If I were them, I’d be worried about targeted violence against me and my party more than random spree killings.

They very much are. The endless “You shouldn’t be able to track my jet” was very much about making it harder to plan a blue shell than it was about caring about getting clowned on for hating the environment. I honestly suspect THAT is the big reason that musk wanted to be a government official and destroy things. Now he can get a secret service detail (or at least pretend his hired thugs are secret service) for life.

You’re right, I don’t care about the plight of veterans any more than the plight of anyone else. If anything, I care slightly less because of their culpability in our military misadventures and the trail of death and destruction we’ve left in our wake. That said, they should be taken care of. Like anyone else should be taken care of.

That is more or less where I come down. I do not at all think that we should shake people’s hands and thank them for their service in shooting a brown kid and destroying a mosque… or sitting in an office chair while their coworkers did that for them. I don’t like salmon THAT much.

But the US military is more or less proof that socialism and planned economies work. And we have done wonders implementing aspects of UBI for them. But the moment they put down the gun/wrench/pen? Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

Like… fuck the VA. You shouldn’t have to have been told to look the other way from sexual assault of a fellow soldier to get medical and psychiatric treatment.

But deleting the VA without providing anything better? That is the same as destroying the orgs that apparently helped lower income households not freeze to death in the winter and is just about suffering for suffering’s sake.

And, of course, the call of duty generation just fantasize about how everyone is soap mcprice and is going to do a rambo because they don’t ACTUALLY understand how militaries or modern warfare works and refuse to acknowledge just how dangerous the guns on store shelves actually are.

And they won’t be.

Back in the day of bolt actions and single aimed shots? Yeah. Training matters a lot.

In the era of semi automatic rifles with high capacity magazines? Just aim at a crowd and squeeze a few times and you’ll get a couple kids.

Let’s break down the Call of Duty wank fantasy, shall we?

It’s the strategic operation planning, explosives training, understanding of communications, battle logistics and OPSEC training that makes them a possible threat to the government.

• Strategic Operation planning: Ah, yes. Because the average grunt is coordinating combined arms efforts. Let’s not forget that probably the most effective planned (alleged) murder of the past few decades was allegedly done by a rich comp sci kid
• Explosives training: Oh, okay. So they are going to be given a backpack full of C4?
• Communications: See above regarding how every grunt is Jack motha fugging O’Neill himself.
• Logistics: Ah, so those unhoused people are going to have the best supply chain to ever exist?
• OPSEC: Dude… it has been a decades long struggle to explain to the military why fitbits and cell phones aren’t good things to carry around

Again. Maybe we should discuss reality and not just thank Rambo for his service before he draws first blood for the fifteenth time?

The military aspect of this doesn’t make much of a safety difference because of all the other horrifically stupid decisions this country has made over the past century or so. What matters are that people are losing their homes. And maybe, just maybe, we should think about why one class of people get basically UBI but the rest of the country doesn’t.

You don’t need much training to commit mass murder with a semiautomatic weapon you bought from walmart. You just need money for ammo.

There is this propaganda (can’t imagine where it comes from…) that the real danger are poor people. It isn’t. It is middle and upper class people who have a dozen ARs in their closet who snap and decide to go on a killing spree.

And if you are going to pretend you care about military veterans: Maybe don’t imply they are all one bad day away from going on a spree?

The modern world needs to change. Humans are getting more and more depressed, broken, struggling and mentally ill just to get more and more exposed to ads, social pressure and the lot.

This is by design. People are rightfully criticizing the US for barely protesting our fascist regime. But everyone is either living paycheck to paycheck or well aware how quickly their savings will burn away if they get fired. So protests in the middle of the week, when politicians MIGHT see it, are a no go. And weekend protests mostly are ineffectual and just antagonize people who “just want some peace and quiet on their day off”

UBI is definitely something we have needed for decades now. I personally come down on the side of UBI for basic living expenses but encourage people to work for luxuries and advancement (and if that sounds like the dystopia of Mars in The Expanse…). But we need something so that people can actually live without a job as we put more and more work into automating those jobs away.

As for the topic at hand: I was fortunate enough to have a 9/80 job for a number of years (basically every other Friday off) and loved the schedule. And it is why I am so skeptical of the 4/40 movement and am increasingly suspicious it is a poison pill.

Because it isn’t like the workload is going to drop. So people are going to be expected to get a full week’s work done in four days. For some that is going to be trivial because they have such a small workload (that they are super eager to find ways to use AI to automate…). For others? That means early mornings and late nights and even faster burnout where they have to fit every single errand and the like into that Friday off and have even less energy to do anything on the weekend.

Like I said, I loved my 9/80 and it was really nice for making me value that every other Friday off and try to do something with it. But the number of times I had to swap a Friday last minute because of meetings or just come in for a half day to get a deliverable done…

And the logical reality is that companies will decide 4/40 is good for productivity… and pay people 90% of their former salaries because “We respect the work you are doing but you also only work four days a week…”. 90% of already stagnating salaries during a time of global inflation.

Having consistent uptime and not locking broken IMAP behind a paywall would beat Tuta.

