“In 2014, a team of scientists based at Harvard and Yale published a remarkable study on how people make decisions about the natural world. They were interested in whether people will choose to share finite resources with future generations. Future generations pose a problem because they cannot reciprocate with you. If you choose to forgo immediate monetary gain in order to preserve ecology for your grandchildren, they can’t offer the favour back – so you gain little from sharing. In light of this, economists expect that people will make a ‘rational’ choice to exhaust resources in the present and leave future generations with nothing. But it turns out that people don’t actually behave this way. The Harvard-Yale team put people in groups and gave them each a share of common resources to be managed across generations. They found that, on average, a full 68% of individuals chose to use their share sustainably, taking only as much as the pool could regenerate, sacrificing possible profits so that future generations could thrive. In other words, the majority of people behave exactly the opposite to how economic theory predicts. The problem is that the other 32% chose to liquidate their share of the resources for the sake of quick profits. Over time, this selfish minority ended up depleting the collective pool, leaving each successive generation with a smaller and smaller supply of resources to work with. The losses compounded quickly over time: by the fourth generation the resources were completely exhausted, leaving future generations with nothing – a striking pattern of decline that looks very similar to what’s happening to our planet today. Yet when the groups were asked to make decisions collectively, with direct democracy, something remarkable happened. The 68% were able to overrule the selfish minority and keep their destructive impulses in check. In fact, democratic decision-making encouraged the selfish types to vote for more sustainable decisions, because they realised they were all in it together. Over and over again, the scientists found that under democratic conditions, resources were sustained for future generations, at 100% capacity, indefinitely. The scientists ran the experiments for up to twelve generations, and they kept getting the same results: no net depletion. None. What’s so fascinating about this is that it shows widespread and intuitive support for what ecological economists call a ‘steady-state’ economy. A steady-state economy follows two key principles in order to stay in balance with the living world: 1) Never extract more than ecosystems can regenerate. 2) Never waste or pollute more than ecosystems can safely absorb. To get to a steady-state economy, we need to have clear caps on resource use and waste. For decades, economists have told us that such caps are impossible, because people will see them as irrational. It turns out they’re wrong. If given the chance, this is exactly the kind of policy that people want. This helps us see our ecological crisis in a new light. It’s not ‘human nature’ that’s the problem here. It’s that we have a political system that allows a few people to sabotage our collective future for their own private gain.” (from the book “Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save The World” by Jason Hickel)

-

“Ownership of things in common was so universal throughout the American continent when the Europeans arrived that even the cooking pot, Columbus noted, was available to anyone who wanted to take from it, and this even in times of starvation. Two centuries later, Thomas Morton could also say of the Five Nations inhabiting New England that “although every proprietor knows his own . . . yet all things, so long as they will last, are used in common amongst them.” The idea of ownership of land was so alien among Native Americans that individuals made no effort to secure for themselves the lands they occupied, frequently moving grounds, and readily sharing them with newcomers. As Kirkpatrick Sale writes, “Owning the land, selling the land, seemed ideas as foreign as owning and selling the clouds or the wind.” William Cronon too comments, “This relaxed attitude towards personal possession was typical throughout New England.” […] No effort was made to set permanent boundaries around a field that a family used, and fields were abandoned after some years and allowed to return to bushes. What people possessed was the use of the land and the crops; this is what was traded, and this usufruct right could not prevent trespassing. In fact, different groups of people could have claims on the same land, depending on the use they made of it, which might not be the same. Several villages could fish in the same rivers recognizing their mutual rights. And when one left the clan they left everything they had possessed. Yet, these unattached, nomadic tribes had a far deeper communion with the land and agriculture than the privatizing Europeans and so much respect for it that though “they had taken their livelihood from the land for eons, hunting, foraging, planting, fishing, building, trekking,” at the time of the Europeans’ arrival “the land of North America was still by every account without exception a lush and fertile wilderness teeming with abundant wildlife in water, woods, and air.” The result of this lack of attachment to private property among the Native peoples of America was a communal outlook that valued cooperation, group identity, and culture. […] The dislike for individual accumulation was so strong that they invented the ritual of the potlatch, that is, a periodic redistribution of wealth, to free themselves from it.” (from the book “Re-enchanting The World: Feminism And The Politics Of The Commons” by Silvia Federici & Peter Linebaugh)

We aren’t programmed by nature, we were programmed by economic interests.

