USB thumb drives. Sneakernet. Common in Cuba before they loosened internet restrictions, from what I’ve read.

In 2019, Gates characterized his relationship with Epstein as a ‘huge mistake’.

Probably because it was the final straw for his wife Melinda, and Gates wasn’t happy how much she would take in the divorce. Considering he was a serial philanderer and often used his position at Microsoft as a way to meet women (including Melinda!), it’s not like he respected that marriage or his wife very much, so it can’t be that he’s sad about losing her or something, so my bet is on sad he was going to lose a lot of wealth over his Epstein connections.

Massgrave doesn’t work for Office I’m pretty sure.

Woosh.

It’s already here in all but name, which I think is what this article is also implying.

More than half.

He’s here to do some business with the Big Iron on his hip

It doesn’t even make sense in context at all. It’s so painfully obviously a move intended to harm out of sheer vindictiveness. Food stamps aren’t even connected to the issue they are claiming fraud over. They are raging about people using funds for day cares that don’t serve children… so the response is to take food out of children’s mouths? It’s so fucking stupid and so transparently intentionally evil.

DHS Tells Obvious, Insane Lies About It

As is their custom and modus operandi.

Fairness doctrine never applied to newspapers, magazines, cable television, podcasts, youtube channels, twitch streamers, and so on.

It literally only ever applied to broadcast television and broadcast radio. In other words, anyone using radio spectrum to broadcast their message. It applied exclusively to broadcast because businesses pay licensing fees for exclusive use of specific bands of the publicly available radio spectrum (naturally public I might add, literally anyone with the knowledge and tools can set up a radio tower which is why the spectrum is tightly controlled). Cable Internet is private infrastructure, the internet in general is hosted on private infrastructure, newspapers are built on private infrastructure, and so on. Under what arguments could we even use to regulate modern media in the same way?

It was abolished 9 years before FOX News (a cable tv station) existed.

I’m sorry but I get tired of this canard that if only we had kept it somehow things would be better. We live in a world where it got repealed, so I have a hard time believing that if it had been kept around that it would have been sufficiently updated to cover other forms of media. I mean look at the fight over Net Neutrality, it’s a similar idea as the Fairness Doctrine, that all data should be treated neutrally and equally, ISPs shouldn’t have the ability to pick winners and losers in media reach and access. It has been gutted and no longer exists.

With all that in mind I find it so hard to believe it being kept around would have changed much about what is happening now. Hardly anybody even watches antenna driven over the air television anymore.

We need a world that recognizes this reality and does everything possible to ensure that there is a very low limit to the amount of power that a single person can accumulate.

And how do you achieve that in a flat structure? That’s basically relying on local communities to all be self-correcting which feels to me like that hippie shit “why can’t we all just hold hands and get along.” Oh I don’t know because some people are going to grow up into Nazis and I am not sure that in itself is a solvable problem about humanity.

Small communities are more likely to make exceptions for people they know closely. Like church groups absolving abusive men in the clergy and grouping around them to pray for them. Groups allowed to self police rarely police themselves successfully.

So to me it sounds like you need power structures to help control the populace and stop them from doing that, and power structures invite corruption.

I am pro-decentralization but the problem I always come to is education: education is inherently a power discrepancy where on person must teach another something. Some people are just bad at teaching, so leaving education in the hands of just anyone means you end up with less educated population, and a less educated population can’t be counted on to be independent enough to be a reliable citizen that can contribute competently, which perpetuates the cycle even further if the uneducated are expected to teach the uneducated. Flat structure is a noble goal, but I’m not sure we’ll ever truly be able to escape power discrepancies existing at all. Children are simply at mercy of the people educating them. Like you said, power corrupts, and plenty of people use that power over children toward selfish and controlling ends.

They’re learning the hard way that it’s a big club, and we ain’t in it. Rooting out corruption is hard because you basically have to have people to replace literally every person in government literally immediately. Also, you have to make sure those new people can’t be bribed or threatened into complicity. Trying to rely on people who seem to have good credentials isn’t a solution if they’re still surrounded by corruption at every level. How are the small number of trustworthy people going to handle an endless stream of corruption running interference and doing their damnedest to make sure no one is held accountable.

Maybe the old battle cry “don’t trust anyone over 30” wasn’t so wrong at all. Anyone who is already invested in the system as it exists probably can’t be truly trusted to get the job done.

Anyway, quite tragic and I feel for them.

For real, the EU needs to stop playing up this dumb fantasy that the US is still somehow reliable. Rip off the bandaid. I say this as an American. US is cooked, someone else needs to take the reigns and Europe is the best shot of a group of nations that generally want to take care of their citizens and prioritize human rights.

Asking “so what do you do for a living?” when meeting someone new as if their job defines them. It’s one of the first questions Americans will ask someone when meeting them for the first time. I am American, but as I understand it, this question is far less common elsewhere in the world.

Yes

Apathy

This is actually one of the kinds of situations that Bitcoin was originally invented to solve, the debanking of “undesirable” people by corporate owned systems. Too bad the entire crypto world has been invaded by huckster scammers.

Dragon sickness

For me it’s the Starship Troopers rifftrax that is infinitely rewatchable.