I have a proton subscription (although I am in the process of switching to fastmail since that better suits my needs) but I think “privacy respecting email” is a fool’s errand and increasingly a red flag. In a lot of ways, it is no different than a VPN: They can say whatever the hell they want. If you are in a situation where you are trusting them then you have already made a mistake.

Proton et al ARE awesome because you can get a mostly functional email for free without any other identification (mostly functional in that a lot of services put the proton domains on a spam list… because anyone can get a burner). But if you are sending ANYTHING sensitive, you want to be encrypting that. And you want to do that in a way that is not asking the company to do it for you.

So as long as thundermail doesn’t require a phone number or some other form of personal ID to make an account: f’ing A. After that it is just a question of their support for IMAP et al (highly probable considering… Thunderbird) and what it costs to use your own domains.

Yes-ish.

The problem is getting a hold of that medication. For The Pill: Some monthly pills are prescription and others aren’t. Same with Plan B (emergency birth control to be taken within a day or two of the sexual encounter). Depending on the person’s health and body, they may or may not be able to get away with the non-prescription variants

But for “real” abortion pills? Those are basically all controlled to one degree or another.

So yeah. Anyone sort of kind of can mail whatever (blah blah blah, surveillance state, blah blah blah). But getting a hold of the materials TO mail is very much a challenge.

Hell. How do you know they were ever “good” to begin with? We have seen an increasing trend in long cons in open source projects and social media and the like.

Especially when most discourse is largely indistinguishable from AI anyway. Just make a vague non sequitor that aligns with the politics of the audience and everyone cheers.

And all of that is super easy to detect and assumes that the majority of major instance owners are actively fighting this. Just like how free market capitalism ensures everyone is happy and satisfied.

This is not a simple problem to solve. It was a problem in the days of message boards, a problem in the days of digg/reddit, and is still a problem today.

Understand the risks and dangers of what you use rather than just assuming things will be ideologically pure.

While I obviously support and use lemmy:

You DO realize that lemmy has even fewer protections against bots and no vetting of instance owners (or even mods on those instances), at all, right? The big difference is that there won’t be a news post about “special interests” controlling discourse on here.

It varies, but a general rule of thumb is that any personal insurance (home, life, auto, boat, whatever) will pay out for a terrorist attack but commercial policies (property insurance, loss of revenue, workers comp, etc) won’t unless they specifically pay for terrorism coverage. That said, even the personal insurances will generally have exceptions for war and mass scale destruction (e.g. nukes).

Which mostly boils down to the reality of any kind of insurance policy: In isolated cases, they’ll pay out. The bigger the incident, the more they will fight it and the more likely they are to pull out of a region.

Which is kind o a moot point since many/most auto insurers already refuse to deal with teslas due to their high repair costs and other fun stuff that they pretend isn’t a factor but totally is (the tendency for a car on “full self driving” to plow into oncoming traffic milliseconds after “full self driving” was logged to have been disengaged by the user).

Which is the other “secret” in all this “Won’t somebody think of the tesla drivers?!?!!?” stupidity. Yeah, teslas were often very competitively priced in their categories (in large part because of government subsidies that only musk was eligible for) and were very much an option for the people wealthy enough to buy a brand new car. But the moment you try to get insurance for the tesla you are going to take ownership of in one or two business days? You suddenly are shunted to a special insurer with higher rates and anyone with half a brain would raise DOZENS of red flags at that.

Whoa now. Some people bought their teslas an indeterminate period of time ago and are now afraid that people will look down on them for it or they’ll have to file an insurance claim. And even putting a “I bought this before he went crazy” bumper sticker on the back to show ANY form of solidarity is a personal attack on them.

And that is obviously the real issue. Not the people who chose happiness and transitioned to their actual gender identity and are now afraid that they’ll be violently assaulted for it. Or immigrants who are afraid they’ll have their visas or permanent residencies revoked and get deported to a random country. Or, you know, anyone who cares about any of those issues and are worried that the rest of the planet will hold them accountable for the horrific crimes coming out of our government.

But nah. This shit is the real issue. Gotta protect those purchases. Protesting is good so long as it doesn’t impact anyone who matters. And this is the kind of shit where people will complain that it is a waste of government resources and how it only serves to protect musk’s interests. All while they quietly are happy because it makes them feel safe and snuggly.

… What tesla are you fitting 7 people into these days?

Because they only have one vehicle that isn’t a sedan and… he was a full mask off hatemonger long before the cybertruck actually hit market.

A lot of that is why I have kind of always resented the tesla marketing even before we k new musk was a hateful sexpest. My uncle had one of the early models before they added a lot of the safety features and it was REAL fun to go basically have instantaneous acceleration… and he would probably have died from that if he didn’t die from cancer instead.

But very quickly they made the argument that people need giant batteries and massive range. And that still permeates today. And the reality is that, no, people don’t. The vast majority of driving is commuting which tends to be more stop and go than not and just making charging stations in parking lots more ubiquitous would go a REALLY long way. No, not the super chargers. Just simple slow as hell level 1 and 2 chargers. And that would cover basically everyone 6.9 days a week outside of the folk with REALLY long commutes.

