Relevant conversation from 2016

Oh good, so different from using Terrorists to justify the surveillance state.

Speaking of which the NSA Haiku Generator has been lifeboated!

Consul Leak Toxic
DDOS Agro Burst
Hazmat Ebola

Our surveillance goons are bored and lonely! Give them something to scan every day! 👋

This was the norm far longer than not. Only nobles rich enough to have washer servants would wear undergarments. The rest of us enjoyed brisk breezes betwixt our nethers.

I have multiple pairs of underwear but I hate h going to a laundromat, so I used to wait until I was absolutely out of everything and the clothes I was wearing were oversoiled.

I have laundry facilities at home now, but when I’m double-plus depressed, I still will wait until I have absolutely nothing to wear.

to keep games safe

Really ups the clarion call to pirate the hell out of it (or not play it at all).

< English language not allowed… again. LEMMY IS WEIRD. >

Hard Habit To Break by Chicago is pretty straightforward, but I liked it on the radio as a kid because it’s peppy and has an orchestra.

Decades later I get access to music service libraries and give it a listen.

I was a jerk and you left me, and now you’re with another guy. I’m not sorry. I’m not going to do better. But I have an orchestra!

I still like it, but have perspective now.

The alternative to communism is drift towards monarchy.

This smacks of the hyperloop, a false product offered to suppress support of other competing products.

Id est, a high-capital entity using their power to suppress competiton for smaller (more sincere) interests.

Obvously Facebook- and Zuckerberg-mocking AI content must continue until morale improves.

So the secret to this thought experiment is to understand that infinite is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is…

The lifespan of the universe from big bang to heat death (the longest scenario) is a blink of an eye to eternity. The breadth and size of the universe – not just what we can see, but how big it is with all the inflation bits, even as its expanding faster than the speed of light – just a mote in a sunbeam compared to infinity.

Infinity itself looks flat and uninteresting. Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity – distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless. And thus we don’t imagine just how vast and literally impossible infinity is.

With an infinite number of monkeys, not only will you get one that will write out a Hamlet script perfectly the first time, formatted exactly as you need it, but you’ll have an infinite number of them. Yes, the percentage of the total will be very small (though not infinitesimally so), and even if you do a partial search you’re going to get a lot of false hits. But 0.000001% of ∞ is still ∞. ∞ / [Graham’s Number] = ∞

It’s a lot of monkeys.

Now, because the monkeys and typewriters and Shakespeare thought experiment isn’t super useful unless you’re dealing with angels and devils (they get to play with infinities. The real world is all normal numbers) the model has been paired down in Dawkin’s Weasel ( on Wikipedia ) and Weasel Programs which demonstrate how evolution (specifically biological evolution) isn’t random rather has random features, but natural selection is informed by, well, selection. Specifically survivability in a harsh environment. When slow rabbits fail to breed, the rabbits will mutate to be faster over generations.

Voting for Trump (or for any Republican candidate for elected office) is voting for one-party autocracy. Even if the individual is ethical, they will be pressured into serving the party (or removed for a more loyalist alternative). Not voting for a Democrat when there’s a Republican candidate is not voting against one party autocracy.

Trump is not Hitler. He’s the Secret Hitler of this election. Even if he’s less bright than Hitler and less charismatic than Hitler, he’s fulfilling the same role, and the outcome will be the same, a one-party autocracy propped up by fascist enemy-within rhetoric and a massive deportation effort that will ultimately turn into a massive evacuation effort. (That is, evacuation into mass graves, or even an ash pit).

We are on the precipice. Do not fuck around. Do not think otherwise. Do not let anyone else think otherwise. If Trump wins, the world is going to hold America’s beer while it works to enact a holocaust that dwarfs the Holocaust… unless the resistance is really good (it’s probably not) or the Allies overrun Washington (not in time).

The short tl;dr answer is, we don’t. For me, it’s something I contended with around 2003-2004 when my father stood with most staunch Republicans in advocating for extrajudicial torture of POWs and eventually of civilians including Americans who were mistaken for terrorist agents.

On the other hand, the same event drove me to study moral philosophy so I could explain at length why torture was wrong; he didn’t care, which was the gaze into the abyss moment. I saw who my dad was in the dark.

Cut to 2024, and even if Harris wins (and any coup d’etat attempts are put down) we are a long, long way from the scare being over. This has been reviewed at length by CIA and we’ve heard from experts on civil wars, how they erupt and historically what must happen to prevent social unrest from turning violent to the degree that it overwhelms responders.

The universal panacea is the restoration of power to the people. So that’s not to say we can merely preserve elections in the US. Our election system is corrupt and relies on FPTP voting models (one person, one vote) which means third parties cannot be competitive. It also means the two principal parties don’t have to be very public-serving to stay in power.

This means Harris not only needs a cooperative Congress (and cooperative state populations) but also the impetus to operate against the interests of her party for the good of the public, and we all struggle to discard the One Ring. She’ll also have pressure from establishment politicians, as well as progressives who are not progressive enough to go the distance and let power be diffused to a wider body of persons and interests.

