• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 20th, 2023

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  • People tried that.

    reddit corporate will remove those mods and ask which other mods want to be super duper awesome and be able to say they moderate another N thousand users per day for zero pay. And people leap at that.

    Until the users leave, nothing will happen. In a fucked way, reddit corporate are doing everyone a favor by removing the spineless “We are going to go silent for 24 hours with no real demands or bargaining power” idiocy.




  • I mean… someone with basic literacy might key in on a way that actually can cause damage to an occupying force. And the reality that the US has so much surveillance that hit and run tactics fundamentally won’t work.

    Unlike some people, I am not going to talk about becoming a domestic terrorist on message boards because… I wish that were obvious. But I have yet to see anything suggesting how all the assault rifles people NEED to fight against tyranny are going to do… anything against even the militarized police force, let alone the national guard or the army. Its just people being pissy and larping that they are Patrick Swayze and are going to scream “WILDCATS” while heroically defeating an entire army through the power of their after school NRA classes.


  • So… your assault rifle exists just to pop Mrs O’Coppy in the face and not much else?

    And Vietnam and Afghanistan ARE great examples.

    The Vietcong basically only stood a chance because they were entrenched in a low visibility jungle that negated most of the advantages the other side had. And Afghanistan? The Brave Men And Women Of The Mujahideen ™ were getting slaughtered until they were given stinger missiles to counter soviet air superiority (wonder who gave them those…). And the more recent conflict was more about IEDs than any form of stand up combat.

    Also: If you are at the point where you have no hope of progress and just want to bleed an occupying force dry? Assault rifles are bulky. What you want is a high velocity pistol round that you can conceal and unload point blank on. Also you want to roll back time ten or twenty years and get rid of all those cameras that will immediately trace you back to the neighborhood you are hiding out in.





  • Getting way too real but those movies are actually well worth watching. No, not the first one where Ethan Hawke and Lena Heady are rich white upper middle class people who are betrayed by their neighbors because they didn’t own enough guns. Like… every other Purge movie

    The reality is what we already see. The Holy Second Amendment is supposed to let people defend thmselves but it results in rich (predominantly white) people owning forty ARs and heavy body armor whereas lower class ethnic folk MIGHT have a pistol for self defense. And when shit hits the fan? Fat white kids cross state lines to mow down some protesters with their assault rifles.

    And every movie (except the god awful first one) addresses this. Bubba Gump’s convenience store lost their purge insurance so he is forced to try and defend his livelihood. Hispanic women are openly told they will be raped when the clock hits 6 (?). Impoverished black neighborhoods have klan members bussed in to murder them all (its cool though because Y’lan Noel goes John Wick on the nazis). Totally Not Hilary Clinton gets the biggest target ever painted on her head on purge night (its cool though. Frank Grillo is mostly only a dumbfuck that Chris Evans will never talk to again but damned if he isn’t an awesome white guy with a pistol). And the rest of the rich white fucks just hang out in panic rooms with the poors they bought the rights to torture and murder.

    Because that is the reality. Privilege is everything. If you have enough money you can avoid the consequences of anything. Whether it is the decades of horror because people were too busy looking at Marisa Tomei’s ta-tas to realize she should not be allowed to write legislature, the fucking idiocy of wanting a heavily armed populace, or just driving drunk and running over a few kids in a car.


  • … mostly the other way around?

    Theoretically it is possible that a compromised machine could compromise a USB stick. If you are at the point where you are having to worry about government or corporate entities setting traps at the local library? You… kind of already lost.

    Which is the thing to understand. Most of what you see on the internet is, to borrow from a phrase, Privacy Theatre. It is so that people can larp and pretend they are Steve Rogers fighting a global conspiracy while necking with a hot co-worker at an Apple store. The reality is that if you are actually in a position where this level of privacy and security matters then you need to actually change your behaviors. Which often involves keeping VERY strong disconnects between any “personal” device and any “private” device.

    There have been a lot of terrible (but wonderfully written) articles about journalists needing to do this because a government or megacorporation was after them. Stuff like having a secret laptop that they never even take out of a farraday cage unless they are closer than not to an hour away from wherever they are staying that night.



  • I think any “privacy oriented OS” is inherently a questionable (kneejerk: Stupid and reeks of stale honey) strategy in the first place.

