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[–]yellow_algebra_31 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (5 children)

I never used many of these companies, and I've stopped using others since. These will be the hardest for me:

  • I can move my bank account to a local bank. That's probably the highest impact thing I can do.
  • Mastercard: fuck. How tf am I supposed to engage in commerce? Visa and mastercard? Do I just send checks by mail now?
  • I could move my email account to Protonmail (or a better alternative that doesn't give in to DDOSers). Google docs I'll need an alternative to. I guess I can just keep that stuff locally, I don't really use it for anything that really needs sharing. Maybe I already use alternative browsers but I'm not sure what's best. searx? duckduckgo? startpage? qwant? I'll need to download my email data. Youtube will be hard but I guess I gotta do it.
  • Twitter will be hard, I follow people there. Maybe I can learn how to make a tweet mirroring bot to the fediverse. No, that's probably not realistic. Fuck. Those tweets get me through the day and provide my news. This one I will need help with, comments appreciated.
  • Guess I gotta stop visiting reddit subs for good.
  • There are a lot of payment processor and fund transfer stuff on that list. We need some legit options to switch to.
  • Mozilla, yikes. Guess it's time to ditch firefox? Suggestions?
  • Microsoft?! Time to do that switch to Linux I've been putting off.
  • No more gardening supplies from Lowe's... or Home Depot...
  • No logitech purchases, I potentially needed some new hardware...
  • Intel?! and AMD? How tf am I supposed to do computing? I think we need a list of computer hardware and software suppliers that are legit.
  • FexEx?! Ebay?! Alternatives please?
  • Can commit to not using Discord again.
  • CVS, yikes.
  • Creative Commons?!
  • Burt's Bees? :'( I liked their stuff, but fortunately I already found another lip balm maker. This is something your local small business artisinal beauty products maker can do, btw.
  • I think I gotta get a new cell provider.
  • Amazon :(

We need a full legit whole supply line, guys. This is absurd. Don't ever fucking sell out ever under any fucking circumstance every fucking again, you guys here me? No letting somebody "buy" your company. This is one of the oldest tricks in the book and they've been doing it since the invention of agriculture.

This is a longer list than I thought it would be. I think I'll start with the banks, that seems like the highest-impact. Started doing this several years back but never made the transfer, ashamed now that I didn't. Time to go look up all that old info the Occupy people put together about banking.

Any helpful info about alternatives greatly appreciated.

[–]FlippyKing 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

Wow, that is a staggering list. I guess it is just obvious that the tech companies are owned and run by VERY-like-minded people, o say the least.

Local products, and as you say local smaller banks and credit unions, are important. Even if their "politics" don't line up, what is more important is that local communities build themselves up as best they can so these behemoths have less power over us. So many communities have been neglected and their economies so devastated, that they can't repair their own water infrastructure.

I guess it helps to know the monetary system is just completely fake anyway. Anything we can do to get out of using the fake money and dealing in real things is better. Ultimately, the money is a way to manipulate how we get what we need. We need shelter, food, clean water, clothing, and community. If money were real, the people who just manipulate it would never make more than a farmer.

I think real solutions, as in the kind that might free us from being dependent and influenced by these douchey corporations, will ultimately come via local organizing: community by community, addressing specific needs where they are, and untangling ourselves from the things that sap our power away from us and towards them. Yes, that's all just a bunch of empty rhetoric.

[–][deleted] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

the problem with credit unions is that they have terrible I.T. security and privacy problems. They don't have as much money as the big banks to spend on cyber security. I used to work at one and it was a nightmare and so easy to steal people's personal information. It is mostly old people who use credit unions and that's they are are targeted in scams online. I think Bitcoin will solve this in the future. Im using Bitcoin more and more often. Leaving traditional banking.

[–]FlippyKing 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

I agree about the problem with credit unions and IT security. I wonder about how much investment one must put into such security before you get a real and effective protective result. I think it's an area where a lot of money is wasted on fools and bad services.

I'm just anti-currency at this point. I don't see how bit coin or any currency can solve problems caused by currency, those who issue currencies, those who manipulate them, and those who rig the the system so bankers "growing" a social construct make more than farmers growing food.

The problem I see, and I probably say this above, is that essential things our species had a very easy time with-- food and shelter-- are now tied to and made difficult by currency. How many generations of humans have had to secure shelter either via a 30 year mortgage or a 2 1/2 month security deposit, a credit check, a bank statement, proof of ID, the legal contract of a lease, and first and last month up front? Same with food. We live successfully on almost every acre of land on the earth. Problems with survival certainly exist in some areas. Inuit people dealt with growing too old to be of use to society and being a burden on loved ones and a drain on limited resources by just walking off into the wilderness to die. But, the fact that they lived long enough to become burdens shows there were successful in ways that should make us question ridiculously low life spans in segments of civilized society now and more so historically.

