Autist here:
Holy shit, an actual good joke, half revolving around Autism?
Damn.
Don’t see that often, hahah!
Autist here:
Holy shit, an actual good joke, half revolving around Autism?
Damn.
Don’t see that often, hahah!
In some sense yes, but:
If your TOR entry exit node is comprimised, you are basically fucked.
I’ve seen estimates that roughly 1/3 of them are comprimised, run by State actors of some kind.
People seem to forget that TOR was originally invented by the US Navy and used by them and the CIA and shit to move sensitive data around in the early 2000s, possibly late 90s.
Then they handed it off to the public.
Do you really think they do not know how to defeat it, when they really want to?
…
Also… I2P traffic is more anonymized/encrypted than TOR traffic is, in that each chunk in each packet is anonymized and encrypted… each packet is kind if a sausage of a bunch of people’s data being moved around all at once, the whole point is you can’t tell whose data ia whose.
IIRC, TOR packets do not work this way, they’re specifically addressed to a single encrypted and anonymized person.
So, its easier to reverse engineer who is the actual person using the network.
Whereas with I2P, you’re always routing for others as well as receiving your own data, albeit much, much more slowly.
What does nth grade reading level even mean?
Very broadly, a lower grade of reading level means:
Less broad vocabularly,
Less ability to use and comprehend more complex grammar and sentence structure,
Less critical analysis capability,
Less ability to understand context and domain specific, different meanings of words,
More reliance on nebulouy defined, vague slang vocabulary.
In the context of adults I can understand, but I think I’ve heard things like Xrh graders having an average reading level as Yth graders.
This means that say, a typical 8th grader now has reading/writing abilities on par with a 6th grader.
In other words, kids keep failing classes and getting passed onto the next grade anyway, instead of being held back, or sent into some kind of ‘catch-up’ or ‘remedial’ classes to get them up to standard.
…
Teachers and the education system broadly have, you know, rubrics, standards, lists of concepts that a kid is supposed to be taught in each class and grade.
This is how ‘grading’ works, the idea is that your test is supposed to evaluate how successful the student was at learning, how succesful the course was at actually teaching the student new concepts.
The main problem is that we underfund teachers and schools, and also punish teachers and schools when they actually do the right thing and refuse to pretend a kid has learned things they haven’t.
So, the result is, kids don’t learn.
…
Another recent contributor to this is just pandemic levels of kids on their phones in class, all the time, not paying attention.
What you should do is something like ok, if I see your phone in class once, it gets taken away for the rest of the class, two times, the rest of the day, 3 times, you have to surrender your phone to the office when you get to school and get it back when school is over.
But students and parents literally respond like feral zombies when you propose this, despite this being the norm throughout the proliferation of cellphones, and early days of smartphones.
There’s nothing stopping you from using a phone responsibly. Set it on vibrate, if you get an actual important txt or call, ask to step outside the class and take the call/message.
Schools also have landline phones for emergencies.
Another thing is that short form video content addiction does actually cause brainrot, it is real, its been shown in numerous academic studies.
Lower attention spans, lower impulse control, less control over emotions, and shortform video content platforms in particular also spread misinfo and disinfo like wildfire.
Its also a (nearly?) 10 year old paradigm at this point.
TOR is ‘experimental’ in the same way I2P is.
I2P works, though it is more technically complex for an average user to properly set up than most VPNs.
This is a joke, right?
The US is currently economically collapsing, nearly every company/corp is firing and laying people off, an entry level job requires 3 to 5 years of experience, and something like 60% of companies freely admit to posting ghost jobs, fake online job listings that never actually result in a hire, or are just done to pretend an internal promotion is actually being competetively sourced to the whole job market.
It is extremely difficult for young people to find a job right now, one that ends up paying more than they’d lose in the costs of buying a car and gas and insurance to get to said job.
If you are broke and cannot afford a VPN, I suggest you use I2P.
I2P is basically an internet protocol that treats all kinds of internet activity in the manner a torrent works.
Basically, you run a local node.
Traffic is routed around in a bunch of anonymized, encrypted chunks, from many different users, which are then bunched up together into packets and encrypted again.
As a client, you can only decrypt the parts of a packet that pertain to you…
But as a node, you help move packets along to every other person who is running a node, in a sort of meshnet like fashion.
The result is a free, but very slow, but also pretty well anonymized way of passing net traffic around…
…and it is also arguably more private/secure than a VPN, which can simply hand over its server logs if legally asked to…
…and it is also arguably more private/secure than TOR, which can have de-anonymization attacks run on it if enough onion nodes, or your entry/exit nodes, are either comprimised or just outright run as honey pots, which is a thing various law enforcement agencies do.
However, another downside to I2P is that it is… considerably more technically complex for most users to actually set up and use properly, than just a basic VPN for switching your geoip to watch Brazillian netflix or w/e.
But, it does allow torrenting and portforwarding, and is totally free.
Don’t expect to be able to stream any media with it though, it is again very slow.
I didn’t think you were arguing that, no worries m8.
I was just trying to throw in some relevant numbers to attempt a more realistic estimate of the situation.
