sidereal

Cybernetician & thalassophile. Most posts auto delete. Just shytpostin 4 the rev 🔥

"One of the most vicious partisans in the labor movement." -- real quote from a real hater!

Location:: Seattle, Earth
Pronouns:: He/him
Age:: 30's

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npub1jf6zjmdfmjmglsvyqz4x33ttu4udx9qtkspsvkrgd74ygkje6nssqsjumu

NIP-05 Address

sidereal_at_kolektiva.social@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsfyapfdk5aed50cxzqp2ngc44727xnzs9mgqcxtp5xl2jytfvafcgpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dscwt2at

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relay.damus.io

nos.lol

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Last Notes

2026-04-29 14:46:31 UTC

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yes, that was unclear haha.

2026-04-29 14:37:14 UTC

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even today, they’re at about a 1:1 ratio of profs to admin staff. Which is where most American universities were at the beginning of the sixties. Since then, at most American schools, it’s ballooned to more like 3:1 and then 5:1 in favor of the admin.

2026-04-11 02:23:17 UTC

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slsk is the best. I joined a band with some older teens in like 2003 and they turned me onto it. It has consistently been the best part of the internet this entire time

2026-03-10 15:01:18 UTC

Whoever came up with the system “if you don’t allocate all of your yearly budget, your budget will be smaller next year” is responsible for so much human misery and wasted money

2026-03-01 17:12:46 UTC

LLM boosters: This is trained with all of the text and code on the public internet!
People who can fucking think: So it's extremely low quality, then?

2026-02-27 01:41:31 UTC

I'm not saying the Democrats WANT to lose the next Presidential election, but they are weirdly attached to Gavin Newsom, and that makes me think they definitely don't want to win.

2026-02-20 16:14:41 UTC

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real ones know!

2026-02-20 15:32:40 UTC

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The one editing tip I have, and it's some shit most writers don't do:
Read what you wrote out loud to yourself.
This instantly calls out when something flows awkwardly. No need for any technology or other people.

2026-02-20 15:23:17 UTC

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The process Cory is describing of
- finding an open source AI program
- downloading and installing it
- maintaining it
is all time that I would prefer to just be writing and editing manually. Maybe he's finding it worthwhile to invest that time. I don't think I would, so I won't be doing that.

2026-02-20 15:20:12 UTC

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This is all to say, when I first read the "avoiding AI is neoliberal purity culture take" it raised my hackles. On reading the replies to Cory wherein people weren't even engaging with the fact that he's using self-hosted AI, I gotta admit, he kinda does have a point. There are some people avoiding AI out of a sense of purity culture.
But for me, I'm avoiding it because I'm just not impressed by it. I don't see a way to use any of these tools in my regular life and work.

2026-02-20 15:18:29 UTC

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How did I get so good at English grammar that I have little need for technical editing?
Well, I certainly didn't get this good by using AI to correct my shit.
I spent a lot of time reading, and then I spent a lot of time writing.

2026-02-20 15:16:26 UTC

Re: "Avoiding AI is neoliberal purity culture" discourse
The main reason I avoid AI is because I've never been impressed by a use case. I've never seen AI do something and been like "OMFG I need to do that!"
What Cory Doctorow has outlined is a fine way to use self-hosted AI for grammar correction. As a professional writer, we can see why he would want to speed up this process.
But also? I don't need AI for this, all my first drafts are perfect the first time. ASK MY EDITOR!

2026-02-06 19:13:53 UTC

Lying is wrong. However. The only fringe benefit I can see from the proliferation of AI/LLM shit is now it’s very easy to tell who I can get away with lying to: all the people into AI/LLM may be intelligent, but they lack capacity for critical thinking.

2026-02-04 20:12:04 UTC

Trump talking about suspending midterm elections is the absolutely predictable result of the last few years.
He said in 2016, before he was elected, that if he didn't win re-election he would stage a coup.
Then he did exactly that in 2020.
It's almost hard to condemn Trump for this stuff. He is literally just doing what he said he was gonna do. It's very easy for me to condemn the Dems for not attempting to stop this guy, and instead adopting his policies and tactics.

