Considering the price of a Fairphone you have a right to be upset. I suppose the only thing going for your situation is maybe the parts are worth something since they can be used to easily fix other Fairphones.

Political ads are not designed for targetting unpersuadables. Over the very long term propaganda that over and over blames undocumented people for problems starts to take a toll which could pull someone out of the unpersuadable demographic. But to a great extent they influence pursuadable voters in swing regions.

You say you would not switch to voting for Trump, and yet the sole reason Trump took power in 2016 was precisely due to advertising. Read about Cambridge Analytica and Peter Thiel. If Peter Thiel had not introduced Cambridge Analytica to the Trump campaign and bought Facebook data, Trump would not have taken power in 2016. THAT is how important advertising is. C/A master-minded indentifying the most important pursuadables, did a deep analysis of exactly what issues would be of interest to those individuals, and targeted them surreptitiously.

I strongly recommend you watch the PBS series “Hacking your Mind”. This episode in particular:

https://www.pbs.org/video/weapons-of-influence-gpuj68/

Just wondering what you mean by “concrete instead of glue”. Glue is certainly problematic but I can’t imagine concrete having any useful quality.

I agree that breaking them up would do some good, but in the case at hand you would just have a longer list of companies working together to defeat r2r.

If you could break them into very small pieces (e.g. split Google’s Android line into 6 different companies instead of 2), then you might see some competing for repairability against Fairphone. But still maybe a long shot. I walk into a phone shop and have 10s of different brands and not a single one of them has tried to go after the built-for-long-life market. Fairphone is alone on that AFAICT.

I think the only way out of this is to ban the environmentally detrimental practices of burying batteries in glue and booby trapping toothbrushes to self-destruct when opened. Because there will always be enough zombie consumer masses willing to buy that shit.

Well to be more accurate, boycotting is the practice of fighting harmful use of money by witholding money. Of course that stands to reason. If your money spent in a certain way is doing harm, you can prevent the harm your money does by not putting it on the harmful path.

I’m not sure what specifically you mean by getting people to reason better (whether you are talking about voting w/money or voting on the ballot in that context). Of course ads work. Political campaigns have started leveraging the same manipulation by ads that works to get people to buy goods and services.

What we certainly know does /not/ work is people thinking they are immune to ads. Everyone thinks that, and marketers prove them wrong over and over again. Advertising is specifically designed to exploit vulnerabilities in the human mind. You have no hope of creating an advertizing-immune population. It would be an ocean-boiling type of endeavor.

The most stark demonstration of money buying politicians seems to be with AIPAC. It happens often enough that a US politician who goes against Israel gets ousted that there’s even verb for it: AIPACed. AIPAC blows a fortune on the campaign of whoever runs against anyone who opposes Israel in any way – and they apparently get their way every time.

• https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/03/aipac-israel-spending-democratic-primaries-00144552
• https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/wesley-bell-backed-by-aipac-defeats-squad-member-cori-bush-in-st-louis-distrct-primary

Also interesting to note that most American Jews are liberal democrats who oppose AIPAC. But what can you do against a massive war chest like that?

From our side we can already do many things. For example using cash helps. using a crypto like monero through a decentralized wallet helps, delaying to obtain a digital Id (wherever this is possible) helps. And we learn as we go!

Yeah indeed we need more cash and/or cryptocurrency users. More speciifically, fewer bank users. It’s really a tough sell because people are so hooked on convenience. And I think that convenience is so powerful that it manufactures a good dose of bias that prevents the convenience zombies from absorbing anything bad news about banks. This is compounded with the addiction to Amazon.

The old laptop is the same one I use for all computing. So using an SBC would just add to the energy consumption.

But an SBC could be interesting anyway because there could be moments when I would want a phone to connect without the laptop dependency. So I would be interested in hearing how it works. Does the SBC also charge the phone over USB? Does the reverse tethering software exist that can run on an SBC? It would be cool to have this configuration:

phone → USB → SBC → ethernet → router…

Especially cool if the SBC could run Tor and proxy all traffic over Tor (though I suppose that job would best be served by the router).

I’m surprised to hear a phone for $100 referred to as cheap. But I suppose it is relative to some phones fetching 4 figures. Crazy! In the past I would go to the shop of a carrier and ask what they have in the backroom which is still new in box but not current enough to expose on the store shelves. I got new phones between $5 and $20 this way, which were only 1 or 2 Android versions behind.

That’s still not good. It’s frugal but it still feeds the 1st hand market when the 2nd hand market is absolutely flooded with phones no one wants. Going forward, every phone I buy will be 2nd hand.

The street markets are flooded with cameras (both digital and film). If you’re not fussy about pocket space that could be worth considering.

I believe you were suggesting to post lemmy bugs in [email protected], which is in an instance I generally avoid. It’s a fair enough suggestion but [email protected] is catch-all place where people can report bugs if they object to the official channels. I don’t expect bugs I post here to be seen by the right people but for me It’s enough to just get the issue recorded somewhere.

