It’s not a topic issue. The discussions are largely around platforms and custodians. They bring lots of ethical problems. Anything on this page is relevant to personal finance:

https://git.disroot.org/cyberMonk/liberethos_paradigm/src/branch/master/usa_banks.md

If someone managing their personal finances wants to ask how to avoid the bad players and still achieve their goals, it’s relevant. But Bogleheads is not keen. I don’t recall the particulars (it was over a decade ago) but it wasn’t topic related. It was just a conservative moderator or crowd who don’t want ethics getting in their way or cluttering their view.

Tor. I wonder if that is a more fraud or trolling concern. Or maybe for financial houses more of a US law concern.

Certainly not a legal issue in the US. Tor works ATM on Bogleheads. Cloudflare is often chosen out of ignorance by admins who don’t even know what Tor is, or at least don’t know that most Tor traffic is legit. It’s usually a lazy move. I don’t recall the details about Boglehead’s tor hostility but they’re reachable over Tor right now.

I used the Bogleheads forum over 15 years ago. It eventually turned sour and I left.

One of my issues is that the banking and finance sector and consumers engaging in it are conservatives. So if you want to ask a question like “where can I find a relatively ethical bank/investment firm that does not invest in fossil fuels?” it’s alienating to right-wingers to consider ethics. They don’t see the ethical problems that plague the industry and at the same time they don’t recognize the concept of ethical consumption. They just expect everyone to look after number 1. Bogleheads had little tolerance for politics, which inherently forces a narrow discussion of what financial products bring what value to the selfish types of consumers who neglect ethics. They don’t want someone exposing JP Morgan’s investment in private prisons or fossil fuels, or even how JPM Chase has a sneaky anti-Tor policy to discover which of their customers use Tor. Bogleheads did not kill my account… it was just that ethical topics either had crickets or hostility, and censorship. IIRC what ultimately drove me off was Bogleheads started blocking Tor or using Cloudflare or something that demonstrated disrespect for digital rights. But apparently they re-liberated their forums since it seems Tor is permitted again.

For medical chatter I would look at mander.xyz, which is science focused.

For law it’s a bit of a ghost town, but at least there is a ghost town ready to host interested litigants→ links.esq.social

There is !personalfinance@sopuli.xyz, which would be somewhat related to personal tax. There is also a Lemmy instance dedicated to finance. I don’t recall it off the top of my head but the instance joined Cloudflare so I immediately abandoned it.

For the record, lemmy.ml is a terrible place to discuss tax or personal finance. The admins of that instance treat personal finance questions as spam and even go over the heads of moderators to censor such discussion because of their political baggage. IMO sopuli.xyz might be a good place to create an account and create finance communities.

You’re talking about Republicans but then saying “state” is a generic word.

I’m saying when I personally used the word “state” in the bit that you quoted, I was using the generic meaning of state. It’s an overloaded word (multiple meanings). What I mean by the “generic meaning” is that I was not referring to the state level jurisdiction. E.g. if the context were Texas, my use of the word “state” was not the state of Texas in that quote. The word state can simply mean government at any level. A federal government (aka nation state) can also generically be referred to as the “state”, even though it’s not state as the jurisdictional construct that composes the United States.

Likewise, even a local government like a city or county can be generically called the “state”. So to answer your question, the state of Texas can ban welfare checks from the state level in the whole state of Texas, but a lower (non-republican controlled) government can circumvent that by offering food and shelter instead of checks.

Welfare can happen at any level. I went to the emergency room and racked up a 4-figure hospital bill, and said “I have no insurance or income”. It was no problem… the county had financial aid that I qualified for. The county paid the bill for me, not the state¹ or fed.

1. in that case, I mean state in the sense of a jurisdictional construct.

And to be clear, the use of “state” in your quote was the generic sense of the word.

(emphasis added)

The local govs taking direct action. The state gov may be controlled by human rights hostile republicans at the state level, but there are many smaller governments within the state controlled by liberals.

And to be clear, the use of “state” in your quote was the generic sense of the word.

