japan is a sovereign nation too. one that doesn’t get to decide whether a foreign power from across the pacific ocean gets to park military bases in their land.

there’s a long spectrum from totally under control -> totally independent and you will find that virtually every smaller country is rarely totally independent

i’d like to challenge you and show me one thing i said that was false. it’s easy to throw shade say something like “everything you are saying is because you have fallen for propaganda, whereas me I am pure and untouched by propaganda”

russia was content with Ukraine being loosely coupled. They were not OK with Ukraine totally leaving the Russian sphere and joining the west. this is what triggered the invasion of Crimea and the little green men from the east.

you can see a similar, albiet different, dynamic with Taiwan and China. China is content (for now) with Taiwan remaining sort-of independent. but once the US for example says something “Taiwan is an independent country” they would invade.

there was a vulernability on the iphone a while back where someone would send you a specific hindu character and it would crash the OS. it can get you no matter what you do really, use or business. the difference is a business has a lot more to lose.

as for the OS talk…

I use MacOS on my macbook & Linux on my desktop at home. I don’t think Mac is intolerably locked down. I have virtually the same experience on both. Mac is a very smooth experience once you set it up how you like. I have the same command line applications, the same config files, the same firefox profile that gets synced in between them, same unix utilities that share folders/files as if they were native, can ssh from one to the other, etc

including windows in that would be a PITA

windows is clunky and the company pushing it is becoming progressively more hostile to its users. apple is greedy but at least with their OS it’s not pushy. it’s the hardware where they stick the knife and twist in terms of price

it’s pretty dangerous not to be getting security updates. probably for regular users won’t be a big deal. i have a feeling really bad vulnerabilities will be patched even if you don’t pay for it just out of a potential PR issue. but i would almost definitely pay this if I were a business who didn’t plan on switching to Win 11 soon

on a personal level i don’t understand why anyone continues to use windows these days

war in Ukraine is not a civil war

The war started in 2014 with Euromaidan. Where the pro-Russian government got ousted in a violent coup/revolution/uprising (what you call it depends on what you believe). The pro-Russian president had to flee the country.

Then a new government was quickly appointed, unconstitutionally, and that government is the current one. That administration was made up of far right leaders (think people like Andriy Biletsky). This administration immediately started cooperating with the CIA the very first day.

Then Russia invaded Crimea and started the covert operation in Donbas a few days after that.

It’s more complicated than saying it’s an invasion of a sovereign nation. It’s not a civil war either, you are right. But I think it’s closer to the Spanish Civil War than the invasion of Poland.

Really it’s: a coup triggered a war of independence against Russia. Ukraine was firmly in Russian sphere from 91 until 2014. Once that stopped being true, Russia invaded.

But I like to think of the Spanish Civil War because it’s the proxy war before the war. It’s a place for big powers to test new technologies. Get ready for the inevitable showdown.

How you end up on the candidates being equal on immigration is more mysterious to me. One of them is talking of mass deportation and there are still kids left over from the family separation camps

i guess i didn’t communicate my message well enough. it’s not that they are equal. it’s that I think they are both equally impotent to stop the march of the zeitgeist.

if you fast forward 10 or 15 years, i don’t think it’ll matter which president wins next week- in terms of immigration. people are inevitably going into camps, no matter what, at this point in time.

One of them is talking of mass deportation and there are still kids left over from the family separation camps

remember that Biden continued using Trump’s illegal loopholes to refuse asylum to people at the border, breaking both US and international law, while also still separating kids: https://www.kpbs.org/news/border-immigration/2024/07/29/report-reveals-migrant-family-separations-continue-under-biden

it’s done “bureaucratically” instead of “cruelly” but I dare you to try and explain the difference to a scared 6 year old

i hate trump because of his racist comments. but i hate biden and kamala too. at least trump doesn’t pretend to care- would you prefer someone abusing you to be honest about it or gaslight you? is it really a meaningful choice?

