No idea about tools although I hope you find something.

Two related suggestions that will change your life:

1. Grunt Fund if you are making decisions about equity
2. Have people estimate the total time for a task, rigidly enforce that every man-hour spent on a project has to be allocated to one of those tasks (including the elusive but vital “oh shit we forgot” task), keep track of the coefficient between the two. It’ll be different for different people sometimes. When estimating a project, have people come up with estimates and then multiply by the coefficient. Be transparent with everyone about this system. It’ll revolutionize your project management life once people get used to it. I tried to find a blog post which explains more detail, but honestly, it’s not complicated, and Google is too shit now to find it.

• Librewolf is also quite a good browser
• Piefed seems like it’s shaping up to be better than Lemmy in a few different ways and it’s compatible with all the Lemmy people

Yes, demesisx and demeaning_casually are two alts of the same person. There were some others as well, I think they’ve all been banned at this point. They did the standard Lemmy bad-faith-person behavior of being hostile and obviously dishonest with the admin when the admin went to talk with them about it, at that point without the intention of banning them I don’t think. For as unsuccessful a behavior as that is, it’s pretty popular, I’ve dealt with it multiple times. I think the admin was able to find some more detailed information about it than I was, they caught a bunch of different alts.

The timestamps come from the time that votes get federated, which is often in batches a little bit after they were posted on the origin server. They’re not reliable to the second. If I remember right you’ll see batches of votes even from legitimate users come in all at the same time or within seconds if they’re all on the same instance, and also there tends to be a reliable 30-second cycle on which they all get sent out in those batches. If you look on a scale of minutes, and there tend to be bunched-up votes from apparently different accounts that all are taking the same types of actions, that’s more of a reliable sign of fuckery.

See my other comment; I think the same user contingent that likes VPNs tends to also want maximum convenience, which isn’t Tor. Of course they frame convenience as the only relevant factor, instead of acknowledging that being the tradeoff they’re making.

I haven’t really played around with VPNs to make the comparison. Tor breaks for a significant number of sites, but it’s still a pretty small minority; “only works for a small number of sites” is a comical untruth.

If Tor breaks more sites than VPNs do (which I think is likely), I think it is because Tor is secure. It is easier to do malicious things behind Tor because you have, for all intents and purposes, an unbreakable shield of privacy while you are doing those malicious things. And so, site operators tend to block it more readily than they do VPNs.

Whether you want to make the tradeoff in favor of convenience or genuine privacy is, of course, up to you. It’s not surprising to me that the Lemmy userbase is more or less unanimous in favor of convenience. Of course it is fine if you want, but you don’t need to misrepresent how things are to make it the only possible choice.

Tor Browser

Done

I dislike the phrasing “data rape.”

I’m not going to have a conversation with you where I explain why, as bad as Biden and every other president has been, Trump is a meaningful change. I’ve talked about it already twice today and it is too grim. Look in my history if you want to see.

It has absolutely zero impact on conditions in Palestine.

Impacting the policies of the United States is probably the single biggest thing on the planet that someone can do to help Palestine. A mass movement to spread awareness and force discussion of the issue is, I am sad to say, probably the best out of all the slimmest chances of being able to effect that.

It will not be very effective, because of awful problems in the US government, but I literally cannot think of anything at all that any person could do that has any better chance of helping the Palestinians than effectively organizing protests in the US that are as big as you can make them. The only other thing that I can even think of is a massive paramilitary attack on Israel, and I think that would be much more likely than not to backfire and be the end of Palestine.

Oh, also, not letting Trump get in office would have been a big thing, but we sure fucked that up, and God help them now.

Okay, so why would I want to adopt a governmental system that, if history is any judge, is going to get destroyed by some external military? Isn’t that a flaw that is more severe than the electoral college?

I mean I do completely agree with you in terms of making life better and the problems of modern government. I was asking that specific thing because of genuine interest in talking substantively about it, and you’re not wrong about the overall smug and hostile tone I’m taking. I do apologize. But, on the other hand, you came out with an incredibly smug tone (“How to explain to libs in crisis”), and other people in the comments have been incredibly directly insulting (as well as just generally incredibly unproductive in the conversation). Generally speaking, when someone’s rude to me or about me, I’m not real polite to them in turn. IDK, maybe you are right and I should not be rude. If you’re really trying to talk about this, instead of concocting insulting strawmen and talking about “libs,” then sure let’s talk. Why is a governmental system that’s easy to crush a good one to adopt even if life is temporarily better before it gets crushed?

Yeah. Like I say, it is heartbreaking.

I am delighted that Palestine has gotten more attention, and I am very hopeful that somehow the situation can be stabilized and improved for a people that has suffered way too much.

