Secondly, amyloid is increased in response to viral infections, to protect neurons. This is why full vaccinated elderly have signficantly less dementia.

Sorry I don’t understand this? If beta amyloid deposits in brain do not correlate with AD, why does vaccination make a difference?

How many people listed in the credits of your favorite show do you truly think own one, much less multiple Porsches?

I don’t think those people are responsible for pricing. The Porsche comment was a flippant way of pointing out the whole parasitic machine that sits atop the actual creatives - the actors, the set designers, the script writers, all those people that you and I do want to support. All those people are not involved in pricing decisions or exclusivity contracts, and they’re mostly paid a salary so by the time a movie or series is out, they’re already on to the next job. By refusing to subscribe to all the myriad streaming services, you are mainly putting pressure on those executives to make a more appealing product.

I think you’re right in that it’s very reminiscent of US tipping culture (I’m not in the US), in that the people at the bottom are the ones who do the real work and yet they don’t get a fair share of the profits and instead have to take on unfair risk (i.e. the risk of not being tipped).

That said, I need to confess that I’m partly playing devil’s advocate, I pay for Netflix and just the other day I paid YouTube to “buy” a digital copy of a movie - for the exact reasons you said, I want to support the creative people behind the shows & movies I enjoy. I just don’t think it’s accurate to say that there’s a moral requirement to pay for entertainment, especially given how unfair the system currently is.

what would happen if nobody paid and everybody pirated

they wouldn’t just slowly starve to death you know. they’d start making the price more competitive and the service more user-friendly before they’d even had to pawn a single Porsche.

In all locations presumably? Do you know if it’s indistinguishable from you being at your main residence? Like are there any technical ways a service you’re connecting to could tell that you’re going through a VPN? (Just curious BTW!)

it’s somewhat overdramatic to call VW of today a Nazi company, but not completely baseless.

They originated as the people’s car - it’s what Volkswagen literally means. The original beetle was the result of the Nazi government’s requirement for a German-built car that was accessible to the people i.e. white, German people.

I thought we switched to libre

Maybe some people did. Thing is there’s a whole rest-of-the-world out there, and they didn’t necessarily get the memo or are happy with the existing way.

I commend this guy for sticking by his principles. I remember feeling shocked and let down when walking into my uni’s computer department for the first time and finding out that the main lab was the Windows lab, with the Linux lab being smaller and hidden away.

He must have tried the patience of his professors though, with his refusal to even use non-free JavaScript - for instance he wouldn’t use the Zoom video conferencing web client. Given that you don’t have to install anything on your machine and JS is heavily sandboxed, that does seem a bit too idealistic!

But hopefully he made his professors think a little and maybe they’ll even opt for true FOSS solutions in future. Like this Jitsi Meet that I’d never heard of before - I’m looking forward to trying it instead of Google Meet next chance I get.

“We demand you voluntarily side with progress”

They have an interesting concept of voluntary to be sure

Your downvotes make me wonder if I misunderstood your post, but you seem to be saying that Spain’s Airbnb regulations make it harder for people to buy flats with the intention of using them as short-term holiday lets, while not really stopping people who just want to rent a room in their own house for short periods. Which does sound good to me, given that those empty rooms in grandma’s house wouldn’t otherwise be on the market.

So is your point that this is “anti-tourist” in the sense that it does make things more difficult for tourists, but that should be expected given that tourists are generally indifferent to the long term negative effects of tourism on a city?

You live in a fantasy world if you think “Don’t go” is a feasible alternative. If I don’t go, someone else will, and all I’ve done is deprive myself of something that I want to make a point

Come on mate, you could say this about any kind of protest or boycott.

all I’ve done is deprive myself of something that I want to make a point

Yes that is exactly how boycotts work. You make a personal sacrifice as a protest against something that’s unfair or immoral.

If you’re not prepared to make a sacrifice, that’s OK, but at least have the honesty to admit you just don’t care enough about this particular issue.

Such a cop-out. Every boycott is a personal sacrifice, and every individual participating in a boycott knows that their one purchase isn’t by itself going to make a difference.

There’s really nothing special about Jesus, if you accept that the voices he heard in his head were not really “the all-powerful creator” speaking to him.

What I mean is that Jesus did not say anything more remarkable or ground-breaking than say Socrates, Marx or … I don’t know Iain M Banks or any other story teller. Way less remarkable in fact.

There’s this persistent idea that Jesus was some wonderful caring hippy, and before Jesus everyone was just a callous exploitive bastard. But there’s nothing new about the share-and-share-alike philosophy Jesus espoused. It’s basic game theory and has been present in society since before our species even evolved. Even chimps grasp those ideas.

Jesus was just a poor Jewish common person who thought he was the messiah. Just like his compatriots of the time, he believed the Jews to be the “chosen people”, and his message was only directed at his compatriots. He had no more grasp of humanity as a whole than any other common person of his time. As the messiah, he believed - as did his followers - that he was going to usher in the end of the world.

It’s complete nonsense, and if you truely understand what a scam the modern church is, you would stop promoting him as some kind of revolutionary.

yeah, they’re not actually using dead bodies as a fuel source, rather they are already expending a ton of energy to burn bodies so why not capture that heat and use it for a second time to heat up the living.