I have my doubts about this. I had my back/front yard sprayed for mosquitos and the population seems to have dropped by 90-95% while bbqing out back.

Fogging works for sure, and there’s lots of data to back it up, the issue is not efficacy but toxicity and environmental impact.

Both things can be true. They can try and prevent -corporate- surveillance through things like GPDR and various consumer protections that are superior to say the USA. All the while they can be trying to "slip into your DMs, all your DMs, peasant!" They are not mutually exclusive.

That's why people need to always pay attention to this stuff. They only have to win once to make it "precedent" and "the way it should be, obviously". THe people in power want to remain in power forever. This is one of the main ways they can stay there, by monitoring every single moment of our lives, even the most private of messages. Of course they will always have private back channels to collude, but the rest of us are cattle to them.

I just don't believe those boycotts have the power they think. How many people are going to give up their Visa card because some do-gooder pearl-clutching MAGAtastic group is crying about it on tik-tok and facebook

Ask Budweiser how they feel about the right wing led boycott after they made a can or two. They may disagree with your take.

The CC companies really need to tell the Debbie Downers and pearl clutchers to go pound sand. The CC companies hold all the power here, but are too cautious to push back, in the meanwhile they're losing out on all the commission money on Legal Sales. I personally find most conventional porn these days kind of sick and demeaning to women, and thoroughly dislike it, but they have a right to exist to as consenting adults. I completely fail to understand why they'd ever ban gaming comissions. No reason that CC companies should have to play arbiter of morals.

I've been warning people in the USA about this for well over a decade. Laws like the states passing porn laws are the foot in the door to expand it to -any- internet activity. Freedom is had to take in a coupe, it's a a lot easier to nip at it around the edges until the structure cracks. Strange how people here in the states value the 2nd amendment so much (including me, I'm a proud gun owner) but they will ignore the 1st, 3rd, 4th .... This is particularly true here in Texas.

To any Brit citizens, do you feel like the general populace won't fight back about their freedom being taken, or do you think that this will continue until a semi-autocracy result? Is it a topic of conversation in the general population, or is it just a shrug of acceptance?

Shrug mostly.

Tech savvy like me think maybe I'll have to click the vpn button on the browser one day - not that big a deal.

Non tech savvy probably haven't heard of it.

Semi-autocracy result? It's a democracy. The policy was fairly popular. The next election, quite likely Reform will win and scrap it.

The conversation seems to go something like: UKgovt: "kids are being hurt by porn and self harm stuff on mostly US and overseas sites - we'll stop it and fine them £18m if they do" US folk: - freak out - "how can they harm our precious websites? The UK is over. It's going 1984!" UK people - whateves.

Bear in mind we wrote 1984 and are familiar with that stuff and this bill isn't it. That agent Krasnov guy is more of a worry.

I think a decent amount of people don't even realize what is happening. For example, lots of people still don't know about the iCloud backdoor that's trying to be implemented by the government.

Those who know are annoyed but not enough that it will cause change; I don't think most believe it will get worse either.

Unfortunately the default will be people going on the App Store, getting the first app that has 'VPN' in the title, download, and forget. Completely failing to address a systemic issue.

China is most definitely an adversary, bordering on enemy, of the USA, other than trade we really are in a cold war with them by all measures and many aspects. Culture, education (attracting best students), Asian interests (Taiwan/Japan in particular), government styles (recently arguable however with Trump's actions moving us closer to autocracy), and the list goes on. Very little of that is going on between us and India.

NASA like most government agencies could use a good, independent audit. That's not what this is. The DOGE lie was all about going in with pre-determined goals to reduce and to embarrass every org that they "audited". It was to "prove" MAGA world's criticism even if they were completely wrong (and the vast majority are). MAGA world "leaders" think that the US's role as a lead in science and top universities needs to be damaged in order to reduce our role in the world. It can then attempt to repair it with private tech billionaire solutions that are under their 100% control, instead of having to deal with government between them and profits.

This is part of the new administration's war on science and education. They are actively gutting science, medicine, and education in order to shift wealth to the upper 0.1%. It's not about budgets or "woke", those are just excuses to dumb down America and reduce our position as a world leader in science and tech. A move in order to have short term gains for a few billionaires and an overarching goal to create a more religious and less educated society that is more easily controlled.