I mean, again, you’re claiming if Republicans get rid of minimum wage

Min wage is entirely different than what these bans are about. There are no wages in this context. This is about a flat periodic income for non-wage earners for the most part.

then they’ll have to come up with some state-sponsored plan to get Bob his shoes when the inevitable wage reduction makes shoes even more unaffordable.

You’re confused about how these bans work. If they don’t want to give Bob a flat living income from state funds at the state level, a ban is pointless because they can simply neglect to provide the money (as they already control the policy and money at the state level). The purpose of a ban is to prevent lower governments from acting. So if they implement a state-level statute banning Bob getting min income, city/county X can cannot give Bob a min income but they can still buy Bob a pair of shoes. Hence how it can backfire.

I’ve seen public libraries with sewing machines. So for example a librarian could theoretically use it to help Bob construct a pair of shoes using material that’s supplied by public money to the libraries. Such an outcome is a game of whack-a-mole… The republicans would have to discover that’s happening and then legislate against it separately.

You say this like they have any decency or shame.

I”m not sure how you arrive at that. You seem to have missed my point. That is, if the republicans get what they want (a ban on min incomes), they could end up getting as a consequence something they want even less: the state getting involved in commerce in the course of upholding human rights legal obligations.

It makes little sense because they know full well the money will spent one way or another. So most likely this is a political tactic for something else. If there is a segment of unmotivated R voters somewhere but a strong likelihood that they would be more motivated to the polls if there were a proposition to ban any form of welfare, getting a proposition on the ballot would actually just be a trick to get more people turning out for Trump (because they will tick the Trump box while they are there).

What matters to republicans the most is not any kind of values or ideology; it’s simply nothing more than taking and holding power.

IIRC it was the Bush election where the republicans put a proposition on the ballot for gay marriage. Superficially you would think “sure, the republicans want to stop gay marriage”. But in reality the republican politicians did not care about gay marriage at all. They cared about a segment of elderly non-voting christian right conservatives. Those voters could not be motivated to get off their asses and travel to the polls to vote for Bush, but they would be damned if gays could get married, so they were highly motivated to vote in that election and of course while they are in the voting booth they ticked the Bush box. The gay marriage proposition was just a trick to get more votes for candidates.

This is why I’m so disgusted every time someone says “republicans and democrats are basically the same”, which I most often hear from Europeans.

I would love to see this backfire. If they ban min. incomes whilst being a human rights signatory, it means the state must buy food, shelter, and clothes, which means that portion of commerce would be outside of their “capitalist utopia” as the state would decide where to buy Bob’s shoes, or perhaps even make Bob a pair of shoes. It can (and should) backfire spectacularly for them.

Sure, but then republicans are well into the territory of “I don’t like the facts”. They need to be told to work on trying to un-sign the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (from 1948?) before they can make what they consider “progress” in their minds.

from the article:

“I never thought we would be going down the socialist road,” Gillette told BI. “I spent 35 years in the Army fighting communism, fighting terrorism. Now we’re slipping. The left is pushing us toward the socialist program.”

LOL… I read that as: “help! We’re slipping past the 1940s because of the commies and socialists!”

All the oil companies quite rotten slimeballs. But if you look closely enough there is still significant variation in the extent of the evil. Off the top of my head:

• Chevron - a right-wing ALEC member, thus contributes heavily to the politicians who are the most environmentally destructive, who neuters the EPA. ALEC also finances climate denial propaganda. Chevron was also caught financing the cloakroom project to arrange secret meetings between politicians and corps like Chevron.

• ExxonMobil - Notable for oil spills and also because Exxon discovered climate change in the 60s and kept it secret, thus enabling it to have a much more harmful impact.

Those are two worst. Chevron and Exxon are also both partnered with a quite evil tech giant: Microsoft, who uses AI to help those two shitty corps find places to drill for oil. Google partnered with Total, and Amazon partnered with BP and Shell for the same purposes. The greater evil to boycott is Microsoft, Chevron, and ExxonMobil. MS also has a quite long list of unethical conduct, such as helping Israel acquire facial recognition tech to weaponize against Palestinians. So if you boycott Israel you also boycott MS.

