You’re missing the point.

Pornography addiction is a real thing.

I don’t think citronella actually does anything.

I have thought that way before.

But nowadays I have a different perspective. I’ve got everything I need to be happy, and that’s enough for me.

You’re not going to be obsessing over all your career achievements on your deathbed, you’re just going to wish you had spent more time with loved ones.

Even in relatively corruption-free countries, there are often shadow mechanisms the governments uses to decide who they charge with a crime.

Prosecutors can just say they don’t have a case, or they can fumble the case purposefully in the initial stages to give credence to the “no case” idea.

We don’t have to look any further than how police charge themselves to see how the laws don’t fairly apply to everyone. And a simple google search will reveal that Sweden is not immune to police corruption, which shouldn’t surprise anyone.

“Disobeying police orders”, which is what Thunberg was charged with, is one of those catch-all laws that are purposefully vague in a way that allows police total discretion over how to enforce it.

I guarantee in this case that calls were made all the way up the top of the Swedish government before police decided what to do here.

Basically, my point is that there are so many strings to pull, even in developed countries, that it’s often possible to suss out the motivations of the administration just by examining how charges proceed.

What this says about Thunberg getting charged for her actions? Probably nothing significant. Sweden cannot allow activists to freely disrupt their economic infrastructure, especially those involving energy. So they charge her as “normal” regardless of her celebrity status. Though they will be very careful to do everything by the book with so many eyes on the case.

Motherland if I’m not mistaken.

The only thing you can’t do with an open API is exploit every dollar of value that passes through your service.

The main difference between a Silicon Valley API and a FOSS API, is the SV API is trying to get tons of people rich as fuck by exploiting you. The FOSS API can live long and prosper by simply asking for donations every once in a while, or engaging in very light-handed monetization.

There are like a million little nuances to this whole issue, and the lack of nuance is what Silicon Valley relies on to convince people that they must pillage their users, but that’s the gist.

I think the best solution to this whole monetization issue is to just make sharing bandwidth as easy as possible on the fediverse.

If hosting can be done by everyone using an instance, no one entity has to bear overwhelming costs, so there’s no excuse to demand money.

Advertisers keep pushing for a more and more obtrusive browsing experience, while shoving consumerist junk in my face to try and drain my wallet.

And I’m just supposed to be okay with that?

Nope, I block all the ads I can.

That page has to be satire… right?

The whole “police your language, so there’s no chance anyone could ever be offended” idea is such an oppressive path to a more equal society.

Every billionaire uses charities.

They’re a way to exert control over the money that would normally go to taxes, and be up to the government to spend.

It’s not inherently bad, but charity is not quite the saving grace of billionaires that many make it out to be.