Where long range and super fast charging DOES help is for people doing long road trips and… folk think they are gonna be in their 30s and 40s driving 12 hours straight with only a stop to dump their piss bottle at a gas station. The reality is that by the time you are even considering a “new” car, you are probably also going to be more likely to stop for lunch or have kids to deal with where 30-40 minutes for a full recharge makes a lot more sense.

But instead we got into the mindset that you need a massive battery so you only charge up once a week and when you do it is a 10 minute recharge because even that is too long to wait.

I occasionally think of an alternate timeline where we realized that was stupid and instead L1/2 charging stations were a lot more popular and pretty much every major manufacturer switched to plug-in hybrids. Yeah, their battery tends to be shite compared to a “real” EV but people vastly underestimate how much you get from regenerative braking under real world conditions. Couple years back I had a rental toyota sedan and ended up driving all around Ontario for the better part of a week on like half a tank of gas and it was insane. And the needle literally did not move the entire time I was in Toronto or even frigging London.

All major companies have blood on their hands. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism.

To my knowledge, only one company’s CEO is publicly heiling hitler and actively destroying a government and killing children by defunding aid programs in a manner that violates the constituion.

And, personally? I do make it a point to avoid giving money to the REALLY bad companies. In a lot of cases that is just not possible because of the late stage capitalism hellscape we live in. But when I have the choice between some Popeyes and some chikfila? One of those companies openly funds MUCH worse things than the other and walking a block farther is, quite frankly, the least I can do.

But, instead, we need to celebrate people supporting evil through apathy and then actively defend them when protests are happening? Y’all were the ones who were talking about how kyle rittenhouse is a bad person but he had a point about being worried about the guy who owned the Target on 5th street, huh?

Because what does this say to our LGBTQ+ friends (assuming everyone involved has some…) or the people being illegally deported and sent to internment camps when the biggest pushback is “Whoa. Your protesting might inconvenience me and is thus bad”?

Okay? Then don’t expect me or anyone else to research the political affiliation of the owner of the tesla we see on the street to decide if they are a hateful pro-nazi prick or not?

Google says you can sell it to a dealer or a used car service like carmax.

Is that going to be a bit of a hassle? Yeah. You know what else is going to be a bit of a hassle? Needing to pretend you aren’t the gender you are because the government has painted a target on your head for choosing happiness. Or hoping nobody decides to take away the green card you worked your ass off to earn.

And is the value going to be dropping? Yeah. So get on that. Plenty of us are getting on finding ways to emigrate to countries that are less horrifically fucked and speedrunning their way to gilead and we know those slots are gonna dry up. And we are the privileged ones who even have a chance at doing this.

So “it is hard and I might lose a bit of money and it isn’t my fault I couldn’t be bothered to care until now” is a load of horse shit. And people wonder why I, and so many others, just laugh-cry whenever people talk about how this upcoming thing is totally going to flip the switch and get America to riot in the streets.

All owners that they can find in various leaks/databases when I checked last week.

And musk has been a known evil dipshit since at least 2018 when he threw a hissy fit because the divers who rescued those kids didn’t use musk branded products. He accused one of the divers of being a pedophile and actively devoted resources to “proving” this.

Let alone the countless stories of musk being a sex pest (remember having to buy a woman a pony because of whatever he did to her?)

So, at best, people can argue “I didn’t care enough to do any research on what I bought and accidentally enabled a nazi.”. At which point… I really don’t give a fuck? Its the same as the people who couldn’t be bothered to do any research and were surprised to hear that biden apparently wasn’t on the ballot.

Their apathy is causing untold horror to at risk groups and the global economy. So they can go fuck themselves.

And, totally anecdotal: I have seen fucked up teslas in parking lots next to un-fucked ones that just had a “I bought this before he went insane” or “I hate him too” bumper sticker.

Ah. I see. Your entire point is that a completely ineffectual group that will do nothing will be unhappy. So there is absolutely no reason for trump et al to care just like they haven’t cared about anything else.

I “love” the “I am technically correct” reddit crowd.

“the majority of Americans” already don’t give a fuck. They’ll just listen to whatever the news tells them (and CNN et al are eager to not piss off trump). If we were actually going to go from 0 to building guillotines at the drop of a hat, wouldn’t it have happened when Power of the Purse was completely shat on? Or, you know, the violent insurrection?

PEOPLE will “continue to follow laws” because laws apply to them.

The fascists in charge of the government? They will ignore the laws because they won’t be enforced. And then they’ll make new laws to suit themselves (see: Attack a Tesla, get sent to gitmo).

You are arguing the exact same fucking idiocy that schumer et al have: “Oh, well, there is a line they won’t cross because clearly the republicans are afraid of The American People and our love for decorum. And then we can talk and fix things”

So…

Not the potus. Not musk. Not doge. And not the rest of the fascists.

But hey, we’ll all sign a bunch of moveon petitions and express our anger while still tut tutting anyone who defaces a tesla or a target.