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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Most obvious monopoly since Ma Bell. Even worse than Microsoft which was also obviously a monopoly. Break them all up. Microsoft, ATT (for the… 4th time? Maybe just abolish them at this point…), Comcast, Verizon, Google, Apple, the list goes on. All those food corps that end up being 3 parent companies owning everything else. Break it all up. Force unionization also while going through the legal processes.


  • What if I told you… that’s a feature, not a bug?

    It’s far too much to type and way too philosophical for anyone to give a shit about, but, tldr: the US (and arguably the world) is on a freight train speeding at absolute destruction. No one in power is pushing the stop button. (In the US) one party is (sometimes) pushing a slowdown button but the other party is always slamming any button they can find that doesn’t say stop on it. They know where it leads, and this is what they want. Everyone “knows” the current institutions and systems are failing, but the only politically relevant (so, in the US, not the actual left) force with power is the far right wingers who desire destruction and their only resistance is the left and right wing liberals in the middle going “noooo the institutions!” but no one actually cares about the institutions, besides other liberals. They lack any ability though, due to their political ideology, to actually fight for the beloved institutions. They can only rely on the powerful far right to “come to their senses” and stop pushing the death button. Unfortunately for them, the far right will not stop without someone stopping them- forcefully. And since the far right and liberals effectively eliminated the far left and even the center left for the most part… there’s no one to counter that far right fascistic death drive.

    But you don’t even need that accurate assessment of things to understand the situation. Just know they want to abolish public education, medicine, doctors, anything related to “science” broadly, any non-Christian religions, non-white people, LGBTQ+ people and anything tangentially related to gay stuff (imagined or real), etc. pretty much infinitely.

    These people are the proto-Nazis of our time. Not everything will align perfectly, but it doesn’t have to. They want to burn medical information, they want to destroy what they see as “perverted secular society” burn it all away and cleanse the land for some great rebirth of a Christian Nationalist theocracy where white men are elevated above everyone and your white male status plus property owning status is all that matters. I know this all sounds cliche and overstated at this point… but they keep proving it true every chance they get.

    The worst part is that ultimately they’re the only side making progress towards their goal because their goal is aligned with the way things are going and must go. But the difference is we can arrive at that destructive moment, whenever it is, and come out the other side in some Christian theocracy nightmare world or something much better than we can currently imagine possible. As it stands right now, that nightmare vision seems to be the only viable conclusion. Which is rather depressing…



  • I think it’s just the ease of GUI for people. This isn’t to shit on anyone, btw. A lot of people don’t like dealing with the keys and IPs involved, few as there may be, with setting up wireguard.

    If someone else has a compelling difference or reason to use tailscale then I’d be happy to hear it. I tried it once and it worked fine enough. But wireguard works just as fine and takes the same time to setup if you already know what to do. Like wireguard seriously takes 2 minutes.



  • Is this the landlord and city that Musk is currently having his asshole drilled into for illegally (without permit and using unlicensed workers for commercial work) modifying a bunch of shit? I remember he asked some dude to add a toilet near his office. Not like to hire a plumber or get estimates or ideas and shit. Just like, “hey. Put a toilet here.” That was my favorite story and where I really went like “oooook duuuuude” uncontrollably out loud. I’ve had a fuckton of “trade” jobs like HVAC, electrical work (mostly related to the HVAC), did some industrial scale backup power generator installs/maintenance, did some plumbing stuff. Kinda touched all over and all around in the world of building and adding on shit. So when I heard about him modifying electrical circuits without a permit… ok. I can see that if you get the right dude who knows what to do but isn’t legally certified. Of course you shouldn’t do that, especially with a business and a place you don’t own, but I get it. Adding a fucking bathroom though is absolutely bonkers to ask a regular dude (not even a guy who considers himself “handy”) to do. Like I think with all the shit I’ve done over 15 years or so, yeah, I could add a bathroom somewhere. But it would probably suck ass. And I’m not an engineer nor have I dabbled at all. And adding a giant, heavy object filled with water, ventilation to suck your shit smells out, a sink, lighting and all that stuff is gonna obviously require some demolition and then doing the whole thing. It’s an insane job to ask of someone who isn’t presenting themselves as a professional in that field. If it was replacing a toilet or sink, ok, again, not correct but I get that. Building a full whole new shitter is insane. It just shows his complete detachment from reality too because I don’t think most “normal” people would even think to ask anyone BUT contractors/plumbers whatever to do such a job. Definitely not a personal assistant.



