How many times do you need to be told, you don’t buy games on PC for full price when on a budget you wait for sales that will frequently get you down to 60% of the price if not even lower for a couple year old game. Go for more indie titles and you have an exponentially larger pool of games to pick from than on game pass. Then you are not having your library pulled out from under you when Microsoft decides not to support a title anymore.

When internally, you have multiple teams competing, you get the following lmaoo

https://images.app.goo.gl/UNHdEde5gUodGhhx5

You can also get grayjay, which will also condense twitch, nebula, youtube, etc into one consistent feed without trackers or ads. Also it supports the down vote plug-in and 3rd party comment solutions so you can get even more from the app then you can with say revanced which is just the regular old YouTube app with patches.

Talk about completely missing the fucking point Holy shit, and this is why we don’t have unions. They need a collective to work properly and have an effect on the industry you disciding its bad because there isn’t enough backing is the exact problem that causes there to be few decent employers for fucks sake…grow the union and watch its power to work for you grow.

Sure for major artists pulling in millions a year, but at that point fuck em. For indy and unsigned artists, directly buying their media goes basically straight to them and is usually the highest margin item they have. If they are a massive artist sure their merch has economy of scale setup and they rake in money through that but I don’t support massive wealth inequality so they can fuck right off.

Spotify pays like 0.003 per stream the fuck are you talking about? Either you are racking up millions of plays or you are straight talking out your ass. Granted taking a shitty label deal is not something to promote, but don’t act like Spotify actually pays shit, because it does not…

Selling 20 albums at $10 would net around $200, getting 20 people to listen to your album on Spotify nets maybe 80 cents…

They get fractions of a penny per play, you are better off streaming it once on SoundCloud for them then listening a hundred times on Spotify. All the dick riding here is from people who do not understand the business model of streaming services and how they steal all profit from those creators bringing content to their platform. Ad monetization does not fucking work it creates businesses with massive losses so data brokers can eventually scoop up the data from the ashes of the service and feed it to marketing departments at other companies for a fee, and no artists do not get a cent from those sales it’s a joke. Buy directly from the artist on band camp or donate via patreon if they have it.

Not all artists have labels, there are a lot of independents and getting 0.001 cents per play from Spotify is basically robbery compared to what sites like SoundCloud will pay per stream…

I wonder what the market would be for such a solution. Make a custom raspberry pi like small server that has a self hosted website with a decent UI to setup most solutions like email, nas, pihole, and maybe a media server. Sell the easy setup to those who can’t be bothered, while still being open source and promoting Foss alternatives. I’m sure you could even sell different server tiers for power users as well who don’t want to be bothered with it. Then you could always sell a security service in a sense that will have people at the organization maintaining and updating the packages on the server os for that identified hardware. Then anyone who is inclined could set this up on their own so long as they have the skills to maintain their security, otherwise for basically the same cost as most subscriptions you could be able to self host email, Nas, media and an ad blocker network wide. As long as the ui experience setting this up is just as polished as simple as setting up a Gmail account I feel like this could do pretty well.

Liberalism: a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise.

I think you are conflating the free enterprise to mean endorsement of late stage capitalism instead of a system of actual market competition. Please don’t base this on the complete market capture demonstrated in the US currently. If anything the US is more like an authoritarian oligarchy with the illusion of democracy peddled through conflicting culture wars in the media. While there are great ideologies in play in something like socialism the reality is unless you could end the idea of money tomorrow their will always be inducements and incentives to hoard and leverage outsized resources outside of which ever community produced them in the first place. It’s why US resource capture on smaller nations works effectively, and it’s why Russian oligarchs have most of their wealth outside of Russia, etc.

Marxists are materialists. This is in contrast with the idealism of Liberals. While Liberals believe ideas are the force which drives change in the material world, Marxists understand that ideas are just a reflection of the material conditions they emerge from.

Liberal vs Marxist has nothing to do with being a materialist or idealist, and trying to conflate them like they are is very disingenuous and misleading. Not to mention that is not what a materialist even is. A materialist is someone who values possessions for comfort, think a hyper consumer, where as an idealist is routed in ideals, like equality for all, regardless of the difficulties in trying to accomplish such a task. If anything by your definitions a Marxist would be an idealist fueled by an ideal (communism) , and a liberal would be someone on either side as they value personal freedoms and ones ability to choose either ideology.

Either you are trying to be intentionally misleading or you need to take a step back from your own propaganda as you are parroting off information that is completely ill informed at best or intentionally misleading at worst. There are definitely issues in US institutions, but a liberal is not going to defend the shortcomings, they would be proposing ranked choice voting, imposing age limits, redefining our checks and balances, and making sure these systems are inherently democratic. We don’t even have a true left in the US, we have a moderate center and then people like Bernie who are just barely into the left political territory in the global scale of things. A conservative would be someone who values conserving existing systems and institutions or leaving them as initially intended as they aim to conserve status quo. Seriously take a step back my friend, seems like you have been lost in an echo chamber for a while.

Becareful that’s what everyone in the US thought, and then we got Trump and the Q brigade taking down our democracy.