Uriel238 [all pronouns]

Musk remains true to his Disney villain character and I stand by my previous wish for his fate to be:

…eaten by hyenas. Preferably hyenas he had recently betrayed to save his own skin.

At the rate were going were going to get the bad ending which is:

…Chinese bombers over Washington blotting out the sun.

From its inception ICE has taken the role of the German SS, which is to say a paramilitary force loyal to the administration rather than to the Constitution (what FBI was during the J. Edgar Hoover era) It was that way though George W. Bush’s admin as well as the Obama admin.

ICE also lent itself out to corporations and trade organizatiobs. They raided the Dotcom estate in New Zealand, and they raided Florida repair shops that did unauthorized (but effective) repairs on Apple products (an event that fueled the right-to-repair movement).

To not talk to ICE. Do not associate with anyone who associates with ICE. Do not cooperate with Law Enforcement that cooperates with ICE.

Eventually when agents and collaborators of the Trump regime are tracked by Nazi-hunters (whatever they call the new iteration of hunters) ICE agents and their collaborators will be the highest priority.

Remember ICE is the agency raiding houses and taking people without due process to CECOT in El Salvador where they suffer tortuous, inhumane conditions comparable to gulags and WWII concentration camps.

The new holocaust is here.

Yeah, my other ride is a broom and similar stickers also imply if you cross my path you better be firm in your beliefs curses don’t work, because mine will find your immortal soul and drag it, screaming and writhing into the very heart of Hell.

Also my coven depends on me for the sticky-icky and some amazing baked goods. And they don’t want me sad.

I might be reading a lot into it.

This family has a LOT of activities. And is middle class, but ranking enough to have free time and money to buy stuff, possibly due to the oilfield worker.

Their neighborhood has family rivalries but is knit enough to have community barbecues. My daughter has best friends and ballet partners in the community, so at least we know our neighbors as fellow parents.

Oh and if you fuck with us, we have high-powered rifles and know how to track a bitch. We also have friends with a similar set of skills.

I posted more lenthy comments on the other communities. Here I’ll say this:

When it comes to backdoors to security, there are no good guys. Zero.

The eventual outcome of this sort of thing is more widespread use of steganographic data storage schemes. We already have plenty, such as ones that make your data look like unused LTS blocks of garbage and code blocks with multiple hidden partitions, so that you can open one block showing pedestrian data and the court unable to prove there are other hidden blocks.

These are technologies that already exist for those people who are really interested preserving their renegade data.

But if I own a business and I don’t want my rivals reading my accounting, and open crypto is illegal, I may go stegan whether or not I have secret slush funds.

It sounds like you haven’t observed the conversation.

And it’s not the tech companes so much as the Linux community who have pushed for e2e.

Considering how many abuses (pretty clear violations of the fourth amendment to the Constitution of the United States) have been carved out by SCOTUS during mob investigations and the International War on Terror, no, the people of the US want secure communication. The law enforcement state wants back doors and keep telling tech folk to nerd harder to make back doors not already known to industrial spies, enthusiast hackers and foreign agents.

You’re asking for three perpendicular lines on a plane. You’re asking for a mathematical impossibility.

And remember industrial spies includes the subsets of industries local and foreign, and political spies behind specific ideologies who do not like you and are against specifically your own personhood.

Governments have long wanted backdoors on secure private communication, and so long as we have an ownership class, they always will.

And backdoors will always be more useful to hackers, industrial spies and terrorists than they are these departments of state looking to ensure national security (or watch for proletariat unrest. We’re already pissed.)

And the private sector will always route around these backdoors, possibly by modding the client or offering new services that are still secure.

States should get used to disappointment. Investigation bureaus should prepare for going dark. Once upon a time they had to rely on detective work rather than asking Google whose phones were near the incident or what web-surfers were asking questions about the circumstances pre-hoc.

Um no.

A state can decide what it names itself or names a part of itself (e.g. Black Lives Matter Plaza). The story of Ukraine illustrates this.

But geographers and cartographers don’t decide what to name a place or get orders from states by fiat (unless the mapper is a state agent working for a department) They name things based on what they’re called.

The gulf is known to most of the world and the International Hydrographic Organization as Golfo de México or in English, Gulf of Mexico, and calling it the Gulf of America (say by Google Maps) is political allegiance signaling, that they are MAGA or MAGA collaborators.

If you want to be spicy you can call it Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl or the House of Chalchiuhtlicue based on the South American deity of the sea. It has a nice ominous Siege of R’lyeh feel that reflects the tempestuous weather of the ocean expanse.

As I explained to Google (from Dan McClellan) _references do not assert from fiat what things are called. A dictionary definition is not an official definition but what a word means or what a thing is called at the moment.

Most of the world calls it the Golfo de México or in English speaking regions, the Gulf of Mexico. Changing all the maps of the world won’t change this.

Now granted, a state chooses what to call itself (such as the changing of The Ukraine to simply Ukraine but that is the incorporated entity that is the sovereign nation of Ukraine.

