balsoft

Yes, but not because they have fun gimmicks on gas stations

I think there were some (plenty?) of NFTs that were backed by IPFS.

The fundamental problem with them is that the concept of "owning information" is ultimately absurd.

I think it was pleasing enough to right-wing billionaires (sorry for the tautology) - both the campaign itself and the ultimate failure.

modern corporatism is a long way from the rights-respecting free trade that was originally meant by capitalism.

After seeing it cited multiple times in Das Kapital, I've recently read "The Condition of the Working Class in England". Read it for yourself to see what "was originally meant by capitalism".

Modern-day corporatism is not the worst form of capitalism (for the USians themselves), due to workers organizing and literally fighting for their rights in the past century.

While it's true that the ideology of liberalism "has its heart in the right place" - by that I mean it does advocate for human rights and development - it also promotes capitalism which is in direct contradiction with those ideals.

Campaigning with Cheneys, promising full support for a zionist genocide, backing off from universal healthcare and trans rights. Need I go on?

So you believe that a dictatorship of capital, wielding the power of state violence to suppress its enemies and plan the economy, is better than a stateless, classless, moneyless society? Basically what you're saying is that USSR was the absolute peak of societal development, and while I do like many faucets of USSR I will disagree here.

Again, if internet censorship in Russia has taught me anything is that people can learn this stuff pretty quickly. My 80+ grandma knows how to set up and use a VPN on her android phone.

Good! But for how long?

The security advisory is not viewable

Russia has been trying to make a whitelisted internet for over a decade. It's still easy to get around their blocks with obfuscated VPNs etc, even my parents can do it. It's really really difficult to implement this kind of blocks without breaking everything. It's possible to access the outside net even from China if you know what you're doing. Worst-case scenario, your local mesh network nerds will hook more and more people up to the network, eventually the town-local movie sharing groups will come back like in the good old days. And even if they shut all that down, movie swapping groups will pop up in big cities - piracy existed long before the internet, after all.

As for the hardware, well, yes, that's a concern on some level. But then again you can still play DVD-quality movies on 20 year old potatoes with Linux, and DVD-quality is quite watchable if you aren't too snobby about it. There's a lot of old computing hardware around, even if no new computers are produced starting now we will be fine for a while just with second-hand parts and dumpster diving. Perhaps the biggest concern for video content specifically is storage, which has a more limited lifetime and is also getting very difficult to find new, but if you're only aiming at DVD-quality, a few dozen TBs will give you something to watch for the rest of your life.

Most streaming services are nothing like Steam. "Your" stuff can disappear with no notice and no ability to watch it even if you have it "downloaded" due to layers of DRM.

It's snowing so it can't actually be that cold, it's fine