Ask Lemmy

Don’t know if it counts as sticking it to the man, but I adblock everything. Seriously, Ive got adblockers on my adblockers. Ive been adblocking for so long I don’t know what to buy anymore.

I’m sitting here in my empty house surrounded by my bags of money I don’t know what to spend on. Send help.

I joined a union and organized the election of a workers council at my workplace.
Union dues are 1% of my salary.

In the past 5 years, we managed to enforce:

• the right to work from home
• 20% pay for the time spent on call after hours, plus 1 day paid vacation for each week you're on call (so I now have 42 days + unlimited sick days)
• a company car for on call duty, which you're allowed to use privately, too
• work phones for every employee (instead of having to install the company MDM on your private phone)
• convertible desks for everyone
• and a substantial pay raise

When I buy from a small business that I want to support, I will use cash. When I'm buying anything from a large company, I will always use the fanciest credit cards in my wallet.

In the United States, credit card processing fees are more expensive for fancy rewards credit cards and obviously there's no fee for cash.

Push Nestle and Goya products way back in the shelf / turn them around / grab non- Nestle/Goya equivalents and put them in front of the Nestle/Goya shit.

Goal is to make their products less visible to other customers.

I'm nice to others.

I don't remember the last time I saw an advert.

Like, genuinely, I get politely confused when people talk about them. What do you MEAN you're not adblocking everything? What do you MEAN you still use a service if you can't adblock it? WHAT DO YOU MEAN you paid for YouTube?

Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime, thats why I poop on company time.

I mute commercials.

I ride my bike everywhere. Don’t buy gas, need no license or insurance, can’t be tracked easily, no parking passes, and I can go where the fuck I want.

I pirate my media. The way I see it, I will pull one over on any company I can get away with that would absolutely swindle me given the chance.

We buy almost nothing new except consumables. I could spend an hour, probably two, showing you around our house and pointing out all the things I made, found on the road, bought used or was given, etc. Our vehicles are 2002, 2004 and 2014.

Not sure we've ever bought Christmas stuff. Our house is lit up like none other on the block this year. Wife toted home a milk crate packed with lights the other day, free. The nice tree in the living room? No idea where it came from, sure didn't buy it at Walmart.

Tried a new coat today my wife got for $1, had to cut the tags off. Damn it's soft and warm! Had to make myself stop buying shoes and clothes at the thrift, have way too many.

Just got done making my own soap. Still not curing for some reason. :( Got some borax and will try making my own laundry soap next.

This year I grew loofa sponges. Got at least a year's supply of scrub pads, kitchen and shower, won't spend a dime on that shit. I'd have a 3-year supply, but made mistakes learning. I'll grow next year and probably skip a few years after that harvest. Also, the seeds sell for $5/20 on eBay. I have hundreds, if not 1000+.

Torrenting and seeding, if i had more storage i would seed for the Anna's Archive

I work in ads and I use ad blockers.

I peer pressure many of my friends into using adblockers and other tech stuff that gives them more agency.

Something that I'm especially chuffed with is that a I actually caused a friend to switch to open source software for scientific research. She's doing a psychology PhD was getting frustrated with the online experiment setup on the no-code experiment builder she had been advised to use. The platform didn't allow her to input the experiment parameters she needed and she was complaining to me, and so I had a gander at it, out of curiosity.

I expected there'd be some documentation showing how to use the experiment builder, but there was nothing I could find. Everywhere I looked, there were just more sales pitches. It seems that my friend was only using it because the university had a license for it.

I exclaimed that the lack of documentation and features was ridiculous, given that there's almost certainly an open source equivalent that does more, is free, and almost certainly better documented. I said that flippantly, but then went and researched that. I showed her a few different options and she ended up going for one called PsychoPy.

As one might be able to gather from the name, that's not a no-code experiment builder, but rather one that uses Python. However, for my friend, this was a feature, not a bug; although she didn't already know Python, she was keen to learn — "what's a PhD for if not to learn how to do actual science?".

I found it quite affirming because I don't know if she would have had this thought if not for me. I'm very much a jack of all trades, master of none, due to having many different interests and being spread relatively thin between them. I'm a better programmer than the majority of scientists in my field that I've known, but probably worse than most people who actually write code for their jobs. However, gaining expertise in the more computery (and in some cases, philosophical) side of science makes me feel like I've "diluted" my scientific expertise compared to my peers. It's nice that this problem was one at the intersection of my knowledge areas.

