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They can make money on market downturns; especially if they know it's going to go down beforehand. Also, during extreme downturns, the rich buy up everything for cheap.

Grants were for immigrant assistance.

Could use it kind of like an extra monitor with something like Barrier.

Could use it like a home assistant for a kitchen or something, but I don't know if there's any good privacy respecting software for that ATM (looks like MyCroft went bankrupt).

I used an old laptop I had laying around for controlling a Maslow CNC. Could also use a laptop to run OctoPrint or something.

I think unionization is very important, and I personally lean toward anarcho-syndicalism, but unions are not hardline anti-capitalist institutions. I guess the term I should have used is that unions definitely want the companys' "revenue" to increase, not necessarily profit to increase. Nearly every person I've known that worked in a union job was conservative (probably more of a reflection of where I lived), and many were very emotionally attached to the company they worked for. I've known several Ford plant workers that would disallow any member of the household to own a vehicle from any other manufacturer. I've heard that if a worker drove a car from any other manufacturer to work, it would likely get vandalized in the parking lot.

Yeah, I was disappointment when I bought a very expensive Galaxy S22 to replace my old Moto G whose charging port wore out,. The S22 had worse battery life, camera, and no noticeable performance improvements. Recently, my S22 stopped charging, and I just bought a "Mint"-grade used Pixel 6 and installed GrapheneOS on it. Happy so far, and it's nice to be able to block network access to all apps, including Google's.

Meh, I don't necessarily disagree with the sentiment, but don't like black/white dichotomies (though I'm personally anti-capitalist). Unions most definitely care the businesses they work for make money. The more money the better, since union members can bargain for more. They have incentive to be pro-consumerist and to protect their business/industry. Even at the expense of others.

Trump has mentioned that tariffs will help him pay for his planned tax cuts. Tariffs are like a flat-tax, which disproportionately help the rich while taking more from the poor.

I also think there may be some other angles they're working; but I'm not completely sure on. Trump often threatens people to solicit favors; so this may also be a way for him and his cronies collect bribes and favorably business deals from politicians and the wealthy from around the world. He may also have deals with Putin, because he's acting exactly how you'd expect a person to act who was trying to destroy the Western hegemony.

In the early days, the Bitcoin community was very ideological (and I guess a lot of it still is). Libertarian, Mises Institute, Ayn Rand, abolish the Fed types. People actively willed-it into having value (e.g. setting up a pizza delivery for 10,000 BTC). It's specifically designed to be "digital gold," where the amount that can be mined decays logarithmically over time, so supply is effectively constrained (very much so now), and the more people that want to buy it, the more it's worth, because that means you need to find people willing to sell it at a particular price. If you were to think of it as a currency, it would be a disinflationary currency, or effectively deflationary (because coins get "lost"). This gave and gives people that hold Bitcoin financial incentive to proselytize Bitcoin so their holdings are worth more. Overall, it's a pretty stupid idea, IMO, and the crypto space is full of mostly scammers and grifters now. A deflationary currency is a really bad idea under capitalism, since it encourages people to just hoard the currency instead of loaning it out, investing in new businesses, etc. Gold is also a horrible currency, which is why no country uses it as such, or even backs its own currency with gold anymore.

I try to find home-compostable disposables, which I can just throw in my compost pile, and eventually adds organic matter and nutrients to my various garden beds and pots.

Nearly all clothing contains synthetics, which I do not want in my soil, so I try to buy higher quality, more durable clothing.

I do not do humanure composting, and just buy the cheapest toilet paper :)

I generally try to avoid disposables if there's a practical alternative.

Not an answer, but some observations:

• Most right-wing influencers appear to be grifters who have a strong financial incentive to attract and keep an audience (to sell supplements, overpriced gold, crypto, pillows, etc). They obviously think right-wingers are easy marks (I remember watching a Trump speech on OANN or NewsMax or something, and the ads were insane).
• I believe many right-wing influencers are funded by wealthy ideologues and state actors (as has been confirmed for at least Tim Pool and Dave Ruben)
• Platform algorithms intentionally or unintentionally boost right-wing content.
• Jordan Peterson is an "intellectual" who's appeal first came from his self-help books and talks that are targeted toward disillusioned boys and young men (i.e. he does focus on ID politics; just on the identities with the larger numbers, wealth, and power). I actually don't think he's a full-on grifter; but he still has the strong financial incentive as grifters (to sell books and "educational" courses).
• Like Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate heavily relies on ID politics; but I believe he is a grifter.
• Actual "intellectual" discussion is boring to the majority and none of the very popular influencers on the left or the right do much of it; and when they do, their view numbers are much less.
• Right-wing "explanations" and "solutions" are often easy sells. These aren't complex systematic issues, migrants and DEI are holding us back. A strong man will take care of everything; you don't have to do anything.

I'm not sure I agree with your statements on "extremism" and social issues.

What do you mean by "extremism?" I rarely see anything I'd consider "extreme" on the left (except on Lemmy, lol). However, extremism seems pretty popular. The Republican party is now pretty much mask-off fascist; can't get much more extreme than that.

I may agree with you on not focusing on social issues too much. However, they are strongly intertwined with economic issues. The disadvantaged and demonized are more easily exploitable, which drives down wages and conditions for everybody. If rights can be taken away from one group, they can, and will be taken away from another (often rights are taken away from the whole using a group that's been demonized as the false pretext).

Marginal cost doesn't always decrease. More people buying gold or whatever won't decrease the price of gold. The cheapest way to feed cattle is to just let them graze, but there isn't enough land on Earth for everyone to eat as much beef as Americans, even if using intensive agriculture to grow feed (which degrades the soil over time and results in large amounts of greenhouse gas emissions). I don't think there's enough land on Earth to maintain the current human population for very long. I.e. I think we are in the overshoot phase of a boom and bust population dynamic. Saw this graphic a while back, and it's wild how much of the biomass we've took over:

Some of the "open" models seem to have augmented their training data with OpenAI and Anthropic requests (I. E. they sometimes say they're ChatGPT or Claude). I guess that may be considered piracy. There are a lot of customer service bots that just hook into OpenAI APIs and don't have a lot of guardrails, so you can do stuff like ask a car dealership's customer service to write you Python code. Actual piracy would require someone leaking the model.