Random Dent

Case in point: Dick Cheney. And Henry Kissenger.

Thus opening the door for some sort of Clinton-Bush type of future scenario where a Democrat and Republican are buddies behind the scenes and just keep running for one term and alternating for 20-odd years.

“Not only will America go to your country and kill all your people, but they’ll come back 20 years later and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers feel sad.”

• Frankie Boyle

Also even “Today” is not a happy song lol. From Wikipedia:

After the release and minor success of the band’s debut album, Gish, the Smashing Pumpkins were being hyped as “the next Nirvana”. However, the band was experiencing several difficulties at the time. Drummer Jimmy Chamberlin was undergoing an increasingly severe addiction to heroin; James Iha and D’arcy Wretzky had recently broken up their romantic relationship; and Billy Corgan had become depressed to the point of contemplating suicide and plagued by writer’s block. Corgan recalled that “after the first album, I became completely suicidal. It was an eight-month depression, give or take a month, and I was pretty suicidal for about two or three months.”

…

The dark, ironic lyrics of “Today”, describing a day when Corgan was feeling depressed and suicidal, contrast with the instrumentation. Michael Snyder of the San Francisco Chronicle said that the song is “downright pretty as rock ballads go” but that “Corgan manages to convey the exhilaration and tragic release he seeks.” Corgan told Rolling Stone that “I was really suicidal … I just thought it was funny to write a song that said today is the greatest day of your life because it can’t get any worse.” Corgan later compared writing the lyrics of “Today” and “Disarm” to “ripping [his] guts out”.

I wonder if some sort of “Dead Man’s Switch” might be an appropriate solution for something like this? IIRC there are services that will send out messages to certain people if you don’t log in for a set amount of time, so maybe something like that could be set up to email friends/family/a lawyer/the consulate of your home country or whoever in case you get snatched?

It probably won’t be able to tell them where you are or what exactly happened obviously, but it could at least let people know something’s up.

I feel like the “getting into privacy” journey for a lot of people tends to look like a bell curve - you start off with a few apps and minor tweaks to protect you from the worst online privacy invasions, and then it gradually builds and builds until you become the sort of person that has all their cat pictures on an air-gapped encrypted server hidden in a cupboard somewhere while you use SearX to find the best mask that will confuse facial recognition cameras, and then after a while you break through and just go back to using a few apps and tweaks to protect from the worst of it again.

Yeah that’s what I was thinking too. A village would involve someone helping this woman in some way, not just making her do everything and then taking a picture of it for (presumably) social media clout.

Brit here. It’s always been like this, at least for my whole lifetime. I remember in the 90s they were trying to get biometric ID cards going with people’s fingerprints and retina scans on them, and the government has been pretty consistent with trying to undermine encryption, harvest everyone’s metadata etc. Best I can tell, we seem to be the testing ground for any Orwellian nonsense that gets dreamed up, before it gets shipped out to the States and other places.

Me too, they can go fuck themselves in the ear.

Where I live in Canada has started turning fire hydrants into free drinking fountains during the summer for the last couple of years.

I did poke around a bit more and found that I didn’t have the direct mode on, so it was hopping around. Switching that on and doing a direct connection made it much better, like 50Mbps. But that’s still only 25%-ish of the regular speed, whereas I thought it’d be about 50%. But way better than like 2% of the original speed which is what I had before lol.

As a side note, I don’t know if I maybe have something configured wrong but is DAITA supposed to absolutely massacre your connection speed? I assumed it would be slower but my connection goes from ~190Mpbs to 3Mbps when I enable it.

I think maybe Multihop is the Mullvad equivalent?

I think there should be a rule that if we can go 5 years without a single person in the world crashing a car on the ground, then we can have flying cars.

Yeah I like my Kobo too. It’s never done anything sketchy as far as I can tell, plus you can sideload things, and if you plug it in via USB it just shows up like regular drive so you can do what you want with it. And also Libby is awesome lol.

It stopped working for me recently. It’ll play the first 5 seconds or so of the video and then just freeze up.

The US does this too!

Washington may be the most expensive state to be behind bars, as it charges up to $100 per day just for room and board, according to Lauren-Brooke Eisen, senior counsel at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice. Maine, which charges around $80 per day, may be the second most expensive, she added, but it’s not clear because many states don’t report the exact amounts. “Most states don’t provide the exact amount; they call for ‘full cost of incarceration’ or ‘a reasonable amount,'” Eisen told Truthdig. “In reality, these states which don’t provide real numbers may demand the steepest already very difficult for people with a criminal record to get a job, even if they committed a nonviolent crime, so steep fees can add to their struggles,” she said.

As with most irritating Windows features, I assume there’ll be an option to turn it off hidden in some obscure place, which will either not work, or it’ll turn back on after a random amount of time.

I’m not saying NDT isn’t a smart guy, but yeah he does tend to do that thing a lot where you describe a normal concept in a sort of detached anthropological way so it sounds profound even if it isn’t.

I got exactly that number too, but also when I looked at the detailed results section lots of it was incorrect. It got that I was on some sort of Linux and using some sort of FF variant, but things like time zone, plugins, screen resolution and system fonts were all wrong.

So sending out 17.49 bits of largely identifying bullshit is still okay I think lol.