To be fair I think there are scenarios where Harris is less likely to get into a war, a bit like Chamberlain was less likely than Churchill to get Britain into a war

this is frankly a reductionist take. the situation today is not like the situation in the 1930s. if anything, Biden’s approach of milquetoast risk-aversion is probably closer to Chamberlain than a hypothetical Trump presidency would be

consider why the US doesn’t allow Ukraine to use American weapons in Russia. consider why US aid is limited to just enough to keep Ukraine alive. consider why the US has been openly pumping untold millions into Ukraine under the guise of the National Endowment for Democracy since the early 90s (and almost certainly many millions covertly, too)

this is a proxy war for control of Ukraine. if you were to make an analogy to WW2 it would be more Spanish Civil War than the invasion of Poland

i’m more cynical about her. it’s not that i don’t think gay rights and women rights aren’t important. they are. but to me, the primary issues i care about, in order of importance

a) probability of war

b) attitude towards immigrants

c) economic position

d) foreign policy in general

so for example I think Kamala is probably more likely to get us into war than Trump is. That gives points to Trump.

on the immigration front, I don’t have any illusions about where the national conversation is going. I was brought here to this country illegally as a small child. I grew up here illegal and it wasn’t until my early 20s that I managed to naturalize

so i’ve been embedded in immigrant communities, with a lot of illegals sprinkled in, and have been paying attention to immigration news for virtually all of life

i can only think of two politicians who have done something meaningful for illegals. Reagan and Obama. Reagan of course gave amnesty to millions of illegals. Obama enacted the DACA policy, which wasn’t nearly as broad as amnesty, but it was definitely a good thing that helped hundreds of thousands of people. but “immigration reform” has been promised my whole life by DNC and never delivered. best was the half-assed DACA

But let’s look at rhetoric from Biden. During campaign in 2020 he advocated for a “compassionate approach” and was “pushing for immigration reform”. he promised to halt the construction of “the Wall tm”

What about the last couple years? He expanded construction of the wall which he timed with a photoshoot with Customs and Border Patrol at the southern border. He also went on TV and started using the word illegal - which is a term Democrats historically haven’t used. I don’t think it’s offensive or anything- but it’s telling to show how the overton window has sharply been shoved to the right

Now look at Biden’s successor - Kamala - the woman I voted for begrudgingly. go to her website and look at the policies and you will see zilch about compassionate approach or immigration reform. today it’s “security and strong border”

right now over 65% of all Americans (not just GOP) support deporting all illegal immigrants. Something absurd to say even a decade ago. Majority of Americans support a policy which would effectively have the military going around house to house in order to put over 10 million people in camps, which they would stay at for years while the government tries to figure out the complex and expensive logistical challenge of moving millions of people out of the country (Germans had this same problem back in first half of the 1900s. they came up with a controversial solution to that question, of course)

so i’m not saying kamala is equal or worse than trump on this. trump is partly at fault for the rise in this change. but i think long term it won’t make a difference who wins in this field. either way immigrants are screwed, so it doesn’t really matter to me in this election

economic position, i think not gonna matter much. the whole “tax breaks for first time homeowners” from Kamala is yet another bailout to the banks at the expense of regular people. Trump put in sanctions on China, raising prices for Americans… Biden kept them in place and put some more. I don’t think this is much different. the reductionist “tax the rich” is a nice slogan but without meaning. as long as the government has a money tap funneling public money to leeches, no amount of taxes will ever filter down to help the working class

foreign policy in general. again, i don’t see much of a difference. china from above is a good example. iran is another. Obama actually came up with a revolutionary deal- bringing the Iranians back into the fold. Trump torpedoed that deal in spectacular fashion and then moved the American embassy to Jerusalem. Biden maintained the “get fucked” attitude towards Iran and went to Tel Aviv in Oct of last year to bend the knee to Netanyahu.

so to summarize

for the issues i mentioned, which are the ones that matter to me, i think long term the choice of candidate isn’t going to influence anything significantly either way. the zietgiest is headed in a certain direction and i don’t think either candidate has the capacity or willingness to meaningfully change the course of things

so then we get to why did i vote for kamala. because I think it’ll be inspiring to girls and women across the country. it’ll implicitly let them know they are equal and are able to accomplish anything, even the highest office in the country

i think that alone is worth voting for her. and of course Trump is a bit of a wild card and I prefer stability.

indie OS

it’s the OS that virtually every server uses. even Microsoft servers slowly switched away from Windows roughly a decade ago. Today majority of their servers run Linux

it’s not indie- it’s big and corporate. the difference is there’s a weird serendipitous intersection of OSS and corporate interest that has arisen in a way that allows regular joe schmoe to run software you can actually control. so that your computer actually belongs to you

imagine with your car. would you be OK with ads in your rear view mirror? with your car constantly sending data about how you drive to some nameless corporation? your car randomly turning on and updating itself while you sleep? taking away features you may want or adding features you don’t?