  • They only read what is presented to them and as we all know the “official narrative” lacks a lot of details and includes outright lies. Any true telling of history would always result in “oh so we should probably do what the Soviets were doing… and improve it.” Instead the US being dominant after WWII has led to so much ridiculous and insane propaganda that can even the light suggestion to Americans to rethink their ideas on China and the USSR (and the US or Israel on the other side of that coin) is instantly smashed with YOURE A COMMIE FASCIST! Great world to live in…

    I think this was all fairly well predicted by many people way before my time and smarter than me, but it seems kind of obvious that in a world of declining hegemony and in turn declining material conditions that the average workers of the world either push to the far left and embrace socialism or to the far right into fascism. It’s basically inevitable in the long run.

    The problem is one ideology seeks more equality, fairness, etc. and to end exploitation by capitalists around the world so everyone can live lives of dignity and we can all work in our own and each other’s common interests of, you know, not destroying the world.

    Fascism kind of plays on the same mindset of “someone is fucking me. But who?” and smashes in whatever ethnic or racial group is convenient to hate. Black people, “the Jews!”, Arabs (“Muslims” to Americans), South Americans and Mexicans, Chinese people, etc. Instead of the logic of cooperation towards a common goal it just sells cooperation but only within your assigned group for their betterment and the extermination of other groups.

    given two paths basically, one which requires overcoming whatever baked-in resentment, fears, racism, whatever people all are raised to have in this world and the other which says “no, all that bullshit is actually correct. most basic primal urge to kill everyone else because you think you’ll die otherwise is correct.” Obviously there’s some amount of “some people are like that” because I don’t think I’ve ever really thought like that, but of course there’s also a learned and socially instilled component helped along by lack of education and straight up misinformation (propaganda) that can lead otherwise “good” people to just follow along, believe the zero sum game bullshit, and commit any atrocity in the imagined grand idea of defending themselves and their people from the others who they were purposely denied ever actually knowing and learning about.

    We’re kind of at an unfortunate point now too where it seems like (and who really knows?) we’re heading towards some incredibly bad times. More wars and a shitload more deaths as the world transitions from US hegemony to sharing it with other nations, China being the biggest right now. It feels like we’re fighting an impossible battle of winning over minds already complacent to the right wing. The Marxist, et al. education in “the west” is essentially zero and the world can basically count on the US/EU to fight every step of progress along the way if any progress is to be made at all. I mean look at the whining over China who has explicitly pretty much stayed out of foreign politics. They have a few loans around the world and the west is in full-on baby crying mode. Just imagine where it’s likely headed (and this is not blaming China who has every right to do what any other nation does. The US/EU are clearly the ones in the wrong here).

    So I dunno. Shit’s fucked, people are uneducated and falling for bullshit fascist shit, and the left seems unable to keep up with radicalizing people. Not for lack of trying or for lack of “being correct” but because of really too many reasons to go into… probably the chief reason being the fucking US lucked into its position post-WWII and that basically setup the world to get bent over and fucked by fascism sold under a different label. The US isn’t called “the fourth reich” for no good reason after all. I’ll stop rambling.


