My doom and gloom is catalyzed by a lot of things including, yes, a novelty cookbook that appears to be made in recognition of desperate times. It isn’t the only thing that informs my doom and gloom, and this isn’t to say I don’t have hope. But it is a Goblins at the gates of Gondor kind of situation, in which a lot of things have to go simultaneously right before we’re out of the fine mess we’re in.
In the Great Depression, it’s not like anyone was starving to death. Rather it was like they were eating flour paste and dying of malnutrition.
That we are in an era that we need the SBC speaks to how bad things are. Here in the states, we don’t have food deserts, we have food swamps, where the only thing one can get is junk food.
Kids figure out how to provide false positives in 3… 2… 1…
European aristocracy is scared of the working class. They will tremble…! < Bolshevik chorus swells >
Sink plungers without the flange work better on sinks, in my experience. So it’s nice to have one of each.
There are different builds for drainage snakes for sinks and toilets as well.
One way to be a better neighbor is to get a good drain snake and lend it out as needed.
Clean it first. Then clean the sink after using soiled plumbing tools.
I’m sorry. It came out years ago that Win 10 keylogged and told home all about it (justified as to improve our predictive typing software ) even though there were no promises in the ToS to limit its spyware use, I screamed about how the fucking sky is fucking falling, and now Windows 10 is in bunches of US businesses, and more than a few outside the US. It even says in the EULA MS will snitch on you to law enforcement about anything it feels like.
So yeah, all the people who have legitimate businesses that have real secrets (and break laws as a matter of course) have all wittingly chosen to give Microsoft all the biographical leverage MS needs to take over the world. (Some companies actually got their tech teams to defang the Win10 spyware. But more didn’t than did.)
Now I’m one of those 1960s hippies who screamed about the rising police state in the US to whom no one listened. Another Cassandra crying like a bainsidhe into the wind.
You should vote regardless (downballot blue votes also help resist the creep towards obe-party autocracy).
At the same time, be aware of efforts that might be active in your area to disqualify you:
Racoon is what I came to after Liftoff died.
Take this object, [new Lemmy client app] but beware it carries a terrible curse…
…But it comes with a free Frogurt!
Communism is a far-off ideal, and we don’t yet fully know how it would work, or how we’d get there, but people starving or dying would be a sign that it wasn’t working.
You might be thinking of USSR, which sought to create a communist state, but was subject to internal corruption and outside threats (not to mention, Wilson sought a pact with the European states – some of which were still monarchist – to sanction trade with USSR, so it was at a considerable disadvantage from the get go.
But while USSR was going through its growing pains, the rest of us were going through the great depression, and those of us living in cardboard boxes and stacks of paint cans were wondering if Lenin had a point, the industrialists boozing and gambling with Hoover were admiring the Austrian fellow. Eventually those industrialists decided they need to create a propaganda package and teach it in our schools.
Huh. I can’t post images anymore. I wonder if it’s a browser problem or a Lemmy problem.
In an ideal (post-scarcity communist) society, we should be able to be completely libertine without judgement from society or from government systems (so long as we’re not causing harm). But as with the rest of this ideal we don’t know if we can actually get there.
I have an ancient (2016) paper about potential joys of full disclosure (on Wordpress, if you’re interested) that portends the enshittification of Google. But it points out Google’s original business model, which was to have an enormous body of data that no human being got to look at directly (except their proper owners), and in the meantime the computers would report on observable trends and correlations.
In the end, it got messed up by the usual suspects: Advertising interests pressured Google to reveal more and more. Technicians abused their positions of power to stalk. The police state forced Google to fulfill reverse warrants and list all people near the scene of a crime, making them all suspects. Or to completely reveal all the data of a given suspect, which poisoned the whole idea of your own safe private place to track contacts, dates, travel, etc.
As it is, we need privacy specifically because of all those interests that would want to link our data to us. All the reasons for commercial or state interests to have our data are causes for them to not have our data.
I WANT to disable the Samsung store but that can’t be done in options. I’ll have to figure out how to brute force it.
Bookmarked to look at the other store options.
