Yeah, I think their CEO might have QNAP stock or something.

It’s hilarious how dumb this is.

Yeah, I agree.

On reddit it seems the remaining human commentators are those who have taken over the mannerisms of the bots and adjusted to talking to the bots.

And you always get stuck in these endless loops of hostile disagreement.

That’s just not how normal humans argue. Even on the internet.

Normal humans either agree to disagree or just give up. In both cases ending the conversation after all useful things have been said.

I agree. Very much like Reddit in the early days.

Also, the level of civility and intellect in the comments is relatively high.

Bingo.

The idea that CEO’s will put morals over profits is hopelessly naive.

If you want companies to act morally, you need to implement legislation and be willing to enforce that legislation. And not small million dollar fines, serious fines like 10% of revenue and personal liability and even jail time for executives.

But the American public only cares about having the stock market go up. They don’t care about their data.

That’s what they’re trying to do.

It makes most sense to switch the email+office users to Linux and reserve MacOs and Windows for users who really need to run specific applications.

More or less, yes.

Germany and France have been trying this for more than two decades.

But every time, there is pressure from the US government (the stick) and Microsoft arranges a short-term deal to make Windows cheaper than the cost of transitioning (the carrot).

But this time, the EU is serious about decoupling from the US, so I think it will actually happen.

We have long passed the point where lobbying and bribing were just doing your fiduciary duty.

And indeed, it seems we are back to feudalism and you have to pay tribute to the divine king and kiss his ring.

And how will they know if you’re a fundie or not?

What they’re doing is checking phones and social media. If they see you are a member of some antifa or BLM org, they’ll get you.

So don’t do those things via Facebook. Use meshtastic and hide your receiver.

But if you practice good OpSec and all they see is baseball, BBQ and church, then they won’t be able to tell the difference.

Thanks for the effort post with great tips!

I would also really recommend having a physical community near you, not just online contacts.

I would even go so far as to say: join a progressive protestant church It’s not a silver bullet, but the fascists in the US are Christian Nationalists and some of them will hesitate to mistreat a Christian. And some of them will feel an obligation towards a Christian.

This is a big part of why Martin Luther King wasn’t killed earlier. The thugs in the 50s had no problem persecuting “godless heathens” in the McCarthy era, but black Christians were Christians.

And yes, they were also mistreated, but it would have been much worse if they had been atheist or communist.

Fascists divide the world very black and white. Us v. Them

Looking like them provides a survival advantage.

Not in the US, but it would make more sense to spread it out over multiple years to avoid the tax.

There already is blood.

Jan 6th

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Wadea_al-Fayoume

But I understand your point. You’re saying there will be much more blood.

Sadly, you are right. 😔

I once read an article many years about how arsonists were burning expensive cars in Berlin. The journalist indeed reported that they would light barbecue starters under the tires.

If I recall correctly, they would even place it a little bit further under the car (i.e. not the outside) so that any passerbys wouldn’t notice anything until the tire was properly burning.

This was before Tesla’s though, which have a sentry mode

With the more recent cases, I have read that they smash the windows and throw Molotov cocktails inside, but I think that would draw a lot of attention and make alarms go off.

On the other hand, I think this method might have less risk of the sentry mode filming.

Agreed, this article would have made sense in 2020 or earlier.

And now we have the fediverse, which is causing a resurgence of content that is independent of Reddit or Discord.

Thanks, never heard of SimpleX, but I will check it out.

But to make an analogy. Bitcoin wasn’t good for privacy at first. But they added features and new coins like Monero were developed with strong privacy.

So I expect there will eventually be a private ActivityPub, either “on top of” or “next to” the current one.

In my opinion, we really need decentralized, self-hosted infrastructure.

I kind of hope we get a Fediverse alternative for WhatsApp.

I imagine running some kind of relay node on a raspberry pi, for perhaps 20-100 acquaintances. All traffic would be anonymized and encrypted as much as possible. Push notifications replaced by polling. Anonymous broadcast groups that allow anonymous sending and receiving of messages without revealing either who is sending or who is receiving.

Everything wiped every few minutes on the relay node.

Others would also run relays that are then federated together.

Most people use seedboxes for private trackers, which are superior and just as private as a VPN.

But yeah, it’s a different ecosystem and it’s not for everyone.

I do think it has replaced the old DC++ hubs of old.

To my knowledge, both eMule and DC++ are still active, but I think private trackers have become the more dominant technology for file sharing.

I read that Ubuntu is trying to solve this with the Snap Store.

But to be honest, I’m just not the target demographic for that.

I honestly think if the EU had continued with rolling out Mandrake and SuSe to public sector employees 20 years ago, Linux would be dominant today. Microsoft lobbied hard to stop it.

And I think the way forward will be to have a handful of big customers making the switch. Either China or the EU will probably drive this.

Maybe Huawei might sell MacBook alternatives based on Linux. Or the EU might revisit that old SuSe/Mandrake strategy.

I agree, except that I wouldn’t classify Israel as a top intelligence power.

Their dependence on the USA is immense.

For European purposes, Egypt (Suez) and Turkey (both Bosporus and the land link to Asia) are the most important regional allies. Both or very populous and could become a new source of cheaper labour, now that Eastern EU countries are becoming more expensive.

Iran, Iraq and the Gulf countries are important as long as we can’t have Russian and/or American fossil fuels. But even then, Turkey and Egypt are the broker between us and them.

I agree, which is why I advocate for reform, not abolishment.

Perhaps AI companies should pay a 15% surcharge on their services and that money goes directly into the arts.