I wonder how many of them just got badges.

Myspace existed for a really long time after it ceased to be relevant. It actually only ceased to be relevant after they lost all the music that had been uploaded. That’s when independent musicians finally abandoned it, and it basically disappeared.

Reporting on “X” is what’s keeping it alive, IMHO. Stop reporting on it and it will stop being used. Alternatively, if there’s some major incident, that would probably be enough to finish it. It may eventually go bankrupt between now and then, but it’s actually pretty useful for people wanting to spread nazi propaganda so the far right will probably keep pumping money in until it collapses.

Murdering people has been a normal part of corporations for a long time, but they generally do it to union organizers in the developing world.

If I were malicious enough to design the system, I would make it a heartbeat. Skip too many heartbeats and your car bricks. It could be written in to the terms of the loan since companies are using in-car computers for repossession.

“Why is my car bricked?”

“Because you tried to disable our payment verification system.”

“I live in a rural area.”

“You’re like 1% of customers. Your loan contact says you have to drive within cell range once a month. Fuck you, we’re repossessing the car and keeping the money anyway.”

your car is bricked

I can’t save you from looking like an arrogant idiot if that’s what you want to do. Have fun with your life.

Exactly. His relationship with the US is just as cynical as it is with Russia, and as it is with any country or people (including his own). He will do or say anything that gets him more power. That means he’ll be a solid US ally as long as the US is completely stable and functional, and he will take advantage of any weakness (like he did with Trump letting him murder Kurds in Syria).

I think we’re in violent agreement about the overall with perhaps subtle difference in the details.

Ok, so you, who have absolutely no context on the situation, keep being told that you’re wrong by people who have context on the situation, and your responses is to record all the ways you’re told you’re wrong so you can gloat about how you keep getting told you’re wrong by the ignorant people who actually have lived their entire lives in the place you know nothing about? Cool.

It’s kind of like you’re listening to the 5 blind people describe an elephant over the phone and you’re like, “I have a cat, therefore you also have a cat. You need cat litter and everything you’re saying is dumb.”

America for Europeans is either Hollywood, major cities, or Europe with rednecks. You fundamentally do not understand the context. You keep comparing to Europe and Austrian, but those models don’t work. Europe enclosed the commons generations earlier. It’s not possible for Europeans to comprehend America.

I’ve driven for 6 hours straight with the radio on scan and not even found a signal in more than one part of the US. There are vast areas of nothing with no law and no possibility of control. The vast majority of the US is unpopulated. The closest analog would be Australia or Canada.

Except that Austria and Canada never had an economy that relied on chattel slavery enforced by “organized milita.” That’s what the “well regulated milita” is in the second amendment, it’s slavers. Slavery and genocide are essential to the US in a way they aren’t in any developed country. If you want to compare the US to something, you need to look at Brazil.

The US is more like a developing nation or a dictatorship than a democracy the way you think about it.

Americans have all heard the same things over and over again. Your arguments are old and bring nothing new. So what is it exactly you’re trying to do here? What is the point if first hand information will change your articles of faith? Are you just trying to feel superior? Because coming in to a place, knowing nothing about it, and telling people they’re doing everything wrong is a pretty old school European thing to do and it really isn’t convincing anyone.

Erdogan has been close to Putin for a long time. He’s one of the most extreme authoritarians in the NATO alliance. The US has armed it’s enemies in the past, and I don’t think it’s short sightedness has changed.

I don’t believe that Erdogan will help Palestinians, but he very well may materially support Hamas as long as he doesn’t do it openly enough to cause problems. I mean, Netanyahu propped up Hamas for years in order to forward his interests. No one would care if Erdogan helped justify continuing the genocide by making Hamas more dangerous to Israelis, as long as he didn’t send any American weapons to them.

But perhaps I’m just extremely cynical.

Fixing US gun violence is trivial from a policy perspective. You tax bullets at an extremely high rate while also creating a social welfare system like Europe. This restricts the ability to execute violence while also addressing some of the biggest causes. But it’s impossible to implement that because right wing terrorism is the point.

Right wing terrorism isn’t a problem with America. It is America. It’s how the system is supposed to work. It is the point.

Right wing terrorism keeps people traumatized. It ensures that anyone proposing a social safety net would be murdered. It is the extrajudicial extension of the oligarchy that controls America. What the government can’t do, right wing death squads do instead.

If you stop mass shootings, you will destroy America. It isn’t being stopped because it is intentional. It isn’t being stopped because both parties, and, more importantly, the oligarchs who control them, benefit from it.

