Very little in its current form, I think mainly just IP address.

All I know is that if you’re very worried about being surveilled by governments, the Fediverse is the absolute last place you should want to be.

This is one of the most transparent platforms we have come up with yet. Instead of all your data only being viewable by a host company, it’s viewable and able to be analyzed by basically anyone who puts some effort in. This makes it economically worthless, can’t really sell something that everyone can already just get for themselves.

We’re all out in the open here. So, wave to all the national security agencies everyone. Hiiiii! Hope you’re all enjoying the memes!

Only somewhat populated one I can think of off the top of my head would be using Lemmy from a dedicated Instance like mander or maybe that solarpunk one, and sticking to the local feed.

But memes are tough to escape. The internet almost runs on memes, they’re a horrendously efficient form of communication.

The reason you are being downvoted is because you’re reminding people that the internet has a lot of very young folks on it. People don’t really want to be reminded of that, they want to feel like all the hijinks that internet people get up to are with adults. But if your age cohort is here on a niche service like Lemmy, then there must be more of you elsewhere, on other services too. This is genuinely unhealthy, in many different ways, so it disturbs people.

So, they downvote you for reminding them of something they’d rather not think about. Afaik though, there is nothing wrong with this question being posted here.

Regarding the question itself, we do tend to call them urban myths for a reason. People have not yet outgrown silly, superstitious thinking from centuries ago. It’s not necessarily an age thing either, plenty of older superstitious folks too. lol

Oh, and welcome to Lemmy.

Think like a gambler. What are the odds of winning a higher sum if you play the game, vs taking the guaranteed tax savings? It’ll vary case-to-case, and is ultimately a subjective decision. That said, they have a very large dataset of historical examples to draw from to inform their decisions on the likely outcomes. They don’t need to make wild guesses like a bunch of amateurs on the internet would.

Also, sometimes you want your money today, and not five years down the road. Corporate structure itself does not necessarily place a strong incentive on long-term success, since ownership of shares of corporations can be so fluid and rapidly changing. If you have no strong attachment to owning part of a company in five years, you have no real reason to care about it’s long term health, and you’ll naturally start to prefer $5 today over $10 tomorrow.

This is the main reason corporations end up as such a pain in the ass, and require oversight from multiple directions, from consumers in the market on up to regulatory agencies that are supposed to be independent of them. Their structures do not naturally incentivize much long-term thinking beyond what might be necessary.

So, thinking they are automatically lying is even worse than thinking they must be telling the truth. The position you need to hold is between the two.

The reason to hold it consistently is to take advantage of habit building and using how your brain works to your own advantage. You can try to calculate an independent “likelihood” for every claim if you want, but you’ll frequently be wrong, just because you can’t take everything into account. And it’s a massive waste of energy.

As to why, it varies. Humans are very different from each other, so the reasons will be many and varied. But the important thing to remember is just how easy the lie is, and how there’s really no consequences if someone does.

You should not believe firsthand accounts you find on the internet anyway. People are here for recreation, for starters, which does not set a high bar for accuracy.

For instance, if I said I tried a dragonfruit the other day and it tasted amazing, you would be somewhat foolish to assume that I actually did try a dragonfruit the other day.

If you follow the general rule of holding reasonable doubt about all firsthand accounts you read online, you will not fall into this trap. Note that the doubt does not need to be complete, just partial. This is sometimes described as taking things with “a grain of salt”, and honestly, is a good idea irl as well.

You absolutely do not want to be one of those people that just believes everyone. That is extremely unhealthy, and will result in you being misled and/or scammed.

A good example would be user reviews, which are highly corruptible. If you go onto amazon, you will find a number of low quality, garbage products that are full of glowing reviews that have likely been solicited by the seller, in one way or another.

I personally use “queer folks” as a general catch-all. It used to be a pejorative, but has largely been reclaimed with the whole “we’re here, we’re queer” type messages.

Try on a longer, larger view. For instance, we say “witch hunt, witch hunt” these days, mostly disingenuously, but when was the last time we actually burned one like we used to?

