Plenty of judges won’t enforce a TOS, especially if some of the clauses are egregious (e.g. we own and have unlimited use of your photos )
The legal presumption is that the administrative burden of reading a contract longer than King Lear is too much to demand from the common end-user.
A picture of exactly that, several swastikas dangling from nooses, would make a great cartoon or art-piece.
Maritime Christmas Ornaments if you want to be seasonal.
And then in astronomy, students are being forced to learn the Arabic names of stars (like Sirius, Deneb and Betelgeuse).
FOSS works on the premise of an angry engineer, that someone finally got pissed off about a problem enough to write a solution.
This so tracks.
All we need is for the communist government to say we like what you’re trying to do. Here’s an allowance for expenses!
But can I chat with Good Shepherd Jesus, the young Dionysian, boyish, beardless, short-haired Jesus of women and lepers? (Contrast the bearded, long-haired, often blue-eyed imperial, Apollonian and sometimes white-supremacist Jesus of kings and churches)
(Jesus’ looks and depictions was a recent topic of Dan McClellan.)
I use my context menu key as the chording key to control any keyboard macro profiles, so that I can terminate, reload, summon for editing or summon a help file as needed.
There are VPNs that operate in stealth mode so they don’t look like VPN traffic as they’re being used.
Still illegal, but not detectable. No riskier than being a political activist antagonistic to the state.
In the US, internet piracy is not a crime, but a civil infraction. And yes, our media overlords have been trying to make it a crime for decades.
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No, this is a line of reasoning that leads to something different than what we got, which could be authoritarianism, or could be a better democracy… or we could try sortition, eliminating the role of the politician, entirely.
This was established in the Federalist Papers, that democracy works when the constituent a) knows their personal best interests and b) votes accordingly. In fact much of the post Southern Strategy GOP movement towards authoritarianist domination of the federal theater has been focused on getting constituents to vote against their own best interests, whether in favor of vibes or towards single issues (e.g. abortion access, gun control) or based on cultural pressure (liberalism = communism).
There are many directions we can go to make the system more democratic, many of which include moving away from FPTP elections (which promote a two party system, making third parties untenable) but we’ve also had some success in actually educating the constituency and instilling in them a sense of duty to do their civic homework and know what they’re voting for.
If people didn’t respond to these, then Trump would have won in November 2024 by a much wider margin than fractions of percents spread across several battleground states, and he wouldn’t have needed the support of the EC and gerrymandering to give the illusion of a mandate. The GOP and its vibes-based voting system is propped up by a trillion-dollar propaganda machine to keep Americans uninformed and believing in the Joe Rogan way of life.
If that’s the best that democracy can do, I will be the first to dispose of it for something better. But I believe democracy can absolutely do better.
Helen Cox Richardson advises general strikes cause division among the organized groups striking (possibly in what terms as appropriate to relent), that targeted boycotts seem to prove more effective in the United States.
I can’t be sure, having never seen general strikes manifest or boycotts that lasted. Boycotts also rule out those of us who live in poverty who can’t afford to have opinions. Or as Marge Simpson put it We can’t afford to shop at any store that has a philosophy. We just need a TV.
So boycotts are revolution by the petite bourgeoisie, rather than by the third estate, which is why France still contends with capitalism and authoritarian drift.
I, personally, don’t know the right answer, or the most effective strategy against the current regime. I’d argue both are good methods, but maybe we should look for third and fourth fronts of attack.
The warnings were there when the George W. Bush administration was doing all the things. We should have learned then never again to vote Republican, but we did. Twice. For the same monster both times.
We need to be having a sober conversation as to why and how that happened, given democracy doesn’t work when people vote based on vibes or propaganda feels.
I think the demolition of the White House is particularly poetic. It also shows us what our federal government is willing to let the regime do without input from the commonwealth.
The No Kings numbers was a warning, a bellwether. Let’s see if they’re able to pick up on what it means.
Nothing AI can’t fix (badly).
When my dog, Fester, was a puppy, he was chewing power cords and I am still surprised and grateful he never harmed himself in the process, at least not that warranted care.
He’s more constrained to his own toys and chewables now, but for a while nothing was safe. He has the epithet Fester The Destroyer for having chewed through over $1K of shoes in a week. His grand total it significantly higher.
Alexandrite doesn’t allow image downloading so I don’t know how to provide pet tax.
Here we go. Jackie on the right; Fester (The Destroyer) on the left.
And this is how you get a positive crackpot index.
Though I’ve known legit physicists and engineers take pride in [their] >0 CI.
For most definitions of supernatural, no.
I believe in unidentified areal phenomena, not that it’s ETIs or aliens, but that something’s up there doing its thing.
I believe in ball lightning even though we don’t have a model of electrodynamics that explains it.
There’s some weird shit out there, Horatio, that isn’t explained in our philosophy. I’m sure we don’t have all the answers. I just am okay with knowing we don’t know what those answers are.
As for ghosts, spirits, afterlife, etc. There’s strong evidence those things do not exist, just in the stark silence where there should be noise.
I do pretend that treating my cat well and wearing cat themed tees and keeping cat kitch does please the cat gods. 🐱👤
Curiously, while in character, it’s about the stupidest thing companies can do, at least according to Mike Brock
But yes, corporations are notoriously short-sighted when it comes to autocrats, even with a long history of ultimately getting their assets seized by the autocratic regimes they assisted into power.
I’d like to think this all might be a time to teach common end-users the joys of FOSS and, if necessary, jailbreaking, but that’s still a big ask for the general public even in the face of abduction and rendition.
The agents who implement state violence are not a group. They’re agents of the state.
And now Google is directly collaborating with an oppressive autocratic regime.
This is not a solution it’s a workaround. Sleeping in cars is typically hard sleeping, which is still the problem.