They eat crops and are considered a disease vector here. They can also damage your home by trying to build a nest inside a wall or something.

The little bastards are still so ugly they’re cute though.

Sure, butterfly a chicken breast and fry it over high heat. Or eat cheese. Or make succotash, or lentil soup.

All of our cultural defaults for breakfast are terrible for us anyways, we need to eat other things regardless.

I make a bunch of deviled eggs maybe once or twice a year. I don’t care for most other types of “easy” egg preparations and there are plenty of cheap beans, chicken, and cheap bits of pork for my protein needs.

Tbh I don’t understand why people don’t just buy something else. There are several good alternatives available.

The US military has actually been short on recruits for a long time now due to the obesity epidemic.

I mean we could stop maintaining an invasion force in basically every corner of the globe simultaneously, but we aren’t filthy communists or whatever.

Oh legality absolutely does not equate morality, although we obviously work to correlate them as much as possible.

I will admit, much of my reasoning here is driven by the fact that I live in suburban America, and if I expect to buy literally anything, I buy it from or using a company that does something horrific. It isn’t reasonable to boycott based on even something as simple as “don’t kill people”, because…well I don’t have an alternative.

This is probably a hot take in many circles, but I do not boycott companies.

The purpose of a business is to make money. I do not fault a business for doing something in pursuit of maximizing their money any more than I fault a goat for eating a tin can or a stove for burning my dinner.

I fault our government for not protecting the human rights of the people that business harmed, and I fault the individuals who work in that business for knowingly helping to cause human misery.

The sole exception to this is companies like meta, who have intentionally worked with foreign actors to subvert our democracy. That is treason, and by extension they have made their company an instrument of a foreign power. That entity should be forcibly dissolved and the people in power should be prosecuted under the relevant statutes.

Honestly I don’t know what the issue is on a technical level, I just know they are not encrypted and won’t be for the foreseeable future.

Consult privacyguides.org for guidance regarding new messaging and email solutions. I imagine you’ll probably want to ask your family to sign up for signal.

The only alternative to social media is the fediverse. The bad news is that the fediverse is not private. The good news is that frankly social media as a concept just isn’t mandatory, so if you need privacy, you can just…not. Once you break the addiction, you realize how unnecessary it all was.

Consult privacyguides.org for guidance regarding new messaging and email solutions. I imagine you’ll probably want to ask your family to sign up for signal.

The only alternative to social media is the fediverse. The bad news is that the fediverse is not private. The good news is that frankly social media as a concept just isn’t mandatory, so if nobody signs up, you can just keep in contact with your friend and family using signal.

We don’t need to match a billionaire. We just need to finance lawyers and advocates to work on our behalf.

As bad as things are now, think about how much quicker things would devolve without organizations like planned parenthood, the EFF, and the ACLU.

Ok, so serious answer for our friends who don’t live in places without an active culture of protest:

1. Vote. No, really. If people actually fucking voted, we wouldn’t be in this mess.

2. Give money to advocacy organizations

3. Give your time and money to mutual aid organizations

4. Read the news (not just on lemmy either)

5. CALL your congresspeople. Emails and letters are better than nothing, but do not have the same impact.

6. Try to get your friends to do #1-5