Discord.

Doesn’t matter whose. They’re all shit. They’re not a substitute for forums for support yet everyone uses them as that. They breed power-tripping children (and man-children) who think they’re super special because they mod some server. They’re made for churning out drama. They aren’t searchable from search engines. I mean they were made for GAMERS and then spread out to the rest of the toxic internet.

Third party anti-fraud database providers that have access to private databases with info on people. Things like public records, private records, data brokers, etc.

Presumably given they’ve all been released in the past few years and are still getting updates the manufacturers would release an update disabling the functionality to comply with law. Same with end user devices removing the functionality via software update.

You’d have a small percentage of holdouts who have auto updates off and also refuse to apply it manually and who also have non-updated computers or smartphone. They’d leave it up to whoever buys the spectrum to locate illegal use like this based on detected interference in their usage, report it to the FCC and they send you a nasty letter followed by debilitating fines and a legal order to seize your equipment if that fails.

In practice people who go out of their way to avoid the updates that disable it will probably see no consequences but decreasing benefits as well and will eventually update or replace devices.

Those are the ones that actually work, yes! It’s just most of the buns aren’t that and even some of those aren’t so good.

• Mustard, lots (none of that Frenches garbage, either a good dijon or spicy brown),
• diced raw onions,
• finely diced garlic
• dill relish,
• peppers (cayenne or jalapeno)
• sauerkraut
• chili sauce (optional overload topping)

It’s a real challenge getting hot dog buns that can accommodate all those toppings, I swear the manufacturers either expect really skinny dogs or hate toppings. Only a few premium brands seem to carry buns that will bear it all, the store brands and things like ballpark are hopelessly inadequate for more than mustard and one other topping at best.

Not even a choice.

If you choose over 100F you will see electronics failing more often, working harder, less efficient, working badly, etc because the heat is causing them to throttle in various ways. In the modern world it is far, far easier to heat up a space with a house full of electronics and humans than it is to keep it cool. The energy required to raise the temperature from say 5 degrees F to a more comfortable 40 degrees (35 degree change) pales in comparison to the energy required to keep yourself and your devices cool a mere 10-15 degrees less to around 90 degrees which is still uncomfortably hot and sweaty.

I’ll note that a constant 100 degrees is more than hot enough to cause various foods, medications, substances to break down and go bad. Check your medicine cabinet, most of your pills including over the counter are only rated for storage at up to 86 degrees. Your medicine will lose efficiency or go bad in some, perhaps many cases. Your food outside your fridge will spoil more quickly, mold and bacteria will grow more quickly and readily. Your fridge itself will work harder and die sooner.

The tap water will run hot or warm most of the time meaning a shower won’t necessarily cool you off much.

The colder temperatures are cheaper all costs considered, feel better, can be negated at a moment’s notice with socks, a jacket, and a blanket.

It’s easy to insulate a home against extreme cold and just retain heat you generate inside including by your body and devices. It requires a lot more effort to keep the inside cold when both the outside and things inside are generating heat and trying to warm it up.

This is a reason why climate change is a nightmare not just for human comfort but on so many levels. Our electronics are going to operate less efficiently in a warmer world and draw more power to do so.

Apple TV: No ads. Been around for over a decade.

Google TV: homescreen ads for a decade+ and even pushed onto Nvidia shield owners who originally may have bought the devices because Nvidia made a premium customized version without ads until they got tired of that and put ads in.

Apple has problems but ads aren’t a big one.

Neither big company is your friend. They both exploit workers and are both bad.

It’s just Google tends to be better at cutting edge bad like enabling genocide with their products and stuffing ads down the throats of people while Apple tries to maintain a crunchier appearance and vibe and is fine reaping 30% App Store fees on all transactions and making side loading very hard.

Apple rips you off on low storage and high costs to upgrade compared to Google/Samsung it’s definitely true.

It’s impossible to de-google or meaningfully remove unwanted stuff from Smart TVs while keeping them usable for streaming purposes.

What you want to do is factory reset, don’t connect to the internet, go into settings and turn off whatever you can, and then use a streaming box.

Yes it’s an additional cost but it’s BETTER. The processors and memory in those TVs are lousy, the apps are often sluggish, the experience is simply not great. Frankly the hardware was built not to be usable for you, they are data collection platforms that include minimal low quality streaming experiences in order to collect data. No software is going to fix that.

Want something that “just works” and supports all the major streamers? Get an Apple TV 4k. It’s pretty private but importantly no ads, clean interface, powerful hardware. Is it maximally private? No. But it is easy.

