fwiw, here is an emacs version:

https://codeberg.org/martianh/lem.el#headline-11

I think what would be most useful would be a usenet→lemmy gateway, so that rich catalog of usenet clients can be leveraged on Lemmy.

Enshitification warning: #Arstechnica manages to push bandwidth-wasting autoplay video in a way that bypasses Firefox’s setting to disable autoplay.

I recently read a complaint about the opposite. Someone deleted their Proton account and their handle was made available 1 year later. They were rightfully angry because the next user would potentially start receiving mail from things like the original user’s bank. The new user could perform password resets on accounts where the original user had not yet changed the email address on file.

I have a shopaholic aunt who is said to wear things she buys once on avg. She could open her own 2nd hand shop (or if she moved her stock to Europe she could open ~6 2nd-hand shops). Many women in my family are inflicted with this disease to varying degrees. It’s a gender-specific disease that I think men are immune to.

I guess my underlying assumption was that a dictatorship is not in play, but rather a gov elected by the people to represent them. I don’t see how the idea would come from the gov. The gov would be carrying out an idea from the people it represents.

Otherwise, what would you envision with the rejection of consumerism coming from the people? Do you mean individual actions like boycotts? I’ve been boycotting Black Friday for years but it’s not working.

I’ve also switched to a bicycle but this does nothing to get people out of cars. In fact by going to a bicycle, I made the street less crowded so car drivers are rewarded by my action. My individual actions don’t scale well enough. Nonetheless, I still take individual actions like consuming like a vegan more and more. And I hope it catches on. I hope the thread would inspire readers to boycott Black Friday. But I have little confidence it will make a dent.

EDIT: one thing I think I under-emphasized, which Europeans seem to pay attention to more than the rest of the world: Black Friday is a day off for non-retail workers. But retail workers don’t only have to work, but they also have a busy stressful and long work day while everyone else has fun. Those workers should have equal rights protections. I speak theoretically in a sense, because BF is a not a day off for anyone outside the US anyway.

Consider how Europe and Australia counter tobacco ads by forcing them to put gross pics on the cartons, and blocking their ads from places where children would encounter them. It’s acknowledged that marketing works. If it didn’t work, it wouldn’t be used.

I don’t have a problem with govs regulating harmful ads. But at the risk of going on a tangent, I think the research shows that the sensational pics Europe and Australia actually proved to fail. Though it failed for reasons that wouldn’t apply to Black Friday. It was related to how the extreme pics stimulated a part of the brain that triggers smokers to want to smoke (or something like that).

Belgium and Netherlands, perhaps France already regulate sales. So at least in those places, why would it be “the wrong tool” to refine a tool that’s already in play?

Even if you banned sales the day after Thanksgiving, that’s not the issue

What would happen? If the absence of sales promotions would have no reduction of consumerism, why would retailers go to expense of organizing a sale and marketing it?