rekabis @ rekabis @lemmy.ca

Posts

2

Comments

784

Joined

2 yr. ago

it would for sure lead to a Constitutional Crisis.

News flash: America is already in-play with multiple constitutional crises. PoTUS ignoring direct court orders, abducting and sending US citizens and legal residents to foreign gulags, and so forth.

Now granted, this would be just another one on top of a rapidly-growing pile. But so far the Orange Cheeto has already “won” on a number of points. Right now, the constitution is such in name only. It’s pretty much window dressing at this point. What makes you think that another crisis will actually discourage him from just doing whatever he wants?

America is no longer a democratic country. It is plunging full force into “failed state” status in an epic swan dive of authoritarian destruction.

Doesn’t help me with the neutering of Manifest v2… I’m slowly migrating away from anything Chrome-based in order to maintain my digital safety.

I’m even dumping Vivaldi, which I see as the only decent non-Firefox browser, because they are unwilling to keep Manifest v2 or upgrade their own internal ad-blocking to uBlock Origin levels of effectiveness and user-customization.

Most of my family, including my Octogenarian parents, are die-hard NDP voters. We have always recognized the sky-high value of good socialist policies that directly benefit the working class that produce 99% of all economic output, but get only a fraction of that back as wages.

The problem here is that in this election, the choice comes down to picking a globalist, or becoming the 51st state.

And I don’t want to become the 51st state. So I am doing my best to ensure that PeePee doesn’t win. Trump’s lapdog is nothing more than a rage-farmer, gleefully pointing out what is wrong and who is to blame, but providing absolutely no effective solutions that actually help the working class. And when push comes to shove, he will roll over and open the gates to a Trump occupation of Canada.

We would love to still vote NDP, but the stakes are just far too high, so we’re voting for the “less evil” option in the Liberals.

ACAB.

As someone with deep roots in the sciences, and good access to the latest data and evidence surrounding anthropogenic climate change, I seriously doubt that there will be much civilization left by the time I shuffle off this mortal coil. All indications used to point towards widespread economic, societal, and ecological collapse in the latter half of this century, well past my effective lifespan, but recent (and strong!) evidence has moved that up considerably to not much past 2035. So no, I am not worried in the least about “burdening” anyone with my collection. I seriously doubt that there will be anyone left who will care. The few who remain will be too obsessed with surviving another day to give two shits about books. I just want to live long enough to read most of them in relative comfort.

My mother

…WAT…

or sees a visible map of time in their head

Like how a day or a year is like a rollercoaster, coming down in the first half to rise back up in the second? It’s like a really odd sine wave for me.

eating hamburgers and hot dogs with flatware instead of on buns.

That sounds so German. I know the bun-less burgers as “frickadellen”, my own parents (both German immigrants who met each other over here) used to make them fairly frequently.

My goodness, I am so much like you.

I’ve been using a book tracker app since the iPhone 4s (2011) just to keep track of what I buy - I don’t track anything else - because even way back then I had trouble remembering if I had a book or if I had just browsed it elsewhere.

In 2018, various functions (search, sort, stats, etc.) took a permanent dirt nap just as I was nearing the 3K number of entries. And these are just the books I own.

The size of the DB backup file has nearly doubled since then.

Now granted, a number of books I get need to go straight into storage before I can even read them, as I have not yet built my library. It’s already gone through several redesigns to stay ahead of the size of my collection, and right now I’m looking at movable library storage stacks - the kind that roll on miniature railway tracks and have wheel-like dogs at their ends that a person turns to easily move them back and forth (opening and closing an access corridor between the stacks for access to the books). I’m hoping to eventually have almost half a linear kilometre of shelving in my library once it’s built.

I cannot imagine the horror of being even semi-illiterate, much less fully illiterate. I absolutely love reading.

Certain parts of America tried this. It’s what put record numbers of non-violent “criminals” permanently in prison for such things like stealing a loaf of bread.

Tens of thousands spend per prisoner for having stolen a loaf of bread.

If that same money were spent in giving low-income people more economic opportunities, none of those crimes would happen and the country as a whole would be far wealthier.

#YES, PLEASE.

I have been fighting advertising in my own way since the early 2000s:

• I abandoned broadcast radio in the mid-1990s. I can’t recall the last time I turned on a car radio.
• I abandoned broadcast TV in 2001
• I jumped on board with Adblock the moment it was released for Phoenix (now Firefox) back in 2004
• The lone streaming service I actually subscribe to is the cheapest non-advertising tier available
• Torrenting covers many of the remaining gaps
• Even my Internet Radio stations are chosen primarily through lack of advertising.

It’s gotten to the point where stumbling across an ad is the mental equivalent to nails on a chalkboard.

I always found him to be slimy AF, always worshipping the wealthy purely because of their wealth. Anyone not rich seemed to be a waste of space in his eyes.

Will have to look into that, thanks.

One of my key implementation requirements, however, will be resiliency, which means simplicity will be a core feature. The more “moving parts”, the easier it will be to break.

flip phone

Almost all such phones are actually smart phones in a flip phone Edgar Suit. Especially if it has maps or YouTube or any kind of an App Store. I see a crapton of flip phones that run Android, which has all sorts of Google spyware piggybacking along.

I think there may be only two or three dumb flip phones or feature flip phones left on the market, and IIRC two are locked to specific networks.

If you want a bona-fide dumb phone, you might be limited to something like the rotary un-smartphone.

or toaster can't do its basic job offline

pats my 1962 Sunbeam Radiant Toaster

Obligatory Red Dwarf toaster scene

Go for older laser printers. They’re bulletproof, cheap on toner, free of DRM, and even if they only come with an LPT port you can always build your own print server that gives you all the bells and whistles like AirPrint.

About 3-4 years ago I took a bit of a dive into the firmware of IoT devices. The utter lack of security and the amount of information being hoovered up to the mothership made me swear to never build anything “smart” into the renovations of my current home. Sure, there will be automation. There will be CCTV. There will be solar with battery backup for essentials. There will be conveniences of all kinds. But virtually all will be air gapped, incapable of remote rooting, and under my full control.

Hell, even my laser printers are HP models over two decades old - an HP 4050DTN and an HP 5000DTN - that are totally devoid of any DRM or “smart features” and can trivially take generic overstuffed cartridges that can do 20,000 sheets at 5% coverage.

Canadians are generally considered super nice and polite by Americans

That’s actually a common misconception. We aren’t really all that nice. We just do passive aggressive really, really well.

This is how the Parasite Class gets ever-wealthier while the Working Class (the lower-99%) get ever-poorer.

Sometimes criminals also shoot back at the police that come after them with guns.

In the heat of the moment, the only difference between a vigilante and a cop is the level of training, the assigned equipment, and the choice for the cop to follow well-established procedural rules. It’s only when you zoom out do you see the legal system supporting the cop. But when zoomed in and examining the individual incidents, nothing says the cop can’t come away with added lead, either.