The cost of consuming media doesn’t match its worth. I never used ad blockers until they became invasive and disruptive.

Funny, there's a lot of people on lemmy itself (especially around dbzer0) who would agree with the judge wholeheartedly.

people have been living in Europe for ages. We are one of the countries with the lowest corrupt, we do pay a lot of corrupt nations/people though, but that is a different story. Netherlands specifically did a pretty significant reboot after WWII, and again in 1983? even if the base Constitution was established in 1814 / 1848. The US has been screwing around with a women's rights amendment to our Constitution for over 100 years and we still can't get that done - which I attribute to all kinds of entrenched interests blocking change for the better for most people because the special interests might be a little inconvenienced. It is hard for people in the US to make a choice other than support these companies, mom and pop stores are an alternative. In Europe, I am seeing a trend that we are more focusing on EU based alternatives or even better national based alternatives. (or open source, even better imo) My grandparents' generation (born in the 1910s, formative young adult years during the Great Depression) pushed a strong "never spend a cent you don't have to" ethos on my parents, and my parents pushed that hard on me. That ethos is pervasive throughout rural America, and when a Wal Mart Supercenter opens they undercut Mom and Pop stores by just enough margin to push that "can't pass up a better deal" ethos in the local population. Mom and Pop stores usually go unprofitable and close within a year or two of a WalMart opening anywhere within 100km. The customers could afford to still patronize Mom and Pop and ignore WalMart, but that "save a penny whenever you can" ethos wins out. Of course once Mom and Pop are out of business, WalMart goes on to raise prices higher than Mom and Pop used to charge - big data analysis tells 'em just how much they can charge for each of their tens to hundreds of thousands of items to achieve their customer acquisition / retention goals. Meanwhile, Mom and Pop still had stick-on paper price tags on their merchandise when they went out of business.

Safe, yeah. Private, no. If you want to verify whether a user is a real person, you need very personally identifiable information. That’s not ever going to be private. The best you could do, in theory, is have a government service that takes that PII and gives the user a signed cryptographic certificate they can use to verify their identity. Most people would either lose their private key or have it stolen, so even that system would have problems. The closest to reality you could do right now is use Apple’s FaceID, and that’s anything but private. Pretty safe though. It’s super illegal and quite hard to steal someone’s face.

enable the absolute worst of what humanity has to offer. can we call it a reality check? we think of humans as so great and important and unique for quite a while now while the world is spiraling downwards. maybe humans arent so great after all. like what is art? ppl vibe with slob music but birds cant vote. how does that make sense? if one can watch AI slob (and we all will with the constant improvements in ai) and like it, well maybe our taste of art is not any better than what a bird can do and like. i hope LLM will lead to a breakthrough in understanding what type of animal we really are.

"Not Interested" is just free data for them to fill out your account's advertising profile.