  • Agreed on the edit. I’d go further and say it’s almost definitely not worth his time/effort/money because even if he does win, which is never guaranteed, or squeezing a fat settlement… I dunno, laws are fucked and doing it isn’t worth it imo for a few stupid comments that I find unlikely to really do anything to his career outside of reddit app development (which is dead now anyway…)

    As far as the court case stuff goes, first, not a lawyer. So, you know, you could stop reading now and perhaps should! However, if the case is basically “the reddit CEO said X and Y things publicly accusing my client of attempting to blackmail reddit. There’s no proof of such attempted blackmail and reddit has harmed his potential to develop professionally for corporations in the future… blah blah blah.” Then, in this hypothetical case, the burden of proof would be on reddit/Stevie boy to prove that Christian, the dev, had attempted to blackmail reddit and they’d have to show something or provide something in someway as to prove that. Like emails, phone calls, tweets, something. It’s actually kinda funny because like you COULD attempt to blackmail someone but if no proof of that exists, and the target complains and openly defames you by saying “he’s a bad person and he tried it!” You could actually then sue them for defamation and possibly win. The burden of proof in the US (or whatever the wording is there) for being liable for civil offenses is only a “preponderance of the evidence.” I’ve watched an unfortunate amount of lawyers talk about it, also unfortunately friends with a couple, and had it explained that this means basically “51% or more chance that this happened based on the evidence then the person is liable.” As opposed of course to criminal cases, which defamation is not, where the standard is “beyond a reasonable doubt” which basically means without making up insane scenarios and hypothetical a normal person would see this evidence and conclude like 99% that the suspect committed the crime. There can be some doubt remaining, but all reasonable doubt (logical scenarios and shit) is eliminated basically. The standard for civil is pretty low in this way, honestly. If Christian provides the spez comments about him the court would say “why did you make these comments mr. Spez moron guy?” And at that point he has to provide a real reason. Saying he felt blackmailed or “it just was” wouldn’t cut it, I don’t think. Obviously corruption exists and such, but honestly, unless spezy moron kid actually has some message or email from Christian he probably would win some case if he bothered. I have no idea what the damages would be. Probably not much. Probably not worth it besides annoying spez which would be pretty funny.


  • Non-US citizens can sue within the US the same as any US citizen can. It’s the same rules where first standing has to be proven and go from there.

    An example of this playing out was when Elon falsely called that submarine British guy living in Thailand a pedo on Twitter (more than once actually). He was able to sue Elon in US courts (I believe he lost that case for some BS reason or another, but the point is it can be done).


  • This insane behavior is directly enabled by Apple.

    True story time:

    iOS has never, to my knowledge anyway, allowed changing icons on stock iOS ie not-rooted/jailbroken devices.

    After a decade of stock icons they released the shortcuts app that allows for creation of… shortcuts.

    Some crafty fuckers figured out quickly you could create a shortcut that was placeable on the home screen and could completely replace an the original app in function. Basically a shortcut that you tap and it simply opens some app, any app, and that’s it. And you could give that shortcut any image you wanted. Just download a cool .png or recolor the original one, whatever you wanted. Sounds cool. A shit-ass, annoying work around to an obvious QoL addition (making icons changeable on per app basis or allowing icon theme packs like android has had since forever).

    So story over, people have a work around? Wrong. Apple specifically went out of their fucking way to add this little notification. A small one, but so fucking annoying, which was never there before and cannot be turned off by any non-root access means (so far anyway). Now when the shortcut is run it says like “automation complete” for a second and disappears. There is SPECIFICALLY an option under the shortcuts and automations in iOS to disable those types of notifications but they seem to have added it (because it wasn’t there before, confirmed by old videos where people explain how to set it up before updates broke it) as a giant double middle fingers up fuck you to customers. There’s clearly no reason to not be able to disable that notification completely when you can disable basically every other notification (oh, system update pending can’t be turned off either- gotta make sure you update constantly so you can’t accidentally have a root-able phone one day and escape such bullshit! Oh no!). They’d probably claim safety or it’s a bug or some bullshit if they even bothered to acknowledge it, which they never have and it’s been several years now.