I installed Bisq a few years ago the 1st hurdle was buying cc required having some cc escrowed to start with. I’ve also heard that some banks are so hostile toward cryptocurrency they freeze accounts of people suspected of trading it. I got the impression Bisq transactions would be detectable by the bank but my memory is fuzzy on that. I suppose I need to use a burner bank account I don’t care about, and use a bitcoin ATM to get the escrow money. It’s a shame the Bisq escrow money can’t be in fiat money.

I would love to be using cryptocurrency in cashless situations instead of just nixing those options. I’ve reached a point where if it’s not sold locally for cash I don’t buy it. Cryptocurrency has failed me because most exchangers are in Cloudflare’s giant walled garden and I will not patronize a Cloudflare user. There are cryptocurrency ATMs but the fees are extortionate.

I never have to use PayPal. Goods and services my life depends on can all be bought without PayPal. If a hospital emergency room were to only accept PayPal/Zettle, they would treat me then I would simply refuse to pay the bill until they change their payment terms. It has been over a decade since I made a PayPal transaction. Exceptionally, PayPal may have processed some of my card transactions without my knowledge (before I knew what Zettle was), but if I knew I would have walked.

I spoke to a small cafe owner who only accepts Zettle, no cash. He was the owner and cashier. He said Zettle was the cheapest for him. But as an ethical consumer I have choices and price is low priority. I don’t have to buy my coffee from him. In some cases I have managed to compel a cashless shop to accept my cash. If I have exact change or their staff has change, the staff will use their own personal payment card and take cash from me. I normally boycott cashless brick and mortar shops, but sometimes I do an experiment of forcing cash on them. But in the case of Zettle that’s not an option because PayPal still profits from the transaction even if PayPal does not obtain or profit from my data.

I don’t know your situation with gas or how trapped you are, but if you must buy gas you can probably boycott Chevron and ExxonMobil and buy from one of the other lesser evils. Or if you have a diesel engine you can do what a friend does and collect waste oil and convert it to bio diesel.

#PayPal is one of the most evil:

https://git.disroot.org/cyberMonk/liberethos_paradigm/src/branch/master/rap_sheets/paypal.md

I got burnt personally by them but even if I hadn’t they are among the least ethical options. There are some vendors selling products I would like to buy but they accept paypal exclusively, so I walk… and go without. Recently I have encountered some small brick and mortar shops/cafes that use “Zettle”. #Zettle is paypal. So if I see Zettle and they don’t take cash, I walk out. They share data with over 600 corporations so I will not allow Paypal to serve as a payment processor of my credit or debit card. Paypal are rotten to the core scumbags. They have some sneaky tricks for keeping people’s money under the guise of AML/KYC/anti-fraud, even though they are not a bank and escape those regulations anyway. It’s no surprise Elon Musk and Peter Thiel were involved with the founding of that company.

Glad to see CFPB might be growing their balls back after Trump neutered them. When Trump was in power the CFPB took no action on complaints of unlawful conduct and seemed quite inactive… as if to just be managing their own office (like the EPA).

The thesis of the article works to fix anti-ebike attitudes. It makes some good points but it wasn’t intended to influence people on what suits them personally.

The shame of it is that a lot of people just read headlines. I sure as hell don’t have time to read every article I encounter. So those who just read the headline will walk away a bit misinformed. OTOH, the click bait actually works to get more people to read the article. It forced me to read it. So it’s hard to say if it does more damage or more benefit overall.

Indeed as someone who straddles two places of living I can attest to that. When living in a relatively flat city I’m cycling everywhere (on e-bike until it was stolen, then on cheap muscle bike thereafter). My other place of living is extremely hilly. Used a muscle bike and quickly said “fuck this, I’m done”. Just like the article said about hills on the trails. And since I cannot justify the cost of an e-bike in that particular place/situation, I do not cycle at all when living there. But if an e-bike had been cost effective I would be getting more exercise in that area.