He doesn’t have to do shit to justify anything. He hasn’t thus far.

All he has to do is say “I declare an insurrection” and the democrats will hem and haw while the republicans move in lock step. And the military will support him, just like they did last time.

Oh, wait, that pisses people off. Let me try again

The military will wait for orders from the POTUS to figure out what to do about the POTUS. SUPPORT THE TROOPS MOTHER FUCKERS!!!

This is gonna suck but fuckin’ A canada. Have the spine we don’t.

I haven’t checked this week (yay, might already be too late) but my understanding is that amazon only disabled the web interface to download ebooks to a computer.

Using the (Windows) Kindle for PC App at a sufficiently old version was still working last week even after people had claimed the web interface was disabled.

It is only a matter of time but it is also something that the vast majority of people are too computer illiterate to do so it is probably going to be a decent amount of time. Cost amazon more to disable it than to let people do it.

To my knowledge, Sanderson has not spoken out against Kindle*. His kickstarter was mostly to advertise Dragonsteel which is likely going to become his own publishing house at some point.

And while… fuck amazon, Kindle is a ridiculously author friendly platform to publish on and is the only reason we have so many amazing self published authors these days. And while KU is not great per book, it is an excellent way to get people interested in an author and buy their latest books. I strongly encourage actually reading what authors say instead of what users and armchair financial analysts do.

*: I would be incredibly shocked if he did. I think he is definitely becoming more “woke” than “mormon” these days based off his writing and character details but he is still very much a business person

I strongly encourage POLITELY reaching out to your favorite authors on social media to talk to them about this.

One of my favorite guilty pleasure reads is very open that this is why his ebooks are only on kindle. But he is also looking into alternatives (especially since he is now big enough to have at least a small publisher) because the readers he is trying to help with KU are the ones asking him to get away from it.

Not going to tear down my de-drm setup any time soon. But optimistic I might be able to before amazon does it for me.

Truth has no meaning. When they are ready to do that they’ll just say that they saw there were riots on the news and that is why you now have a live in nazi to keep an eye on your family and make sure you are not passing on any gay frog genes.

Nah, this is just ransacking and gutting the government. All the oligarchs remember how much money they made off the covid pandemic and want to recreate that. Doom spending to try and drown out the voices, panic spending because toilet paper, etc. Also there is 100% a reason trump kept talking about wanting to see the gold in Fort Knox and that is totally just a stimulus for the uhaul industry.

Same thing with the tariffs. They are hoping for small stock market crashes that let them buy low and then sell when it rebounds because the tariffs are totally coming next month, not this month.

And… that is also why there is such a big focus on Canada and Greenland. That is land that is going to be less impacted by global warming and they know it is coming (there was a spectacular article by a sex worker in Geneva on the topic. Short version: Everyone knows it is coming and that stopping it would hurt quality of life. So they are focused on making sure they are comfortable while we die).

Don’t worry. teslas will have a huge government rebate program to help offset the tariff induced price hikes.

RENEGADE!!!

The only thing providing ANY resistance is the fear of what happens if constituents realize their representative killed social security.

There will be no resistance whatsoever for an anonymous vote.

I’m not saying it’s not entirely true because we’ve been hearing about this for years. But given who is in charge of the FBI now, I wonder how many of these “credible threats” are actually credible vs. how many of them are actually just made up by Patel to make sure they stay in line.

If the people saying there are death threats against you are the same ones who are supposed to investigate them: There are death threats against you. It just might be a fed holding the gun.

Yeah.

It is very important to understand this concept (or just listen to bannon et al talking about doing exactly this…).

But also? trump’s deadcatting IS causing damage. Stuff like “the price of eggs” is going to be heavily impacted by bird flu (out of their control), mass unemployment (thanks musk), and the economic policies being pushed by the republican congress. But also? Stuff like “threatening a trade war with the entire planet” sure as hell doesn’t help that either.

So, no, people can’t just ignore the deadcatting as many folk online insist they should. Because the trump admin is so incredibly incompetent that even their distractions are deeply harmful.

Yeah. I think it was hilarious to “hack” government displays to show this in protest.

I am REALLY uncomfortable with sharing it on a wider basis. Because, at the risk of sounding like DNC leadership, it is opening a huge can of worms. Imagine if instead this was musk posting a deepfake of him and AOC similar to how he offered to rape taylor swift a while back?

