Probably the Windows, then. Like I said above:

This new one uses Windows 11. I did log into Windows 11 with my Microsoft account. Maybe that’s how they tracked it? That seems far-fetched, but maybe?

No. Lemmy is the best I’ve found, but there aren’t nearly enough users to make it anywhere close to as useful as Reddit.

did you use the same websites on brave that you normally use?

No. I exclusively have used Brave just for Reddit specifically for this reason. I also used Edge, which came installed on the laptop. Maybe data from Edge is used in Brave or Reddit is somehow able to track that? I never went to Reddit in Edge, let alone logged in, but I did log into my Google account (which has never been linked to any Reddit account, but I’ve been logged into it on the same browser as my older Reddit account in the past).

did you use a different operating system?

I’ve used Reddit with my old account on Android phones and my old laptop, which ran Windows 10. This new one uses Windows 11. I did log into Windows 11 with my Microsoft account. Maybe that’s how they tracked it? That seems far-fetched, but maybe?

did you use a brave account on it?

No, and I only use Brave in incognito mode. I know that doesn’t prevent anyone else from tracking anything, but it’s supposed to not save local files after closing the browser.

did you verify that your vpn was using an exit point ip address that you’ve never used before every single time you accessed reddit?

I mean, I don’t track every IP address I’ve ever used. As far as I know it’s been a new IP address, but I really have no way of guaranteeing that. It seems incredibly unlikely I happened to stumble upon one I’ve used before, though.

most importantly: why bother using reddit?

Lemmy isn’t to the point where it can be a Reddit replacement. Sure, for some stuff it’s fine, but the user base is just too small. There are multiple subreddits for local communities around me that are very active which I like to check. There are communities for more niche hobbies, games, and books I like to follow. There’s just WAY more content on Reddit that you can’t get on Lemmy.

Nope. It was a temp email account from one of those temp email sites that deletes the email account once you close the browser. I have no idea how they were able to track me, but it’s kinda scary.

No, I don’t think so.

A few months ago I got permabanned from Reddit. I had an older account I hadn’t used in a few years. I logged into that one and found it, too, was permabanned, with a reference to my other account. I tried to start a new account, and it got immediately banned.

A few weeks after that, for unrelated reasons, I got a brand new laptop. Without ever even going to Reddit on that laptop (let alone trying to log in), I downloaded a new browser I had never used on any device before which advertises it’s focus on safety (the name of the browser is Brave). I connected my VPN. I created a new burner email account. Then I created a new Reddit account. Within 2 days it was permabanned referencing me trying to evade a ban on my other account.

I have no idea how they were able to know it was me. It was a new account, made from a new device, with a new email, through a new privacy-focused browser, on a VPN (so different IP address). There should have been no way for them to track me, yet they somehow still did.

I’d really like to know how they tracked it. Not even just to get back on Reddit. If Reddit is able to track you like that, then you know other companies and governments can.

Do you really need one at this point? AI images are really easy to notice.

Bretton Woods wasn’t about military protection. It was about stabilizing the global economy and monetary system. It absolutely gave the US a ton of economic influence, but it didn’t have anything to do with military protection. The Soviet Union even took part in the negotiations that turned into the Bretton Woods Agreement, although they chose not to sign the treaty.

The US’ military hegemony came out of NATO, the Cold War, and the Marshall Plan.

Yeah, it all built out of WW2. After WW2 pretty much all of Europe was in shambles. Most major cities had been bombed at least once, many far more than that. Infrastructure all across the continent was destroyed. The industrial capacity was destroyed. Armies had marched, pillaged, and destroyed first out of Germany across Europe, then back across Europe into Germany. The US was uniquely positioned as the only world power that didn’t suffer massive economic devastation from the war. In fact, due to stuff like the lend-lease act and massive industrial mobilization for the war effort, the US was experiencing a massive economic boom while Europe and east Asia were in a depression.

But in the aftermath of the war the Cold War set in. The USSR and Allied powers (led by the US) drew lines in the sand and established their areas of influence. The US instituted the Marshall Plan in Europe which essentially just shotgunned money at western Europe to rebuild as much as possible as quickly as possible. This had a massive positive economic impact on western Europe, but it also ensured that so much of Europe would be dependent on American products and companies. If your rebuilt power grid was made with American parts, then anything new would have to be compatible with that, ensuring your country is a long-term customer of American products. At the same time, the US and western Europe created NATO as a military pact against the Soviet Union, which further strengthened the western alliance. Again, with the US as the only major western power with a larger and more powerful army after the war than before, the US took the leading role in NATO.

Another major factor that most people tend to overlook was the Bretton Woods Agreement in 1944. This was an effort to stabilize the global economy and monetary system after WW2. It said that the US would readopt the gold standard (we had abandoned it during the war, and would later permanently abandon it in the early 70s), then every other western-aligned country would use the US dollar as the basis for their currency. Think of it like a gold-standard, but instead of gold, they used US dollars. This gave the US enormous economic influence because everybody needed US dollars to maintain their economies, and the only way to get them was to do business with the US.

This created the conditions that the US expanded and exploited over the second half of the 20th century to cement ourselves as the dominant western world power. Through colonialism and Cold War dynamics, the US and USSR forced most of the global south to pick a side, and often forced regime change when they didn’t like the choice countries made.

Then the Soviet Union fell and the US was the only global superpower left remaining. Over the 90s and early 00s a lot of formerly Soviet-aligned countries hitched their wagons to the US since it was the only game left in town.

