If you join an official public server, there's an extremely high chance you'll join with cheater bots that spawn endless, aimbotting snipers. It's less of a problem on community servers as they're actively moderated by players, but official servers have to rely on vote kicking a fresh cheater bot every few minutes.

This is all done by some script kiddy group who apparently want to highlight Valve's deprecated support. Basically ruin the game until Valve fixes the game. There's also some measure of farming ingame item drops to sell for money, I think.

Honestly, I don't believe save TF2 will get anywhere. Valve is clearly uninterested in supporting the game, and who could fault them? It's an old game, and games don't need to be supported just because people play them.

The real problem Valve is playing with is that TF2 is still monetized. They should not be selling microtransactions for a game this broken. If they weren't selling microtransactions, they would be entirely in their right to kill all official support and leave the game to community servers.

My main concern is that Valve will calculate this over the bad PR they're receiving, and rather than do anything to curb the bot problem, simply kill their support for TF2. I would be okay with this. I think most people wanting to #SaveTF2 won't be.

character creator, shove a RobCo Reflectron in the newborns face so they can generate their preferred potato look

yes, for sure. I think we all do.

I think it requires a reframing of the mind. The 'smart-dumb' scale is an oversimplification of human intellect. It was never entirely accurate. Ignoring intellectual disabilities, every human is equally as capable as being as smart as any other human. We're the same kind of animal.

The true factor in intellect is your curiosity. Some people are naturally curious of different subjects and will learn more about those subjects. Some people are incurious about most subjects and won't learn much at all. Most of the traditionally 'smart' people you think of were just sufficiently curious in whatever field they're qualified in. None of the traditionally 'smart' people you think of were born smart.

Foster your curiosity. If you know what excites you, you're already half way to intelligence.

I don't think it's going to happen over any single event. I think Federated platforms will remain small scale but very active, and that's all they have to do as mainstream social medias spring up, monetize, and collapse, over and over and over again.

Then one day in the future, the latest generation of cool kids will just realize that it's way cooler to be on the Federated platforms than it is to be on the mainstream sites.

Hook my number up and I'll be the voice assistant. I promise I'll be extremely private and secure.

In all seriousness just posting to boost, good luck on this project. It seems really promising and wish I could contribute.

Love me ProtonMail.

that amount of money is simply not able to be accrued quickly, ethically, legally, and safely. a loan is the only thing that comes to my mind other than crime time. you could try visiting mutual aid communities and crowdfunding. you'll get something from your comrades, at least, but probably not 24k

asking the real questions

i don't have an answer but im here for the question

If you're part of the global south, there's a decent chance NATO opposes you or someone you're closely affiliated with. Is your suggestion to those countries for them to just not be part of the global south?

Because that's incredibly hard to do.

NATO is a purely defensive alliance, not a battering ram.

You can definitely see how this isn't true, right? It'd be incredibly problematic to be opposed by NATO and to have NATO creep up to your borders. Superpowers flipped their shit over stuff like this in the cold war all the time. It's not any different today.

in a few hundred years historians will look back at this time of the internet and feel extremely frustrated that we had perfect record keeping systems that would retain all this knowledge and culture forever but we for some reason let companies blackhole it