2026-02-02 06:54:36 UTC

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😡😡😡

2026-02-02 02:34:40 UTC

Wow it finally happened to me!
An elder in my community approached me asking for help about digital security and privacy!
I feel like being on here kinda prepared me for the conversation. I thanked him for asking me about it, and talked about how there's a lot of ignorance and people preying on that ignorance.
I asked him what, specifically, he was worried about, and we talked about effective ways to mitigate those risks. Honestly it was great

2026-02-01 13:58:56 UTC

Kinda hilarious that the Dems are focusing on affordability now… and not during the Biden admin when everything at the grocery store started to cost about 4x as much
These motherfuckers are always a day late and several dollars short

2026-01-30 16:58:39 UTC

All I’m saying is the stuff Trump has done in office is way worse, and more illegal than, any of the Epstein stuff.

2026-01-30 02:28:39 UTC

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@SnoopJ/115981267745589573
"posts on fediverse can't go viral"
trolley problem meme i made years ago: [exists]
haters said it couldn't be done. and yet

2026-01-27 16:41:01 UTC

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“the term has been overused to the point of meaninglessness, especially by left-leaning types who call you a fascist if you oppose abortion or affirmative action.”
Uhhh, only a fascist would oppose abortion or affirmative action. I love how in this guy’s article about how “I was wrong about fascism” he’s STILL pulling this fuckin fashy talking point.
Leftist people don’t overuse the term fascist. The USA is merely a country with a lot of fucking fascists in it.

2026-01-27 15:50:51 UTC

Almost all of the tear gas being used right now was made & procured under previous administrations.
DHS has not “fallen from grace,” they were always bad. Some people have been saying this since they were founded.
There is nothing uniquely “Trumpian” about what is happening right now. This is the natural & very predictable result of the course of American society for the last several decades.

2025-12-30 17:05:36 UTC

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iPods were great for DJs in a way that smartphones haven't been able to mimic.
You could just put like 40gb worth of music on there, and then play it on almost any sound system of the time (without an internet connection!). Output via audio jack or USB. And, crucially, iPods had no notifications, ever, interrupting your music. They never needed to have their software updated, either. Like, there were bugfixes and stuff, but you could ignore it and they worked fine out of the box.

2025-12-30 17:00:12 UTC

It's almost 2026 and I still dislike not having a headphone jack on my smartphone

2025-12-13 20:33:16 UTC

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Flo mask > all
https://www.flomask.com/
Good seal, v comfortable.
Expensive to get the mask in the first place, but the replaceable filters mean it ends up being more cost effective than anything else.
50 filters for $60, and I replace the filter once a week. Also IMO it looks cooler than most other n95-compliant respirators (I don't care how effective the duck bill ones are, I just can't with them).

2025-12-09 01:07:09 UTC

Augh, today I briefly used a computer with no adblock to access the internet.
It's so bad! It's so much worse than I remember. Oh my god. I don't think I would/could use the internet anymore if ublock origin didn't exist.

2025-12-03 16:41:26 UTC

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In case you were wondering, "why didn't anyone warn us about this?" I was. I told you all so.
I told anyone who would listen in 2020 that Biden was a shitty candidate because some shit could heat up in Israel and he would lose the election over it.
I didn't think he would lose to Trump, though, I figured the Republicans would run a better canddiate after Biden put Trump in prison.
Biden was probably the most disappointing President of my lifetime.

2025-12-03 16:04:17 UTC

Good morning! Trump won re-election because Biden enacted all of Trump’s plans on Covid, and was far more hawkish about Israel/Palestine than Trump has ever been.
If you interpret this as a pro-Trump post rather than an anti-Biden post, congrats, you aren’t part of the problem, you’re the entire problem.
When the Dems run someone who is more conservative than Trump, and their entire campaign is little more than “omg you want Trump to win” what reason is left to vote for them?

2025-11-28 16:49:02 UTC

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In the USA, "everybody knows" that the Wright Bros invented the airplane, because they achieved the first powered flight.
In Brazil, "everybody knows" that Alberto Santos-Dumont invented the airplane, because he built the first airplane.

2025-11-28 16:43:28 UTC

In the USA, "everybody knows" that we "obviously won" the space race by landing on the moon first.
In the former Soviet Union, "everybody knows" that they "obviously won" the space race by going into space first.

