Valid points.

Sadly the large social media sites will continue to be “free” but for them end users are not a customer but a product.

In terms of remaining open free sites there could be more use of sites like wikipedia, https://www.openstreetmap.org/ and the Fediverse.

Websites that rely on surveillance advertising to provide “free” content are not your friends:

https://lemmy.ca/post/73824048

Micro payments for advertising free content can preserve more of your privacy.

This is interesting and rage inducing reading. What a deep rabbit hole the whole surveillance advertising industry is and how its used by surveillance state organizations to identify individuals of interest. Paying for content by accepting targeted advertising comes with the cost of loss of privacy.

No vetting required to bid on user data with the ability to plant spyware on your target’s system

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_bidding

This is very interesting. A way to do micro-payments to get content over the web using the existing but rarely used HTTP 402 status code.

I wasn’t aware https://x402.org/ existed and is stable to use. I’m wondering though what the impact on performance will be if a payment needs to be processed for every request.

It will be interesting to see how this changes the economics of the web. Advertising revenue and hits are down since search engines use AI summaries to show contents without a user needing to visit the original site.

Content producers don’t necessarily need monthly/yearly subscription paywalls but instead can have a small payment per page of content.

It would be interesting if a “Requested Donation” could be deployed for sites like Wikipedia where users can control if they want to make a donation when downloading content.

Andy Yen from Proton is not the same person as Andrew Yang

So what penalty will be given for those performing these unlawful activities? Some snippets from the Guardian article:

Sooknanan said the department “improperly” disclosed and maintained records.

In her ruling, she cited two people who had been incorrectly removed from their state’s voter roll list because they had been wrongly identified as non-citizens.

Here’s the video for that scene from Starship Troopers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18aGbK_8szA

Here’s the relevant truth posted about this on Trump’s private social media:

https://www.trumpstruth.org/statuses/42215

I have just concluded a highly successful discussion with President Vladimir Putin, of Russia, wherein it was agreed that Russia will immediately supply over 300,000 Tons of Diesel Fuel to the American and Global Marketplace, another 500,000 Tons during the month of November, and 1,000,000 Tons immediately thereafter. Additionally, based on the condition of their Diesel Refineries, Russia will then deliver, within a short period of time, 3,000,000 Tons of Diesel Fuel. Between our TOTAL CONTROL of the Strait of Hormuz, and this great announcement on Russian Energy, Diesel Prices for Americans and, indeed, the World, will be COMING DOWN, IN RECORD NUMBERS, AND FAST! Lower prices for Americans, especially our Great Farmers, Ranchers, and Truckers, is my Greatest Priority. This is a very big and important announcement. Additionally, it must be understood, that Iran will not have a Nuclear Weapon! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP

This comes across as a loss of artisan craftsman pride of work:

It shows in how unfulfilled we feel at the end of the day. For software to spark joy, it has to be imbued with its creator’s love.

The real question though is the end product faster to produce with sufficient quality.

deleted by creator

The fossil fuel industry is lobbying hard to survive. Currently they have USA federal government support but there is pushback at the State government level.

There’s some resistance to the hatred Trump has on wind power by the Department of Energy. They avoid using the word wind and instead are looking at "aeromechanical energy systems”:

https://cleantechnica.com/2026/09/19/offshore-wind-west-us-canada-energy-policy-trump-fear/

The articles of impeachment are available at:

https://massie.house.gov/uploadedfiles/articles_of_impeachment_sec._hegseth.pdf

The articles are:

• ARTICLE I: WAGING WAR IN CONTRAVENTION OF THE WAR POWERS RESOLUTION OF 1973 SECTION 2(c)
• ARTICLE II: WAGING WAR IN CONTRAVENTION OF THE WAR POWERS RESOLUTION OF 1973 SECTION 5(c)
• ARTICLE III: WAGING WAR IN CONTRAVENTION OF THE WAR POWERS RESOLUTION OF 1973 SECTION 5(b)
• ARTICLE IV: IGNORING LAWS THAT MINIMIZE CIVILIAN CASUALTIES
• ARTICLE V: EXTRAJUDICIAL KILLINGS
• ARTICLE VI: SUPPRESSING FREE SPEECH
• ARTICLE VII: KIDNAPPING OF A SOVERIGN FOREIGN LEADER
• ARTICLE VIII: UNLAWFUL WAR IN YEMEN

It’s going to be interesting which articles each representative votes for/against for the record.

