yo dawg i herd u liek boats so we put yo boat on a boat so you can ride while you ride

I grew up wanting a fast car and lots of powersports toys, now that I am in a position to afford some (small amount) of that, I find myself thinking more that its not right to spend on those kind of activities now due to the impact on the environment.

Exactly, as I begin to be able to afford some smaller luxuries (say, a higher-end computer part or an extra monitor) I realize that I morally object to many luxuries because of their environmental cost, e-waste, and thinking of better uses for that money.

I do believe there’s some truth to the slogan of “no ethical consumption under capitalism” but luxuries are so often just egregious and repulsive.

Buying an island:

https://www.privateislandsonline.com/ lists many islands. They’re between about $100,000 and $75,000,000 (some lower-end ones are undeveloped and just trees), most seem to sit in the millions range. There are also renting options but prices aren’t public.

This advertisement blog post shows similar prices: https://www.jamesedition.com/stories/real-estate/how-much-does-a-private-island-cost/

Mega-yachts.

Here is a yacht buying/selling website with a filter for mega-yachts: https://www.yachtworld.com/boats-for-sale/type-power/class-power-mega/

The most expensive ones listed there are in the lower hundreds of millions (US$). I didn’t check if these were new or used. The smallest ones I would start to call mega-yachts were mid-to-upper hundred of thousands.

There’s also this calculator site for the purchase annual operating expenses of superyachts: https://www.luxyachts.com/yacht-cost-calculator

Depends on your instance and the community you’re posting in.

For example, on lemmy.world a user might get warned or banned for openly celebrating the shooting of Brian Thompson. (I forget exactly where they draw the line, but it’s an “advocating violence” thing)

Or here, a user on lemmy.ml might get banned for bigoted statements, even normal things that plenty of people don’t even notice are bigoted because it’s “common sense” in their own country.

But you’ve got to be pretty damn intolerable to get banned from more than a few instances. Like, actual Nazism.

It’s nearly useless unless you TRULY need the highest levels of privacy.

Absolutely not. My main adversary is simply commercial surveillance capitalism tracking and I daily drive Tor Browser. Most of the time, it’s fast enough for my browsing and video watching.

That’s why it’s annoying when people say “just use TOR”

I’m more annoyed when such people treat it as a panacea. See: https://medium.com/@thegrugq/tor-and-its-discontents-ef5164845908

Tor is not a VPN, so something calling itself “Tor VPN” is ringing alarm bells. Is it official? Who developed it?

edit: Yes, it’s official - https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/vpn/

I was confused since I didn’t understand the difference between it and Orbot, and misunderstood its name.

A government or state, like a corporation, will always act in its own best interest.

I can’t think of any human structure, or any person, who doesn’t tend to act in their own perceived best interest. The issue is when self interest contradicts mutual interest.

Self-interest is an important concept in understanding why capitalist corporations are consistently antisocial and why most states act against their citizens, but self-interest isn’t a reason in itself.

It was just called thoughts before governments weaponized it.

Government propaganda definitely predates the modern English language. e.g. Roman Empire

Just make your IP addresses pronouncable words like feed:deaf:babe:beef:cafe:: problem solved ez (working 2023!)

You should unironically read Mein Kampf though, at least once

The funny thing about that book is if you tell a neo-Nazi you’ve read it and have a criticism, they’ll immediately ask which translation and claim most of them are a “Jewish trick”.

Olivier Mannoni, who translated the 2021 French critical edition, said about the original German text that it was “An incoherent soup, one could become half-mad translating it”, and said that previous translations had corrected the language, giving the false impression that Hitler was a “cultured man” with “coherent and grammatically correct reasoning”. He added “To me, making this text elegant is a crime.” [snip]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mein_Kampf#Criticism_by_translators

Related: I believe it’s ok, given certain contexts, to speak broadly and crassly to people who expect that. It’s ultimately ineffective and therefore bad to come off as an pretenscious arrogant know-it-all, correcting everyone’s grammar and word choices and any ignorance they have. I see some students in the labor movement and wonder if they’re capable of expressing their knowledge to typical joe worker, without injecting French, German or Russian, or losing their temper at some unintentionally offensive ignorance. We’re speaking broadly to regular people, don’t alienate them with your academic knowledge.

That doesn’t mean never correct crappy things people say, you can and should, but pick your battles. A climate scientist once told me, being correct isn’t enough.