shorts are not my cup of tea. Pretty sure shorts have a negative impact on peoples attention span. I'd still be happy to see people watch their shorts on the Fediverse rather than at tiktok/yt. Of course, but still....

Yeah I agree with you. To be fair, they could be a Mossad-front to any degree and I wouldn't be able to tell. So I won't claim anything with certainty on the subject. The world is a fucked up place and the Middle East particularly so.

Which is a shame because it's a beautiful part of the world with a beautiful cultural heritage. I myself have been having a lot of fun experimenting with Islamic geometry after reading a book (and guide) on it by Eric Broug. I also dived into some (extensive) Sufi poems like the Masnavi and the Conference of the Birds, and I feel like these taught me many things. What surprised me was that many of the wisdoms shared in them would appear to me as Buddhist rather than Islamic. Never ever heard of that side of Islam before, but I can highly recommend them. The latter poem I read in a publication that came with Persian miniature illustrations, which are of incredible beauty. I feel like in the West we often lack respect for the beauty of near-eastern culture. Here in the Netherlands the biggest political party is anti-islamic, and I feel like many people can only see the Near-East as a terrorist warzone, not the place of beauty and culture it is just as well. I'd be the first to admit that religion can be a horrible force of oppression in the world, and being an atheist myself I tend to encourage criticism of it. But when you criticize others without knowing the slightest thing about them I don't think that's particularly helpful.

(nothing that you said asked for the last paragraph, but I just felt like sharing it ;-)

I guess there's the Sunni-Shia divide that's of interest here. Iran (shia) is Israels arch-enemy. Al-Qaeda (as well as it's offshoots like ISIS) is led by Sunni jihadists. They too are generally considered enemies by Israel, but in the grand scheme of things they are (currently) a much smaller threat than Iran and it's allies. Al-Qaeda and Iran themselves are each others enemies, and since 'the enemy of your enemy is your friend', Israel sometimes benefits from the presence of Al-Qaeda. They formed a sort of buffer for them. This report tells us Israel was treating Al-Qaeda fighters wounded in the Syrian civil war. So it's very clear that Israels and Al-Qaeda interests sometimes align. Were Al-Qaeda ever to become more powerful than Iran is, then Israel would obviously shift their focus, since a powerful Al-Qaeda would also be a clear threat to them. Any pan-islamist organization would deem the presence of Israel on the Levant a blemish. Israel is often seen as a sort of colonial state that treats their Muslim population as second class citizens at best. The biggest threat to Israel would be Muslims uniting under any one pan-islamist flag, so Israel has a vested interest in division so they play the divide and rule game. All this is not to say though, that Al-Qaeda is a Mossad front. Their actions can be explained by their interests sometimes aligning, so according to Occam's razor we shouldn't rely on the assumption of them being a Mossad front. We don't need that assumption to explain what we are seeing. AFAIK there hasn't been any proof of the theory. This PolitiFact article looks into the Hornet’s Nest-theory, wherein US and Israel created ISIS to sow division in the Middle East, and PolitiFacts deems it an unfounded conspiracy theory.

Discalimer: not an expert in any sense, just my best take.

I followed in 2021. What remains is that I use YouTube quite a lot (even though it's through piped or yt-dlp).

ListenBrainz

entomological

Entomology is the scientific study of insects, a branch of zoology. source: Wikipedia

Phonetic transcription exists for a reason. The comments here are full of "this is pronounced as this". Which isn't very helpful.

Is there any particular hate against 'live, laugh, love' that I am missing, besides the phrase just being a bit cheesy?

Sabotage Wikipedia, Ddos the Internet Archive. Makes you wonder if in the future we're going to forget our past. Will actual history be obscured in a sea of alternative histories unrecognizably presented as the same thing. Maybe we need to keep some books laying around in archives just to be sure.

We still have it, and it's quite nice.

But a fair point nonetheless.

This article is from 2015. By then it's been 10 years since the company started, and he already left it. In the article he explains that still only 25% of the cacao used in Tony's Chocolonely is guaranteed slave-free, let alone that they've had any significant impact on the industry at large. He says the situation of slave labor in cacao industry has only worsened. Tony's has changed the message on their product "100% slave free" (which was false advertising) to something like "working together towards slave-free chocolate", which he concludes to be meaningless marketing. It's rather bizarre that such a message is allowed on a product that contains cacao from slave-labor....

Some info, that's interesting and helps balance this blatant advertisement. Tony's was started by Dutch television maker Teun van der Keuken. He worked on a program that exposes products for their production methods and false marketing and so on. They stumbled onto the slavery that's part of the cacao industry. He asked to be arrested for eating chocolate, and in doing so enabling slave labor, but he wasn't. He started out Tony's Chocolonely to attempt to change the chocolate industry. He's not part of the company anymore. He has concluded the mission has failed, and is very critical of his former company, saying they've lost sight of the aim: slave-free chocolate.

If you have a lot of money

• you contributed a lot to society
• you took a lot from society

If you're a successful businessman and you want to contribute, perhaps you could lower the prices of your products, perhaps you could give shares to your employees who do all the work. Not only is it efficient for them to have a stake in the company, it's also only fair. Not doing so is unfair. We won't celebrate your 'success', a successful thief is a thief nonetheless. You doing so-called 'philanthropy' won't do any good either. Money is power, you exerting your power over us isn't the moral thing to do. It's still wrong to the core. Sure, people voluntarily giving money to all sorts of causes is a beautiful thing, but only if money is reasonably distributed among people in the first place. If you take money from society on a large scale and then exert this power, than undoubtedly your views and interests are disproportionately represented. Your intentions are dubious, because if you intended well, why did you keep all the money and power for yourself in the first place? It's likely that you're a power hungry maniac. But even if you're somehow naively unaware of this and truly have the noblest of intentions with your philanthropy, then it's still a ludicrous idea that this would be an efficient way to distribute money. It's quite obvious that if everyone got a say in where the money goes, that the distribution of assets would better represent what society deems important. It's only logical that if you get to distribute the money, it will go to things you deem important. If you think that makes sense, it can only mean that you deem yourself wiser, more moral, than all of humanity combined. It means you are a narcissist. It's not unlikely that you are, people who are successful money-wise, often think that life it a money-game and they're the winning players. And they have won because they work hard and are clever. The thing is, life isn't a money-game, people have moral compasses and strive towards others goals than making money. And even if it was a money-game, you've not won because you're so smart and hard-working, it is in a very large part due to your luck. That's not an allegation, it's a logical fact. People don't have the same starting positions. Being a billionaire is morally wrong, even if you give all of it away later in life.

That's a lot of words for saying: focus on buying houses, and keep them so no one else can buy these houses.

Also it's not at all obvious that you'll accomplish it before others get houses/hotels.

Where ever you listen to your music, in most cases you can hook it up with ListenBrainz, to save your listening data on a FOSS alternative for Last.fm. And to get all sorts of beneficial features, like for instance recommendations that are truly independent, and getting updates on new releases.

good luck finding one with a decent resolution AND price.

That raises the question: is there one that has decent resolution and privacy, but is expensive? Those of us who can afford it should surely go for the privacy friendly option regardless of price. Boycotting the surveillance society that's in full development is worth a lot.

Interesting, care to explain?

I can only see 'being a billionaire' as 'stealing from the population at large'. So you're saying the biggest thief of society is still popular among 6% of democrats.

Youtube isn’t just a thing people use to waste time

I fully agree, didn't mean to imply it's just that. But it's also that.