2025-11-24 16:17:08 UTC

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“Let’s boycott to bring down capitalism! Still support small businesses tho!” Why?

2025-11-24 16:16:11 UTC

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If you interpret this as a pro-corporate thing, you missed the point. I’m not saying corporations are good, I’m saying small businesses aren’t any better. They’re just as exploitative, sometimes more.

2025-11-24 16:13:45 UTC

I don’t care about small businesses.
They’re all capitalist hellholes.
Independent landlords and employers have fucked me over even more than big corporations.

2025-11-22 01:41:14 UTC

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I did NOT predict Trump and Mamdani getting along so well. Surreal.

2025-11-21 19:08:47 UTC

The thing about "bread & circuses" as a tool of oppression is that you can't give people too much bread. If people have enough bread to live on, you just get the 2020 Uprising.
In the form of the internet and digital media, we have circuses like the ancient Romans could have never believed.

2025-11-11 02:28:25 UTC

OK, the new mastodon update is pretty good. Cheers to everyone involved thank you bless this mess

2025-10-29 17:21:00 UTC

Like most people in Seattle, I live on the side of a steep hill.
Awhile back I stopped and helped a homeless guy get back in his wheelchair. He had fallen out while going downhill because the sidewalk was so uneven.
I noticed how the street was totally smooth, had just been repaved. The sidewalk looked like it was decades old, cracked & gnarled with roots.
It wasn’t an accident that this guy fell out of his wheelchair, it was policy decisions that prioritize car owners over everyone else.

2025-10-29 16:39:11 UTC

It’s backwards that the government shutdowns include funding the military (allegedly to keep people alive) but don’t include funding the welfare programs (SNAP etc) that actually keep people alive

2025-10-19 15:49:50 UTC

Job interviews: bad for the applicant, but it’s also a massive waste of time/resources for the company. There is no correlation between interview performance and job performance, it’s purely a method of discrimination. Multiple rounds of interviews? There is no economic justification for this level of complexity. No job is so meaningful as to require multiple interviews.
If someone is qualified? Hire them. If they lied about their qualifications, fire them. Cut this shit out.

2025-10-10 14:49:46 UTC

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Like why is being an antifascist important? Because fascists want to kill people, and saving lives is good. Protecting people who fascists want to kill is good.
It's not a thought exercise, it's not about being morally correct. It's much simpler than some of these academics are making it.

2025-10-10 14:48:44 UTC

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I guess it's just surprising to me that someone who writes books like Dr. Bray doesn't also own a gun.
I don't mean any disrespect, I just would have thought someone in his position would have either "bought a bunch of guns and learned how to use them" or "moved to Europe" by now. The time to make this call was, like, 2017.

2025-10-10 14:07:59 UTC

I’m gonna say it. Full sympathy and support to Dr. Mark Bray but it is weird to me that more people on “the left” aren’t more prepared for the possibility of death threats, and the possibility of needing to leave the country without getting on a commercial jet.
These are all things I have spent the last nine years thinking a lot about so I don’t see why all of these academic “fascism experts” seem to not understand the stakes

2025-10-10 13:56:37 UTC

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this is not a fucking win, and neither is anything Newsom has done. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news
How is it a victory to give the Nobel Peace Prize to someone who is calling for war? How is it a victory for Newsom to ape Trump’s tactics? Remember, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Also, no one mentioned Newsom or Pritzker except you.
I invite you to please, please get your shit together and stop posting embarrassing stuff.

2025-10-09 22:50:48 UTC

"the United Nations estimates [stealing crypto] now accounts for 13% of North Korea's GDP."
Perfect, no notes

2025-10-03 10:08:06 UTC

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the school I’m going to right now has a required math class that is taught by an AI booster who encourages students to use chatgpt for math

2025-10-01 16:50:16 UTC

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*landlords who also own combine harvesters that are run by GPS and get paid by the feds to employ nobody

2025-10-01 15:17:30 UTC

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Yes, the people most folks think of when they say “farmers” are more properly termed “farm workers.”
Also, even back in the “golden age of American independent farming” (between 1790 and 1860 or so) the veggies and crops were for their own families. They were making money off of their woodlots — which is to say they were extracting timber from stolen land.
Not very many people in this country have ever farmed and the number is lower now than it ever has been.

