Eleanor Saitta

Thinking about security, failure, change, art, and living. Recruiting barbarians; complicate your narratives. Fractional CISO to startups via Systems Structure Ltd. HEL/NYC/LON

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nprofile1qqsp54mhueh54nj5v9qc6dnakqmt99hdkwfce9wme8u6y6fgjya4k6cpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerfw36x7tnsw43qc0vev3

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Last Notes

2026-03-20 08:58:27 UTC

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@nprofile…3qha
Not a Delta Mike Zulu?

2026-03-20 08:48:52 UTC

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@nprofile…3qha
At least we know where to aim.

2026-03-19 20:34:34 UTC

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@nprofile…v2v2
Fuck this fascist collaborationist bullshit. You know full well this isn't going to end here.

2026-03-02 08:20:29 UTC

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@nprofile…3qha
There was definitely a broad base of support then for military action and security — one which was viciously abused in ways that we are still now seeing the fallout from domestically, let alone internationally.
That's said, as others have, I cannot let that statement that everyone was all in go unchallenged — tens of millions of us were dead set against it and in the streets trying to stop what was in the end as predicted — another round of pointless warfare that left the country and the world a much worse place.

2026-02-26 21:31:00 UTC

Today I've been told that C is memory safe if you're just very neat, that code is documentation, and that expecting protocol specs is a form of bias?
I didn't realize it was 90s week; I'll go get a flannel.

2026-02-26 17:46:42 UTC

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@nprofile…ezqw
@nprofile…2aqy @nprofile…sut4 @nprofile…rhuz and like, sure, building on convenient stacks with no properly documented security model is fast if your system will also have no documented security model and no security validation. But then you don't have a secure messaging tool, you have a vibes messaging tool.

2026-02-26 17:28:53 UTC

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@nprofile…ezqw
@nprofile…2aqy @nprofile…sut4 @nprofile…rhuz and why would bittorrent not have threat model? Certainly, I'd expect that a safety critical app using it as a transport layer would need to take the time to figure what threat model it de facto implemented and make sure that was suitable for how they were using it. That's much more expensive than doing it the other way around, though, and leads to dangerous cases where the upstream does not know what security properties of their system downstream users are depending on them, leading to nasty and hard to fix vulnerabilities when they're broken without notice. Which is why folks building systems where security matters usually build on tools with a proper security engineering foundation.

2026-02-26 17:20:16 UTC

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@nprofile…ezqw
@nprofile…2aqy @nprofile…sut4 @nprofile…rhuz Yes, that actually is a red flag, very literally. Especially if folks are suggesting it's the right stack to replace tools where a breach may result in many many deaths.

2026-02-26 11:16:48 UTC

Many, many years ago, at school for CS and before that interning at NASA Ames, I learned to take programming seriously as engineering work, and also the level of rigor that engineering work requires. In the intervening thirty years, I have had to come to terms with the degree to which this attitude is rare in theory and vanishingly rare in practice again and again. Tooling has gotten better, but the rigor applied to the average line of code has gotten worse.
I would hope that safety-critical systems would be different, and in some cases they really are. However, the number of people who want to build secure communications systems that they want to be safety critical and who expect thousands of people to literally use in a case where a breach of the threat model means the users will die and who as developers cannot bother to meet the basic design rigor requirement of 2006 — have a fucking threat model that is accurate and up to date — will never cease to shock me.

2026-02-26 08:30:04 UTC

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@nprofile…ezqw
@nprofile…2aqy @nprofile…sut4 @nprofile…rhuz Not having a baseline way of explaining what the set of threat models and security guarantees it's designed to be able to meet is a red flag, especially on a complex, reconfigurable protocol stack. It means that if someone wants to use it for something real, they have to start from scratch in analyzing the security properties of each element in the configurations they might use, then analyze how those elements interact, etc. The same thing applies with trying to figure out if this protocol stack is or can be appropriate to solve a given particular problem.
In a lot of cases, it's going to be easier to start from scratch and build simpler, smaller components designed directly around the security guarantees and architecture your specific project needs. The expensive part of a piece of software is not the code, it's the team that has a living, detailed model of the code in their heads — a technical model, a user experience model, a security model, and a performance model, at a minimum. To be worth seriously adopting, a protocol stack should at the very least attempt to make this legible to developers.