that’s the path we’re going down with cars right now. and it’s partly because people are content to sit on their laurels and cede all of their collective power to companies like Microsoft

i think breaking the barrier of sex in terms of male/female president is a powerful thing. there’s been so many women throughout history that could have been judith pulgars, politically speaking, and ended up getting pushed into more subservient positions

that’s the main reason. i dont think that’s an awful reason

as for the russian war thing, i rather like living in a pre-nuclear-war society.

this should have been done a long time ago. there’s gonna be a referendum on nov 5 2024 along with the general election: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Puerto_Rican_status_referendum

PR (pop: 3.2M) has more population than Wyoming (pop: 586K), Vermont (pop: 648K), Alaska (pop: 734K), and North Dakota (pop: 789K) combined (2.8M)

Puerto Ricans (at least outside of PR) tend to be less inclined to vote right wing unless another famous little Caribbean island

this is really just Trump searching for controversial takes to show up on headlines

realistically any real attempt to mass deport illegals would require

a) the involvement of the military

b) a dramatic increase in the size of ICE

police participating or not isn’t going to be a significant player in this

at that point it’s not really about the money

everyone needs a purpose. if you take away that purpose, people will start deteriorating.

“journey not the destination”. once you’ve reached something like $50M any more money doesn’t make any real difference in your daily life.

with the current stranglehold the pro-Israeli lobby has on American politics (includes both GOP and DNC) even 0.1% is a stretch

AIPAC even brags about it: https://aipacorg.app.box.com/s/t8vvqt7evxvgkzn5jktpwejate6oxo0y

98% of AIPAC endorsed candidates won their election in 2022. if you are a politician and you say something mildly critical of Israel they will go to war with you and do everything so that your opponent wins

Israel has figured out how to hack American democracy. There is no going back at this point. We are a pro-Israel country for the foreseeable future, regardless of which candidate wins this election or the next one or the next one

i guess it’s just puppeteer + ai prompting

unless AI gets significantly better in the next year or so I doubt it’s gonna be any better than someone spending an hour writing a puppeteer scraping script

which of these candidates is more likely to respond to any kind of public pressure about this?

neither. 0.0% chance for either candidate.

i only voted for kamala because she’s a woman and even though she’s an awful candidate at least we can get it out of our collective system, show little girls they can be president, and the neoliberal status quo is probably still better than Trump

i’m not entirely sure on that because I think Kamala is more likely to lead us into a war with Russia… but Trump is more volatile in general I think

Kids are disadvantaged in a number of ways compared to adults

• the obvious factor is that the prefrontal cortex is not developed. they simply do not have the capacity to make fully informed decisions.
• another factor is the simple lack of experience. when you compare an 8 year old to an adult, that adult has been through a lot of shit in their life. they learned a thing or two and that gives him the ability to sniff out bullshit much more easily than a child. think of it as the bullshit immune system
• kids don’t have the resources that adults do. they typically don’t have access to credit cards so the free things on the internet attract them more easily. websites (really apps these days) prey on this fact.

it’s an interesting moral question

if i give someone money and that alleviates their poverty, is that an ethical action? i think so. you are eliminating harm by reducing hunger, providing shelter, etc.

if i give someone money and that alleviates their poverty, but i do it for my own personal gain, is that an ethical action? you are still eliminating harm but you are doing it for an amoral reason.

ethical action, amoral motivation

then there’s the perspective of by taking advantage of this individual, you are doing your part in perpetuating an unjust system. you are playing the role of the opiate of the masses. distracting and comforting those who are at the bottom of the pyramid.

having said all that, i think it’s still more ethical than bumfights. although i couldn’t tell you if it was ethical or not by its own

at 76 with a reasonable amount of wealth under his belt, I’m surprised he was even mowing his own lawn

What do you mean “install as app”?

Around 2009~2011 if I remember correctly. Back then it was either IE or FF. Then Chrome came on the scene with their fancy marketing ads and blew up very quickly to overtake FF.

At the time FF felt bloated compared to Chrome, so Chrome was like the fresh new and faster alternative.

I can’t think of a single example where a web page doesn’t work on FF.

if FF want wider scale take-up outside of geeky niche groups

Lol. I remember when FF was the most popular browser.