It’s fucking harrowing right now. The food is gone. The amount that can come in has been cut to 0, and the aid agencies that were operating inside the country have run out as of this week.

I think May might be the month that everyone dies. That’s not an exaggeration. I hope I am wrong.

The best I can hope for, honestly, is that they didn’t die in vain and the holocaust beginning for real, combined with the strength of the recent protest movements you talk about, is what finally motivates the international governmental community to act in a big way. None of this “divest.” None of this “strongly worded statement.” I don’t know what it should look like instead, but it is heartbreaking that they want to just stand on the sidelines and watch it all happen. And, maybe with Trump and his dysfunction disabling the US’s ability to defend Israel as they usually would, maybe there is a little window of opportunity to make a better life for the people in the West Bank and really hold Israel to account for once.

I am not hopeful, to be honest. But that is all I can see of hope, is that something better will come from it in the long run. Right now it is very, very grim.

I think socialists can and should focus the message on issues like healthcare for all, childcare for all, housing, etc., but in order to actually win and protect those gains, you need to have deep, direct democracy

Wow! We really do agree on a lot of things, this is amazing.

The Consitution (and I would argue representative democracy in general) doesn’t provide that. I won’t go into all of it here, but there are socialist currents like communalism, libertarian socialism

Great! Can you point me to some examples of where these things have been put into practice and not succumbed to the systemic forces I talked about which tend to send government askew? Since these are such better things and the constitution of the United States is such a pile of shit by contrast, I’m sure you have tons of examples.

Yeah. They’re not all fakers, either, I’ve seen these people at actual protests too. The one time it’s happened I thought about interacting with them but I decided it wouldn’t go well and went and hung out with the pro-Palestine people who didn’t feel the need to be injecting a whole bunch of leftist infighting (to the point that it eclipsed anything pro-Palestinian and the leftist infighting became the main thrust of the message).

Ding ding ding you broke the code lol.

I also like how, if you sort of unfocus your eyes and take a broad look over the comments, it’s very obvious that the chief purpose is shitting on “liberals.” There’s very little interest in the topics about democracy and improvement of the government and people power that are the ostensible purpose for this whole thing. Basically, almost all of it boils down to:

• There are all these horrible people running around who believe the constitution is sacred and everything in it is great but they are wrong it’s just a piece of paper and also it and they are going to make fascism
• And you are one of them, no don’t tell me what you believe, I already told you what you believe, shut up listen to me
• YOU’RE A BIG PIECE OF SHIT ARAGRABRAGREWHDBEFJKHEBF

Absolutely! So, talking about the importance of “the constitution” is a common phrasing for principles that are under deadly attack right now, that you can use which will engage the support of a massive range of people including among them conservatives, liberals, leftists, military people, police, lawyers, judges, and so on. And, using it in that way will not in any way interfere with reforming the problems with it, or indicate to people that we need to go back to having slavery or other atrocities that were codified into it. It’s a way to rally support for things that need support rallied for them right now. Letting protestors out of jail. Not sending anyone to concentration camps. Stopping ICE from busting in people’s houses and terrorizing them. People can get mobilized to oppose that, even if our current constitutional system needs significant reform to be sustainable in any way.

Beyond the current crisis, what this country actually needs is a massive people movement to get the crooks and tyrants out of government. Trump didn’t invent any of those problems or even close to, but if him trying to have the government kill everybody who looks at him funny or gets in his way is what it takes to get that reform going, let’s fucking take advantage and accomplish some things, lord knows we need it.

The supreme court is 9 ppl appointed for life, so that’s antidemocratic.

Yeah, we should change that.

The Senate is 2 ppl per state regardless of population, that’s antidemocratic.

Yeah, we should change that.

Amendments need 3/4 of the States, not people, to go through, that’s antidemocratic.

That one I’m a lot less sure about but we can talk about it.

The federalist papers specifically discuss the desire to prevent the people (“the mob” they called us) from having much power.

Yeah, they also said we shouldn’t have a bill of rights.

Also, the need to protect government against “the mob” and how it’s not as simple as just “let’s let people vote and whoever wins the popular vote gets to rule because that’s democracy” should be absolutely starkly apparent after November of last year. Trying to build a government that works is not really a simple thing, and just like in engineering, saying that some tool is deeply flawed isn’t always necessarily an argument for why things will get better if we just get rid of it (without exploring what the alternate option is going to be and how it’ll play out).

But mostly we’re in agreement. Glad we worked all that out! It turned out to be really simple, who knew.

Everyone knows that when the ship is having trouble and seems like it might be out of control, the first thing to do is destroy the wheel. After all, it wasn’t working right, it was a big problem.

Almost as if they are being disingenuous, and the theory under which what they’re doing makes perfect sense is more likely than the one at face value which makes 0 sense.