Here’s a few more data points. Canada is smaller but some targeted parts of the USA economy will feel the pain:

25% tariff on USA carpet imports is to target purple state Georgia. It was imposed initially between 2025-03-04 through to 2025-08-31 at 25%, then removed, now added back effective 2026-09-08. (1)

Appliances are to target red states Tennessee, Ohio, North Carolina and purple state Pennsylvania. 25% rate since 2025-03-13 and ongoing. (2)

(1) Stats Can carpet imports by State

(2) Stats Can appliance imports by State

There were previous DOGE dividends (thousands of dollars) and Tariff dividends of $2,000 which never happened:

https://www.trumpstruth.org/statuses/29768

Less than a year ago Trump posted:

https://www.trumpstruth.org/statuses/33756

People that are against Tariffs are FOOLS! We are now the Richest, Most Respected Country In the World, With Almost No Inflation, and A Record Stock Market Price. 401k’s are Highest EVER. We are taking in Trillions of Dollars and will soon begin paying down our ENORMOUS DEBT, $37 Trillion. Record Investment in the USA, plants and factories going up all over the place. A dividend of at least $2000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone

Since then the debt has grown by $3 trillion dollars and no dividends have been paid out. What’s changed since then is rather than not paying out $2,000 he will now not pay out $5,000.

Blaming Canada is all they can do as they can’t blame themselves or their dear leader Trump:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/gop-republicans-canada-tariffs-trump-9.7329848

Texas Republican August Pfluger praised Trump for bringing manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. and pinned blame for the trade war on Ottawa.

“It’s a war that is perpetuated by Canada,” Pfluger told CBC News. “The Canadians need to get reasonable. They’ve taken advantage of the United States for a long time.”

This trade war against Canada was started by the USA when they unilaterally violated the existing signed CUSMA deal (agreed to during the Trump 1.0 administration) by imposing tariffs on our steel and aluminum. Canada responded in various ways including most provinces banning the sale of their alcohol. Complying with the existing agreement is not “taking advantage of the USA”. The trade deficit in goods in Canada’s favour is mostly due to us selling them crude oil at a discount. Almost 4 million barrels a day. Who’s taking advantage of who?

The USA escalated again on August 22 so there will be “dollar for dollar” increases in our tariffs for their products coming up on September 8:

https://www.canada.ca/en/department-finance/programs/international-trade-finance-policy/canadas-response-us-tariffs/complete-list-us-products-subject-to-counter-tariffs.html

As a result of the U.S.'s decision to impose a 50 per cent tariff on $27.6 billion of Canadian goods effective August 22, 2026, the Prime Minister announced that Canada will match the incoming U.S. Section 338 tariffs – dollar for dollar.

These new countermeasures on $27.6 billion in products imported from the U.S. will be effective as of 12:01 a.m., September 8, 2026.

The new targeted counter tariffs are concentrated in sectors such as steel and aluminum, dairy, appliances, agricultural equipment, pulp and paper, plastics, and electronics. In certain sectors, such as steel and aluminum, existing counter-tariffs will increase from 25 per cent to 50 per cent to match U.S. rates.

Other existing counter-tariffs, including against U.S. autos, will also continue to apply.

Canada’s counter-tariffs are targeted against red/purple states such as carpet manufactured in the state of Georgia. Canada’s economy is smaller than the USA but there will still be negative impacts felt by the USA with higher prices for imported goods and less demand for their exports. Not good for the ruling party leading into their November mid-term elections.

So if the first Epstein Files Transparency act is not being followed how will creating a second one help? What is the penalty for Trump administration officials in not following the original act? What will it be for version 2.0?

Hey, there’s at least two of us that use lemmy formatting for

emphasis

without relying on a LLM. Sometimes I even resort to emojis❗

The lemmit.online instance already exists that hosts a single user, bot@lemmit.online, that mirrors reddit posts for a subset of sub-reddits.

I was looking into why this instance was blocked on some lemmy instances and was trying to get a discussion going about unblocking it for lemmy.ca. It turns out of the top 10 lemmy instances only 4 did not block either the instance or the bot@lemmit.online user:

https://lemmy.ca/post/69414850/24851333

It’s moot now since reddit locked down their old.reddit.com access which lemmit.online relied on:

https://lemmit.online/post/8716662

Before this blockage I did create a new user on lemmy.dbzer0.com and subscribed to some bot communities mirrored from reddit via lemmit.online. It turned out to not be a great user experience but did lessen my need to use the reddit app for discovery as I would just visit reddit for posts of interest.

Thanks for your detailed post.

I’ve bookmarked many of the links to various tools you mentioned and will put them on my todo list to look into.

upvoted for referencing Cory Doctorow’s enshittification.