Time to cancel your ChatGPT, Copilot and Office 365 subscriptions if you use any of those things.

If you're investing in stocks and using an index fund you may be funding Tesla. I would recommend seeing if there's an option to use a similar index fund but exclude TSLA.

This website has some information on others ways to divest from Tesla and call and email people to encourage others to do likewise.

People in Georgia have been protesting everyday for over a year (406+ days) but for whatever reason it's not currently getting much media coverage likely because the media tends to not report on reoccurring protests.

There's more information about the protests on the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024%E2%80%932026_Georgian_protests

Basically they're protesting due to election fraud, democratic backsliding and protesting against pro-Russia policies, they want to be aligned with the EU.

Note that this originally happened in 2020 during Trump's first term. Justice is sometimes slow.

I accidentally posted this: https://lemmy.zip/post/56692643 because I made a mistake while checking to see if anyone posted it already so I immediately hit delete after I saw it was "crossposted".

However I still saw the post on Zip and other instances like World and ML so I then hit hide post and it seemed to fix the problem on Zip but not yet other instances.

Is the issue that I just need to be patient for it to federate or am I misunderstanding these features? My assumption would be deleting the post would make it go away for everyone but perhaps people or maybe just moderators and myself could still see the post by clicking on my profile which is fine with me, I just wanted to delete it since the same article was just posted a day ago.

I'm very sorry I searched for the title and didn't get any results so I posted it thinking no one did but then it showed me "crossposted" and I realized someone already posted it here. I've attempted to delete this post but the deletion may not have made it to your instance so I would highly recommend taking the discussion to where it's already been posted instead of commenting here.

I believe the world is facing a new threat: disinformation and cognitive and psychological warefare. Russia is already doing it. They call it "new generation warfare".

The article describes it best:

"the Russian view of modern warfare is based on the idea that the main battlespace is the mind and, as a result, new-generation wars are to be dominated by information and psychological warfare, ... morally and psychologically depressing the enemy’s armed forces personnel and civil population. The main objective is to reduce the necessity for deploying hard military power to the minimum necessary."

Now Europe is facing another threat. The United States.

The NSS says "Cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations".

I don't know for sure how they will do it but I suspect it could be similar to what Russia does. Things like online trolls and bots brainwashing vulnerable people.

So I'm calling for action: please contact your politicians and warn them about this and warn everyone you can. Demand media literacy education and classes designed to foster critical thinking skills, mitigate the harm caused by social media, encourage emotional resiliency and strength, encourage conflict resolution skills. I singled these out because I notice that those who are weak in these skills are more vulnerable. This is by no means a silver bullet but I hope that experts can also look into how to deal with psychological warfare and by making it an issue more people are aware of hopefully we can do everything we can to stop it.

Also you can make a difference yourself. Block and report trolls and people who regularly share disinformation on social media, call out those who unintentionally shared disinformation. Ideally trolls would be blocked shunned as opposed to people being drained/tricked by them. Also do what you can to give the gift of media literacy to others. This website has three different tests you can try for disinformation: https://guides.lib.uchicago.edu/c.php?g=1241077&p=9082320

I would also recommend reading this article here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_warfare

I strongly suggest if you work for a company and you have the option to join a union please do! If the company you work for is non-union consider being a leader and push for unionization.

The dues may be small but they make a big difference for worker's rights and are worth it. You have people dedicated to fighting for your pay and your rights and rights of all workers.

Also part of the reason Democrats are not winning as much is because Unions used to support them, now there is less funding.

The comment says it was mid interview but in the video I heard them say she was arrested immediately after the interview.

Canada's boycott of American alcohol is working!

I propose scaling this up significantly and expanding it to other countries and also include pop (ex: coca-cola) and tobacco for the boycott.

Here's why:

1. All have harmful health effects.
2. Countries in general have more regulatory control over these things so a boycott could be enacted faster. Ideally your government should lead the boycott using their regulatory authority or pass a law to make it happen if not possible yet. The reason why Canada's alcohol boycott is so effective is because in Canada most alcohol is sold in state run stores so the government had the authority to stop selling it. This is key to success. However if not possible you can still boycott these products yourself.
3. These products all in general tend to come from red states. Coca-Cola is headquartered in Georgia, USA and has such an impact that people nearby instead of saying pop or soda they call everything even Pepsi products a "Coke". Red states are already feeling the effects of Canada's boycott. In Kentucky they were already forced to shut down a Bourbon distillery. Tobacco is also heavily grown in red states. You can see this for yourself: https://tobacco.ces.ncsu.edu/2020/03/from-the-field-agronomy-notes-vol-4-num-2/

In addition while I have your attention I'll reiterate suggesting boycotting fossil fuels and big tech social media. These also harm the environment (fossil fuels) and your own mental health (big tech). Lemmy and Piefed are already a great non-US alternative to Reddit so if you have friends still on Reddit help them join here. In general hopefully you notice the correlation between something being harmful and them supporting/donating to the Republican party. This tends to happen a lot so concentrating on boycotting what causes the most harm helps stop the Trump regime the most.

If you like any of these ideas please try contacting your politicians and make the suggestion. You could make a huge difference!

Personally I would suggest migrating away from Microsoft 365 by using Libreoffice and Thunerbird or SeaMonkey or your favorite email client rather than giving Microsoft any money. However if for some reason you're absolutely 100% locked-in with Microsoft Office 365 then the linked instructions will at-least save you a little money hopefully. I would still recommend trying to find a solution to why you're locked in as soon as possible because I'm not sure how long this will last.

With RAM prices and other computer components increasing so much in price it made me think about who is impacted by this.

Gamers and PC enthusiasts in particular are going to be hit hard by this (but anyone who needs a computer or smartphone or even other devices is in fact impacted) so I believe this should be leveraged to the maximum extent possible.

The same could be said of anyone who isn't a Trump bootlicker because OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman gave $25 million to Trump and it needs to be a decision he must very deeply regret.

Also artists have long not liked OpenAI.

I hope this thread could serve as a way to brainstorm finding groups of people who would be most upset at OpenAI then turning that anger into action and ultimately making as much of an impact as possible. Does anyone have any ideas they'd like to share? I can say for myself finding out about the Trump donation made me personally very angry at OpenAI for doing that. Other groups of people would have their own reasons like being upset their computer is a lot more expensive.

I think no matter what group the conclusion is always the same. Cancel your ChatGPT, Copilot and Microsoft 365 subscriptions. Groups most angered by OpenAI which would be a very broad coalition all with the same goal could really propel this forward.

Time to cancel your ChatGPT, Copilot or Microsoft 365 subscriptions. Donating to Republicans needs to have hard consequences against the big donors.

Note that if you cannot escape from Microsoft 365 at this time you can switch to their classic plan which doesn't have AI according to: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/switching-to-microsoft-365-personal-and-family-classic-plans-58342e83-38e7-4cda-b63b-88604a8fb7ef

I hope this isn't political. I just find myself sometimes randomly thinking about the fact that Truth social is based on Mastodon and thinking about how weird it would be if they were to start federation.

Important caveat that this would depend on what changes they made to the code. Did they just disable federation or was the code stripped out? If stripped out how hard would it be to add it back?

Edit: maybe this was a dumb shower thought. I ended up deleting it.

I hope every penny Musk donates becomes so toxic for the GOP that any Republican candidate backed by Musk looses the election.

It's time we put a renewed focus on boycotting Twitter and Tesla.