Adding a relevant quote (also see an additional quote in a separate reply to this one in regards to how people can protect/conserve nature if given the chance/freedom to do so)

“There was a day when the prevailing American culture was the mass marketer’s worst nightmare. Frugality and thrift were central to the famed “Puritan ethic” that the early settlers brought with them to America. The Puritans believed in hard work, participation in community, temperate living, and devotion to a spiritual life. Their basic rule of living was that one should not desire more material things than could be used effectively. They taught their children, “Use it up, wear it out, make do, or do without.” The Quakers also had a strong influence on early America and, although more tolerant and egalitarian, shared with the Puritans the values of hard work and frugality as important to one’s spiritual development. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, both important early American writers, viewed simplicity as a path to experiencing the divine. The consumer culture emerged largely as a consequence of concerted efforts by the retailing giants of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to create an ever-growing demand for the goods they offered for sale. The American historian William Leach has documented in Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture how they successfully turned a spiritually oriented culture of frugality and thrift into a material culture of self-indulgence. Leach finds the claim that the market simply responds to consumer desires to be nothing more than a self-serving fabrication of those who make their living manipulating reality to persuade consumers to buy what corporations find it profitable to sell: Indeed, the culture of consumer capitalism may have been among the most nonconsensual public cultures ever created, and it was nonconsensual for two reasons. First, it was not produced by “the people” but by commercial groups in cooperation with other elites comfortable with and committed to making profits and to accumulating capital on an ever-ascending scale. Second, it was nonconsensual because, in its mere day-to-day conduct (but not in any conspiratorial way), it raised to the fore only one vision of the good life and pushed out all others. In this way, it diminished American public life, denying the American people access to insight into other ways of organizing and conceiving life, insight that might have endowed their consent to the dominant culture (if such consent were to be given at all) with real democracy. The populist cultures that grew out of the hearts and aspirations of ordinary people in America stressed the democratization of property and the virtues of a republic based on independent families owning their own land and tools, producing for themselves much of what they consumed, and participating in communities of sharing. Theirs was the model of a strong social economy, supplemented by involvement in the money economy at the margin of their lives.” / “Gradually, the individual was surrounded by messages reinforcing the culture of desire. Advertisements, department store show windows, electric signs, fashion shows, the sumptuous environments of the leading hotels, and billboards all conveyed artfully crafted images of the good life.” (from the book “When Corporations Rule The World [20th anniversary edition]” by David C. Korten)

The real demons are the friends Epstein made along the way…

Nah, other users won’t know who you are.

Well, at least until the database inevitably leaks

https://www.pcmag.com/news/reddit-could-soon-require-face-id-to-prove-youre-not-a-bot

Huffman indicated the platform may use decentralized third-party information providers to verify users’ personal details.

“Part of the promise to users is we don’t want to know your name," he told the hosts. "But we want to know that you’re a person.”

Sure, “we don’t want to know your name, we just have to know it or have to have another party that we have access to/a deal with know it”

They will either give special permissions to relevant businesses (maybe an expensive Super Premium Golden Access), or use selective enforcement to only go after people/businesses that don’t comply to their overall authoritarianism and pose too much of a risk to the status quo.