2026-02-26 00:40:31 UTC

Probably mostly not my audience here, but I'm currently looking for a business-side/CEO cofounder for an encrypted radio startup. There are solid funding options, but while I can build the team to make the product happen, I'm not the person to navigate the money side of things. I'm looking for a cofounder with previous startup CEO experience and executive-level experience (although not necessarily CEO) in a hardware startup specifically. EU citizen and resident, although it'll be a remote team, so where is less important.

2026-02-25 23:22:29 UTC

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@nprofile…ezqw
@nprofile…sut4 right, after digging around for a while I see no threat model or even vague notions of what "secure" means to them. Also, it looks like this is some more cryptocurrency-led bullshit?

2026-02-25 10:40:42 UTC

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@nprofile…ezqw
@nprofile…sut4 while I am extremely supportive of p2p secure messaging, getting it working to a tenth the reliability of signal with a user experience where they were a decade ago is the very definition of nontrivial.

2026-02-09 10:29:53 UTC

At a certain point, one must look at well-funded mainstream 'activist' organizations that have a lot of reach and never support anything so radical that it might actually cause a meaningful change in the causes they claim to support and wonder why.

2025-12-29 18:51:01 UTC

Yet another big decades-long environmental ad campaign revealed to mostly be about reducing risks to corporate profits by turning it into an individual responsibility — just like consumer recycling and carbon footprints: https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/the-sinister-origins-of-americas-anti-litter-movement

2025-11-24 10:18:25 UTC

I've been instituting exactly this kind of cooldown/delay on dependency updates at all of my clients for four or so years and I'm glad to see more people talking about it: https://blog.yossarian.net/2025/11/21/We-should-all-be-using-dependency-cooldowns

2025-10-22 10:21:57 UTC

Hilarious side effect of the OpenAI pivot to porn plus the Swedish ban on online pornography purchases: Paying for ChatGPT in Sweden may be a criminal act soon.

2025-10-15 07:23:16 UTC

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Finland, for historical reasons, is a country where most (white) people (with Finnish passports) trust the police, despite most of the police belonging to the fascist party. There is no organized digital rights work happening in this country (Effi technically exists and is for all purposes completely useless; if you're reading this and from Effi, prove me wrong). While Finland has historically had a strong reputation for freedom of the press, but this is only because the press have never wanted to publish anything the state doesn't like. When they do (a few years ago with a piece about a military research center), the police just show up without warrants, steal hard drives, and charge all the individual journalists with treason, despite none of them being e.g. party to an official secrets act.

2025-10-15 07:22:55 UTC

So last night I just found out that the far right Finnish government is planning on gutting limits to police use of malware, wiretaps, undercover infiltration, and police/military intelligence data sharing, and eliminating some or all of the constitutional protections around personal communication and the safety of the home and allowing tools now only used in the context of treason and terrorism investigations to be used much more widely. This will include investigations where not only has no crime happened yet, but no crime is expected to happen in the future.

2025-10-07 13:04:18 UTC

Delighted to see China getting ahead of the game and banning scraping that circumvents technical restrictions and some kinds of deceptive advertising and monopolistic platform practices. Them claiming global enforcement scope (enforced by among other things market access bans) is also an interesting move; curious to see how it plays out in practice.

2025-08-26 07:21:53 UTC

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@nprofile…qwua
And thank heavens for that. Expanding the definition has not helped any society that's done it
@nprofile…auwy

2025-07-13 07:13:56 UTC

New worst idea ever for geo engineering just dropped. We're speed running the 50s now:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.06623

2025-07-05 17:28:41 UTC

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@nprofile…gu7x
Yes. Please.

2025-07-03 18:37:36 UTC

One of the most reliable things I learned, early on in my years of watching politics and working with organizations, is that when someone tells you that they believe, what they want to do, or who they are, it saves a ton of time if you just believe them and assume they're completely serious until proven otherwise.

