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Comment by Grimblewald

8 days ago

Corporate America never backs down. It simply rallies and tries again later until people are too fatigued to care. The only solution is to abandon ship, which I am doing. MS walked back in OS ads the first few times, but ultimately we still ended up on the exact trajectory everyone was outraged at. OpenAI still ended up on its path to closed AI despite initial walk backs. The story repeats itself over and over again, so, once the bad behavior starts, you leave. Their apologies are as hollow as their moral posturing.

Same with VISA/Mastercard deciding what we can/cannot buy. The only solution is to stop using their credit cards at all.

  • Easy to say, but every bank I've had the (dis)pleasure of doing business with only ever issued a Visa or Mastercard so it's not really feasible to just "stop using them"

  • Yes, Monero is a lot better than credit cards for privacy and freedom. I hope to see it accepted more.

  • The only solution to MacDonald's and Burger King deciding what we can/cannot order on their menus is to stop eating there.

    • "Taco Bell was the only restaurant to survive the Franchise Wars. Now all restaurants are Taco Bell."

This is more on brand on the evil shortcomings that comes with letting effective altruism run unchecked and honestly is worse than average "Corporate America". And the Tech/AI Space have been warned many times. Getting paid for providing a compute/token hungry model and still intentionally sabotaging your customers and poisoning their workflows is something that should be unforgivable and frankly ground for antitrust prosecution.

"Corporate America never backs down. It simply rallies and tries again later until people are too fatigued to care. "

Frankly, that sounds excactly like Chat Control and similar recurring attempts to enact total surveillance here in the EU (Now shifted to heavy-handed age verification and various politicians touting bans on VPNs.) I don't want to abandon my continent of birth, though...

  • guess who is pushing for those anti-privacy laws?

    hint: they're publicly traded

    • I have encountered enough such people to know that the really heavy push is coming from the police and secret service circles. These are the workplaces that attract all the wannabe Stasi types.

      1 reply →

  • Then you have to fight, not just the battle but the war. Its not enoygh to get people to back down, keep going, go for the throat. Demand the resignation of the politician proposing the bill. If theres no risk for trying, theyll keep trying.