Well… the threat of a good example / the domino effect threat / the threat of hurting profits and hurting the easy exploitative access to resources

Adding some quotes from the book from the book “The Untold History Of The United States” by Oliver Stone & Peter Kuznick

“In February 1901, while U.S. troops were, in McKinley’s words, uplifting, civilizing, and Christianizing the Filipinos, the U.S. Congress dispelled any lingering illusions regarding Cuban independence. It passed the Platt Amendment, which asserted the United States’ right to intervene in future Cuban affairs, limited the amount of debt Cuba could accumulate, restricted Cuba’s power to sign treaties, and gave the United States a naval base at Guantánamo Bay, which would secure the eastern approach to the Isthmus of Panama. The United States made clear that the army would not leave until the amendment was incorporated into the Cuban Constitution. After the war, American businessmen swooped in, grabbing all the assets they could seize. United Fruit Company gobbled up 1.9 million acres of land for sugar production at 20 cents per acre. By 1901, Bethlehem Steel and other U.S. businesses may have owned over 80 percent of Cuban minerals.”

“U.S. interests and prestige were dealt another devastating blow when revolutionaries, led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, toppled Cuba’s U.S.-friendly dictator, Fulgencio Batista, on New Year’s Day 1959. American corporations had dominated the island since 1898. In 1959, they controlled more than 80 percent of Cuba’s mines, cattle ranches, utilities, and oil refineries, 50 percent of the railroads, and 40 percent of the sugar industry. The United States still retained its naval base at Guantánamo Bay. Castro quickly set about reforming the education system and redistributing land. The government seized more than a million acres from United Fruit and two other American companies. When the United States tried to strangle the new regime economically, Castro turned to the Soviet Union for aid. On March 17, 1960, Eisenhower instructed the CIA to organize a “paramilitary force” of Cuban exiles to overthrow Castro.”

And more generally, in the context of Vietnam:

"In April 1954, Ho Chi Minh’s peasant liberation army, commanded by General Vo Nguyen Giap, and peasant supporters hauled extremely heavy antiaircraft guns, mortars, and howitzers through seemingly impassable jungle and mountain terrain to lay siege to desperate French forces at Dien Bien Phu. Incredibly, the United States was then paying 80 percent of the French costs to keep the colonialists in power. Eisenhower explained in August 1953, “when the United States votes $400,000,000 to help that war, we are not voting a giveaway program. We are voting for the cheapest way that we can to prevent the occurrence of something that would be of a most terrible significance to the United States of America, our security, our power and ability to get certain things we need from the riches of the Indonesia territory and from Southeast Asia.” He envisioned countries in the region falling like dominoes, ultimately leading to the loss of Japan. Nixon agreed: “If Indochina falls, Thailand is put in an almost impossible position. The same is true of Malaya with its rubber and tin. The same is true of Indonesia. If this whole part of Southeast Asia goes under Communist domination or Communist influence, Japan, who trades and must trade with this area in order to exist, must inevitably be oriented towards the Communist regime.” And U.S. News & World Report cut entirely through any rhetoric about fighting for the freedom of oppressed peoples and admitted, “One of the world’s richest areas is open to the winner in Indochina. That’s behind growing U.S. concern . . . tin, rubber, rice, key strategic raw materials are what the war is really about. The U.S. sees it as a place to hold— at any cost.” "

Not humanity. It’s capitalism and its inherent incentive and demand for more and more profits/growth/consumption regardless of consequences (“externalities”). It’s the rich and their extravagant lifestyles and the industries that they’ve forced upon us.

• https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/10/world-richest-used-fair-share-emissions-2026-oxfam
• https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/billionaires-emit-more-carbon-pollution-90-minutes-average-person-does-lifetime
• https://studyfinds.org/worlds-richest-destroying-the-planet/
• https://shunwaste.com/article/how-much-do-the-rich-pollute
• http://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/whose-consumption-is-killing-the-planet
• http://www.commondreams.org/views/2009/07/08/forget-shorter-showers-why-personal-change-does-not-equal-political-change
• http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/nov/20/90-companies-man-made-global-warming-emissions-climate-change