Support right to repair.

Edit and add to the Consumer Rights Wiki

Buy things I can actually own (not modern cars / smart fridges which can have features remotely removed at any time.)

Use solar power + house battery + V2G.

Automate everything with Home Assistant.

Provide free source code for all of my projects.

I have sex with my husband. He's a man. I stick it to him. Does that count?

Sail the high seas

I have never paid rent or utilities or electricity.

Currently live off grid on land I own using solar power. We have all electric appliances. Generator uses propane but only use it 1-2 times a year so it’s rare to refill the tank.

The dump is only a few dollar when we take our trash (under $10) every few months.

Self host on a NAS, have home assistant that helps a ton with power monitoring and control.

My goal in a few years is to provide almost all my needs from my own land. Food, water, shelter, power, etc.

I buy single purpose devices that are fully offline, durable, user serviceable, and useful... and then I go for a long time without buying anything but food. It's almost like setting a new personal record: how many days in a row I can go without buying a single thing?

“A trans person peed here” stickers in gas station bathrooms/other public bathrooms.

I get up.

Take that, bitches.

Not everyday but every time I go shopping

Enter in cheaper fruits/vegetables at the self checkout if someone is watching and you can’t shoplift

Cosmic crisp apples at 3.50 a pound? I’ll just pretend they’re shitty 1.50 a pound apples instead (:

Reject cookies.

I reject fascist propoganda and I listen to antifascist music, I may not have conquered fascism from this world but I have conquered my mind from it. I also attempt to spread antifascism and class solidarity to every online space im in.

When watching over-the-air television, I mute the TV and look away when ads come on.
You can show me all the ads in the world but you sure as fuck can't force me to engage.

About 5 years ago our town centre introduced parking charges, so now one of us goes shopping while the other sits in the car looking out for parking enforcement so we can drive a loop around the carpark. We probably pay less than once per year, but we park there at least once per week. Saves us ~£100 a year.

Always pirate content from large corporations.

I say anti-CCP stuff to trigger my parents lol.

They aren't even involved in the CCP in any way, like they're just originary people never been involed with the party in any way, but they have like some weird nationalistic glass heart that gets mad when I say anything anti-CCP.

Like... lmao what, are they afraid of the China's secret police? Why do we have to continue pretending to love CCP? We don't live in China anymore lol.

Like if they piss me off, I'm just gonna say anti-CCP shit to piss them off. I really wanna like make a WeChat account, add my parents, then spam their accounts and get them banned.

I remember a few years ago, my mom yelled at me so much and made me cry, so I just used a permanent marker and wrote (graffitied) "消滅中共，世界和平" on a wall inside our/their house [in the US], it's still there, I didn't know how to write the characters, so I just typed it in pinyinyin and used traditional characters for emphasis, they couldn't wipe it off the wall. That is a permanent mark of our relationship. That writing on the wall represents the scars of my traumatic childhood memories.

Like wtf, CCP literally tried to kill me (long story short: One Child Policy, I was the 2nd child), and they still like defend CCP as if there's a CCP secret police here in the US watching us. Fuck them, who cares.

(I just had an argument with parents so this comment might seem very angry and like a rant, whoops, I trauma dumped on the internet again)

Run every reasonable possible method of ad-blocking. From whole-house PiHole with uBlock, Privacy Badger, anti-tracking, VPN, and more. F/OSS software when possible.

By not participating in work's non-work activities.

I cook most of my own food from cheap whole ingredients. I'm almost completely vegetarian.

Linux and piracy.

Pirating except when the service/purchase is worth it

I poo at work

I'm actively working towards a passive income, and I am very low consumerist. I decided I don't need anymore devices (asides from solar panels/other forms of power generation).

Once I have mycrop, passive income, and elrctricity, "the man" is fucked without lube, because my plan is to rabidly "jailbreak" anyone who will listen by getting them to the same state.

Minimum bills, minimum subscriptions, own food, own power, anti-consumerism, mutual trade.

Do you see how this would affect an exploitative system once you have the option to just not participate in it?

The government would be forced to treat their people better, and so would the companies trading with them, because they are no longer as important.

I dont want to repeat same things that many said here. I think all I can add things that me and others do is maintain my own NAS and services. No google photos, no onedrive, no netflix. Just selfhosting stuff now.

More to the woman. My girl once complained about me leaving the seat up.

For years, I always put the seat AND the lid down.