Nothing But Trouble, so they don’t come back

We made an automaton clerk. It has neither arms nor body, but it works all day translating physician’s documents, so they may be stored with uniformity in a library that has neither shelves nor paper.

Sometimes, somewhat.

You wanna go for start-ups then. Most bigger and medium-sized companies have centrally-managed security where they wanna push updates and such to all computers or there’s some corporate spyware everyone’s gotta run or they’ve got everyone on M$ Office etc etc. Odds are a place that lets you use a linux laptop is going to be reluctant to buy you one and invite you to use your own. Macbooks aren’t so bad, if they let you have sudo, lots of places use those.

I wonder if it has much to do with the USAF being a relatively new service with a proportional cultural impact, coming into being as a service in 1947. Up until then, combat aviation was subordinate to the Army and Navy. This would point to a preponderance of Army/Navy WWII vets among the show’s consultants and audience.

Being privacy-conscious can protect your information from being passively collected by mainly corporate entities that track your buying habits, life events, and health.

If you think you’re being actively targeted for surveillance, then you need security that is proportional to the resources that the people who are spying on you have. In the case of say, the NSA, they could have a backdoor in a various location in your hardware or software stack. If you have privacy tools like tor, they’re liable to target you and collect your data just for that. Most android/IOS phones are thoroughly bugged and tracked, to the point where if the battery is still attached and the phone is switched off you can still be tracked. If the NSA does collect your data, there’s a 99% chance no human will look at your data unless they have a reason to search for you.

If you are being spied on, odds are you won’t catch it. You might be able to isolate abnormal outbound network traffic if you’re really good about tracking that kind of thing on your network. Your phone could connect to a fake Stingray cell station and you wouldn’t know.

If you’re being stalked by a person with less resources than the NSA, it becomes a lot easier and common-sense privacy protections can help you keep a low enough profile.

It’s also worth noting that if private companies get a hold of your data, they’ll sell it to any government or private organization who’ll pay them. There’s scant regulation about what they can’t collect and what they can’t do with it.

I think the simplest rule of thumb is if you have something sensitive, don’t say it near an android or ios phone and don’t put it on a computer that’s plugged into the internet. Criminals have their own OPSEC, as do people in the intelligence industry, and usually the answer is an “air gap”.

I’m typing on a mac keyboard on Debian. USB one with the numpad. It’s fantastic if you’re into that.

The last time I tried to pair the magic mouse 2 though, no joy. I’d be wary of the bluetooth keyboard.

Soulseek is good for downloading albums and discographies, soundiiz, qobuz-dl and deemix-gui are good for that and also playlists of whatever. It’s also a good way to get FLACs. I download genre mixes, pitchfork’s top albums, it’s a good way to get 80gb of music in a night. It’s taken me 3 months to get that much off Soulseek. Sometimes you want to try out artists without downloading their whole discography.

Nicotine+ is OK, I upload about a tb a month on there and occasionally I find a missing track I can’t find on Deezer, Qobuz or Bandcamp. Turns out other people aren’t just imperfect versions of you.

2023 was absolutely the year I dove back into music piracy. I started with downloading youtube playlists but the real game changer was soundiiz, which allowed me to import text, m3u, csv, spotify, xspf playlists into qobuz and deezer so i can download whole playlists of FLAC with qobuz-dl and deemix-gui. My collection went from 20,000 to 100,000, downloading playlists from qobuz and deezer, xspf playlists from my remaining lossy music. I used streamripper on a few web radio stations just to get a list of songs to pull down this way. I only bought music for years and years, but that got me a narrow type of collection.

I worked with Aaron Barr

He went on to be CEO of HBGary, a federal contractor. He claimed he could dox Anonymous. It didn’t go well for him.

I was doing that anyway in my early 20s. Now I’ll do it for $50,000.

Generally it’s the belief that America’s police, military, state department, and politicians of one’s political party, represent the country, and that they deserve preference over all other countries. Further, it usually involves upholding a belief that there is a national identity that supports the dominant language, culture, historical narrative, etc. The word for this type of belief, generalized to any country, is Nationalism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationalism

There’s also the belief that America is unique in that it has the best government, that it is a positive influence on the rest of the world, and that international laws do not apply to the USA, this is a subset of nationalism called American Exceptionalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_exceptionalism

Here are some things these people believe:

• The US military is a heroic force that spreads freedom and peace to the world.
• The US was the dominant factor in winning World War II
• The nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was necessary and caused the Japanese surrender.
• The US was trying to help the people of Vietnam from their communist revolution and was militarily winning the war until they withdrew forces. The bombing of Laos and Cambodia is not mentioned.
• The US has been a beneficial and protective presence in South Korea.
• Israel is a benevolent ally that spreads peace and democracy in the Middle East.
• Immigrants, especially Mexicans, refugees, and Muslims, are a threat to American culture and prosperity.
• Everyone in the country and world should speak English.
• The US constitution created by the “Founding Fathers” in the 1700s is a perfect document.
• US Americans enjoy more freedom and democracy than any other country.
• Cuba, China, and North Korea are repressive authoritarian dictatorships and it is right for the USA to try to free those people from their governments.
• The USA was justified in destroying the government of Libya.
• The USA was justified in invading Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Panama, Cuba, Russia, Grenada, Somalia, etc.
• The USA was justified in joining NATO in the bombing and overthrow of Yugoslavia.
• UN is bad. They try to stop the USA from fighting just wars and they want to take over US sovereignty and take your guns.
• NATO is good. They spread freedom. Or they’re bad because they’re globalists.
• There is no mention of supporting genocide in Indonesia, white terror in South Korea, biological warfare in South Korea, etc.
• The people and government of China and Russia are bad and everything they do is bad and supporting them is morally and factually wrong in any context.
• Communism is a political system where political power is concentrated into the hands of a privileged few, people are propagandized to believe that they are free and happy and that their government is beneficial, when in fact they are subjects to a harsh and repressive totalitarian regime that must be overthrown and require America’s help to overthrow it.
• Capitalism is a political system that is non-coercive and liberates and benefits everyone who participates in it.
• The United States is the only country with true freedom of speech.
• Communists are criminals and should not be allowed to have a platform.
• Socialism is destroying Europe and the US health care system is the best in the world.
• Refugees are destroying Europe and raping everyone.
• The police in the US are heroes and people who protest them are misguided and trying to destroy our country and are not true Americans.
• Crime is a problem that is solved by increasing the number and power of police, as well as more gun ownership.
• Terrorism is a problem that is solved by increasing the funding and power of the military.
• The motto of the US Army Special Forces is “De opresso liber”, “To free the opressed” and nationalists believe that is what they do.
• There is no reason to visit other countries, because everyone knows they’re shitholes.

If you want to know where these ideas come from, I suggest “A People’s History of the United States” by Howard Zinn, “Inventing Reality” by Michael Parenti and “Manufacturing Consent” by Noam Chomsky.

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Atheist. Raised catholic. Too old, I realized that the god of the bible isn’t a moral person. 1 Samuel 15:3 etc. Arguing with young-earth creationists gave me the final push, I understood science well enough to understand the implications of radiometric dating, plate tectonics, geology etc.

Iron Sky