I’ll just explain why that is a horrible idea with three simple letters:

A. O. C.

You’re welcome to believe whatever makes you happy in this post truth hellscape we live in.

But reddit (generally left on drugs, center-right on social issues) tears into them pretty regularly for that. Bluesky seems to be left-center-left-ish and is also a place where people can tear into the account. And while there are much better moderation tools on both platforms, that still doesn’t protect them for the equivalent of a trending hashtag or /all post.

We can only speculate but considering plenty of people have criticized the mastodon community over the past year or so (Alec from Technology Connections being a great example where, if anything, he should be our patron saint rather than the guy who gets harassed any time his posts get surfaced by The Algorithm) AND basically the entire “internet” decided on bluesky… it likely really is just cost cutting and not caring enough to monitor the mastodon account.

Also, it looks like they have a Threads account anyway? https://www.threads.net/@protonprivacy. Which means that the Mastodon users can still follow them? I forgot what the status on federation with facebook ended up being.

It depends how they are doing it.

People learned years ago that there is a big difference between microblogs (twitter), blogs (facebook and tumblr), and message boards (reddit). And there are major differences even within those. The post you make for tumblr and the post you make for facebook are targeting very different audiences. Which IS time consuming for a good community manager and is shitty 100 character blog posts for someone’s nephew.

From checking out their bluesky, it looks like proton is pulling out of all the microblogs in favor of just reddit (https://bsky.app/profile/proton.me). Which sucks but is “fine”. And it is likely more that positive engagement on Mastodon was just too low to even be worth multi-posting once every two weeks. Which… is something a lot of not shitty companies have decided to be the case.

That said: I didn’t check twitter because fuck that shit. If they are still super active there then, yeah, ridiculously “sus”.

What exactly can you upgrade iteratively?

From the laptop perspective (because the desktop is totally all about that side panel life):

1. Memory: Ultrabooks are hell, no arguments there. But many brands have increasingly allowed at least one SODIMM to be swapped out and many still no longer solder the other one. And I’ll say, from personal experience, that buying and swapping out RAM in a relatively new-ish laptop often comes out closer to the price of just paying for the upgraded SKU to begin with. So there is the logic of “I’ll add another 16 GB in two years” but… yeah.
2. Storage: Again, same. Except that they tend to not even solder down the nvmes. There are some particularly asshole vendors but they are few and far between. And this totally is worth doing since they tend to be fairly standard nvme drives or the small SSD that I always forget the format of. Rather than RAM that is only used by laptops and NUCs and costs an arm and a leg…
3. Ports: Framework laptops just use USB C dongles for everything. They have a semi-proprietary format for those but it is still, fundamentally, a usb c dongle. And, from talking to a mutual on a discord who has one, it has the same fundamental problem that USB C dongles/hubs do when installing the more finicky OSes (hi Proxmox and OpnSense) where you can’t actually access the hub capabilities until AFTER the OS is installed (the more live CD based distros avoid this). So no difference in terms of upgrades and modularity outside of having fewer vendors to buy a dongle from if you care about form factor that much.
4. CPU: Only if you swap out the motherboard which is the vast majority of the price of the laptop anyway.
5. Keyboard, display, etc: These are less “upgrades” so much as replacements. Which are good arguments for repairability but also… go actually look at ifixit’s website and see how many laptops are repairable. It is mostly just apple who suck horrifically

And just because it always amuses me and never fails, let’s price out upgrading/replacing a framework (uplacing?). I’ll assume no parts failed to keep prices simple and “You can replace your keyboard every time it fails over a five year period” is not the flex people think it is. I’ll use the intel core ultra series 1 because that is in stock and not a preorder. We are dealing with last year’s model (I think. I haven’t followed Intel laptop processors too much) so there is inherently wiggle room there, but it is theoretically fair as it is last year’s model for both of them since I had to dig deep into the framework site to find an Intel since fuck Best Buy’s website if you are trying to compare AMDs (also fuck AMD for their naming insanity).