If you think you can stop gun violence in the US, you fundamentally do not understand what the US is. The KKK has been deeply involved at all layers of government across the US for generations. Today Aryan Brotherhood infiltrates police departments across the nation. The violence is the reality of America, the thing you think is America is just a facade.

America is colonial white supremacy maintained through terror, where guns are the primary tool of that terror. America is not normal, it’s a two party dictatorship pretending to be a democracy. America is the problem, it cannot fix the problem anymore than Nazi Germany could have fixed their antisemitism problem.

It would have been more accurate for me to say that he’s not really aligned with anyone. He works with Israel and the US when it benefits him, he works with Russia and Hamas when it benefits him. He does whatever will get him more regional power.

Lol, yeah, the FBI that’s been cracking down on the left for 100 years while ignoring the Klan? That’s who you’re taking about? They would rather join the insurrection. Who do you think these cops are?

They already won. That’s the point.

Erdogan is a fascist who’s responsible for genocide in Northern Syria. He doesn’t give a fuck about Palestinians or the genocide Israel is carrying out against them. He is aligned with Hamas and terrorism because disrupts regional power and gives him opportunities. This is an opportunity for him, and nothing more. His government backed Isis before. This is the same.

It has nothing to do with the very real need to end the genocide of Palestinians or the legitimate desire of Palestinians to resist their oppression. He aligns himself with horrible people because he is himself horrible.

Guns are harder easier to manufacture than cartridges. Honestly, when civil war finally does break out it will be ammunition, not guns, that the government restricts access to because that’s way easier to control and way harder to manufacture. Reloading still needs brass and primers, and those are hard to make for anything outside of a shotgun.

Edit: said exactly the opposite of what I intended to say.

Any officer enforcing this would be killed and most cops would just outright refuse to enforce it anyway. There’s a logistical problem of how this would even be done.

I lived in a town with maybe five cops for it and the three surrounding towns. Cops would to on several hour patrols, so if you called 911 at the wrong time it could take an hour for the police to actually show up. They knew about meth cooks in the area and they left them alone because the cops knew they would wind up dead and no one would ever find them.

Now, the whole population of the area was a few thousand people and most of them were armed. Now, if they couldn’t deal with the meth cooks that no one liked, how exactly would they deal with the big chunk of the population that includes small business owners, members of the city council, and maybe the mayor?

In the early 1900’s Roosevelt sent federal officers to try to assess and deal with a form of slavery called “peonage” that was pervasive in the South. These officers were shot at and ultimately chased out. Roosevelt gave up on enforcing the law.

The US government has failed multiple times to enforce laws that law enforcement agreed with. Overwhelmingly, law enforcement does not agree with outright firearm bans. Why do you believe that firearm owners could be arrested for refusing to give up firearms? Like, from a logistical perspective, how would that work exactly?

People who understand technology know that most of the tremendous benefits of AI will never be possible to realize within the griftocarcy of capitalism. Those who don’t understand technology can’t understand the benefits because the grifters have confused them, and now they think AI is useless garbage because the promise doesn’t meet the reality.

In the first case it’s exactly like cryptography, where we were promised privacy and instead we got DRM and NFTs. In the second, it’s exactly like NFTs because people were promised something really valuable and they just got robbed instead.

Management will regularly pass over the actual useful AI idea because it’s really hard to explain while funding the complete garbage “put AI on it” idea that doesn’t actually help anyone. They do this because management is almost universally not technically competent. So the technically competent workers who absolutely know the potential benefits are still not able to leverage them because management either doesn’t understand or is actively engaging in a grift.

Capitalism is a pyramid scheme.

They’re legal in Oregon and Colorado. Oregon has medical treatment programs. I don’t know about Colorado. Washington had ketamine treatments, which operate in a similar way and include a medical professional to administer and monitor you.

I’ve been microdosing for a while to treat my PTSD. It’s helped me more than I can relate. Since moving to the Netherlands it’s also become so much easier. You just go to the smart shop and get a microdosing kit. I dosed for the first time in a couple of months yesterday and now I remember just how big the impact is.

For folks in the US, psilocybin is legal for medical use (under medical supervision) in Oregon. They are also decriminalized in Colorado. Ketamine is also legal in Washington for medical treatments. Last I checked in people in WA were also trying to legalize it.

Ketamine has also been super helpful as a PTSD treatment. I would recommend both, but I’d recommend really understanding what you’re getting in to first. I don’t think they really prepped me well for the ketamine treatments.