FOSS enthusiast, Linux user, Android enthusiast, Transformers fan (he/him)

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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: December 29th, 2023

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  • Fergie Chambers, a 39-year-old self-proclaimed communist with a net worth in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Chambers’ wealth comes from his father’s family’s company, Cox Enterprises, a global conglomerate with automotive and media holdings, including AutoTrader, Kelley Blue Book, Cox TV, the political site Axios, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. With a fortune of some $26.8 billion, the Cox family, a powerful force in Atlanta philanthropy, made the second-largest contribution in 2022 toward the training facility, with their foundation providing $10 million of a planned $60 million in private funding. (Georgia taxpayers are putting up $31 million.)

    In contrast, Chambers estimates he’s donated “a couple million dollars” in the last year to groups opposing the very facility that high-profile members of his family want to be built. Not only has he financially supported signature gathering for the referendum, he’s sponsored buses to shuttle protesters to the site, and contributed “hundreds of thousands of dollars” to funds that paid for bail and lawyers for those who had been arrested.

    While the broader Cox family’s political reputation is squarely centrist, Chambers’ is somewhere in the vicinity of Chairman Mao. When we spoke—after a few weeks of phone tag that involved me missing some pre-dawn calls back from Chambers—he seemed to relish defying mainstream orthodoxy, calling Russian President Vladimir Putin “one of the better statesmen of our century,” and describing Hamas’ October 7 attack as “a moment of hope and inspiration for tens of millions of people.” While he denies a recent claim in Los Angeles Magazine that he chants “death to America” every day, he allows that the idea is more or less true. “I think the most important thing for the prosperity of humanity is the destruction of the US,” he told me.

















  • For YouTube, it’s probably not possible to not use its content, but you can try alternate front ends like Piped (and its wonderful Android client, LibreTube, if you’re on Android.)

    For Gmail, not sure if this works for you but I set the vacation feature to reply to every email I receive notifying them of my new email. I switched to Vivaldi Webmail (Proton doesn’t let you use 3rd party clients w/o a subscription plan btw, I’d switched to Vivaldi first so not a major thing for me) but Skiff (paid) looks good, Kagi Search is planning an email service, Tutanota has an email service, and I guess you could self host. While you transition, use a client that lets you have a unified inbox (K9 works on Android) and just have both logged in.