2025-09-25 16:53:29 UTC

So Luigi might get off completely cos Trump officials won’t stop talking about the case on twitter. All of the terrorism charges against him have already been dropped bc they won’t shut up about it, the death penalty is basically off the table bc they won’t shut up about it, and now the judge is threatening to throw out the entire case… and they still won’t shut up about it. This is kind of incredible to watch.

2025-09-25 15:56:53 UTC

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Starting in about the 1870’s, most American cities banned pockets on women’s clothing because the OG Suffragettes were carrying so many guns and knives. So then big hats became fashionable as women started using hat pins (basically a 9” metal spike) for self defense.

2025-09-23 07:04:18 UTC

Remember. Since autistic people are massively overrepresented in the research sciences: Autism causes vaccines, not the other way around.

2025-09-14 19:01:01 UTC

https://crimethinc.com/2025/01/28/its-safer-in-the-front-taking-the-offensive-against-tyranny
"Faced with intensifying repression and state violence, there is an understandable inclination to seek safety by avoiding confrontation. But this is not always the most effective strategy."
Perennially useful article.

2025-09-11 15:23:50 UTC

OK also there's a lot going on, but let's not lose sight of the fact that Israel recently attempted to assassinate a bunch of Hamas leaders in Qatar when they were supposed to be meeting with them to have a ceasefire.
Like. Israel is going kind of wild right now. I think they've done drone/bomb strikes on 6 countries in two days?

2025-09-09 02:21:00 UTC

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We had something like this at my school, my friend and I ended up starting a counterfeiting ring using the library's copy machine. One of us would distract the librarian while the other made the copies

2025-09-08 21:09:35 UTC

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After an hour on the phone, I now have the soonest possible appointment to establish care with a new PCP. It's in...
March, 2026.
Man healthcare in this country is screwed up.

2025-09-08 19:30:20 UTC

USA, 2025:
I need a new doctor because my old one quit his job and moved to Canada.
I have made two appointments with other doctors which were both canceled a few weeks before the appointment... because both of those doctors were also quitting their jobs and moving to Canada.
Wooo

2025-09-06 20:03:00 UTC

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I saw some chud comment on fedi that "fuck all these apps like Signal and Telegram, the feds are reading everything" and it's like lol yeah they probably are, but it's cryptographically secure. Unless someone adds a cop or a journalist to the group chat lmfao
We know it's cryptographically secure because Bezos and a bunch of other Amazon execs successfully used Signal for insider trading and the FTC couldn't go after them. If the FTC could have, they would have.

2025-09-06 20:01:29 UTC

#1 wish for this Jewish New Year is that Signal would let me pin more than 4 chats.
@npub1rkw…5q62 make it happpen. I'm doing my part, I got like 20 people to get on Signal this year

2025-08-26 17:32:16 UTC

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Off the top of my head I believe Germany, Mexico, Belgium, NL, and a few other countries (maybe Brazil?).
Charges can be made against someone who does something violent or destructive while breaking out of prison, but the actual escape attempt itself isn't criminalized. One won't have time added to their sentence just for attempting to escape.

2025-08-26 16:22:06 UTC

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There were people who thought that New Coke was made up to suck on purpose, so that they could bring back "Classic Coke" and make even more money. The CEO at the time said "We're not that stupid, and we're also not that smart" 🤣

2025-08-26 15:08:14 UTC

Nietzsche: He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby becomes a monster. And if thou gazeth long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.
Gavin Newsom: That sign can't stop me because I can't read!

2025-08-25 16:48:04 UTC

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Conservatism hasn't gotten a huge amount of voters to come out since 2004. The Democrats just keep hemorrhaging their own voter base with shitty policy by ceding to conservative positions, in order to chase centrist "moderates" who don't actually exist in big numbers. I wish I was exaggerating even a little bit. As far as I can tell most of the Democrats (I mean both party operatives & members) just aren't interested in studying political science or winning elections.

