I can do one dollar’s worth of anything GUARANTEED?

That one’s easy: I’ll buy a fraction of a winning lottery ticket.

I guarantee you Ransom isn’t in the Book of Mormon 🙂

Nothing prevents you from going by any name of your choosing in your daily life without necessarily having your name legally changed. Plenty of trans people do that.

In many countries, it’s difficult and often very costly to change one’s name. I know in France for example, you have to prove in court that it’s a handicap in your daily life, like if your parents gave you a legal first name that resulted in something really egregious when spelled out with your last name.

The best unique name by far is this one: Meow-Ludo Disco Gamma Meow-Meow.

I once worked with this guy, who now inserts a H between his first and last name, probably because the “joke” has gotten old for him decades ago.

I would have sued my parents in his place.

Indeed. Normally I pity fhe kids whose parents give them stupid names because they have to carry the burden for the rest of their lives. But ultra-billionnaires’ offsprings who are born with a silver spoon in their mouth and zero obligation to work for anything in life don’t exactly elicit sympathy in me.

Elon Musk’s 7th and 8th offsprings take the cake: X Æ A-Xii (pronounced “X Ash A Twelve”) and Exa Dark Sideræl (nicknamed “Y”). Stupid rich people will do stupid rich people shit because they’re not like the rest of us…

The stock Fairphone runs the stock full-blown Google spyware stack. Privacy isn’t Fairphone’s selling point: it’s repairability.

You can install CalyxOS very easily on it however. That’s what I’m rocking on my Fairphone 4, and it’s great. I have no issues with it.

I hate Elon Musk as much as the next guy - and all the more now that he has this massive conflict of interest working in his favor and at the American public’s expense.

But I will say this for the sake of exercizing critical thinking: everybody is happy to say AI hallucinates when what it says doesn’t suit their narrative, and call AI intelligent when it does.

That’s the catch: you can’t not use Google at all if you’re online at all, because Google has managed to insert itself into every little corner of the internet.

And that’s how the surveillance trap has quietly snapped shut on all of us without most of us noticing anything.

George Orwell had it wrong: the surveillance isn’t conducted directly by a tyrannical dictatorship but subtly, indirectly by the private sector in cahoots with the government. And the date he predicted was 40 years off. Other than that, he was right: we live in a full-blown dystopia now.

Yeah he wears heavy biohazard protection, complete with the hood and the respirator and everything. He’s better isolated than a cosmonaut on the job.

Here’s an interesting video about Zuckerberg’s rebranding:

Why Zuckerberg’s Rebrand Shouldn’t Distract Us

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Not me, but one of my best friends founded a company to clean up murder scenes, houses in which someone has died and their corpse rotted away for weeks, accident scenes… that sort of thing. His stomach seems perfectly unaffected by gruesomeness of all kinds, so he figured he’d market that particular ability of his.

His lowest rate is $300 / hr for “simple” cleanups and he’s doing very, very well.

I use a calyxos device to share VPN, as of a few months ago.

Hotspot & Tethering

• Allow clients to use VPNs

Oh wow I totally missed that. It works great! Genius!

Thank you for that. Suddenly it makes repurposing one of my old cellphones a very simple and viable proposition.

(and I’m posting this from my laptop connected to the hotspot connected to the Calyx VPN 🙂)

get a older cell phone. Put lineage OS on it, or calyxos… share your VPN over hotspot, these are the only two ROMs that I’m aware of that allow you to do that

That’s what I thought too. So I tried it on my CalyxOS phone and… it doesn’t work: the hotspot doesn’t route through the VPN. And from what I read, it’s by design.

I have an old Nokia 4.2 running LineageOS. I might try that one.

end-to-end VPN

Incidentally, do you know if the GL.iNet devices can act as a VPN server too?

At this point, I think China is well known for infiltrating local businesses and forcing them to sell networking gear with trojans.

The US is better known for surveilling people indirectly by exploiting corporate surveillance data collected by big tech monopolies doing their bidding for them and by directly “tapping the line”. I don’t think US officials asking US companies to compromise their products and keep quiet about it would fly in the US. At least not yet. But I wouldn’t put it past them either.

To be honest, of all three, I’d rather purchase something made in Europe, even for a premium.

There are others that aren’t Chinese but nothing anywhere near the price bracket you’ll get from GL.Inet

Can you give me some pointers to non-Chinese equivalents of those GL.iNet routers? I’m quite ready to suck up the extra cost.

First world problem.