The Olympics used to be for amateurs only and athletes who were professional and earned their living from a sport weren’t allowed to compete. I remember reading about the UK’s Torvil & Dean figure skaters who after their win at the olympics in the 80’s went pro… and a couple of olympics later there was massive debate and changes to rules to allow them to compete again.

All the modern olympics of the last 30-40yrs are about is faux national pride and money… same for the bodies of all sports… they’re all corrupt and they’re all about stockpiling as much cash as they can for bribes and kickbacks… some of them like FIFA have hundreds of millions of cash reserves… But they don’t pay countries to host the world cup, the countries pay them, pay for the construction, pay for the infrastructure and FIFA reaps in the sponsorship and TV money.

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Drugs… it’s where I kept my drugs.

I did, but that’s not something that can easily be used in the wild… As for plans and layouts… those plans are located with local planning depts anyway. Proof of concept and a practical use for them are often very different… But yes… criminal charges need apply, not civil ones… and as I’m in the UK, perhaps they could bring terrorism charges against them too… they like doing that to people not actually committing acts of terror these days.

People will go to great lengths to excuse and justify their own idiocy, rather than suffer the simple acceptance they they could have been wrong… and one of these idiots suggested it was me who had ‘hubris’ :)

Morons buying moronic ‘smart’ devices, unable to understand that they’re the product, not the consumer and they have sold away the rights to their eyes and ears with their purchases.

My house contains no smart devices that can harvest data from me (my mum does use a samsung smart TV from 2016) and all devices have everything disabled and other things installed to block data collection and tracking… I can’t stop 100% of it, but what little trickle they do get is basically worthless.

My eyes and ears are not for sale, nor is my privacy.

Ease of access to internet porn, ruined my enjoyment of porn.

Manchester police had a higher body count than the attacker is not the kind of headline that makes them look good.

I used to have a wileyfox phone using cyanogen OS, which was a fork of android with a lot of security and privacy features. That forked again into lineage OS at some point in the latter half of the 2010’s.

I mostly stuck with motorola phones after that, as close to a vanilla OS as possible without going google… but I stupidly bought a Pixel 6 Pro about 2.5yrs ago… the price was hard to ignore, but regretted it ever since.

I only replace phones when the become obsolete and security is an issue, or the phone actually fails… this one is going strong and I keep meaning to look if it can easily be jailbroken to install and alt OS… But it’s been a very long time since I did anything like that and I find myself falling behind on modern tech stuff as I get into middle age.

I pay attention to everything, and refuse to install any apps. I block 90% of the data from apps I have installed, only allowing a couple to access certain things (banking for example). The first thing I do with any android phone is go through and disable all of the bloat from google, disable chrome and turn off most of the settings. Install a decent browser and plugins to block tracking, ads and so forth. I don’t install social media apps, in fact I’m not on any corporate owned social media, I use signal/telegram for messaging… I deleted old SM accounts starting in 2012 with facebook and ending with twitter in 2018. I use email services like a duck.com address or proton mail for online signups where required, along with alias spam accounts for certain things that can easily be deleted and stop spam.

From next year, I will only be buying phones that can be jailbroken and an alt OS installed.

I go even further with my home PC’s to protect my privacy… I can’t stop it all, but I can render what they do collect as worthless as possible.

In some countries you can, I believe Canada is one of them… at least I believe it’s legal to do so in Toronto.

I used Anonine (Sweden based) for 10yrs and never had a single problem visiting any site… I use a VPN 24/7 because I value my privacy and don’t want every fucker tracking my everymove and that includes my ISP.

Recently switched to Proton because streaming from legal sites like iplayer and netflix had become impossible unless it was turned off. Proton actually works with them.

Look… if you’re the sort of person who still uses chrome and thinks a vpn chrome extension is the bees knees… well… that’s on you.

P.S. Microsoft have the perfect tool for you too… it’s called ‘recall’