• FW13 with Intel Core Ultra Series 1 at 13 inches is estimated to be 999 USD https://frame.work/products/laptop13-intel-ultra-1/configuration/new. 8 Gigs of RAM, Ultra 5 125H, 256 GB Storage
• Core Ultra 5 Series 1 at 13 inches. Ultra 5 125U so techincally different but arguably much better for an actual laptop. 256 GB storage, 8 GB RAM. … Eothas wept at this URL https://www.bestbuy.com/site/hp-probook-460-g11-16-ips-1920-x-1200-wuxga-laptop-intel-core-ultra-5-with-8gb-memory-256-gb-ssd-pike-silver-aluminum-gray/6601496.p?skuId=6601496. Estimated to be 879.99 USD

So we are already looking at the framework being about 120 USD more expensive without looking at any configurations or upgrades.

So let’s get into that hyperbolic time chamber and totally not have gay sex with the glistening man hunk known as Vegeta. Five years later, let’s consider an upgrade… to the same SKU.

On the Framework marketplace, another 125H mobo costs 399 USD right now.

• Framework: 999 + 399 = 1398 for two generations of a laptop
• Best Buy: 879 + 879 = 1758
• For a total savings of 1758-1398 = 360 USD over 5 years of getting soaked by that galick gun

Which is nothing to balk at. But that assumes that your display and keyboard held up and didn’t need replacing, you liked all the default dongles Framework gave you (which is apparently just four USB C ports… to plug into the four USB C ports on the laptop), and, most importantly, that Framework didn’t change their form factor (I am not sure if they did for the 16 inch laptops to support the “modular” keyboards). Every spare dongle or repaired/upgraded part costs money. Versus being guaranteed a “pristine” new laptop… full of massive amounts of bloatware that you immediately format the shit out of to put Linux on that.

And, obvious grain of salt, the past few times I have done this exercise it was closer to 100 USD. Framework just happen to be dumping large amounts of old stock right now for their new models so the prices are better and the comparisons are more tedious.

Again, conceptually I like Framework. And, for as much as I mock them, I actually do like the form factor for their dongles a lot. Give me a computer with a shit ton of USB C ports but also let me leep it usable at work without needing to carry around my sketchy anker dongle/dock. And I don’t really fault them too much for not letting you actually swap CPUs since that was basically something only the sickest of sickos did until the AM4 socket lasted like 40 years somehow.

But their key strength is marketing and that has only gotten stronger since they got the full power of linus media group behind them because that company needs to protect their shareholders’ investment.

And, like I said before, I do worry that this just encourages people to hoard parts. Like… anyone who has built a desktop or two has that big plastic bin full of old ram and mobos and even graphics cards that they might use someday but never will (PSU is totally worth saving though).

If black people had joined the air force in very large numbers and abused other ethnic and socioeconomic groups as a way to ingratiate themselves to the crackers and we decided to call them “smackers”? I would have zero problems and would whole heartedly say that.

And if someone suddenly decided that “black helicopter” is more a reference to African American pilots? I would do some research, figure out that is instead referring to night flight painting, and probably still avoid using the phrase while not caring all that much.

Speaking of: What are your thoughts on the term “cracker”? Because you clearly don’t understand the difference between a slur that is meant to degrade a human being and one that is meant to refer to an oppressor.

But seriously, unless there’s some reason to stream live, old tricks are sometimes still the best tricks.

Cops who know they are being recorded MIGHT behave slightly better. It is why they are so hellbent on never wearing bodycams ever again.

An SD card on the person of someone being thrown in the back of a van to have an “accident” on the way to booking? Not so useful.

Again. IF we decide that “paddy wagon” is a slur toward the Irish, it is specifically a slur toward Irish cops. And fuck the police.

Simple as that.

Like I said, I’ll try to avoid it in the future because even though there is very little evidence that it is even a slur toward Irish cops, it sounds enough like one that I would rather avoid it. But I am not gonna lose ANY sleep over oppressors getting their fee fees hurt because people don’t like them.

Yes, the Irish were (and kind of still are) looked down upon by “Whites”.

They historically chose to address that by becoming cops. Oppressors. The idea being that if they were useful they would at least be better than the brown and yellow people. And irish cops have caused untold horrors amongst labor and minorities.

So while I disagree that “paddy wagon” is an Irish slur so much as MAYBE it is a cop slur, it is close enough that I’ll refrain from using it. But it is still the same issue as with “cracker” where… you are gonna have to try a whole hell of a lot harder for me to care if people’s feelings are hurt that folk don’t appreciate how many skulls they cracked in the name of impressing the crackers.