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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 17th, 2023

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  • Though creating a lemmy account is not that complex. Typically all you have to do is fill out a form on the websiten instructions included. The problem there is not the tech literacyn but the willingness of the people to even interact with systems they don’t know, like finding a home instance or understanding the concept of the fediverse. Most people could create a lemmy account, though also most people wouldn’t.

    Spot on, it feels complicated because they don’t understand what’s being asked. I’ve said this before previously, but most people have no concept of frontends and backends. For most people, Twitter is just something that’s on their phone, and it uses the internet to see what other people have in their Twitter apps on their phones.

    Because internet usage and software generally is like 99.999% commercial, even the idea of closed and open source probably doesn’t make sense to a lot of people. “Check out Mastodon, it’s like Twitter but anyone can host it” would mean nothing to the average user. I’m on the absolute lower end of tech literacy in this community, so it’s constantly apparent how much my Lemmy friends overestimate the general population.

    Edit: To be clear, I say that non-critically. The tech industry has made it so astonishingly easy to interact with incredibly complicated systems, but they exploit the resulting ignorance for profit and market share because it severely limits our agency to choose something less antagonistic.



  • The couple times I’ve attempted a chargeback, my credit card company has sided with the business. The last time, we’d bought Switch controllers on sale from Walmart’s website, but they were sold by a third party and the stick click button didn’t work on them. We didn’t notice for a couple months because we’d only used them for games that didn’t use the stick click. We sent them to Nintendo for repair and they were returned unrepaired because they were counterfeit. We tried contacting Walmart 3 separate times after the seller failed to engage, after which point the return window was closed and the Walmart rep told me to dispute because their hands were tied.

    So I did, and sent the product listing, my communication history with Walmart customer service, and the letter we received from Nintendo proving they were counterfeit. The credit card company reinstated the charge. I called them to ask why, and was told they asked Walmart to prove that the order had been fulfilled, and when they sent their evidence the chargeback was automatically canceled. I asked them to reopen it, and they did, and the supervisor told me that because the order was fulfilled and too much time had passed (probably around 6 months by then) there was nothing they could do.

    Do not trust your credit card company to rectify malfeasance. The math is not on your side when they weigh the cost of pissing you off as an individual consumer versus the cost of pissing off a large business. They do not have your back.




  • Many noted a striking similarity to the case of Savita Halappavanar, a 31-year-old woman who died of septic shock in 2012 after providers in Ireland refused to empty her uterus while she was miscarrying at 17 weeks. When she begged for care, a midwife told her, “This is a Catholic country.” The resulting investigation and public outcry galvanized the country to change its strict ban on abortion.

    But in the wake of deaths related to abortion access in the United States, leaders who support restricting the right have not called for any reforms.

    My country’s aptitude for remaining entirely unmoved by preventable tragedies that utterly upend political trajectories in other nations has become one of our most globally defining traits.