    My only conclusion is app makers cried that they wanted to sell the ability to change icons (or Apple took it upon themselves since they take 30% of that transaction anyway). Or it could actually be a bug. If it’s a bug they have never acknowledged it despite certainly thousands of reports over all the versions of iOS. Not even a “oh yeah that’s not intended. But it’s low priority.” Just silence, so, gonna have to go with the obvious option here. They fucked it as a fuck you to users. Might as well be spez at the helm.



  • You’re not a physician because no physician worth a grain of shit would be concerned about the fetus and not the insane overreach of government forcing the endangerment of the pregnant person’s life.

    More right wingery.

    If you are concerned with the fetus here in any fashion, sorry to be the first to break the news, but you have a reactionary take on this topic. I’ve been incredibly generous even (which many purists would roast us both alive for) and given that YOU can hold whatever opinions you want on birth and abortion and whatever- but you cannot apply your perceived morality around a medical procedure to other humans. You can say that makes whoever “look bad” all you want, ok, you think I give a fuck about the opinions of reactionaries who support forcing women to birth babies on top of the wars they want to send that future-kid to so that kid can shoot some random poor person in some far off land to enrich aforementioned reactionaries? I’m supposed to bow down to their opinions and their thoughts on me? No. That’s not how any of this works. Now you’ve been informed of what you support and going forward will never have the excuse of ignorance again. I’d suggest you do a little reflection. And stop lying about being a doctor online. No one cares. I’m Jesus Christ btw.


  • It’s not your decision and should not be the government’s. Only the pregnant person and their doctor matter. Possible input from their parents and/or other potential-parent of the fetus.

    You’re giving away your right wingery too easily. When you call a fetus a baby, red flag, but sometimes people just use that (if the fetus is an intended pregnancy and the parent(s) plan to actually have a child, usually). So, in the interest of debate-bro “good faith,” ok.

    Referring to abortion as disgusting. Well, that pretty much just ruined anything else you had to say. I bet open heart surgery or getting your arm reset after breaking can be pretty disgusting to most of us who aren’t used to such things. They’re all still medical procedures and their disgustingness or not is completely irrelevant to outsiders to the procedure. And if you’re simply disgusted at the idea of the procedure being done, that meaning, well one choose better words and two, yeah, that’s just reactionary mindset creeping in and spewing out your little fingers. At the end of the day whatever little nuggets of shit were implanted into YOUR brain as a child (such as “abortions are only valid until X arbitrarily decided date”) are irrelevant to the world and to this completely other human being seeking a medical procedure. Long story short: it’s none of your fucking business. A fetus is NOT a baby or a child and you’re purposely wrongly using the word to conflate the two. Again… right wingery…

    Prosecution is not warrant for a seeking to obtain medical procedures. This isn’t the year 1647. Please fucking stop.

    If you were discussing a purely rhetorical topic on “the moral and ethics of abortions and when they’re done” maybe you’d have some valid points and perhaps, because my brain was also rotted by arbitrary religious deadlines growing up, I’d be inclined to agree with hypothetical “if it were MY gf/wife, I’d want…” whatever to happen. But at the end of the day this isn’t our partner, it wasn’t our body, we aren’t doctors involved in the decision, we aren’t the person’s parent(s), we aren’t fucking Jesus or whatever. It’s not our decision to make, it’s no one’s but the person with the fetus under the care of a qualified physician. Who, btw, very well might be, and I’d assume probably was, advising towards birth and then surrendering for adoption. But it’s not their decision either. Just one single person gets that right with some important advisors along the way. We are none of those people, so, we and the government should probably fuck off forever.

    And Zuck can completely fuck himself. Not even going to rant on that because corporations bending over and spreading fully for the government at the slightest hint of a request for private data has been happening for decades. They’re morally bankrupt cowards. Even protected from personal legal liability (by their corporations, which do provide that, unfortunately in most cases) they won’t even attempt to stand up for privacy rights if nothing else. Gross.