I hope California succeeds at seceding

They should tariff Israel a lot more

Maybe, but threatening your customers who are buying your exported goods doesn’t seem like a good strategy, and US-based corporations already dominate in the US, so it’s not like they’re helping the US become more powerful unless they’re preparing for WW3.

“The corporations own the government” made sense for a while, but Trump has done enough to hurt said corporations lately that I’m actually starting to question that idea (it’s definitely true for the majority of Democrats though).

The most important part is balancing your own safety with limited time and resources. Perfection is not achievable, getting as close as you can is not practical in most cases, and prioritizing safety a lot of times limits what you’re able to do. So you need to do a cost/benefit analysis on these sort of solutions and decide whether they’re worth doing, which is very contextual (and in the end, you’re going to need to trust something somewhere).

For instance, in the US if you’re a middle class cishet white citizen who ignores politics, you’re biggest problem is probably ads, companies knowing your financial info, and tools being more locked down, so the reasonable response would be to use an ad blocker and switch to open source/self-hosted software when it’s convenient, but not to the point where you have to program all sorts of things yourself unless you really enjoy that. If you’re working class, time and finances is more limited so the extent to which self-hosting, paid services, and CLI tooling becomes impractical might be sooner. If you’re a minority, there’s not really much that can be done that doesn’t severely affect quality of life (like living in the middle of the woods with no technology if you know you’re being hunted by the government, which sounds fucking terrible but probably better than being sent to a concentration camp in a remote country). If you’re an activist or an immigrant or doing something illegal, compartmentalizing data that would probably get you in trouble onto devices (that you can afford) with a strong security setup that doesn’t touch anything else you own and doesn’t cross borders while verifying that the people you communicate with are also on a similar setup and doing other “paranoid” security/privacy measures (while being careful not to draw suspicions) is probably a good idea. If you’re trying to be private for the sake of advocating for privacy, then do what you want to do.

Spotube is decent for playing Spotify playlists you come across or people send you

Personally I use a Guix template I made which downloads necessary libraries and the LSP and pins the software versions, and I use the Helix text editor for editing. Not sure what the more common methods are.

If you’re a nerd, also check out Typst and LaTeX. Being able to format your documents with pure code is awesome, and you can also define functions for different things, import libraries to generate graphs, and write comments that don’t show up in the document.

it increases your chances of getting accidentally added to confidential group chats

If we go the electoral route, I think the main first focus needs to be on local elections in cities since those have the biggest proportion of progressive voters and less obstacles to fuck them over. In this case, probably the biggest problem aside from far-right conservatives is progress being inherently more divisive than keeping the status quo so winning over trust is difficult and Democratic voters are still biased toward voting for conservatives, as shown by the amount of people I’ve seen voting for conservative Democrats over progressives because they’re afraid that the progressives will lose elections, which then ironically leads us to people losing trust in Democrats because they don’t do shit and ignore problems that impact most people (or even worsen them). Competing with fascist candidates and their successful marketing would require very careful/well-coordinated and intense outreach to motivate people and also focusing primarily on (positive) domestic economic issues over stuff like LGBTQ and Palestine while simultaneously keeping strong stances on those issues as well (which is the opposite of what most Democrats are doing) and dodging attacks from the far right. Considering how badly the Democrats fucked up their reputation, I’m not sure if it would be better to run as Democrat or third party at this point. I do know that my local PSL chapter is interested in running candidates if they can find people who are interested in running and know how to navigate this sort of stuff, and PSL, while still being relatively obscure, has won a few local elections in the past.

Even with this there is still a long way to go, since even the most “progressive” parts of the country are still capitalist racist shitholes with most of the same problems as more conservative cities. Federal politics is extremely fucked and the people currently in power will do everything they can to prevent an actual leftist from peacefully gaining power, even moreso with Republicans controlling all branches of government. So it doesn’t address the immediate issue of Trump/Musk genociding Palestinianfunctionss, deporting immigrants left and right and sending them to concentration camps in remote areas, stripping away LGBTQ rights, and privatizing public services while worsening the state of the economy while a third of the country cheers it on.

If they’re pushed away from harming property owned by the relatively well-off but not from committing genocide on actual people, then that’s on them

those 90% of Americans don’t own an expensive Tesla

The damage done to the Teslas costs insurance companies money. Insurance companies hate paying for stuff, so if this is sustained, insurance rates for Teslas will increase. That combined with dealing with the vandalism itself gives customers a reason not to use a Tesla, which means car dealerships and rentals will sell less, who will then purchase less ultimately losing Tesla money. People who buy expensive cars from fascists who are actively controlling our government aren’t innocent, and IMO the people vandalizing Teslas are doing more for society than the peaceful parades and book clubs are since it actually costs them something.

There’s also Kiwi Farms targeted harassment involved as well