What we can expect are some shorter-term measures, maybe some social safety nets, some relief for people caught in the debt crisis or homeless crisis, even some labor reform so that most of us aren’t one crisis away from homelessness and a ruined life. But this will kick the can down the line, and allow the Republican party (whose only trick now is election subversion and procedural coup d’etat when not violent coup d’etat) to persist as it is (and has been at least since Reagan).

Election reform would force the Republican party to reconsider its far-right-wing position and actually offer a platform worth voting for. But so long as we don’t get that, they still have viable pathways to seizing power.

All this said, some people will come to their senses as the precarity lets up. Some people will realize they can afford to be less afraid, and that a public-serving society is something worth fighting for. But that is a long, and personal process for each of them, and usually they’re pretty repentant when they realize what they had become.

Feds are wrong, or would be if copyright continued to serve its original purpose (according to the Constitution of the United States) to create a robust public domain.

All media should be accessible through public libraries, and arguments by federal courts presumes that the public does not have vested interest in content. It presumes the government isn’t there to serve the public, which raises questions as to why we have government in the first place.

Ubisoft is not a serious game publisher, rather is a racketeering company that uses gaming software as a vehicle for its monetization schemes.

It’s also a sex harassment and assault den for its upper management to prey on its clerical staff, and its HR notoriously covers for them.

I no longer play the Ubisoft games for which I have licenses, and I say this as an old fan of the Far Cry series. No longer.

Ubisoft needs to fail enough to get liquidated and bought out, I expect, by another AAA publisher gone amuck or a private equity management company. In either case, may Ubisoft assets load them down like a neutron star.

Sadly, I don’t know enough about it to give you advice. Every time I switched phones or services, I had to twaddle with the settings until I could get features (commonly MMS, or SMS with media) so that they worked properly. If AT&T is actually blocking you out for refusing to use an AT&T phone, the trick would be to get the phone to pretend it’s an AT&T phone, then way Firefox can pretend it’s Chrome when it needs to.

But I don’t know the specifics.

If you get phones from the manufacturer they’re not labeled compatible with AT&T so much as that they have access to specific radio ranges and are controlled either by soft-stored codes or by a SIM card, and I’d buy the sim card from the service, and then stick it in my phone. The Sony I had for a while was compatible with both the T-Mobile and AT&T ranges, and I used a third party service that was an el-cheapo front for T-Mobile.

T-Mobile wanted me to pay extra for hot-spot use, but I got around that with software, which is like hacking the subscription seat warmers on your BMW.

Curiously, Apple phones will lock themselves (or did for a while… is it better now?) based on what service you initially connected them to, and you have to (had to, I hope) get their permission and pay fees to unlock it again.

The telecommunication companies are an oligopoly, so like a legal cartel, so they pull a lot of bullshit that we end users have to suffer. But it means I feel not a jot of guilt when I hack the hell out of it to extract services I didn’t pay for, since it’s all a grift anyway.

The logic is that if we should be able to detect orbital teapots but can’t find any that it may indicate time travel is not possible, or at least never readily available for MIT students to engage in practical jokes. Because they totally would.

Like Roko’s Baskilisk it relies on a lot of presumptions that we cannot immediately make. We still struggle to detect teapot-sized satellites in the inner solar system. Time travel may exist but may never be freely accessible. There may even have been a task force to intercept all the teapot-placement missions before they launched, or a good reason not to frivolously drop objects into the past such as teapots. We might even have evolved to where we just don’t consider trolling each other as appropriate behavior.

As with many of my hypotheses, it’s more of a thought experiment than an actual conjecture of the real world.

Locked phones are what led me into the rabbit hole of purchasing phones from manufacturer, since the carriers not only lock phones but hobble the OS.

It did mean understanding what was necessary for a phone to qualify for given carriers, but I can tech when I need to, and I tech for my friends when they need it.

In 2024, T Mobile and AT&T (and Verizon) have all demonstrated they do not engage in good faith commerce, and so right now they’re being sniveling little shits (quote me please) because the FCC and DoC are escaping regulatory capture.

That is to say, the end users are tired of their shit. Apple and Google, too.

It may be related to all the trolling we do to each other, such as deckpeckers, left-handed smoke shifters, snipe hunting and soft-punching contests.

It may not make reasonable sense at all, but humans are silly muppets.

It’s why I hypothesize that teapots in space (between the Earth and Mars, orbiting the sun) would be almost certain evidence that time travel to the past becomes possible and cheap, and if we ever attain the capacity to detect distant teapots and don’t find any, that may be evidence that time travel is not possible, or at least cannot be made cheap enough to be used for practical jokes.

As a society, for instance, we tend to think that telling kids that Santa Claus exists is unproblematic, because doing so protects certain values – such as children’s innocence and imagination.

Santa Clause may be a fun myth, especially if kids receive presents from Santa for Christmas. But it does not protect children’s innocence and imagination.

Though this raises a question if kids received mischief-enabling presents from Jesus (A Red Ryder BB Gun comes to mind) that might improve their take on their personal Jesus.