2025-07-01 13:00:56 UTC

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@nprofile…833h
Nah, the AMOC also moderates summer temperatures. Central Siberia and northern Canada can get quite hot, briefly.
@nprofile…gu7x

2025-07-01 09:55:00 UTC

When this case first came out, I was talking to a relatively senior Finnish journalist about freedom of the press in Finland. We came to the conclusion that Finland's then best in the world ranking on press freedom was entirely down to the fact that the press had never wanted anything that the government wasn't ok with having in the papers. This decision is broadly incompatible with freedom of expression. Prosecuting folks who agreed to keep state secrets is one thing. Accusing journalists of treason, let alone convicting them, for publishing material that in their professional opinion was newsworthy is completely unacceptable. The Finnish national security bureaucracy does and must not be above the constraints of international human rights law, and must not be permitted to either constrain a priori or decide post hoc what is in the national interests. I assume this will be appealed and that the Finnish Supreme Court (or, failing them, the European Court of Human Rights) does the right thing. This case has already caused a significant chilling effect on Finnish journalism — already not in a great position — and this is happening at a time when Finland's national security position and responsibilities are changing rapidly. We need transparency and accountability in the national security bureaucracy now more than ever.
https://yle.fi/a/74-20170451

2025-06-28 17:32:02 UTC

It's pride this week in Helsinki, and despite all of these fuckers who want us in the ground, we are in fact still fucking here and still fucking queer.
This week I ran a play party (oh, you think kink shouldn't be at pride? Fuck you, cop, we're gonna do more of it), the Pride edition for our crash and variety show (the last show of year seven!), and the safety team for the second ever Helsinki Dyke March. In that march, someone tried to kill me with a car, but you fucking missed, asshole. We're still fucking here, and we're still fucking queer.

2025-06-19 07:19:55 UTC

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@nprofile…dwme
Where is this in settings? I've spent about 20 minutes looking through all the settings menus a half dozen times. Autofetch missing messages and autoload remote media are both off.

2025-06-18 17:15:29 UTC

@nprofile…dwme
The per-message dotted menu is no longer present in thread view, so I can't e.g. edit replies without re-finding them in my account view.

2025-06-17 14:18:54 UTC

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@nprofile…gu7x
I'll definitely say it's an oversimplification, yes. But the contexts where I've heard it quoted have used it to suggest that eliminating fascism in the US is mostly a numbers game, without a need for a political program or structural organizing.

2025-06-17 12:12:39 UTC

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Fwiw, I was not impressed with the source I've seen most often quoted for, Chenoweth and Stephan's Why Civil Resistance Works. Their case was built primarily on a piece of very high level statistical analysis showing that the conflicts they deemed to have been nonviolent were more likely to have been successful in some way, without examining the causes or initial conditions of the conflict or if the success or failure. The analysis is ahistorical in at least the case of the US Civil Rights movement, which was many things and nonviolent only in some places, and likely in many of the others, too. While I wouldn't say their work is entirely without merit, I also would not use it as a guide for resistance strategy in any way.
I worry about this 3.5% number giving folks in the US false hope and convincing liberals that the situation is not as immediately dire as it is, and that they should push back against others using a diversity of tactics, or simply ignore the whole thing and hope it never touches them.

2025-06-17 11:14:37 UTC

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Broadly speaking, the 3.5% number is a metric for the collective organizing capacity needed to get those kinds of numbers without the internet, when you're working with phone trees and paper phonebooks at best — and even then, it's 3.5% in the streets for a week straight. Without the internet, getting those numbers generally implied a meaningful political program, a lot of community political education work, and an actual plan.
One of the lessons of the protests of the last decade was that the internet lets you get those numbers way more easily, but does not help at all when it comes to getting those people to have a unified belief in what happens next. You may be able to take a government down, but all you've done is create a power vacuum, and you do not necessarily have any say in what fills it.

2025-06-17 11:01:04 UTC

I wish US folks talking about the magical 3.5% number would read some of the more recent history and studies there. Bevin's "If We Burn" is a good place to start.

2025-05-24 16:31:32 UTC

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@nprofile…gu7x
Seven! Finland, Estonia, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, and Ireland. And really, calling Greenland Denmark is iffy, but I don't know if they actually looked at it separately.

2025-05-18 21:37:55 UTC

When I say that I can't recommend third-party forks of either Firefox or Chrome for real world use, this kind of thing is why. *This* is the bar for what the security team for a browser needs to be able to do. A fork where the entire technical team is ten people that can't even keep up with upstream patches is sadly not in the running.
https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2025/05/17/firefox-security-response-to-pwn2own-2025/

2025-05-17 08:29:32 UTC

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@nprofile…d2rl
Because I really properly internalized Celsius in a colder country, I still kind of think about hot weather in Fahrenheit, but cold weather in Celsius
@nprofile…rka7

2025-05-17 08:27:43 UTC

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@nprofile…d2rl
The dream!