As the US does not have sovereign control of the Gulf of Mexico, it doesn’t get to declare the name of a region of international waters.

This whole thing just makes the GOP, MAGA, the Trump administration and by proxy the people of the United States xenophobic and barbaric as hell. It’s not a good look.

I have the social skills of a cholla cactus and so when someone says ѻɼﻭคกٱչﻉ ץѻપɼ กﻉٱﻭɦ๒ѻɼɦѻѻɗ กﻉՇฝѻɼᛕ I find it only confusing and unintelligible. I did consider making cookies for my neighbors with a notice saying I don’t know how to ዐዪኗልክጎጊቿ ል ክቿጎኗዘጌዐዪዘዐዐዕ ክቿፕሠዐዪጕ but maybe someone else does…here’s some cookies? Mind you, my neighborhood is a tad lower class and has an air of desperation so they may not trust my cookies.

It’s a thought. My kitchen appliances are lent out right now, and I don’t actually know how to bake.

But I seem to understand enough leftist theory to bridge those who, like me, have been brainwashed to see communism and socialism as derisives and terms of contempt.

I’m also going through a psychotic break because a lot of stressors piled up at the same time seventy-seven million voters decided to give the Genie’s lamp to Jaffar.

No, I’m saying the species as a whole is failing because 77 million people could be simultaneously fooled into voting against their own better interests. It shows that democracy can always be subverted. People, brilliant rocket scientists, in the case of my own father, can be tricked by demagogy into backing malicious despots and kleptocrats, and the plutocrats and oligarchs can afford to find and hire them.

Careening towards more than one imminent great filter, it’s going to take some miracles of innovation to successfully navigate them, and more divine providence in sociopolitical theory to reorganize people into some sort of community-focused government system that resists subversion by those who seek power. So while we’re not completely fucked, we’re absolutely playing long odds.

Granted, not all is completely lost. Homo Erectus went through phases where their species was reduced to less than ten thousand, and they had to suffer through a harsh epoch of millennia before recovering and populating the world until they were weeded out by competing cousin species. We may still survive in small, meager tribes, but all this culture is going to be lost, ground into the geological record.

We may get lucky, but that is not to say we can evade catastrophe at this time (not without extra-terrestrial intervention or other deus-ex-machina techological development that its inventor doesn’t try to restrict and license), but a tenth of our population might survive, and every day we do nothing, or stay subjugated to far-right efforts to cling to power, is a day that more of us are doomed to perish, or rather fewer that our world will be able to sustain, while we figure out how to migrate offworld.

77 million people voting for an autocrat is a symptom of a greater problem, one that has plenty of other symptoms, and has shown us we are just not foresighted enough to act early; we can only be rational with effort, and are otherwise prone to emotion and fixed action patterns. It’s easier to blame the weirdos and marginalized in a society, than to recognize class conflicts, or acknowledge the wealthy fuck the rest of us over to retain their wealth and power.

Feel free to provide evidence that I’m wrong. I often present harsh reality as I understand it with hopes that someone knows a development I don’t. And sometimes that even works! But for now, we have to face the dildo of consequences unlubed.

You think political illiteracy is an epidemic only of white European descendants?

When 77 million people do the thing, you can’t really blame it on character. At that point it’s a failure of the species. Don’t worry, we won’t be plaguing the world for too much longer.

I’m ready to call the United States North Mexico or the Unincorporated British Colony of the Indies

The history of advertising indicates otherwise, as does Das Kapital by Karl Marx. Capitalists will always push the limits, ever seeking to maximize profits.

However upper management appears to want to hold royal court and subjugate their serves (the worker pool), since the goal of profit maximization set by shareholder primacy contraindicates common practices like micromanagement, over-surveillance of the workforce (keylogging, and prohibition of private use of the internet) and crunching, all which reduce workforce efficiency (by a lot) and yet are typical.

In the 1980s, when Reagan deregulated children’s programming, a lot of shows that were essentially half-hour-long commercials (say, the entire Transformers franchise) were released and sold a lot of toys. The weird thing is when we oversaturate a generation with commercials, they develop a tolerance to them, and the marketing industry has been losing that battle since the 1950s, when an hour long show would have a thirty-second sponsor spot.

Well, you see, there’s this thing called capitalism…

According to the Behind the Bastards on Peter Thiel, he is really scared of death (as in dying from old age) and really wants to stay alive or take it with him.

So he may be the first private citizen to buy a DeepSouth supercomputer that has a capacity comparable to the human brain. All someone needs to do is convince him there’s software that can create an adequate simulation of him that he is essentially immortal.

Of course, this thought experiment intersects with the transporter paradox, but that’s part of the deal.

That may be a good thing as it speeds our way to general class consciousness.

That’s how revolutions start. (It’s also how violent revolt starts, which is different from revolution but can become revolution sometimes.)

Marvel Snap is still down. Like the 1980s we nerds don’t matter.

ETA: As of 11:16pm, PST, 2025-01-20, Snap’s been up for a few hours but it’s still not accessible on the Apple Store or Google Play.