2025-08-25 16:43:48 UTC

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100%. The Democrats lost in '24 because they went too conservative. That some of them want to respond to that by going even more conservative just doesn't make sense.
Trump isn't winning because he's popular. He's winning because these folks are driving away Democratic voters in droves.

2025-08-25 15:31:09 UTC

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Also, the last time I checked there are about 1.5x as many registered Dems as there are registered Reps in this country. In a two-party system, we should call this an "undefeatable advantage." Americans as we actually exist are reasonably progressive on most issues. Over 65% of us favor legal weed, universal healthcare, and burning at least some police precincts. Literally the only reason Dems ever lose any elections is voter suppression and a news media controlled by capitalists, don't @ me.

2025-08-25 15:24:12 UTC

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The fact that these "Vote Blue No Matter Who" fuckers won't get behind Mamdani tells one everything one needs to know. The mainstream Democratic Party is worse than useless. Trump never would have won in 2016 with the Dems using obvious corruption to hand the primary to Clinton. And Trump never would have won in 2024 without the Dems mostly ignoring him after J6 instead of.
Trump's 2 presidencies are far more the result of the Democratic Party's actions than the Republican Party's actions.

2025-08-25 15:17:14 UTC

Anyway yeah I was real fuckin mad the entire Biden admin because I was like "bruh if you don't do anything about Trump you're gonna lose re-election due to some shit heating up in Israel/Palestine" and it sucks to be 100% right

2025-08-24 16:10:12 UTC

Rereading Pedagogy of the Oppressed because so many of my zoomer classmates basically cannot read & this was not an accident. It’s not like we forgot how literacy education works. It was aggressively defunded. Generations of people haven’t gone into public teaching because the pay & working conditions kinda suck. The so-called “No Child Left Behind” Act really fucked this country up.

2025-08-22 22:26:23 UTC

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some people can navigate it OK but most don’t

2025-08-22 22:25:53 UTC

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when you work within the system the system changes you too

2025-08-22 19:24:40 UTC

"When someone works for less pay than she can live on — ... she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently — then she has made a great sacrifice for you ... The 'working poor,' as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for. ... To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else."
-Barbara Ehrenreich

2025-08-19 16:09:54 UTC

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So why do landscaping workers use these things, if they don't save time or effort?
Because their bosses like the noise. Their bosses like their workers not able to talk to each other at work.

2025-08-19 16:09:00 UTC

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Anyway from the perspective of a person who actually works for a landscaping company, these things don't even save any time or effort.
1. the tools themselves are heavy af. Like. Way heavier than hand tools that do the same job. Ends up being way more effort to use the power tools. You'll consume more calories and your back will hurt more. Not opinion.
2. How do you like fucking around with filters and doing maintenance on small engines? Because you'll be doing more of that than yard work.

2025-08-19 16:06:38 UTC

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Like how could it be socially unacceptable to listen to loud music...
When these things are way louder?
How could it be socially unacceptable to smoke cigs inside...
When these things are way worse for indoor air quality?
Why do we make exceptions for two-stroke lawn equipment? This shit sucks!

2025-08-19 16:05:26 UTC

I genuinely don't understand how 2-stroke lawn equipment ever became socially acceptable?
- So loud. I live next to a hospital and the lawncare guys once a week are far more annoying and disruptive than all of the ambulances 24 hours a day.
- My entire apartment smells like gas when they're here. this is actually far more annoying than all the dudes smoking fentanyl in the alley.
- For what? So there can be fewer/smaller plants around? Guys. This is way more annoying than the plants are.

2025-08-19 15:46:25 UTC

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The other day I was thinking in the shower how there is no need for people to read dystopian fiction anymore because the world we live in is essentially so similar to 1984 or Brave New World.
Like I was talking with a friend about BNW awhile back and he was like "I wouldn't mind living in a society like that, if I didn't know" and I was like "Bruh. The whole point of that book is that you DO live in a society like that and you DON'T knOW"

2025-08-19 15:30:49 UTC

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As someone who used to work in kitchens and now works in the trades: the pros do both of these things, all the time 🤣
That being said, using a chef knife as a bench scraper is IMO 100% OK if you flip it upside down and use the blunt edge
Screwdriver as a chisel is only OK if you're in a hurry but really most trade workers do so much worse than this every single damn day 🤣
Using any knife as a lever is worse than either IMO.