I avoid all centralized Cloudflare nodes. The lemmy.ml is no longer centralized by CF, but some would say it’s still centralized by disproportionate size inequality. It’s kind of a borderline case but I try to favor the instances that are nowhere near being part of the centralization/network effect problem.

money is only effective as the voters who react to it.

Money is always effective because you always have voters.

It can’t literally make votes it can only advertise.

Of course. The job of the money is not to make votes, but to influence the pool of voters. Advertising works wonders on people. Voters and influence on voters are independent variables, both of which you will always have.

Thanks for the update!

Indeed they would not have made the cost and effort to ban BDS if it had no effect. From your link:

The states that have passed legislation making it illegal for state agencies to work with companies that boycott Israel include Texas, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Florida, Arizona, Georgia, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arkansas, Minnesota, Nevada, South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Kansas, North Carolina, Utah, Missouri, Idaho, West Virginia, Colorado, Mississippi and New Hampshire.

Irony hi-lighted. Especially Michigan.

I sometimes take into account this list of the worst of the worst pro-forced-birth states when deciding on regional boycotts:

Regional boycotts are blunt, high-effort, and low effect. But if I need to break a tie between otherwise ethically similar market choices the regional boycotts come into play. For each of those states I look at the top 10-15 biggest corporations in those states and target them. That’s an old list though (pre-R/v/W overturn) and I think abortion law changed a bit after the overturn. But in any case maybe the intersection of pro-forced birth states with the anti-BDS states would be a relatively meaningful and managable to boycott. Result would be:

• Alabama
• Arkansas
• Georgia
• Mississippi
• Missouri
• Ohio (abortion policy fixed in 2023)

I probably need to update my pro-forced-birth list though. The end game is that revenue to businesses in that state feed state tax which then feeds the scumbag politicians there. So it’s a very round about way of indirectly defunding lousy policy makers.

¹ I say pro-forced-birth instead of pro-life for accuracy, because these states generally: oppose gun control, support death penalties, oppose welfare, oppose public healthcare, etc… nothing about them is really pro-life.

if you don’t vote any other action becomes meaningless in the us.

US elections are a battle of huge war chests. What if Elon Musk and Peter Thiel did not vote? What if they continued to dump fortunes into the republican war chests (along with Russia) among their various other manipulations? Musk and Thiel’s influences does not lose effect if they neglect to cast their own drop-in-the-ocean votes. There is no dependency or association between the war chests and how a particular individual votes.

If that’s still unclear, consider that Musk and Thiel’s influence is not self-influence. It’s influence on other people. It’s important to realize this because all non-enfranchised people have an opportunity to indirectly influence US policy by boycotting republican feeding corps. People in Ukraine can boycott FedEx and UPS on the basis of their ALEC contributions (ALEC funds republicans). You cannot reason that such a boycott is “meaningless” on the basis that Ukrainians do not vote in the US. If that were crippling enough to UPS, UPS would dump their ALEC membership to keep Ukraine business. (FedEx is a bit different… hard-assed; they would likely shrug off the boycott, keep ALEC, and cut their nose off to spite their face).

Thanks for asking. I actually covered it in this post. I will add that to the OP.

Note that Google killed off the ITA Software front end so I’m looking for a replacement. Some airfare aggregators use ITA as a backend and the ITA query language sometimes works in those cases. Hipmunk worked that way at one point but they have been killed off too.

If you are talking about voting in elections (as opposed to voting with a wallet), I’m eligible to vote in two countries. In one country, I vote every opportunity because it’s a good system with no assault on privacy, no barriers, no exclusivity, no voter intimidation. You need not even be a citizen. In the other country it’s a shitshow in just about every aspect you can consider. It’s a moral duty to vote but the gov takes many steps to hinder you and block you. Luckily influence is not limited to elections. You can vote every day with your wallet.

I don’t simply neglect to vote in the shitshow of a broken election system. I write letters to civil liberties orgs and politicians to say why I am not voting. Because if I were to vote, it would send a misleading signal (that the voting system is working).

When I do vote, I also write letters to those I am voting against to state why they lost my vote.

[placeholder for meme of anti-cave dude invoking a meme of a guy popping out of a well talking about participation in society in response to hearing he might want to consider switching beer suppliers]

Organize your workplace, raise class consciousness, support your community, and educate everyone.

None of that is an obsticle to boycotts, so you can do them in parallel.

It’s unclear what you mean by organizing your workplace. Politics at work can have dicey consequences. But if you are careful enough, you can amplify a boycott at a workplace without the workforce even knowing, as I did here.

An employer subcontracted HP for all the office PCs, which sat next to linux workstations. HP got a monthly payment per PC for loaning the hardware and servicing it. I configured emacs and other linux apps to make the HP PC redundant. Then I called HP and said come remove my PC, I don’t need it. My boss had no idea that was a political action… thinks I did that to save the company money or to get more desk space or something. I was happy to keep it that way. If he knew it was politically motivated it could have backfired. So the opportunities to do politics at work are sparse but I still look for them.

I get what you’re trying to accomplish, but many of these companies are more or less vital to everyday life.

Not a single one of those companies is as you describe. Every single one of them has a lesser evil alternative.