for me. Every episode is 'Hello joke>subject>mock subject if funny looking, else mock thing next to subject>let’s get serious, bad thing is happening>it’s really bad>but don’t get outraged enough to go do something about it, here’s someone else taking care of it for you>callback to joke earlier>HBO-brand anti-capitalist recuperation catharsis complete. Go back to work.

I am leaning harder and harder on ‘political comedy isn’t comedy’ as a rule. ‘It’s just a joke,’ is a far too common smokescreen for people pushing terrible ideas and mocking people spreading bad ideas doesn’t do anything to stop them. It can even help. Politics isn’t supposed to be entertaining. It’s the decisions that affect how we live our lives. We need comedy in politics like we need strippers in surgery.

Already started. Revolt seems like it could be a near 1 to 1 replacement soon.

While it’s true that experience is the only way to ‘get used to’ something, having the right settings can minimize the effort of it. It should almost be as effortless as pointing at something with your finger.

You will have to go into the settings and adjust your sensitivity to what matches your personal proprioception. The best way I know to do this is to open up the game and then pick a point to look/aim at (if it’s a first-person/OTS third person) or a point on the screen to put your cursor if it’s something with a static camera. Place your mouse/reticle on that point. Then swing it out for a loop/heart/star shape and try to snap your view right back to the same point based on where it would feel natural. Don’t readjust to get there if it’s not at the spot, just note where you are actually aiming compared to the target. If you go past it, sensitivity or acceleration is too high. If you don’t get there, it’s too low. If you are off to either side on a perpendicular line, (e.g. you come from straight to the side and end up too high or low) that’s you, and that will just have to come with experience. .

You have to pick one as a favorite. No splitsies.