TheTechnician27
On the one hand that’s super fair, and I totally understand that. The fact that I’m open to this prospect isn’t me saying that the government shutting down is a good thing unto itself in the same way that being open to chemotherapy as a treatment for cancer isn’t me saying that cytotoxins rule and I love how they make my body feel.
Another Trump term means a bare minimum of four years where not only is actually important government work not getting done, but its efforts are actively redirected toward harmful ends. (And as we’ve seen from his fascist rhetoric, this likely ends up being much more than four years; even if he does leave office at the end of that term, the US government would spend decades recovering from his fuckery.) The GOP shooting themselves in the foot by making it more likely to get Harris into office and make Congress bluer than it would’ve been would mean that whatever issues the government shutdown would create would be vastly outweighed by the benefits of a functioning government and the avoidance of a second Trump term. It’s not a guarantee, but Harris really needs all the help she can get right now, as this race is still too close for comfort.
Yeah, uBlock Origin not working would take me from liking YouTube a fair bit to making it unusable.
- I use Proton but keep legacy Gmail accounts around to ensure I still have access to accounts I may have forgotten about or people I knew a long time ago sending a stray email. The only other usage is logging into YouTube.
- I use a Captcha solver extension.
- I use uBlock Origin to block all their ads.
- I don’t use their DNS.
- I use DDG over their search engine and Firefox over their browser.
- I don’t use Google Drive or their office suite (I think the latter is abysmal to use tbf).
- I use DeepL over Translate.
- I use NewPipe for YouTube on mobile and have a subscription to Nebula.
- I no longer use Google Maps, opting for OSM instead.
- I still use Android and unfortunately can’t unlock the bootloader but have degoogled as far as I know how, including never even registering a Google account with it (F-Droid + Aurora Store).
YouTube is far and away the biggest means by which I interact with Google, and that falls off a cliff if I’m forced to interact with a mess of their ridiculously shitty ads every time I have to use it. uBO has likely saved hundreds of hours of watching ads over my lifetime (and probably thousands of dollars from not being subconsciously influenced by ads), and I’m not paying a subscription fee to such an unethical company to get rid of the ads. This would bring me from YouTube as a timewaster to YouTube only as strictly necessary. Even though I don’t support them directly through ads, I do support them by supporting creators I like monetarily, by sharing links and maintaining the network effect, and by giving them plenty of metadata by interacting with their service. If they do this, they ensure that I continue to monetarily support competitors like Nebula and permanently lose a grip they’ve had on me since I was a kid.
GeoGuessr mfs inventing the first time machine to have this job:
The first usage was January 1842 by William E. Clarke, not 1846 by W.T.G. Morton, and there was yet another one that March by Crawford W. Long for a tumor removal. Morton was of course still one of the pioneers of ether as an anaesthetic.