In the US, fish stock has been depleted and I blame currency. hear me out. In NYC, large farms like what was on Delancey St are gone. They do not grow their own food. They were replaced by factories and sweat shops, but now those are gone and Wall St grows "money", the media industry distribute lies for money, and the rest of the population mostly support those industries either through education or entertainment or food and services. How did such a large population in a region just stop producing their own food? By burdening the food production capacity of other regions and other populations, by exchanging food for currency. But food is real and currency is a social construct. Gardeners and farmers often have to experiment to find the best practices for the specific bit of land they are on. If the experiment fails, they produce less. No one bails them out, instead it is something taken advantage of as farm bankruptcies weaken farmers and enable the investor classes to buy up the land. Also and counter-intuitively, governments have paid corn farmers to destroy corn to keep prices up, and this kind of thing still happens as recently Vermont paid farmers to destroy milk to keep the prices up.

Why are prices kept up by limiting supply? Excess could feed people, or stored for the future. It's done to make the flow of currency balanced in some way, but also to keep the food out of the mouths of the poor and to keep fed the mouths of the idle who produce only social constructs.

People who make nothing but money also dream up ways of making new money, but if those ideas are bad they've also dreamed up ideas to protect themselves from from the kinds of catastrophes farmers face with their efforts fail. Marx spells this out better than I, but essentially politics is an arena reserved for those with the free time and money to participate. The overworked and underpaid off far away from centers of power are unable to influence the actions of government in the same way as those who manipulate social constructs.

The only solution I see is to disentangle the necessities for life from the constraints of currency, and to treat farmers or health care workers or the building trades, as something separate from lower forms of life like politicians or bankers or movie stars. That is not to say these lower forms of life should not be rich or famous, but those who provide for our material needs need a level of security that just is not provided for in a society run by people who deal mostly in social constructs.

[–][deleted] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

The point of Bitcoin is that it's decentralized and controlled by no one. You dont need a third party. I can keep my Bitcoins offline and I become my own bank.

Food and shelter is not made difficult by money. Its made difficult by the people who control and print the money. The "Bankers"

You take away the ability for them to print, lend and control money and then you have a strong currency which can easily buy you food and shelter.

The bankers have always been the root of the problem. Farmers are poor because they bankers force them to borrow millions of dollars and they are always in debt. Generations of families who only know a life of "borrowing money" is exactly what the bankers wanted.

This has been going on for decades maybe 80 years. You blame money because you stop at that. Keep investigating how money works and where does it come from and you will find out the truth. Most people dont investigate further past currency.

[–]FlippyKing 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

(I apologize for the length here. It is a mix of questions and fleshing out of my ideas, and pointing out some flaws in them)

How do you keep your bitcoins off line, and then how do you use them offline? (I'm really asking. I have none.) Is this a solution that can be used practically by people who now use the central-bank issued currency of their state's choosing? (maybe an unfair question, but I can't think of a better way to ask it).

With regard to the question if food and shelter are not made more difficult by money but by those who control it: I refer back to my point about how many generations of us have lived in shelters without needing security deposits or mortgages. Currency does not exist with out people who control and print it, that must include something exactly analogous to control and printing applicable to bitcoin.

We freely made shelter as we spread across the planet but now depend on currency to purchase it. Bitcoin will not change that, bankers or not. Shelter has been made scarce by a variety of factors (actually talked about by Colin Ward in Anarchy in Action). In the US there are more vacant homes than homeless people, so the scarcity is artificial. The fear of being homeless is a tool capitalism uses to make labor less willing to stand up for itself. I have to admit that my desire to eliminate currency does not address that either though. Making shelter a right removing it from the artificial scarcity, might be the only way.

I agree with you that the problem is the bankers (that may be overly broad. Maybe the banking system is more accurate?). You state the problem very clearly-- the problems farmers face etc, excellently stated-- and I agree most of that. Banker’s power comes from our respect for their currency, which is respect that we have no real choice in the matter.

Bitcoin may be a better method of doing currency, it just seem that anything involving currency places extra steps between us and our needs and transactions. Picture any transaction, minus the money. What changes? The totals in bank accounts, really that’s it.

You can not use bit coin everywhere, you can't really use any currency everywhere. But we must use currency virtually everywhere. I think the potential for problems grow as the range and universality of the currency grows. How can people be assured that similar gamings of the system that bankers now use will not be found by those who issue and manage bitcoin or any other replacement for what we use now? Perhaps more importantly, now can any currency displace the current system while that system not only crushes competition but can be used to make people homeless and ruin whole countries economies, the way Soros did to Portugal and other countries?

I have to say that it’s been more than 80 years, and my ideas in these comments do not address the problem either. Lords and Kings sent soldiers and tax collectors to take the produce of the poor. I can’t say the plight of the peasant or serf was due to currency any more than anyone can blame central banks. For it. I guess authority is the problem, as so many anarchist writers have pointed out.

Well after admitting flaws in my ideas, here are my reasons for not really backing away from my central issue with currency. I chose blame money and stop there, because I see that as the most fundamental way to strike at those who have power undeservedly. Bitcoin is no end-around to the Federal Reserve. I think the ultimate problem is that our natural resources are commodified in terms of a social construct. Being hungry or shivering in the cold is not solved by physical means, but by adding extra steps between those physical means via currency. "Homeless? GET A JOB" should be replaced with Homeless? Build a Shelter while we integrate you into the tasks we do to provide for ourselves as a community, and I say it that way because we fail as individuals and are a social species that live in communities.