It’s tempting to wish for the world to be made perfect, it’s certainly nowhere near close. But focusing in on only the problems, like a propagandist might want, makes it harder to see the things that are actually good and getting better, and on our ability to actually genuinely change things, or sometimes die trying.

There is no quick, magical solution though. People will always be people, for the foreseeable future.

While it can feel good to cut loose, down this path lies madness. Try to remember, people trying to hurt you want you to feel backed into a corner, that perception causes you to disregard some of your real options.

You are not actually backed into a real corner, though. That perception is an illusion to try to make you lash out and hurt yourself in the long-run. It’s a propaganda technique.

If the truth is really on your side, you can use words to spread it, and convince others to help. The actual truth has to be on your side for this to work though, not just feelings and emotions.

Sorry, but if rules are not consistent then they aren’t any good.

… maybe just don’t call for other people’s deaths. And incidentally, the guillotine is centuries old, and in the modern day would be completely ineffective in the face of offshore bank accounts and private jets.

Also people often need to experience a problem before they realize its a problem. I doubt that specific individual will ever make that specific mistake again.

Since people are covering the more common options, I’ll point out a rarer one. If I remember right, (please correct me if I’m wrong) the Stuxnet virus was able to infiltrate a highly sensitive nuclear enrichment facility because someone planted a zip drive in the parking lot, and some employee went ahead and plugged it in at work to see what it was.

No fundamental flaw in your thoughts at all. Holding reasonable doubts is a core tenet of the scientific method, if we did not do so, that would prevent us from improving and refining our methods over time. We’d still be using things like Newtonian gravity.

This is, frankly, a very good question.

It’s only when people try to hold unreasonable doubts about very high certainty things here on Earth that people start getting a little irritated. Like, is the thing flat? No, no it is not.

Your doubt is about things that we cannot easily verify though, so is more reasonable.

One other thing to keep in mind, is that scientists communicate with us in narrative form, and say things like “such-and-such galaxy is x far away”, but amongst themselves, generally do not. They’re just treating us like children, and smoothing over the details to make things easy for us. Amongst themselves they just refer to the specific data that has been collected, like, “such-and-such light has x redshift”. No narrative translation. They do not think the way they talk to us.

Sounds like a job for Kyle Hill:

https://youtu.be/-4Oso9-9KTQ

Because even if they actually had an income of zero, they had saved up enough money over the years to be able to survive off it for some time. Commonly referred to as a “war chest”. They don’t actually have an income of zero though, their income is actually quite significant since they still have major trading partners like Iran, India and China to sell their fossil fuels and other resources to. They don’t buy fossil fuels, incidentally, they sell them. Like Saudi Arabia.

Also, you can buy things with more than just money. People figure that Kim Jong Un probably isn’t trading his stuff to them for money, but instead is getting technological assistance from them. Just one of their modern fighter-bomber tech, for instance, would be immeasurably valuable to N Korea, where their own tech has lagged behind a good bit over the years.

Lastly, people in the west have been doing sanctions evasion. I recall some German financial/tech company has its CEO now wanted by Interpol for being a Russian agent. So, when your own people are playing fast and loose with the law, that’s going to make things like sanctions more difficult.

… yikes. That must be hell.

You speak fluent English, any markets for that kind of skill in that area? Could teach maybe?

Unfortunately, the time-honored tradition for people in your situation is to keep your head down, keep quiet and be careful. I imagine you probably already knew that though.

This is a really fun neuroscience question, it’s kinda diving into the different functions of the prefrontal cortex (conscious decision-making) and the cerebellum. (has a major role in muscle memory)

The cerebellum is one of the most interesting body structures. It’s actually like one super long ribbon cable that’s been folded up to take up minimal space.

It’s going to vary too much based on local circumstances and the norms and expectations of that populace.

A better way to approach it would be to study fascism, and look for that pattern. There is a large body of highly scrutinized work exploring the history of fascism, so that’s going to be a more reliable, efficient approach imo.

Mussolini, Hitler and Franco, between the three of them, more or less laid out the basics. And in that chronological order.