“Much of the response to the global climate catastrophe, in part caused by processes like clear cutting [of forests] and the overproduction of meat, has been individualized through a moralizing of consumer choice. At the grocery store, we are encouraged to bring reusable bags. We are shamed for plastic water bottles. None of these considerations hit at the point of production or social organization at large. It shies away from demanding why water might be bottled and sold, rather than made freely accessible in healthy ways. All of this moralizing operates under the false assumption that our individual choices have the power to shift the tide towards a greener future, without indicting the corporations and the states that support them for their massive projects of resource extraction and production of waste. Our individual buying habits don’t cause the desertification of the planet. Likewise, it is a fallacious argument to say that consumer demand creates these markets, since we are actually limited in our options of what we can buy, not only based on what we can afford but on the corporations’ ever-present interest of increasing profits to the detriment of any other consideration. We can make whatever choices we want at the supermarket without really making any significant change in the overall scheme of things. The effectiveness of boycotts relies on a mass demonstration of refusal, and that massive movement doesn’t currently exist.” (from the book “Practical Anarchism: A Guide For Daily Life” by Shuli Branson)

“Many environmental groups argue for restrictions on population, air travel or general consumption, and a change in personal lifestyles. […] Many proposals […] involve encouraging ordinary people—who are already facing cuts in their living standards—to further tighten their belts or to spend time and money most of us don’t have to make a series of changes in our lifestyles while the life-destroying chaos of the market system rages around us unabated. An oft-repeated mantra is that the developing world cannot have the same standard of living as the developed if we are to make any progress in slowing down environmental degradation. […] It is true that less developed countries of the South cannot emulate the consumer lifestyles and type of development of the North to which everyone, without a hint of irony, North and South, is nevertheless constantly taught to aspire. Further capitalist development of the North is quite enough to wreck the planet on its own; were the people of the southern hemisphere to join in and catch up, we would need the equivalent of five planets. The problem […] is not economic growth per se or population growth, but profit-driven, unplanned growth that in many cases is either socially useless or actively detrimental to humans and the biosphere—the kind of growth that has brought us to the brink of social and ecological disaster. Development and growth must be fundamentally redefined to prioritize real human and ecological needs rather than the priorities of profit and the market.” (from the book “Ecology And Socialism: Solutions To Capitalist Ecological Crisis” by Chris Williams:)

I fear they will commandeer them, reprogram them, and unleash them on the population

I totally understand him, and I don’t know his policies, but wouldn’t it be great if the name Adolf Hitler got “appropriated” towards egalitarian policies of inclusion and equality, in a sort of opposition to the way the nazis appropriated the swastika

I have some quotes to share, though about the government side of things

“The digital age has created the semblance of social connection, while empowering autocrats to better surveil, control, and disrupt perceived political opponents. China, Iran, Russia, and Saudi Arabia have used digital tools to silence opponents, spread propaganda and disinformation, and sow polarization and division among their rivals. So, too, have regimes in smaller countries, like Togo and Bahrain, relied on digital surveillance to curtail civil society. Recent trends among mass movements also show some cause for concern.” (Erica Chenoweth - Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know)

And 3 from “No Place To Hide”:

“Initially, it is always the country’s dissidents and marginalized who bear the brunt of the surveillance, leading those who support the government or are merely apathetic to mistakenly believe they are immune. And history shows that the mere existence of a mass surveillance apparatus, regardless of how it is used, is in itself sufficient to stifle dissent. A citizenry that is aware of always being watched quickly becomes a compliant and fearful one.”

“All of the evidence highlights the implicit bargain that is offered to citizens: pose no challenge and you have nothing to worry about. Mind your own business, and support or at least tolerate what we do, and you’ll be fine. Put differently, you must refrain from provoking the authority that wields surveillance powers if you wish to be deemed free of wrongdoing. This is a deal that invites passivity, obedience, and conformity. The safest course, the way to ensure being “left alone,” is to remain quiet, unthreatening, and compliant.”