Want to put in effort? You can get either a Dune-HD box (some have dual-OS without reboot where one is Netflix certified to get you full resolution while passing DRM checks while another is unlocked bootloader which you can install all kinds of things like Plex and Kodi on) or get some other Android streaming device of your choice (Walmart’s Onn brand 4k devices used to be very good and cheap though you might need to check as I heard rumors the latest devices can’t be unlocked).

You’ll have a better experience on more powerful hardware and will never want to go back to the bad on-board TV experience.

Wait until you find out they offer apps with ties to:

• FBI
• US military
• CIA
• NSA
• The most awful fascist ghouls on podcasts and youtube
• The “israeli” state and its war criminal institutions.

Curious then you pick on vague ties to China to fearmonger.

I mean FFS Microsoft and Google are actively abetting the most documented genocide in a century. Where is the outrage from these garbage people over that? Where’s the push to help boycott and pressure them to stop assisting the slaughter? Children are being killed right now in Gaza with the help of these American companies and where are the stories encouraging people to stop using them?

Never cared for pocket and always disabled it as spyware. Fake spot will be missed though.

This is an ill omen however. They’re cutting back dramatically in anticipation of their Google funding being lost forever and perhaps as some suggest in anticipation of enshitifying. These were both sold originally as additional revenue streams for Mozilla.

IMO focus on purchasing physical content from creators or distributors who NEED to get paid.

It’s one thing to foolishly throw money at these big companies for blurays of an already very successful series while they’re throwing their old libraries in the trash or ‘the vault’ or just shoveling most of their money towards low quality reality garbage.

It’s another to buy a Criterion or BFI or Vinegar Syndrome bluray of something out of print that they need to recoup the costs of restoring and scanning.

If someone buys a bluray of an MCU movie they are a chump, firstly for liking that stuff, secondly for giving Disney more money for it when those things already earn piles of cash in theaters and that alone would be enough to keep them paying salaries and producing that stuff.

Spend money on independent film-makers/releases, on restorations, on series you like on the verge of cancellation.

Sadly I think the conclusion is already written, physical media’s days are numbered, the big companies are going to shut down the overwhelming majority of bluray and dvd production within 5-10 years is my feeling because why sell you for $20-$30 a copy of something when they can get your rent in the form of streaming monthly payments for the rest of your natural life?

And best of all with the rent they can push ads which further increase their revenue. That bluray is a one-time payment, ads for watching the movie on streaming are a continual revenue stream. I predict that they will either have completely killed off ad-free tiers of streaming to push most of their audience into an even bigger and more valuable ad pool to sell to advertisers OR the prices of the ad-free tiers will grow dramatically away from the ad-supported tiers. Right now it’s a few bucks a month, I suspect within 10 years it will be 170-300% the cost of the ad-supported version.

Because their founder (Marlinspike) is probably under a National Security Letter, maybe it’s just that, maybe he’s done some crimes they’re also holding over him. If you look at his behavior it’s that of someone very paranoid that they’re going to be found out to be cooperating with the feds and get hit with charges for not upholding the bargain, someone straddling one or two big lies that have to be maintained to keep their life going. Very controlling of things they should be open about if they care about privacy as they claim. But exactly the behavior of someone under an NSL who’s terrified of getting hit with charges for that and maybe other things but who is expected to front and run a purported privacy first messenger. The secrecy, the refusal to allow others to operate their own servers, the antagonism towards federation, the long periods without publishing source code updates.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that signal message content is compromised, the NSA primarily scrapes metadata and would most care about knowing who is talking to who and to put real names to those people and building graphs of networks of people. Other things like what times they talk can be inferred from upstream taps on signals servers without their knowledge or cooperation via traffic observation and correlation especially when paired with the fourteen eyes global intercept network. With a phone number it’s also a lot easier to pinpoint an exact device to hack using a cooperating (or hacked) telecom. Phone numbers can also be correlated to triangulated positions of devices, see who in a leftist protest network was A) heavily sending messages and B) attended that protest and left last and begin to infer things about structure and particular relationships.

And those saying it has to do with spam prevention, that’s kind of nonsense. First I still get the occasional spam, second a phone number that can receive a confirmation text is something all these criminal organizations have access to which the average person doesn’t. Third it’s possible to prevent spam just by looking for people (especially new accounts under 120 days old) sending very small amounts of messages (1-3) to a very large amount of other users especially in a short amount of time. Third there’s no reason to keep the phone number tied to the account, a confirmation text could be required with a promise to delete the phone number immediately after (would still be technically useful to the NSA though less useful for keeping track of people changing numbers or using a burner for this who might be higher value targets).

No need to be rude. Let me attempt to further elucidate on my point.

