• 4 Posts
  • 370 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Please review the last 100 years of technological development and educate us all on when, exactly, improvements in productivity have resulted in a reduction of the working hours required for subsistence. Extra credit for when it also did not involve threats of bodily or existential harm to the ruling class.

    Perhaps, just maybe, people are less concerned with perpetuating the wheels of the machine “at all costs” and more concerned with what happens between now and then. With who will get crushed before they’re stopped, if they ever do, long after our own lifetimes end.

    Perhaps it is not the entire world who is stupid while you’re one of a select few intelligent enough to really know what’s going on.

    I’m fully in support of the idea of UBI by the way, I just don’t see the hypothetical distant possibility as a reason to discount issues actively occurring in the existent present. Similar arguments are used to defend the acceleration of pollution in pursuit of an AI super intelligence that will supposedly “fix” all the issues we make during the pursuit of it. It’s foolhardy, dangerous, and reckless to leave the problems being built today to be solved by a purely hypothetical future.







  • The base OS of Android is, but the widely dispersed version maintained by Google with the hardware drivers required for it to work with the actual hardware is not.

    That’s why projects like Graphene can’t work on every phone. They have to rely on either reverse engineering hardware drivers or the manufacturers providing the drivers. For many years, Google openly released the drivers for all the hardware in their Pixel line of phones, which allowed Graphene and other customized versions of Android to easily work on Pixel phones.

    Manufacturers usually don’t release drivers separately and instead they’re only available built into the manufacturers customized Android version. Android Open Source Project is the open source base, then Google builds their proprietary stuff on top as “Android”, then the various phone manufacturers build their own versions on top of Google’s “Android” with: manufacturer specific crud added, phone specific crud added, and often phone carrier specific crud added.



  • I think you, and many others, believe that US citizens have far greater control over our “representatives” than we actually do. We literally have no recourse (outside of the ammo box or absurd amounts of money) against a politician taking office and doing exactly the opposite of what they campaigned on, besides waiting for their term to be over.

    Due to tons of laws built up over many years, the only way to get a seat at the table is money, and all the community fundraising in the world isn’t going to outspend corporate interests.

    Look, I don’t have the time or the energy to debate club out all the issues with the US governmental system to the rigid expectations of everyone outside of it with an opinion. People make lifelong careers just trying to explain the mess to people living within it. You clearly have a strong opinion that the collective population of the US isn’t doing enough for whatever metric you have, and I’m not even trying to argue against that.

    I just think it’s absolutely rich to try and assign blame to the proletariat for hesitating to throw their bodies on the corpse pile from thousands of miles away, or even from right here but sitting on your ass taking no action yourself. And no amount of admonishing, debate club bullshit, mental gymnastics, semantics lawyering, philosophy 101, specific individual cases where my generalized statements are untrue, or whatever anyone can bring to bear is going to change my opinion that “If you’re so invested in this, grab a cheap plane ticket and get to work on it yourself instead of trying to guilt others into shedding blood.”


    I’m not denying the responsibility of the people, where we can effect change. I’m simply stating that the area which we can effect is small and not going to make news broadcasts. Basing your take on the will of a country’s people on the multiple times distilled and removed news broadcasts that make it out is just silly.

    This will be my last comment in this thread. It’s clear that many people here simply want an easy outlet for their frustrations about the US government and have decided the populace is the problem, rather than the systems of wealth and social inequality which are global at this point.










  • Groups like the ones pushing data centers can and do literally hire people to figure out how to get in the politicians’ good graces, convince the politicians it is not only a good idea but the best idea, stoke the politicians’ ego(s) such that they think they know best/better than the people they supposedly represent, and then literally train the politicians on how they can do an end run around their constituents to get things passed by the letter of the law but clearly not the intent of the law.

    I know Louis Rossman can be a controversial figure due to how he communicates things, but he’s been doing a good job exposing how Flock surveillance cameras are getting passed/governmentally funded in shady ways in numerous jurisdictions where they have negative public support. It would be silly to expect that the tactics they are using are also not in use by the much larger forces with deeper pockets behind all these data center pushes.


    I absolutely have less than zero respect for politicians, but I seriously cannot imagine living a life almost entirely surrounded by people deeply trained to manipulate my emotions, sense of self, and self validation towards corporate ends. Beyond all the obvious life experience/world view differences due to wealth and socioeconomic strata, that’s fucking terrifying.