That is more than a 10% loss of that customer base in 2 month.

For any industry that is huge.

They are both linked through their families colonizing history in South Africa, including staunch Nazi support in their families.

Even if the reasons where mainly substance use and mental illness, those are still societal issues that require societal solutions through better health care access and overall more social security.

It is wild to me that in America “Oh you have a mental illness? Well go die then and don’t leave your corpse for me to see!” is somehow a position that is considered acceptable among “progressives”. It is deeply reactionary and a hallmark of fascists.

Corporate media and billions in oligarchy money.

It is sad that we keep having to repeat the same thing over and over again yet people refuse to learn. The Democratic party and the Republican party are both tools of the same oligarchy and they both fight against the normal people in different flavors. The Democrats happily gave the last election to Trump instead of stopping an US backed genocide and since then they often cooperated to help Trumps fascist power grab.

Unless the party is fundamentally changed and all its current and past leaders ousted and disgraced, it cannot be a means for bettering society.

Jokes on you, i tried using qwant and they just straight up deny me access because using a VPN apparently is “suspicious”.

Supporting Genocide abroad and allowing, often supporting even, the Fascist takeover at home aren’t separate issues. They are two sides of the same coin and we see with this decision again, that supporting the Genocide comes with supporting the Fascist takeover rather than fighting it.

Well, the former US ambassador to Israel recently declared in an interview that killing children is okay, because they are Hamas children and Israel said so.

Also the former Biden team admitted that they deliberately lied about Israel sabotaging any ceasefire attempt and instead lying blamed it on Hamas, all while providing further arms shipments, without which the Genocide would have been over within a few weeks.

They justified this with the claim that it wouldn’t have helped Israel, so the goal was always clear. The Democratic presidency under Biden was in full support of the genocide. Unlike Trump they merely cared about creating a slight appearance otherwise, but they have been salivating at the continued slaughter of women and children, the ethnic cleansing, the deliberate starvation, the rape and torture of Palestinians taken hostage by Israel.

By punishing them for supporting Genocide at least there was a chance that the party would reform as it identifies Genocide as a loosing issue. However now we see that supporting Genocide is more important to them even than preventing Trumps full takeover. This only leads to one conclusion. They are not only pro Genocide, they are also pro Fascist dictatorship.

It seemed that for Jackass ultimately noone was killed. Also it seems that the participants were not in a vulnerable situation that was exploited, but engaged with full consent and were able to give consent.

After the whole spiking their own wifes and mothers to pass around for rape online, including with making videos and now this, i am starting to think France has a pretty bad problem with psychopaths and a society that is looking away or even encouraging it rather than stepping in.

Specifically the person got raided on a wrong address, so actually his ex partner and child got raided, the raid came after the owner of the twitter account already had identified himself to the police and admitted to the “crime”.

There was absolutely no possible investigative reason for the raid. It was purely meant to intimidate someone for an insuot that is rather mild in German language

Again, where is the difference to Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos?

Actually talking about personal brand, we need to add Elon Musk to the mix. We see that Tesla is strongly dependent on the brand of Musk, while not providing anything unique in their products. Thereby by your logic Musk deserves all his billions and the workers at Tesla got compensated the same way that the people at Swifts brand got compensated.

You retain the logic that the capital owner is right to be the billionaire, because he or she generates the billions off what they own with minimal work put in, while the workers are compensated much less for what they work.

You cannot criticize the US oligarchy without including people like Taylor Swift. It is the same oligarchs working in the same way, favored by the same system and exploiting workers in the same way.

Swift on the other hand is practically the whole reason anyone is paying anything. Whether you appreciate her music or not, Swift is actually irreplaceable and the primary driver of its value.

Because she owns the IP and is the brand. This isn’t different from Bill Gates owning the IP to DOS/Windows in the beginning and Steve Jobs being the face of the brand of Apple. And your argument also fails to address the opposite direction. Without security guards, waiters, stage riggers, stage technicians, event organizers and many more workers, none of her shows would work and people would never have started to want to pay in the first place.

The core principles of people becoming billionaires is that they own something that other people don’t own and the billionaires can extract rent from. Swift is just the brand. She doesn’t produce the music. She doesn’t organize the events. She doesn’t do anything except for singing somewhat well and looking pretty in public. The idea that his should make her a billionaire, while the security guards at her venues can’t afford to buy a house for their family from their salary is part of the ideological problem. There is no good billionaires. “Stars” are the same capitalists engaging in the same exploitation. And unlike people like Ed Sheeran who started as street musicians, or heck even Justin Bieber who started with youtube videios, Swift got the golden ticket as her father broke her into the industry thanks to his existing wealth and connections.

but she did gain her wealth mostly through her own work

When there is a large music event at a stadium or similar venue, there is hundreds of people working there for the preparations and during the event. If you claim that it was still “mostly her own work”, you could make that argument for any other billionaire too. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos… They all put in a lot of work and brought the “ideas”. I fail to see how a stage performer should be seen different.

They advertise prescription medication on TV in the US.

Over the counter cold medicine, aspirin and the like is advertised in many countries on the TV.

Taylor Swift obviously can’t do any wrong and she single-handedly saved the election by endorsing Harris. Because Taylor Swift is one of the good billionaires.

Putin cant visit most countries anymore. Netanyahu neither. Exceptions are the US who want to destroy the ICC anyways and recently Hungary who now want to leave the ICC to suck up to Netanyahu.

As an internationally active company there is many jurisdictions, where Microsoft can be held accountable.

Civil disobedience and “petty crime” aren’t mutually exclusive. It is integral to civil disobedience that laws are broken. Also there is probably a difficulty and lots of legal debate about when violating a civil contract, borrowing an item for a specified time, becomes theft of the item by not returning it.

I think non of these should be the question here though. It is simply a dick move.

Helping a genocide is very much illegal. If you sell precursor chemicals for poison gas to a death camp operator, you are also complicit.

After Oct. 7 the usage by the IDF exploded. In early 2024 reports about the AI tools used to justify slaughtering Civilians en masse came out, employees have been raising alarms through the “proper” channels and then went to public protest as Microsoft ignored them and cracked down on any mention of it in Forums, Town Halls and the like.

They absolutely know that they are complicit and would rot in prison the rest of their lifes if this goes to court properly.

As fiber is rolled out more, i see less and less why it would be cost prohibitive?

All you need to do to connect a remote place is lay a cable. More expensive if you need dig a trench and put the cable in there. But if it can be done for electricity it can be done for fiber.