Nothing But Trouble, so they don’t come back

4 year old article

The existing auto industry would squash this as quickly and effectively as possible, we’d absolutely need a command economy to put something like this through.

We made an automaton clerk. It has neither arms nor body, but it works all day translating physician’s documents, so they may be stored with uniformity in a library that has neither shelves nor paper.

goodbye paywall https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.scientificamerican.com%2Farticle%2Fwhy-do-so-many-mental-illnesses-overlap%2F

“Latinum lasts longer than lust.”

I wonder if it has much to do with the USAF being a relatively new service with a proportional cultural impact, coming into being as a service in 1947. Up until then, combat aviation was subordinate to the Army and Navy. This would point to a preponderance of Army/Navy WWII vets among the show’s consultants and audience.

Being privacy-conscious can protect your information from being passively collected by mainly corporate entities that track your buying habits, life events, and health.

If you think you’re being actively targeted for surveillance, then you need security that is proportional to the resources that the people who are spying on you have. In the case of say, the NSA, they could have a backdoor in a various location in your hardware or software stack. If you have privacy tools like tor, they’re liable to target you and collect your data just for that. Most android/IOS phones are thoroughly bugged and tracked, to the point where if the battery is still attached and the phone is switched off you can still be tracked. If the NSA does collect your data, there’s a 99% chance no human will look at your data unless they have a reason to search for you.

If you are being spied on, odds are you won’t catch it. You might be able to isolate abnormal outbound network traffic if you’re really good about tracking that kind of thing on your network. Your phone could connect to a fake Stingray cell station and you wouldn’t know.

If you’re being stalked by a person with less resources than the NSA, it becomes a lot easier and common-sense privacy protections can help you keep a low enough profile.

It’s also worth noting that if private companies get a hold of your data, they’ll sell it to any government or private organization who’ll pay them. There’s scant regulation about what they can’t collect and what they can’t do with it.

I think the simplest rule of thumb is if you have something sensitive, don’t say it near an android or ios phone and don’t put it on a computer that’s plugged into the internet. Criminals have their own OPSEC, as do people in the intelligence industry, and usually the answer is an “air gap”.

Footage without sound from an organization nobody knows.

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I worked with Aaron Barr

He went on to be CEO of HBGary, a federal contractor. He claimed he could dox Anonymous. It didn’t go well for him.

The new term is “digital audio player”. http://www.reddit.com/r/digitalaudioplayer is a good community for that. mp3s are out, if you want a really small file size, opus has better quality. If quality is more important than file size, rip to FLAC. I know at least for android, there are music player apps like musicolet and poweramp that will allow you to play songs from your phone if you have the storage space. The old ones work with modern computers. You can buy reconditioned ipods on ebay, but the new ones are better IMO. For ripping music a good community is http://www.reddit.com/r/musichoarder

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theatlantic.com%2Fhealth%2Farchive%2F2013%2F07%2Fthe-vitamin-myth-why-we-think-we-need-supplements%2F277947%2F

I was doing that anyway in my early 20s. Now I’ll do it for $50,000.

Mass shootings, although there are indeed many, are a small percentage of the gun deaths in the US. Most are suicide, next most common are arguments outside bars. Most common weapon in gun homicides is a handgun.

Research shows that income inequality causes crime and you can see that more unequal nations (Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, Israel) have more violence.

The problem with the US is it’s a sanctuary for capitalists, capital and capitalism. Worse than anything that the US does or allows to happen to its own people, is what our government/corporations do to “developing nations”. Invasions, supporting coups, fighting to suppress labor rights and wages, extracting natural resources with little compensation, overthrowing governments that try to stop any of that, supporting genocide, committing genocide, chemical warfare, biological warfare, nuclear warfare. Any socialist country they can’t overthrow they’ll try to starve through embargoes.

Anyway, the worst states are ones where abortion is outlawed, lawmakers fight access to public health care or any public resources that don’t go to the wealthy. Usually these states are controlled by the wealthy, like coal bosses running West Virginia into the ground. Capitalists have been using evangelical christianity in north and south America to scare voters into voting right-wing on culture war issues like abortion and transphobia. They use reactionary tendencies like hatred of foreigners, hatred of gun control, hatred of schools teaching the history of how our country treated black people, etc, to keep people voting for the right-wingers who also happen to be the friendliest to business.