Colonialism came before fascism was ever coined or uttered much less a movement that’s true but I dispute it being an entirely different animal and insist it’s merely colonialism adapted for specific circumstances of a specific time in Europe. Some people might say just the same that it was “proto-fascism” and our disagreement is not about what came first but whether it is a different animal instead of just a rebranding.

I think the conversation about colonialism as an enduring phenomenon is more important to center the conversation around than allowing certain parties to reframe the conversation and the victim-hood of 20th century European people as particularly special and unique and isolated from these practices when there are so many clear connections openly admitted by the perpetrators themselves.

Don’t ask meaningful questions about history and politics and systems and then get defensive when people give you academic answers that address it and give context and information. Don’t agree? That’s fine.

Now for you I’ll even expand a bit further since you’re so fixated on “proto”. History is not a series of events happening in separate vacuums. It is a series of connected processes going back all the way to the start. Some connections are stronger than others yes, some closer to one another, directly preceding or even being necessary for the development of for example.

Fascism is a loaded word. People bandy it about not to mean a specific phenomenon in Europe in the 20th century from say the 1920s to the mid 1940s centered on Germany and Italy but to mean broadly “oppressive bad political system or act”. Yet that’s not what it was or means. If you’re using it in those loose and inaccurate terms then well there are lot of historical oppressive, repressive, reactionary, and what we might call bad systems including but not limited to monarchy. But in my opinion there’s no direct line between monarchism and the actual historical fascism. Monarchism didn’t directly give rise to it. Arguments about whether it was historically necessary are more complicated, I’ll just say that colonialism was much, much more necessary as was the American example of genocide and settling and for that matter as was capitalism. For that matter the rise of socialism was a necessity because fascism existed and rose to power in opposition to communists and its rule was seen as preferable to the communists by big business and industry and by a variety of reactionary political ideologues and ideologies including but not limited to monarchists.

Not really.

Colonialism is proto-fascism or more correctly fascism is merely colonialism turned on white people by their immediate neighbors instead of an empire an ocean away. All the tactics and horrors of fascism were adopted from colonial practices by European empires in Africa, by American settler colonizers in the Americas, etc. The mass propaganda model was designed based on American advertising psychological studies and practices. The only true innovations were mechanization (use of extensive trains, computer systems for organizing the exterminations, etc), and white people being the victims. Fascism itself arose specifically due to the threat of socialism as a way of combating it by the capitalists.

Monarchism is an unjust, vile, backwards, reactionary system of government and rule. It has presided over colonialism but it also predated it and colonialism has also occurred from nations without monarchies (US is prime example, but France is another, they continued colonialism well into the very end of the 20th century long after they chopped off the heads of their own monarchs and some including myself would argue their neo-colonialism has continued right up until recent events like the formation of AES in the African sahel).

Now I haven’t thought a lot on this particular question or explored it in depth looking for a connection (maybe you can find one if you want to start drawing lines from x through y to then z) but right now I wouldn’t say that there is any kind of direct line from monarchism to fascism per se. Monarchism upholds itself through brutality and injustice yes and is predicated on unjust thinking and supremacy and I suppose one could explore the influence of monarchism and monarchist thinking on the development of colonialism and racism but in truth capitalism and proto-capitalist modes of production are the father of fascism via the development of colonialism.

This only happens on OEM installs of Windows. Ridiculous but as far as I know if you disable it after first setup (OOBE) it never shows up again if you have only local accounts.

This is going to get DV victims killed. At least on phone tracking like iPhone’s family sharing makes it clear it’s happening and often has a way of disabling it when you make your final run for it allowing you to keep your phone.

Private property isn’t a sacrifice. I don’t own any.

There’s a difference between personal property and private property. Private property is a mall, is a factory, is machinery at your workplace. Personal property is your toothbrush, your Playstation, your Television, your blender, your set of German knives, your computer, your books, etc.

Freedom of speech has never existed. The illusion of it has been allowed to be stronger or weaker in various places at various times, if your speech is no threat it’s often allowed, it’s when it’s a threat that suddenly the freedom vanishes and hides behind excuses like national security or illegal ideologies, etc.

I question how you would get rid of freedom of thought without some sort of hellish brain implants being made mandatory so it’s an odd thing to mention.

I’d be willing to sacrifice an awful lot of fascists, reactionaries, and an awful lot of enabling liberals. I’d be willing to sacrifice bourgeoisie. The expropriation of their private property is not a sacrifice but a necessity for things being held in common trust for the people.

They pulled out of the illegal settlements and maybe the greater occupation some years ago and reactionaries were furious.

Simplewall.

94% of Militia members in the US are foaming at the mouth reactionaries if not open fascists, with many being active or former law enforcement or related to military or intelligence.