So, yes, much of the rest of the world put their eggs in the America basket, but it wasn’t recently, it didn’t happen all at once, and, at the time at least, there were other factors that went into those decisions.

Open curtains to let in as much natural sunlight as possible. If that’s not enough, main overhead light with a super-bright 14W 2700K bulb. I want it bright, and I want it bright everywhere.

when my own joy brought others joy. That was the only thing that was worth it.

If that’s something you truly value, then you should absolutely have kids. There is no joy greater than that which a child feels, especially one with a loving family.

I also don’t think experiencing life is inconsequential. Sure, it doesn’t have some grand cosmic consequence. Our existence has virtually 0 impact on nearly all of reality. But that’s not the only way to define something as consequential. What’s important to me is my life and the lives of those I care about (which extends far beyond just the people I know personally). My kids’ existence has been enormously consequential for many people who I care about, and my life has been enormously consequential on that of my kids.

I don’t need some grand cosmic meaning behind that. The meaning of life is whatever you choose to make of it. For me, that’s providing as much enjoyment and fulfillment to my family as I can.

Maybe it’s because I’m not in IT and don’t write code, since an overwhelming number of posts seem to be directed at coders/IT professionals, but most posts on all just aren’t interesting to me.

Of course not. Everyone suffers in their life at some point. That’s called being alive.

I think that’s also an absurd hurdle to insist someone has to clear.

With hall that filtered, how does anything even show up? I feels like there’s 10 new posts a day, and 7 of them are about American politics. (Obvious exaggeration)

The fascists have no qualms with having kids and raising them to be little fascists, too. I had kids because I wanted to love and care for people as I help them develop into capable and caring people, but I’m also glad that at least 2 of the members of the generation who will be running this planet when I’m old won’t have been raised by fascists.

I think this whole line of reasoning that it’s immoral or cruel to have children at all is just plain dumb and utterly nonsensical. Yes, there’s a lot of fucked up shit in the world. But, other than climate change, this is far from the worst the world has ever been. Brining people into the world now is not particularly worse for them than, say, having kids in Medieval Europe where there was a decent chance they’d die as an infant or get the plague, but the best case you could hope for was to give them the life of a subsistence dirt farmer. Or ancient Mesopotamia, where, again, odds are they’d die in childhood, but they couldn’t expect better than barely surviving on the edge of starvation. Etc, etc, etc.

Yet through all that people managed to find ways to improve their conditions and that of those around them. People fought and built better lives and a better world. Fuck anyone who tells me I should just give up and just resign that the world now and forever belongs to the fascists and capitalists.

Having kids is not cruel. Despite the darkness, there’s still a hell of a lot of happiness to be had in this world. I look at the expressions of pure joy on my kids’ faces as they explore the forest near our house, or when I get home from work, or when they make cookies for their mom, etc. And you’re telling me giving them that joy is cruel? How detached from reality do you have to be to believe that?

I, too, would very much like to know. Not so much to get a new Reddit account, but if Reddit is able to track me across devices, IP addresses, browsers, etc, then who knows who else is tracking us across all that.

I did. I was pretty active on NoStupidQuestions there. I called another user a fascist sanewasher because he was claiming Musk’s Nazi Salute at the inauguration was perfectly normal and something every politician does all the time. Within 15 minutes of me posting my comment I got a 7 day ban from the sub. Less than a day later I got perma-banned from Reddit completely. I hadn’t even commented or posted anything between getting the 7 day ban and the perm-ban.

I also had an alt account which I hadn’t used in a few years. I logged into that and found it was also permbanned, referencing my other account.

A couple of weeks later I got a new laptop (unrelated). I downloaded a new browser I’d never used on any device before (Brave), turned on my VPN and created a new Reddit account using a burner email address. Within a day, before I even posted or commented anything, the new account got permabanned and they referenced my other account. I don’t know how they knew it was me. It was a device that had never logged into my old accounts, in a browser that advertises itself as secure and that I had never used before, on a VPN so they weren’t matching my IP address. I’m clearly permanently banned, though.

This is a big part of how it’s become so pervasive lately, although the racists have been complaining about the same thing for a very long time. The internet and influencer culture has allowed them to monetize the outrage in ways that weren’t possible before.

You’re not crazy, and it’s not new. The current buzz word is “DEI”, but they’ve been doing the same thing since before any of us were alive. Before DEI it was Woke. Before that it was Critical Race Theory (CRT). Before that it was Social Justice Warriors (SJW). Before that it was Politically Correct (PC). Before that they used terms which are less polite.

That’s sort of the whole premise of The Wire, especially the 1st, 4th, and 5th seasons. The mass surveillance side is mostly shown through the cops’ perspective, and the show is now 20+ years old, but it shows an extremely realistic portrayal of how cops use surveillance to build cases against criminal organizations and career criminals.

It’s set in the early days of mass adoption of cell phones, so there are some pretty dated moments. The entire 1st season centers around monitoring a drug enterprise that uses pay phones to communicate. There’s a moment in a later season where the cops have to have text messaging and sending pictures over cell phones explained. They go into a lot of detail about what a burner phone is. It’s kind of funny in retrospect, but it was all very timely when the show originally aired.

The title “The Wire” is a reference to wire taps, ie the police getting warrants to allow them to listen to phone calls.

In a magical hypothetical world where we could make this happen without it being absurdly cruel to the animals, I’d love to see it.