Good to see Khoshekh on this site!

Subscription-based models are a plague, but at least Jetbrains products eventually offer a perpetual fallback license for if you stop paying.

It’s absurd that Adobe can just take tools you might depend on away after years of paying the subscription.

They know that suppressing disability benefits will cause excess death, they just don’t care.

It doesn’t matter to them if their decisions drive vulnerable people to destitution or even suicide, so long as they can feed a few extra bodies into the gears to pump their numbers.

People with mental health conditions and other disabilities need support that the health and social care services can’t provide because the government have spent over a decade cutting them.

Instead we get thinly veiled eugenics, a cynical revival of social Darwinism.

It’s not as though the existence and mechanisms of piracy are a coveted secret. There’s a decent chance that they’ll learn about and attempt it independently, and the method they learn about online might expose them to greater risk than if they did it with more consideration.

On that basis, I think that knowledge transfer is at worst harm reduction. If it’s immoral, which I don’t believe it is, then at the very least your intervention could prevent them from being preyed upon by some copyright troll company when they do it despite your silence or protestations.

Some of the replies here are absolutely vile: if you’re going to endorse locking people in cages for years if not decades and pretend that’s a justified response to anything short of their being an immediate physical danger to the people around them, then the least you can do is accommodate their most basic needs and ethical positions.

Prisons are pitched to us as places of rehabilitation - somewhere to pay penance and right wrongs before returning to the community, better for having served the time. I think it’s a deeply disingenuous characterisation which serves mainly to let people avoid facing up to the reality which is prison’s purposeless and ultimately harmful cruelty, but it is the dominant characterisation nonetheless.

But, if we blindly accept the rehabilitation narrative, then how exactly do we expect to rehabilitate people by fracturing them psychologically? By forcing them to violate ethical commitments which are sacrosanct to them, by alienating them from their communities and forcing them to abide by a clockwork dictatorial regime without any semblance of comfort or dignity, by leaving them to rot miserably for years?

No, and no wonder prisons are factories for broken people and recidivism if this is how people think about them. Get a hold of yourselves.

Also, before anybody retreats to the flimsy position of “but prisoners shouldn’t eat better than schoolchildren” or “but what about the poor” - yes, those people are also underserved, and we have resources available to improve conditions for all of them too. All that’s lacking is will.

Last but not least, if you concede that you care about neither the incarcerated nor the society they come from and will return to in time - then there’s also the question of why animals should suffer? If people aren’t even worthy of being afforded their basic preferences, then why should the default be the option which necessitates the lifelong suffering of sentient beings on an industrial scale?

Seriously, develop a sense of empathy.

I feel like you’d be interested in the Web Monetization API, if you’re not already aware of it.

I’m sorry to hear that you’re struggling, but remember that to transition is a huge step and it’s very common for people to have some doubts along the way.

As you say, I think it’s unlikely that a cis person would accept hormones if they were offered freely, let alone take the steps to acquire them. I certainly don’t think that a cis person would feel euphoric about being given the option.

But if you do start taking hormones and find that you don’t like the effects, it’s okay to just stop. It’s rare, but I’ve known people to start and shortly thereafter stop because they didn’t vibe the early mental or later physical changes. Nobody worth your time will judge you for it.

Whichever decision you make, I hope that you find happiness and freedom from anxiety!