Uriel-238

A long time ago came a man on a track
Walking thirty miles with a sack on his back
And he put down his load where he thought it was the best
He made a home in the wilderness

He built a cabin and a winter store
And he ploughed up the ground by the cold lake shore
And the other travellers came walking down the track
And they never went further, no, they never went back

Then came the churches, then came the schools
Then came the lawyers, then came the rules
Then came the trains and the trucks with their loads
And the dirty old track was the Telegraph Road

Property is theft. <Bolshevik chorus swells>

Privateering usually meant the state’s navy issued the ship and demanded a substantial share of the prize leading to creative accounting at sea. It was a deal taken typically by naval officers who might otherwise be tempted to desert when going on the account is offering better prizes and career options. (Desertion to piracy was a big problem in the Queen’s Navee.)

A letter of marque means you can find safe port at colonies of the issuing state so long as you are attacking its enemies (usually Spanish vessels during the Golden Age).

Piracy is midnight oyster and clam harvesting without a license to break the oyster cartel, making restaurant oysters and clams more available and cheaper to customers.

It is from this grand tradition along the US West Coast that the notion of media piracy rose, and much like the Golden Age of Piracy robbing the Spanish Silver Train, piracy is associated with snatching ill-gotten gains from those who don’t deserve it, sometimes benefiting communities that do. (YMMV).

Media Piracy is copyright infringement, which is totally not stealing.

The US Supreme Court taking content out of the public domain so that it can be reserved for private use isn’t stealing either, but it causes more harm than piracy.

Windows 10 will collect keylogging and send it all to Microsoft. So yeah, it’s spyware before we get to Win11.

The system looks to use you as an expendable, replaceable, disposable part, likely for the vanity project of some billionaire.

Your story is how you break the cycle and subvert the system to express your own interests.

This probably is along the same lines as the predictive criminality models used in some US counties to justify giving some people higher bails and longer sentences.

The programs themselves don’t actually use any valid formulas and are based on prior regional and racial arrest histories, so the software generally would perpetuate the biases of the precincts and DAs of the area.

We’ve long established we can’t trust law enforcement with the forensic tools they have let alone give them new ones.

Actually the possibility of social engineering SWAT attacks on targets is a valid point. I noted some years ago that there are hospital devices that are now connected to the internet when they are in active use (such as those devices that administer medications intravenously based on timing and user input, and while such a set up could kill a patient by reprogramming the module, we’ve not yet an attack affect one yet.

Currently there are an awful lot of bills currently in process in federal or state legislation in the US that aim to restrict healthcare, education, legal recognition, access to gender-separated public spaces and so on. Furthermore, hate crimes against trans folk, and suicides by transgender persons are at elevated levels and have been since 2016.

It may be specific to the US, the UK, Australia and a handful of other countries, but right now a lot of bad shit is going on. Yes.

Do I know when it was last this bad? No.

We also get little conversation about how copyright extensions and patent trilling robs the public use of public-domain content, especially when the Mouse is lobbying the federal government to extend rights further.

The scare quotes remind me the Christian community runs lousy with believers who assert those other Christians are not true Christians according to a personal standard.

It’s a standard that drastically changes depending on the individual. Some believe those who suffer LGBT+ folk cannot be true, while others would challenge the countless Protestant Evangelists in the United States Marine Corps who are expected to follow orders to kill without reservation.

As an outsider, I use the same model as the LGBT+ community, that someone is valdlid if they identify as a thing, which works for Christian as well as it does for Lesbian

The nice way to beat fascism is to make it less appealing. When families live in precarity or in poverty, they start looking to blame someone. Sometimes it’s obvious, like billionaires forcing workers to pee in bottles.

In response, the affluent elite utilize their resources to create a propaganda campaign to blame scarcity on already-marginalized groups (in the US and UK, the rising genocide of transfolk is an example). Hangry communities feeling insecure + Tucker Carlson spewing hatred every night leads to fascist action.

Note that it works because its instinctive. We don’t like living in societies with more than a hundred people, even when it means we get infrastructure like running potable water or internet or electricity or food at our grocery stores so we don’t have to farm and hunt, ourselves. We actually have to train ourselves to live and let live, and not start a centuries-long family feud every time someone cuts us off on the freeway.

Social safety nets and better standards of living can pull people out of poverty and precarity, so they don’t feel they have to begrudge everyone outside their front door.

Otherwise, we’re going to keep trying to organize labor, and in response, the companies are going to try to distract with hate campaigns. Remember Trump commandeered the GOP in 2015 and 2016 because he gave permission to hate while the other candidates wanted to just continue to quietly oppress with code-worded fears. Even if we quash Trump, they’ll find new Mussolini-wanabes to back and worship, and eventually they’ll start a civil war.

If we don’t want the civil war, we need to make shit less bad for the 80% living paycheck-to-paycheck (or worse) and we need to reform elections so that their outcomes are better informed by the interests of the public (not the elite). Or at least that’s what CIA analysts (retired) interviewed on PBS think.

Once civil war breaks out, though, or they’re harassing marginalized people and committing hate crimes, yeah, feel free to [REDACTED] off the face of the earth. And anytime a law is passed or a rule is adjudicated that retracts a civil right, remember that is violence.

And the Coyotes will defuse the traps with a fraction of the cost.

It took France about a century before they went full Republic. I’d give the folks in Iran some latitude.

Note that the hijab thing was the last straw, and they’re still going without functional infrastructure.

I suspect the molotovs will resume flyong shortly. They are already on a short fuse.

The serious question is with what? I doubt the AI is going to kill you with disgusting pics or existential philosophy.

This means they hooked it up to something that might be used as a weapon of attack: an industial printer or a t-shirt cannon or a gunship at port.

Huh. I really can’t imagine normies exist.

When I think of a normie, I think of the Cleavers, or the Simpsons. A conglomerate average of what we expect white America to look like.

I think every family has to deal with weird shit, weather mental illness, disability, fentanyl addiction, Juggalos or a Gen X discordian auntie who takes no-one’s bullshit. We all have stuff going on that kicks us out of the normie threshold.

She can leave her hat on.

When the upper management sexual predatory practices and HR cover up scandal emerged I stopped looking forward to Watch Dogs: Legion even though I liked WD2 and wanted to see Clint Hocking at the helm again. Oh well.

Looking forward to a spiritual successor to Far Cry 2 some day.