2025-08-18 18:19:55 UTC

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Call any alternative to vote by mail “high barrier voting” or just what it is, “voter suppression.”
In Australia they have compulsory voting. You can actually get fined for not voting. Everyone is automatically registered to vote, in perpetuity, when they become an adult or immigrate. The government sends you a ballot that you mail in. Now, I’m not saying Australia is some paradise, but I’m saying this is how a government behaves when it actually wants its people to vote.

2025-08-18 18:15:37 UTC

You’re in her DMs. I’m in her P.O. box. We are not the same

2025-08-16 15:40:41 UTC

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It's a little heavy-handed, but I'm into it

2025-08-09 18:48:01 UTC

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Like, one reason we don't see more progressive candidates at the local level, especially in smaller towns... is the ones who do stand for elections get a lot of realistic death threats from heavily-armed fascists.
These candidates get essentially zero support from the Democratic Party or local law enforcement. So, many of them drop out, because of the credible death threats. What would you do?
Do those folks have freedom of speech?

2025-08-09 18:43:41 UTC

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The rise of fascism in the USA has been primarily enabled by multiple generations of neo-nazi organizers infiltrating police departments all across the country.
This, combined with the extralegal powers granted to police by the court system essentially delivered liberal democratic society to the fascists on a platter.
The voting shit just doesn't matter that much if the police & courts are compromised at the highest levels.

2025-08-09 18:40:57 UTC

Just read: "Unfettered free speech led to the rise of fascism in America."
I can see how folks got there. But. This is inaccurate.
Unfettered free speech would be a better situation than what we actually experienced. What we actually experienced was the police & courts consistently preferring & protecting the speech of fascists over everyone else's... for decades.
Anyone who has been to a nazi protest in the USA has seen lines of riot cops protecting them. Not every fringe group gets that.

2025-08-09 18:37:11 UTC

Anyone have any experience with sticker printers? Got any reccs?

2025-08-03 15:19:44 UTC

Honestly, at the end of the day, the main reason I'm against car culture is most people aren't as good at driving as I am, and they appear to have no interest in improving. Frankly, most people aren't willing to put in the time and effort to safely operate a death-machine and that's OKAY. They shouldn't have to.

2025-07-27 17:58:59 UTC

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Like this was just one company that operated around Ohio (but into every neighboring state). There were dozens of companies with territories this big
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/114/926/491/025/329/607/original/ecb5ba0531cb6503.png

2025-07-27 17:56:36 UTC

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Oh yeah, back in the day you could theoretically transfer (over multiple days) from rural Maine to Madison, WI
90+ MPH with zero emission electric motors powered by hydro dams, with hot food service, too.

2025-07-27 17:54:02 UTC

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Tacoma, too.
You use to be able to ride the interurban streetcar all the way from Spanaway (suburb south of Tacoma) to the Whidbey Island ferry terminal up in Mukilteo, and even on to Everett. For context, this was before there were even paved roads connecting all of these places.
The main way to get around before the streetcars/interurbans was just boats.

2025-07-27 16:36:25 UTC

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Dude. Port Angeles had a streetcar system. Aberdeen and Hoquiam had a streetcar system. Astoria still has that tourist trolley, but it use to be like an actual streetcar system. Raymond/South Bend used to have a streetcar. All these small NW towns that don't even have much bus service today used to have streetcars 100 years ago.

2025-07-27 16:08:57 UTC

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100 years ago everywhere within the current city limits of Portland was within a quarter mile of a streetcar stop. It’s incredible how far we’ve fallen.
Looking at the old schedules, it was far quicker to get around PDX in the 1920’s than it is now.

2025-07-20 17:29:43 UTC

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Just my opinion, but I thought both Biden and Harris were terrible candidates.
The reason Trump won last year was cos the Dems split their own vote over Gaza.
Any Dem would have won in '20, there was no reason to go with a conservative compromise candidate.
When Biden was nominated in '20, I said "bad choice, some shit could heat up in Israel, and he's so hawkish that he'll lose the re-election."
Then that happened + Harris said she wouldn't change a thing.