2025-05-15 18:52:36 UTC

Does anyone know if Apple changed how iOS stores notification content after iOS 16?

2025-05-14 07:27:09 UTC

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@nprofile…5lc3
Do you know how security works at scale? This isn't news and among the majors, MS was mostly late to the party. That said, "spies" is doing a lot of work here. If you mean "collaborates specifically around threat intelligence", sure. If you mean "provides the US with general purpose intelligence outside the digital security space above and beyond the cooperation that the US can compel with statutory powers", no, we have no reason to believe that.
Also, with CISA dead, it's unclear that anyone on the USG side is still listening.

2025-05-09 10:49:54 UTC

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@nprofile…d2rl
Congratulations!

2025-05-01 17:07:33 UTC

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@nprofile…rg89
I've got a boox note max, for the same reason of wanting real Android apps. It's not terrible.

2025-04-29 18:23:57 UTC

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@nprofile…d2rl
I'm feeling pretty comfortable on that side.
You know, also wildly aware that nothing I can ever possibly do will be enough, and terrified that it will be too little, too late, or the wrong focus or threat model in the places inside my scope of potential control.

2025-04-27 12:55:24 UTC

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@nprofile…gu7x
That does pose a problem, yes. On the other hand, you would provide another interesting and unique contribution to medical science.

2025-04-27 12:37:59 UTC

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@nprofile…gu7x
Have you considered a head injury?

2025-04-09 19:38:20 UTC

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@nprofile…d2rl
I would like to be fucking wrong more often. I am very tired of being right

2025-04-07 11:06:23 UTC

It would be nice if signal would let users import and export lists of users, complete with nicknames and verified keys.
It would also be nice if, like on mastodon, we could leave notes about users to remember the context for them.
It would be even nicer if the notes could include some kind of structured data — hashtags would be fine — and the group system would let you set a hashtag filter that would soft-stop you from adding people without the hashtag to that group. Bonus points for integrating the chat folder system with hashtags as well.
This would go a long way toward helping the system scale for organizations.

2025-04-04 05:51:58 UTC

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@nprofile…d2rl
The last time I was hiring for a directly security role, it was shocking to see just how far the hyperspecialization had gone. I live very much in blue team, and trying to find blue team appsec people was effectively impossible. I ended up grabbing a security-interested juniorish dev and mentoring her into the role instead. For most of the small (<150 engineers) firms I work with, it's always going to make more sense to outsource audit, including more serious code audits — the work is bursty and irregular — but we still need in-house folks helping devs with SAST, doing internal training, and working with engineers on vuln fixes. It's not sexy enough, though, not red team, so finding folks is a nightmare.

2025-03-14 12:04:35 UTC

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This guy appears to be the sole original source; one can only assume a misinformation operation, at this point: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/serhii-demediuk-a383521aa_signal-activity-7303700457040809984-5dWZ

2025-03-14 09:52:24 UTC

Anyone have any meaningful additional detail on this? It's widely enough reported that it seems to be real, but it does not make any particular sense and the implications are profound.
https://therecord.media/signal-no-longer-cooperating-with-ukraine

2025-03-12 08:17:32 UTC

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@nprofile…d2rl
Hopefully it'll help the culture shock a bit to learn that there are also some really big positives.

2025-03-12 07:20:08 UTC

By extension, this means that we also have a name for folks who work on design and development in these spaces: kleptographers!
https://antarian.social/@nsgeek/114139645751032693

2025-03-08 02:20:35 UTC

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@nprofile…d2rl
Congrats on breathing free air again. I hope she treats you well ❤️‍🩹

2025-03-03 16:04:22 UTC

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@nprofile…mhl7
Eh, in context it doesn't feel that bad. I might add "emergency options to re-home the organization and its staff and infrastructure"

2025-03-02 15:20:05 UTC

I feel like at this point, any country whose department of state etc does not issue a blanket "Do Not Travel" warning for the US is professionally negligent: https://www.kpbs.org/news/border-immigration/2025/02/28/german-tourist-held-indefinitely-in-san-diego-area-immigrant-detention-facility
Any professional organization, conference, or company expecting third-country nationals to travel to the US is negligent at best. The only ethical way to do this is to provide all travelers with on-call lawyers for their arrival and to post a bond for extraction expenses and physical and mental trauma damages.

