• 21 Posts
  • 238 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 23rd, 2023

help-circle












  • You know, I have to say you’re right.

    At this point, unless you have been living under a giant rock, there are simple, hard facts you can’t possibly not know about Donald Trump that should be unacceptable to anyone regardless of political leanings. It’s simply impossible to ignore them.

    Therefore logic dictates that whoever votes for Trump today must agree with the Nazi stuff, the Trump Purge, shooting protesters in the legs, hanging vice-presidents or locking up former speakers of the house. I mean LITERALLY agree - because he LITERALLY said those things. Even MAGA people shouldn’t agree with those things: making America great again implies not destroying America!

    Meaning roughly half of this country agrees with those things. If that’s not fucked up to the n-th degree, I don’t know what is.



  • annoying to me because my wife didn’t take my surname!

    You think that’s annoying? My wife and I aren’t even married.

    I mean we call each other husband and wife but we don’t believe is shackling ourselves to one another, even for tax purposes, and we find the ease of permanent separation keeps our relationship fresh, and has for 35 years.

    We used to get mail addressed to our house as Mr. and Mrs. <my name> or <her name> and we quickly realized why: it’s just advertisers collecting my name or her name, gender and the fact that we’re married (not legally but we say we are). Absent the name of the spouse, they assume a man would bear his own name and a woman the name of her husband.

    Obviously it can’t be anything other than fucking advertisers since we’re not legally married: city or state agencies wanting to send us mail know exactly what both our names and marital status are and use them correctly.

    The easy solution is to not provide real data to data brokers whenever possible. We now use fake names, and we also track which names we provide to whom because it’s interesting to see how they bounce back at us.

    For example, is she uses the name Elizabeth Corona-Smith to, say, book an appointment at the hairdresser, and I get mail addressed to Mr. Corona-Smith with advertisement inside for arthritis products, I know the online service her hairdresser uses to book appointments sold her data, and the hairdresser filled in her approximate age to add to the data they sold.

    With that knowledge, next next time she goes to town, she can give an earful to the hairdresser and tell them she’ll never patronize them ever again.

    It’s happened several times. It’s really interesting to see how your information gets sold when you use fake information.






  • I trust Google a LOT less than I trust Apple

    I have zero trust in both. So if I have to choose a dystopian surveillance device, even a stock one, I’ll choose the one that lets me sideload apps anyday, even if the experience is less polished.

    And of course, I run a deGoogled OS so the point is moot. I use it for work stuff and I have no issues. I feel no need for a regular Google or Apple piece of spyware.

    What you call a prison, I call a system where I don’t have to fuck around to make shit work. Everything Just Works.

    So, just like I said, you’re happy in your prison. It’s cool, to each his own 🙂 It wasn’t a value judgment. Me, I’d rather cut one of my testicles off than give a cent to Apple - or Google too for that matter - or let either decide what I can or cannot run on MY device.

    iOS is more fit for my purpose than Android.

    As long as it does what you want, then it’s fine.