2025-07-20 16:10:50 UTC

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They are trying to lose if they do this lmao

2025-07-19 22:17:16 UTC

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Yep, the USA clearly has no official language, and for good reason. There is--explicitly--no requirement that anyone understand any English at all to live in the USA. There are just a bunch of big ol' racists here who have a problem with what has been clearly settled constitutional law for over two centuries.

2025-07-19 22:11:18 UTC

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I encounter annoying stuff like this all the time while trying to teach myself Spanish -- websites "helpfully" suggesting to auto-translate themselves. I'm like. Bruh I am literally trying to read this in Spanish /so that I can practice my Spanish/ and you're making it actively harder than it has to be.

2025-07-18 15:10:17 UTC

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>Prices are like pre-covid levels.
Further proof that this is all just price-gouging and not related to actual prices of commodities/distribution
Winco isn't a charity, and they get their groceries from the same distribution companies as every other grocery store. Somehow, they're making it work with the same prices.
It's cos Winco is an employee-owned company! They have no reason to upcharge on individual items, as long as the whole company is still profitable.

2025-07-12 14:35:01 UTC

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If I can't take my bike on the train, the train is less useful and my bike is less useful.
If I have to carry a heavy lock with me because bike theft is actively encouraged by local police in every city in North America (can provide sources, but I assume people on here already know this), that makes my bike less useful.
If there's cars parked on the street everywhere, that makes it harder for everyone to get around.
I am so tired.

2025-07-12 14:30:50 UTC

I would love it if we could talk about how to actually improve urban transit without everyone picking a damn side.
There's only one way forward: grade-separated heavy rail metro/subway systems supported by feeder bus lines.
Everything else is a damn distraction.
Nothing else can move enough people quickly enough to qualify as useful in the modern world.
Freeways suck. Cars suck. Bicycles are great but not gonna cut it by themselves, and so-called "micromobility" is fucking useless e-waste.

2025-07-12 12:30:39 UTC

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I mean. I take your point, but ordinary gestapo members weren't put on trial at Nuremburg. The Allies very much went after a few high-profile Nazis and let the vast majority of party members walk because "they were just following orders." I think this soft approach is absolutely part of why we're still dealing with neo-nazis today.
ICE agents seem far more worried about being doxxed than they are about the law. They wear masks because the Resistance assassinated Nazis.

2025-07-09 20:01:02 UTC

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We turned a bunch of the best near-urban farmland in the world into suburbs, kicked the farms out so far that few people can commute there, and now complain that there aren’t enough farmworkers.
A planned economy would have easily avoided this. The free market has now rendered a lot of the best farmland in the world unusable for growing crops, to build housing, and also nobody likes living in suburbs and we still have a housing crisis.

2025-07-07 10:18:01 UTC

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Lots of people couldn’t leave then or now. IMO the real lesson of WWII is “people who participated in the Resistance survived at a far higher rate than those who peacefully cooperated with the authorities.”
Also there is nowhere you can move to avoid the policies of the USA gov’t. IMO it makes more sense to stay in the imperial core and cause problems, especially when the rise of fascism is evidence we’re closer to winning than ever—fascism is capitalism in decay.

2025-07-03 16:08:58 UTC

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“Biden wanted me in here. It didn’t work out that way, but he wanted me in here, the son of a bitch.” -- Trump
I fucking wish this were true and also Trump calling Biden an SOB is hilariously unprofessional.
This is what happens when you try to meet these people halfway. You lose, and they make fun of you anyway.

2025-07-03 15:57:18 UTC

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The main danger of AI is that your ignorant boss is going to think it can save him some money because he's unwilling to understand economics or programming.
This is basically why capitalist economies crash every few years--the decisionmakers are both corrupt & unwilling to learn about reality.

2025-07-03 15:55:11 UTC

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In marxist terms, a bubble occurs when a good (right now I'm talking about nvidia hardware and stocks, cos none of the rest of it is real) has a high exchange value but little or no utility value and that is exactly what the fuck is going on.
For every element of the tech that's mildly interesting, there are three situations where it's just some underpaid person in another country. Cos it's materially cheaper to pay people to do most of this stuff, and AI won't change that.