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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • From Abraham Lincoln to Franklin D. Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan and beyond, Americans fought for freedom and human dignity and against tyranny; we promoted democracy, funded the Marshall Plan, and saved millions of people across Africa from HIV and AIDS. When we caused harm—Vietnam, Iraq—it was because of our overconfidence and naivete, not evil intentions.

    Wow. This motherfucker thinks Reagan was actually good on the AIDS issue‽ No wonder he didn’t “see this coming;” he’s a genuine moron!






  • You can only live and breathe your job with little to no entertainment.

    Not to diminish your point, but back then they still had (often walkable) “third places.” That included social clubs – think the freemasons, shriners, the “water buffalo lodge” from the Flintstones (since that what Millennials and younger are most likely to be familiar with), etc. They also knew their neighbors a lot better than we typically do today: most houses had substantial front porches generating ad-hoc conversions with people walking by, they more frequently had block parties, etc.

    TL;DR: they got a lot of their entertainment though actual in-person human interaction.




  • It wasn’t even necessarily the majority. Not back then, and not now. What happens is that normalcy bias stops even people who oppose the regime from acting against it until it’s already too late:

    But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

    And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

    — Milton Sanford Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45





  • Every difference between digital and vinyl is caused by vinyl failing to faithfully reproduce the original signal. It may be “pleasing” signal degradation, but it is degradation nonetheless.

    As for the analogy about different headphones, I don’t think differences in quality of the amplification/playback hardware are necessarily tied to the recoding medium playback mechanism itself. In other words, you could just as easily hook some vacuum tube amp up to your CD or FLAC player if that “warm” sound was what you were going for.






  • He’s talking about it now to maximize time spent normalizing the idea in the minds of the public.

    It’ll go directly from “nah, it’s just an idle hypothetical” directly to “so what? We always knew this was the plan and haven’t done anything about it, so it must be okay” without stopping in the middle for “holy shit, this is unconstitutional bullshit!”


  • I mean, technically there’s no reason a router can’t route between more than two networks. For example, I’ve got both fiber and cable Internet (for no real good reason – I ought to cancel one and save some money) and I’ve configured my OpenWRT router to have two different uplinks, reconfiguring one of the four LAN ports to WAN2 instead.

    I’ve also got the other ports configured for separate VLANs (walling my untrustworthy Chinese ONVIF cameras off from being able to phone home, for example), but I think that’s technically not “routing” 'cause it’s OSI layer 2.

    I assume it’s not common to have more that two networks being routed, especially in a SOHO environment, but it’s definitely not impossible.