“Mass surveillance is a universal temptation for any unscrupulous power. And in every instance, the motive is the same: suppressing dissent and mandating compliance. Surveillance thus unites governments of otherwise remarkably divergent political creeds. At the turn of the twentieth century, the British and French empires both created specialized monitoring departments to deal with the threat of anticolonialist movements. After World War II, the East German Ministry of State Security, popularly known as the Stasi, became synonymous with government intrusion into personal lives. And more recently, as popular protests during the Arab Spring challenged dictators’ grasp on power, the regimes in Syria, Egypt, and Libya all sought to spy on the Internet use of domestic dissenters. Investigations by Bloomberg News and the Wall Street Journal have shown that as these dictatorships were overwhelmed by protestors, they literally went shopping for surveillance tools from Western technology companies. Syria’s Assad regime flew in employees from the Italian surveillance company Area SpA, who were told that the Syrians “urgently needed to track people.” In Egypt, Mubarak’s secret police bought tools to penetrate Skype encryption and eavesdrop on activists’ calls. And in Libya, the Journal reported, journalists and rebels who entered a government monitoring center in 2011 found “a wall of black refrigerator-size devices” from the French surveillance company Amesys. The equipment “inspected the Internet traffic” of Libya’s main Internet service provider, “opening emails, divining passwords, snooping on online chats and mapping connections among various suspects.” The ability to eavesdrop on people’s communications vests immense power in those who do it. And unless such power is held in check by rigorous oversight and accountability, it is almost certain to be abused.” (Glenn Greenwald, “No Place To Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State”)

I’ll counter and say that it’s culture/conditions-based. Humans have a range of available/possible behaviors/thought patterns and they are reinforced/shaped by their surroundings/the system they live in. There are and have been egalitarian societies that aren’t full of “mean, stupid, and crazy” people.

“The idea that the key features of successive societies and human history have been a result of an ‘unchanging’ human nature […] is a prejudice that pervades academic writing, mainstream journalism and popular culture alike. Human beings, we are told, have always been greedy, competitive and aggressive, and that explains horrors like war, exploitation, slavery and the oppression of women. This ‘caveman’ image is meant to explain the bloodletting on the Western Front in one world war and the Holocaust in the other. I argue very differently. ‘Human nature’ as we know it today is a product of our history, not its cause. Our history has involved the moulding of different human natures, each displacing the one that went before through great economic, political and ideological battles.”

“The world as we enter the 21st century is one of greed, of gross inequalities between rich and poor, of racist and national chauvinist prejudice, of barbarous practices and horrific wars. It is very easy to believe that this is what things have always been like and that, therefore, they can be no different. […] The anthropologist Richard Lee [said]: “Before the rise of the state and the entrenchment of social inequality, people lived for millennia in small-scale kin-based social groups, in which the core institutions of economic life included collective or common ownership of land and resources, generalised reciprocity in the distribution of food, and relatively egalitarian political relations.” In other words, people shared with and helped each other, with no rulers and no ruled, no rich and no poor. […] Our species […] is over 100,000 years old. For 95 percent of this time it has not been characterised at all by many of the forms of behaviour ascribed to ‘human nature’ today. There is nothing built into our biology that makes present day societies the way they are. Our predicament as we face a new millennium cannot be blamed on it.”

-Chris Harman - A People’s History Of The World: From The Stone Age To The New Millennium*

edit: and adding a short video https://youtu.be/Est6nay4Z5E?t=18

edit: some books that are on my TBR that might be worth checking out:

• Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil
• Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness
• The Social Instinct: How Cooperation Shaped the World
• Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis (“shows how new findings in psychology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology cast human nature in a radically different as the supreme altruists and cooperators.”)

