The joys of not needing ads and tracking are very true. The way I try to live that, is setting up automatic $1/month donations to all and every podcast/blog/oss

The joys of not needing ads and tracking are very true. The way I try to live that, is setting up automatic $1/month donations to all and every podcast/blog/oss project, etc I wish to support. They don’t track me, and I ensure more content to my liking will be produced. I wish ad based business models didn’t work so well - hopefully people will wise up to it and reject it. The flip side of what you speak of is the force and coercion required to fund all these nice things. I’ll use my country as an example: a family father may earn €4600/month (a good salary indeed!) but after income tax and “employment fee” receive €2650. When they spend, they pay a 25% sales tax (VAT). This means he gets to spend about €1700 of the €4600 value he creates. (Source: https://www.ekonomifakta.se/Fakta/Skatter/Rakna-pa-dina-skatter/Rakna-ut-din-skatt/#&&/wEXAQUEY2FsYwUBMYDp9Tkj4OGAN4R9N1IUN54CiLz9yKMG5G2iLHW2Pox3 https://www.ekonomifakta.se/Fakta/Skatter/Rakna-pa-dina-skat...) So as a back of the envelope calculation, you could say that if a government project costs €2650x2, one “effective” expert slave labourer is used for it. And the moral issue is this: these men (main tax funding group) must therefore, in order to fund their families, work more than otherwise, and not see their children. Their wives must often work too, and the obvious solution is to leave the kids in (government) daycare - which effectively is a daily abandonment trauma. The work I did for the government had a direct effect of children not seeing their fathers and mothers, but their upbringing being outsourced to the state. I think this is such a moral ugliness, I can have no part in it any more.