    A very good friend of mine is a journalist. The kind of journalist where… she actually deals with the shit the average person online larps and then some. And what I and her colleagues have suggested is the following:

    Two flash drives

    • One that is a livecd for basically any linux distro. If you are able to reboot the machine you are using and boot to this, do it. That helps with software keyloggers but obviously not hardware
    • One that is just a folder full of portable installs of the common “privacy oriented” software (like the tor browser) supporting a few different OS types.

    Given the option? Boot the public computer to the live image. Regardless, use the latter to access whatever chat or email accounts (that NEVER are logged into on any machine you “own” or near your home) you need.



  • I’ve been rewatching Veep in honor of Kamala and only having moderate anxiety going into November and… this is the kind of shit even Selina wouldn’t have screwed up on. Part of that is very much that Selina might be a horrible person but she is a fundamentally good leader who cares about The American People.

    But it is also just that this level of unforced error from candidates with entire political parties behind them should be unfathomable. Even Veep usually had to make convoluted situations for why Selina would always be blindsided by something The Main Party did or what horrible tragedy she was accidentally mocking that week.

    And yet… that is the GOP.


  • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.ziptoNews@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    11 days ago

    Ignoring the baseless speculation on whether these are legal guns or illegal guns, since there is a pretty good spread on that spectrum:

    The importance is having fewer guns overall. If the availability of legal guns is drastically reduced then it will be a lot harder for an ar-15 to fall off the back of a truck or go missing in someone’s home. It won’t happen overnight but it will happen pretty quickly. We have seen this happen in other “Western” nations.

    Personally? I don’t want to infringe on the rights of responsible gun owners. If anything, I want to make them even more responsible. What that means is that I want:

    1. Much stricter background checks on buying firearms. By all means, factor therapy and rehabilitation into that (just because someone had a nervous breakdown in high school shouldn’t impact their ability to own a people killer so long as an accredited mental health professional signed off on it. But no “gun show loopholes” and more “cooling off periods” to ensure that NOBODY can buy a gun same day.
    2. Ammunition is a controlled substance. You want to buy a box of 9mm rounds? Cool, you are going to fill out a form to make sure that is tracked and you are going to be limited to a certain number of rounds per year unless you fill out the proper forms to get more (comparable to how suppressors and SBRs are handled). And, again, cooling off period. You fill out the form and a week later you can buy your bullets.
    3. Liability on firearms. If your gun is used in a crime then you are charged for it, regardless of whether you pulled the trigger or not. You can bet that people will be disposing of their twenty kitchen cabinet guns almost immediately once they realize they are liable for Little Timmy shooting up his school. And if a gun goes missing? You can bet they will report that within minutes of finding out (and will be checking those gun safes semi-regularly as a result).
    4. Liability on sellers. If a gun is used in a crime then ALL the above paperwork will be triple checked and any improper procedures will result in the seller losing their license or even being charged with negligence.

    All these giant piles of “illegal guns” will dry up pretty quick (comparable to a civilized nation where they are fairly rare for criminals to use) and all the guns that kids take to school will similarly actually be locked up in a way that Little Timmy doesn’t have unsupervised access to.

    But all those Responsible Gun Owners™? They won’t be affected because clearly they are already securing their firearms when not actively in use and always know where their collection is and are making sure that only people who are also Responsible Gun Owners™ have access to it.


    Hell, as a treat, let’s let people who own public shooting ranges jump through some more hoops to relax some of that. You need 500 rounds of .223 a day to practice shooting? Buy it by the mag at Herman’s Military Antiques and use it at his range. You can’t take it home with you but you never needed to take it home to practice shooting, right?

    But also? Public shooting ranges. no private ranges or members only rangers that let rich youtubers build up an armory. If you want the exception then you have to admit anyone who can pass a safety check (with strict penalties for those who inevitably lie to keep The Pink Haired People out) and have documentation that they are using a legally owned firearm.


  • It isn’t about being reasonable.

    If you are expected to track your time to this degree (and, to make it clear, the majority of employers actively don’t want you to), there is a reason. That reason usually being different funding sources. Generally a mix of grants and clients.

    And if a client or grant source finds out you are lying about those? Maybe you only had enough work to do 34 hours instead of 40 hours in one week. Would you be cool paying extra because the guy repairing your muffler had a slow week?

    And if people think being proud of a tool that openly talks about what everyone else silently does isn’t a red flag for employers? Hey, its a great job market so I am sure none of that will matter.