Right, though I believe that when you unload a tab it stays there? With the snooze thing it closes the tab and reopens later

It opens it again as a new/refreshed tab, though it does it automatically at the postponed time and so it’s more convenient than having to do it manually (especially when you snooze several tabs)

It’s not for saving memory but to postpone a tab to check it later (for example to see new comments on a post, or if you don’t currently have time to read an article and want to read it tomorrow)

Tab Snooze - allows you to close a tab and have it reappear at a chosen time later

Domain Volume Control / Better Volume Booster - allow you to set default volume per-domain (note that unfortunately, in the 1st one the set volume gets changed when you change the volume through a site’s player, and the 2nd one currently causes an issue on Nightly with unpaused videos)

Playback speed - allows you to change the speed of videos/audio on any site, even only by x0.01 at a time (you can also change the buttons that appear when you click on the addon in the toolbar/addons menu to have specific speeds readily available) (note that it doesn’t change the pitch of the audio)

• Specifically for YouTube you can also use an addon like Improve YouTube. To configure the feature click on the addon in the toolbar/addons menu > Shortcuts > Playback speed. To change the shortcut so that you hold Ctrl and use the mousewheel (while hovering over the video) click Ctrl and release it before using the mousewheel up or down accordingly (otherwise it acts as a zoom to the settings window)

Media URL Timestamper - automatically inserts the current timestamp of the YouTube/Twitch video you’re watching and updates it in the history in case you accidentally close/navigate away from the page or go to a different time in the video

Feedbro - an RSS reader with filtering capabilities

Oh that’s awesome I didn’t realize cameras are able to create a system where the basic necessities of life aren’t locked down by money, where people aren’t being disenfranchised/marginalized/exploited and not having to fend out for themselves figuring out any way to survive but instead working together to answer everybody’s needs

The crux of the issue is that it’s not the citizens that determine what is hide-worthy.

Are you vocally unhappy with how corporations wreck the Earth and our future for monetary profit? Well then you might have something to hide. Are you not heterosexual and cisgendered? Well then you might have something to hide. Do you complain about taxes being too high while not seeing too many benefits and you’d prefer if they didn’t go to finance wars/invasions and subsidize harmful industries? Well then you might have something to hide.

The ruling class wants citizens with nothing to hide. Those don’t pose any risk to their power and privilege.

And adding a quote I have saved up:

“Whenever the subject of surveillance by police and government agencies is discussed online, invariably some John Doe will come along and declare that they are quite happy to give up some or all of their privacy in exchange for improved security, on the grounds that they have nothing to hide, and “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear” from the authorities, or from whomever else might gain access to your “private” data (this can include private security companies, private investigators, banks, insurance companies, lawyers, employers, computer hackers, and any individual or company willing to pay for the information. And that’s in addition to the thousands of agents working at GCHQ, NSA etc.). Dissidents languishing in Chinese prisons and Russian gulags - not to mention millions of Jews and dissidents rounded up by the Nazis in the 1930s - might take a slightly different view”

I’ve been using this site to convert to PDF for forever, so I’m assuming it’ll also be good for the other way around

https://ebook.online-convert.com/convert-to-epub

I use Feedbro on Firefox. It allows you to create rules for feeds with specific checks/actions (for example to filter out items that contain specific words)

For reference, here are the exceptions I’ve been using to try to make sure my viewership counts. Not sure if they’re all needed and they’re probably overkill, but:

@@||youtube.com/api$domain=youtube.com|google.com
@@||youtube.com/youtubei$domain=youtube.com|google.com
@@||youtube.com/ptracking$domain=youtube.com|google.com
@@||play.google.com/log$domain=youtube.com|google.com
! these are meant for checking for active internet connection (https://www.techtapto.com/what-is-gstatic-why-you-see-it-often/#Is_Gstatic_com_generate_204_a_virus)
@@||youtube.com/generate_204$domain=youtube.com|google.com
@@||google.com/generate_204$domain=youtube.com|google.com
@@||youtube.com/gen_204$domain=youtube.com|google.com
@@||google.com/gen_204$domain=youtube.com|google.com