Both major political parties are right-wing pro-capitalist parties. Some states do have some social safety nets for health care and welfare but being poor is a horrible experience in every state. 50,000 people die yearly from lack of health care access, not including COVID deaths. There’s really no state you can live or party you can vote for to get away from it.

I’ve lived in a few less right-wing states. A friend of a friend was killed by police while he was suspected of shoplifting, trying to run away. Some kid killed himself in my high school while i was there. I live in a town where there’s lots of homeless people and syringes all over the place. 3 people in my family died of COVID.

Basically the US is a fascist country. Fascism is when the wealthy consolidate their power over government, in the face of growing violence and instability from growing inequality. The point of fascism is to protect capitalism from these growing threats by creating a police state, deflecting blame for hardship onto minorities, and handing off chunks of the government to the wealthy through privatization. The wealthy and the government essentially merge, they become the same people with the same goals.

Generally it’s the belief that America’s police, military, state department, and politicians of one’s political party, represent the country, and that they deserve preference over all other countries. Further, it usually involves upholding a belief that there is a national identity that supports the dominant language, culture, historical narrative, etc. The word for this type of belief, generalized to any country, is Nationalism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationalism

There’s also the belief that America is unique in that it has the best government, that it is a positive influence on the rest of the world, and that international laws do not apply to the USA, this is a subset of nationalism called American Exceptionalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_exceptionalism

Here are some things these people believe:

• The US military is a heroic force that spreads freedom and peace to the world.
• The US was the dominant factor in winning World War II
• The nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was necessary and caused the Japanese surrender.
• The US was trying to help the people of Vietnam from their communist revolution and was militarily winning the war until they withdrew forces. The bombing of Laos and Cambodia is not mentioned.
• The US has been a beneficial and protective presence in South Korea.
• Israel is a benevolent ally that spreads peace and democracy in the Middle East.
• Immigrants, especially Mexicans, refugees, and Muslims, are a threat to American culture and prosperity.
• Everyone in the country and world should speak English.
• The US constitution created by the “Founding Fathers” in the 1700s is a perfect document.
• US Americans enjoy more freedom and democracy than any other country.
• Cuba, China, and North Korea are repressive authoritarian dictatorships and it is right for the USA to try to free those people from their governments.
• The USA was justified in destroying the government of Libya.
• The USA was justified in invading Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Panama, Cuba, Russia, Grenada, Somalia, etc.
• The USA was justified in joining NATO in the bombing and overthrow of Yugoslavia.
• UN is bad. They try to stop the USA from fighting just wars and they want to take over US sovereignty and take your guns.
• NATO is good. They spread freedom. Or they’re bad because they’re globalists.
• There is no mention of supporting genocide in Indonesia, white terror in South Korea, biological warfare in South Korea, etc.
• The people and government of China and Russia are bad and everything they do is bad and supporting them is morally and factually wrong in any context.
• Communism is a political system where political power is concentrated into the hands of a privileged few, people are propagandized to believe that they are free and happy and that their government is beneficial, when in fact they are subjects to a harsh and repressive totalitarian regime that must be overthrown and require America’s help to overthrow it.
• Capitalism is a political system that is non-coercive and liberates and benefits everyone who participates in it.
• The United States is the only country with true freedom of speech.
• Communists are criminals and should not be allowed to have a platform.
• Socialism is destroying Europe and the US health care system is the best in the world.
• Refugees are destroying Europe and raping everyone.
• The police in the US are heroes and people who protest them are misguided and trying to destroy our country and are not true Americans.
• Crime is a problem that is solved by increasing the number and power of police, as well as more gun ownership.
• Terrorism is a problem that is solved by increasing the funding and power of the military.
• The motto of the US Army Special Forces is “De opresso liber”, “To free the opressed” and nationalists believe that is what they do.
• There is no reason to visit other countries, because everyone knows they’re shitholes.

If you want to know where these ideas come from, I suggest “A People’s History of the United States” by Howard Zinn, “Inventing Reality” by Michael Parenti and “Manufacturing Consent” by Noam Chomsky.

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Atheist. Raised catholic. Too old, I realized that the god of the bible isn’t a moral person. 1 Samuel 15:3 etc. Arguing with young-earth creationists gave me the final push, I understood science well enough to understand the implications of radiometric dating, plate tectonics, geology etc.

Iron Sky