No, like Prohibition, everyone will keep some around, and the laws will only be enforced against non-whites, non-Christians and uppity women. Oh and gays are right out.
Sure. Which is why autocrats turn to fascism (that is a mythical history of an in-group and out-groups) to redirect that outrage against other races, other ethnicities, other religions, women, LGBT+, countercultures, teenagers, immigrants, etc. And it works because the naked ape is already frustrated with society being too big (hundreds of thousands rather than dozens), and is always looking for common traits among bad drivers and untidy neighbors.
And it works every time, since it takes effort to be rational and practice tolerance. Mostly the lumpenproletariat (simple folks who are not politically savvy) are the driving force behind hate campaigns, but the rest of us start wondering if so many people are negging on the Jews, maybe there’s a point. And rumors like blood libel and groomers helps those feelings along. 24-hour propaganda on FOX News and OAN helps too.
I bet petty crime is the least of EU’s problems.
I bet EU has the same level of problems US does with elite deviance, the white-collar guys who want all the marbles, and will start wars, hook eveyone on toxic drugs and wreck the habitat just to own it all and swim in their vault like Scrooge McDuck.
No one wants to tell the government they’re watching porn, especially in a Catholic country like Spain.
It’s intended to reduce porn use, often to fuel conservative hate-driven ideology movements. Sexually frustrated people are more eager to endorse violence against marginalized groups.
It’s pure sociological manipulation.
What is more interesting to me is he could have persons of interest detained and disappeared as per the still-active surveillance, national security and anti-terror states from the aughts and 2010s.
I would avoid doing anything to Trump directly as the US wouldn’t want to martyr him but it would be delightfully ironic to detain the SCOTUS associate justices for sake of their own safety where they can stay at black sites within earshot of the screaming.
In the meantime there are Heritage Society members and other thinktank analysts who have been caught on hot mic or text discussing policies that would drastically change the character of the United States, that are contrary to the spirit of the Constitution of the United States and parallel to the indictments in the Declaration of Independence.
So it would be entirely justified to introduce them to the US secret detention system and possibly to the enhanced interrogators to remind them what kinds of presidential power they endorsed in eras past.
I’m sure they plan to remind Trump of these resources when Trump wants to make someone sorry they were born.
Right I’m having a hard time not embracing my inner Magneto when I imagine being in Biden’s shoes. After all, these guys made it very clear what they will do to me when they have half a chance.
I realized today, by giving the president protection from the law, the opinion also implies the court system, including SCOTUS is too incompetent to adjudicate.
In another country where we had actual jurists on the bench representing the highest council for 320,000,000 people, I’d expect them to be more than capable and willing to wade through the delicate nuances of any presidental action, and determine if criminal acts were justified in the service of the state. But Roberts essentially is admitting he and his associates are either too inept or too corrupt, and either way are not up to the task.
If the US democracy is to survive, we will not just need a constitutional amendment, but a complete judicial overhaul, and a federal election reform to restore power to elections and thus, to the people. Until all this happens, we are governed at gunpoint, rather than by consent.
So put away your fireworks. The nation is too unwell to be celebrated.
Until we can find a better way to enforce civil liberties, the striking of illegally obtained evidence in the prosecution of terrible criminals is necessary. That they get to walk free is the point first as a penalty to the state (that now a monster remains at large) and second as a penalty to the public for allowing the state to let its agents abuse their power.
If neonazis and terrorists aren’t protected by our Bill of Rights, then you aren’t either. And it informs how the massive extrajudicial surveillance state got formed in the first place, as the US state believes national security (in all its ambiguity) is valued more than American lives.
In my case enjoying life is not something that I can simply do. I manage mental illness which features chronic suicidality, but it’s been driven into me very hard that I am at fault for my grief and trauma. But having a sober understanding of why I feel the way I do, and the social forces that drove parents, teachers and authorities to treat me the way I did helps me counter those neural processes.
This cartoon illustrates the dynamic I’ve encountered, and I hypothesize the mental illness epidemic in the US is intergenerational and compounding.
That we’re also dealing with a couple of imminent great filters the human species is unprepared to navigate hits hard for me.