2025-02-28 07:01:53 UTC

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@nprofile…d2rl
Ah, damn, I knew I forgot the last step

2025-02-27 16:14:00 UTC

French Parliament go fuck yourself
https://tuta.com/blog/france-surveillance-nacrotrafic-law

2025-02-27 09:54:34 UTC

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@nprofile…d2rl I can recommend getting a voip.ms account with a US number for calls like that — it's going to be cheaper than either a AU sim from the US or (once you move) a US sim from AU.
Also sympthy on that whole thing — Finns have a lovely thing where they just won't answer at all until they have a complete answer even if it takes, but also sometimes will choose to just ignore stuff in English or if they don't want to deal with it instead of telling you, and figuring out which is which is impossible. Much stress.

2025-02-22 18:15:31 UTC

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@nprofile…rg89
I was gonna put myself in the bricolage category and then I remembered that my dad was literally an architect and I was doing technical drawing by hand by at the drafting board by like age eight and yeah

2025-02-22 09:25:26 UTC

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@nprofile…d2rl
So, in Europe because there are laws about these things, they forced Tesla to make sentry mode only record to a USB stick physically in the car. If one of the cars tragically catches fire — hopefully a long way from other vehicles, structures, or dry vegetation that might make the fire spread — there would be no way to recover the video footage. How sad!

2025-02-15 14:43:29 UTC

@nprofile…7nxw
Hey, do you know if there's a solution for Flickr legacy accounts? We had a pretty important and prolific photographer in the larp scene die a couple of months ago. Next of kin have control over the account and are keeping it paid up, but it's not a great longer-term option.

2025-02-10 18:09:45 UTC

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@nprofile…d2rl
What, you can't propagate an exploit across a DC-only connection?!

2024-11-17 11:31:22 UTC

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@nprofile…args
Yeah, largely in that kind of space. Also rigor around what it means to measure something, etc. Like, obviously calculus is useful — if nothing else, not having the conceptual tools of first and second derivatives makes looking at a line on a graph or the area under it less intuitively useful — but I think it's more about the things that you learn along the way.
@nprofile…5nuy

2024-11-17 10:40:44 UTC

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@nprofile…args
Hmm. Often, really just basic statistical numeracy so they could understand data they seeing in papers, etc. Sometimes, more the ability to reason about what is and isn't good data for quantitative decision-making — folks really love to make up meaningless numbers to let them avoid qualitative deveined when quant data isn't there. Sometimes data analysis to understand things like perf impact from log data for edge cases. So in some ways, not really statistics itself, but all things that I find that folks who made it through at least one real stats course are likely to be better at, if that makes sense?
@nprofile…5nuy

2024-11-16 21:13:50 UTC

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@nprofile…args
I work in tech, not physics or more classical engineering, but I can say that the number of times I've wished staff knew calculus when they didn't? Zero in twenty years. The number of times I've wished they knew basic statistics when they didn't? At least once a month, for twenty years.
@nprofile…5nuy

2024-03-12 20:12:57 UTC

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@npub1psd…9sr7
While it's not quite as pretty, the Dell 8k monitor is half the cost, if you can drive it

2023-10-28 22:46:37 UTC

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@npub178r…qekt
I was eleven! An oldling, by comparison!

2023-08-25 13:45:29 UTC

Does anyone have an image search tool that doesn't suck?

2023-08-18 21:23:08 UTC

Does #icanhazpdf work here yet? Anyway, if anyone's got a copy of the current SOC2 trust criteria sitting around, I wouldn't mind it.

2023-08-14 07:55:09 UTC

Gods, the English government really is determined to burn every last vestige of kindness or decency out of society

2023-08-10 07:18:32 UTC

Why is this not happening in every European country, as an absolute minimum?
https://www.thelocal.fr/20230407/france-plans-70-supertax-on-fuel-for-private-jets

2023-02-26 00:15:14 UTC

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I know there are plenty of folks who don't have a choice about leaving, or who have communities who they're not willing to leave behind. If that's you, think seriously about what you can do now to increase your community's chances of survival in a hot civil war, whether that's going and getting your first aid cert, helping to build community emergency response networks, de-escalation training, or helping to prepare for more kinetic situations.

2023-02-26 00:14:59 UTC

So, I've done versions of this thread on Twitter a couple of times, but maybe it's time for one here. If you live in the US, you should decide if you're planning on fighting in the coming civil war or leaving. If you're white, cis-passing, and have both money and no particular ethics, you can probably ignore this choice, but I hope you burn for doing so.