Nothing But Trouble, so they don’t come back

4 year old article

We made an automaton clerk. It has neither arms nor body, but it works all day translating physician’s documents, so they may be stored with uniformity in a library that has neither shelves nor paper.

The animal industries have their own lobbying and disinformation campaigns. The pro-corporate media environment is an inextricable part of capitalist society. Their CEOs and those of Exxon et al are all basically saying “we’re doing what we’re permitted to do, it’s your job to reign us in for any social good whatsoever”. Any rational actor in a society that permits this will do this if given the opportunity. They’re products of their environment. Sometimes they’ll get ratioed on X, and agree to some small concession, a mere unconscious twitch of the power of the people causing multibillion $ companies to yelp in terror.

In a way, he’s right. You can’t expect a trillion dollar private company to do anything but maximize profits any way they can get away with. It’s in the interest of the public to overthrow capitalism and the responsibility falls on us to understand this and do this. ExxonMobil exists with the consent of the masses.

Sometimes, somewhat.

You wanna go for start-ups then. Most bigger and medium-sized companies have centrally-managed security where they wanna push updates and such to all computers or there’s some corporate spyware everyone’s gotta run or they’ve got everyone on M$ Office etc etc. Odds are a place that lets you use a linux laptop is going to be reluctant to buy you one and invite you to use your own. Macbooks aren’t so bad, if they let you have sudo, lots of places use those.

I wonder if it has much to do with the USAF being a relatively new service with a proportional cultural impact, coming into being as a service in 1947. Up until then, combat aviation was subordinate to the Army and Navy. This would point to a preponderance of Army/Navy WWII vets among the show’s consultants and audience.

Being privacy-conscious can protect your information from being passively collected by mainly corporate entities that track your buying habits, life events, and health.

If you think you’re being actively targeted for surveillance, then you need security that is proportional to the resources that the people who are spying on you have. In the case of say, the NSA, they could have a backdoor in a various location in your hardware or software stack. If you have privacy tools like tor, they’re liable to target you and collect your data just for that. Most android/IOS phones are thoroughly bugged and tracked, to the point where if the battery is still attached and the phone is switched off you can still be tracked. If the NSA does collect your data, there’s a 99% chance no human will look at your data unless they have a reason to search for you.

If you are being spied on, odds are you won’t catch it. You might be able to isolate abnormal outbound network traffic if you’re really good about tracking that kind of thing on your network. Your phone could connect to a fake Stingray cell station and you wouldn’t know.

If you’re being stalked by a person with less resources than the NSA, it becomes a lot easier and common-sense privacy protections can help you keep a low enough profile.

It’s also worth noting that if private companies get a hold of your data, they’ll sell it to any government or private organization who’ll pay them. There’s scant regulation about what they can’t collect and what they can’t do with it.

I think the simplest rule of thumb is if you have something sensitive, don’t say it near an android or ios phone and don’t put it on a computer that’s plugged into the internet. Criminals have their own OPSEC, as do people in the intelligence industry, and usually the answer is an “air gap”.

I’m typing on a mac keyboard on Debian. USB one with the numpad. It’s fantastic if you’re into that.

The last time I tried to pair the magic mouse 2 though, no joy. I’d be wary of the bluetooth keyboard.

Soulseek is good for downloading albums and discographies, soundiiz, qobuz-dl and deemix-gui are good for that and also playlists of whatever. It’s also a good way to get FLACs. I download genre mixes, pitchfork’s top albums, it’s a good way to get 80gb of music in a night. It’s taken me 3 months to get that much off Soulseek. Sometimes you want to try out artists without downloading their whole discography.

Nicotine+ is OK, I upload about a tb a month on there and occasionally I find a missing track I can’t find on Deezer, Qobuz or Bandcamp. Turns out other people aren’t just imperfect versions of you.

2023 was absolutely the year I dove back into music piracy. I started with downloading youtube playlists but the real game changer was soundiiz, which allowed me to import text, m3u, csv, spotify, xspf playlists into qobuz and deezer so i can download whole playlists of FLAC with qobuz-dl and deemix-gui. My collection went from 20,000 to 100,000, downloading playlists from qobuz and deezer, xspf playlists from my remaining lossy music. I used streamripper on a few web radio stations just to get a list of songs to pull down this way. I only bought music for years and years, but that got me a narrow type of collection.

They’d only say that if the vegetable farmers were offering the politicians more money.

It’s the economic system of distribution that’s the issue. That’s why 10% of our gas is corn. Why the USDA food pyramid had 11 servings of grain. Business and government will continue to merge until we replace the capitalist government with a socialist one. Then at least we’d have a chance of government doing what voters want. As long as the government and the working class are different groups of people, people will always be looking for ineffectual patches for a broken system.

That’s all you get when you’ve got a system where the accumulation of political power through the accumulation of capital is aided and abetted. Agriculture is a politically powerful lobby so they get taxpayer dollars every year and lax supervision through regulatory capture.

To bring this back around to the NSA, they’re prevented by law to do data collection on American citizens who fall outside the exceptions like this FISA bill. The one loophole is that private companies have much more leeway in whose private information they can collect, and NSA can use American tax dollars to buy your personal information that’s illegal for them to collect themselves. Now NSA is a military intelligence organization and they’re not supposed to toss their intercepts over to US law enforcement like the FBI, but they do.

The usual. Journalists, democracy, threats to fascism and corporate profits at home and abroad.

Capitalism will bring out the worst in AI, to prevent it we’d need to overthrow capitalism.

I made a XSPF format list of lossy versions, imported into qobuz and deezer using soundiiz, and downloaded from there using qobuz-dl and deemix, fwiw. Got about 1.2 TB this way

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