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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: November 12th, 2023

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  • Interestingly… Yes. Those words appear nowhere in the article I am looking at. Currently connected to a US VPN (from outside the USA)

    What Led to the War:

    The commercial restrictions that Britain’s war with France imposed on the U.S. exacerbated the U.S.’s relations with both powers. Although neither Britain nor France initially accepted the U.S.’s neutral rights to trade with the other—and punished U.S. ships for trying to do so—France had begun to temper its intransigence on the issue by 1810. That, paired with the ascendance of certain pro-French politicians in the U.S. and the conviction held by some Americans that the British were stirring up unrest among Native Americans on the frontier, set the stage for a U.S.-British war. The U.S. Congress declared war in 1812.

    How it ended:

    Peace talks between Britain and the U.S. began in 1814. Britain stalled negotiations as it waited for word of a victory in America, having recently committed extra troops to its western campaign. But news of their losses at places like Plattsburgh, New York, and Baltimore, Maryland, paired with the duke of Wellington’s counsel against continuing the war, convinced the British to pursue peace more genuinely, and both sides signed the Treaty of Ghent in December 1814. The final battle of the war occurred after this, when a British general unaware of the peace treaty led an assault on New Orleans that was roundly crushed.

    Edited to add: I was not even aware that this was happening now. I find this even scarier. Revisionist history for Americans by IP address!


  • You cannot stop the collection. It ALWAYS collects. It may not transmit, even if connected. For example the black box in many cars is really an assortment of ECUs that contain fine grained historical data. It does eventually roll over and get replaced but the data is there.

    For example there are public cases you can find where the police, not even needing a warrant, were allowed to dump this data off of a rental vehicle that a suspect, not convicted just suspected, was thought to have been in. Of course the copaganda story showed that they the used this data which was mostly location by gps and speed by the wheel sensors and gps to get a track of everywhere that vehicle had been in the last 6 months. Every person who rented it and drove it somewhere had their privacy violated. But I guess that’s normal now.

    The infotainment systems are the biggest jerks for data storage as they’re just mini generic computers today with lots of storage.

    To stop wireless transmission you can remove the sim card from the modem. Many vehicles won’t work or even start if the modem is disconnected (unplugged or unfused). A Nissan for example will drain its 12v battery overnight trying to find the modem if it is unplugged. But if the sim is bad or disabled, it will try and fail to communicate, then retry later which won’t kill the battery.

    You lose a lot of convenience and the data is still there. So the answer is basically you can’t drive a new vehicle without it violating your privacy with collection. You can only make the wireless transmission more private or disabled. I suppose you could buy a scanner yourself and before you leave the vehicle, factory wipe all ECUs. But even then you’ll need to enable them for emissions testing and such if that’s in your area.








  • Always UPS everything. But also always have a simple backdoor. I generally have 1 little desktop like a NUC running some basic Win10 OS and an install of remote software like TeamViewer. It is connected to my hardware router right after the ISP router and a backup connection. Used to be LTE everywhere, now I’m half and half on Starlink. It is then also connected to the router ports needed for management but inactive.

    If I have to, remote into the NUC over Starlink. I can then reboot my main ISP box. I can eventually get into my router and enable those ports which are pre-plugged in. From there I can then access all the stack management and all the IPMI ports like iLo. It’s a virtual interface through a virtual interface. It is slow, and painful. But it works.

    And it works 99.99% of the time. But even then, I’ve had to do a call of shame and walk one of my friends through which button to press as I’m on the other side of the world. In my case it was also power related but the UPS I had decided to overheat. In reality over the summer, the temps were high. But also it is a super awesome double conversion UPS. The line voltage into the UPS was dropped to below standards from the utility because their grid was overworked with everyone’s AC’s. So the UPS saw this as a line failure, kicked in the double conversion and ran happily. But it did not count as a power failure, so none of my services scaled back. Essentially it was delivering 3KW of juice from the wall through a double conversion making the whole thing super hot. Eventually it shut down for safety automatically, just pulled the plug. My NUC is on a separate little backup along with the modems and an auto transfer switch which did its thing. But there was no way to press the reset button on the UPS for a critical safety shutdown like that. It had to be in person.




  • I’ve voted D every time. This question is ridiculous because most people are NOT better off and those that are, are all on the low end of the financial spectrum where the short term income gains have made a difference.

    Even the best stats I see from the Democrats show 8% better income adjusted for inflation. That’s awesome! But what inflation? The low fed number. Not the CPI.

    This means for anyone who purchases things, or where purchasing things is a larger proportion of their income which is everyone below the top 0.5% or 1% in the USA, your effective wage has gone down 10% to 40% depending on what your personal income raise was. Those that job hopped, are only down a bit. Those that didn’t are screwed.

    Everytime this question gets asked, I look around and not a single person I know is better off now from income. Not a damn one. You know what is doing better? Stock portfolios. I have them, I’m up. My friends have them, they’re up. We have traded realized daily losses in living for stock market unrealized gains. The average person doesn’t have stocks. They just get shafted completely.

    It’s incomprehensible to me how low Democrats have gone to just blatantly lie and gas light. That’s a Republican move. And every one of the people smart enough to actually think, gets a little more pissed off when they’re gas lit into trying to believe that 20% year over year multiple years in a row of inflation is good. That’s batshit.


  • Road trip? Usually week or night of.

    Airline travel within 4 hours, domestic or international is usually 2 days before hand.

    Airline travel across the world is usually planned as a time block a month or two ahead of time. The actual destination and activities being planned as the dates get closer.

    Exceptions are scheduled events. If I have an event to attend in a location, I’ll make a hotel reservation and book tickets for the thing. Then checkup options for travel there. Sometimes it’s part of a multileg journey.

    Often I don’t know where in the world I will even be the week leading up to the thing. So I tend to either not purchase travel tickets, or buy a few different ones from hubs globally that are cheap and easy to get to.





  • Unsurprisingly almost all non-negative news of the arab world is suppressed. Yes the path is full normalization and fully legally protected.

    The major difference in the UAE is that the judicial system is victim based. Not DA based. Basically the government leaves you alone for most of these things except if a party to the “crime” on the books complains.

    So for abortion, if 2 expats hook up and a need an abortion it’s basically like California. You make an appointment, you get it done, you get prescription meds, all good. No protestors anywhere, ever.

    If someone hooks up with a deeply conservative person and they disagree with the abortion, then legally they’re correct. And it can be stopped unless as outlined for the reasons in the article now. But just like in the redneck states, most of the conservatives are not against it when it benefits them or they need it.

    Which brings it all back to nobody cares. And having been someone who has taken women to get their abortions in the US (as a friend only!) that walk of pressure and shame is ridiculous. The last time was like a friggin spy movie. We got a location to go to 1hr before the appointment. We parked there. An unmarked van pulls up, and you get in. You put on covers for your clothes and face. The van drives you to the clinic, parks near a rear entrance, and you run inside while all the “Christians” scream at you, throw blood at you, call you a murderer, etc. Then after the woman has the procedure and has to go back, has to do it in reverse in pain. And the van does like 30 minutes of evasive driving down random roads until they finally double back to wherever your car is. This was in a purple area of a blue state btw. The clinic had people routinely shoot it up (at night, not with people in it), try to light it on fire, harass employees, etc.

    It’s absolutely horrifying.