I agree with you that the 60% figure for BNPL is not actually evidenced, and is likely an exageration, so I tried to do the author’s work better than they did and come up with a more defensible figure.
I used to be a copy editor for a while, and oh man, yeah, it absolutely annoys me to no end when a person tries to argue in a direction I generally agree with, but they do so sloppily, with bad citations, logical leaps, lack of approoriate levels of knowledge leading to them making inferences and deductions that do not actually follow.
In American schools?
Normal public schools?
Economics is an elective, only available at fairly good schools, usually only taken by overachievers.
Most US Public schools don’t even teach the basics of taxes or finances as it applies to an average person who is going to like, work a job that is taxed, buy a car with a loan.
Our education system has been intentionally destroyed by Republican s for decades, the result is that roughly within +/- 2 years of when I graduated college… US average adult literacy rate has been plummeting.
The average US adult now reads at a 6th grade level, average math skills are also terrible.
Uneducated people are easier to lie to and trick.
Oh yeah, absolutely, it is ludicrous when people do that.
If you have decent sidewalks, intetsections that are not a 1/2 mile apart, and god forbid, regular low grade inclines at crossings and other places, so that a wheel chair bound person could actually get around?
Well then blamo, throw a back pack on the frame of your chair/scooter, now you can actually go to a local bodega and buy some groceries!
Makes it easier for people who use a cane or crutches, or have a non obvious outwardly presenting neurological or muscular condition of some kind, etc.
But, US infrastructure broadly isn’t ADA compliant in the poorer areas seriously disabled people most commonly live… and we literally can’t, or struggle much more seriously in physically getting to an actual town hall.
Fucking… after a two months of aquatherapy, well now all I have the option to do is show up for basically the night swim at the therapy pool.
My problem is not that I need directed care … I was taught the excercizes/stretches, learned them, remembered them. I do the ones I can at home, out of a pool, every damned day.
The problem is it costs 5 dollars, in cash only, to attend.
I can’t fucking get to an ATM!
I told them this and they just said uh well you’ll figure it out.
Nope, never did.
There are no ATMs within over a mile of a walking roundtrip from me.
And the sidewalks don’t even exist near where I live, and/or they are cratering into sinkholes or erupting out of the ground. No joke, there’s one spot where the ground expanded and the sidewalk is entirely snapped in half, at about 40 degree angles.
But at this point, I am extremely used to falling through the cracks in systems, that are designed based on assumptions… that make no sense to hold, because ostensibly the entire point of these systems is that they are to help those who do not have those basic societal assumptions.
You tell people in these systems this, and every fucking time, no one has ever told them this before, this thought had never occured to them, or they get angry at you.
It is astounding.
Conversely, roughly 10%+ of the US has a negative net worth, ie, they owe more debt than they have assets.
https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/p70br-202.pdf
And I say 10%+ because this is from 2022, and in general, credit scores have been nose diving and car/home loan delinquencies and tenant evictions have been skyrocketing, since 2022.
We’ve also got roughly ~40% at least using BNPL for something.
We also know that … having a negative net wealth is, while not exclusive to poorer people/households in terms of their yearly income… it is much, much more strongly correlated with that.
Though this may change in ‘fun’ ways now that the housing market is collapsing, bye bye remnants of the ‘middle class’!
So anyway, I think a more realistic number for uh… people who are worse than living paycheck to paycheck, people who are actually living paycheck to loan repayment…
Its somewhere between ~10% and ~40%.
… Which is still really fucking bad, as that means something aporoximating a quarter of society sre now just literally debt slaves.
…
So basically, we have:
A ~20% debt slave class,
A ~50% exploited and struggling worker class (who is often in total denial about this being the case),
A ~25% petitie bougeois, decently paid worker / small business owner class (who routinely gaslights and belittles everyone below them, and aspirationally sucks off and praises those above them),
A ~5% capitalist owner class, that gets astonishingly more powerful and wealthy as you increment up each percent and then tenth of a percent, etc.
The SP500 hitting highs is a lot less good news when you realize most of that is simply due to the dollar devaluing against other international currencies.
That isn’t asset appreciation, it’s currency devaluation.
EDIT:
I m on mobile and don’t have the ability to make my own chart with DXY and SP500 normalized to each other, but uh…
https://portfolioslab.com/tools/stock-comparison/^DXY/SPY
Look at this in YTD, then in 1Y, then 5Y.
Normally, these two things move in the same dirrction, though the SP500 tends to grow much more when the DXY grows a little.
Well, now, basicslly since Trump took office, they’re moving in the opposite direction.
So, yeah, this is now what is called a ‘melt up’, where stocks climb higher, but not because of any kind of underlying fundamental strength of the US economy but because the USD has lost about 10% of its value compared to the currencies it most often is traded against.
Yeah, I am not only currently in a very, very unwalkable city…
I also literally cannot walk, not much further than uh… half a kilometer, without extreme pain, and that is using a cane and braces.
Fortunately my physical therapy is yielding good results in terms of regaining range of motion and stamina, but it is slow and painful.
That being said, a year ago, I was in a wheel chair.
So the improvements are real.
Hopefully by either the autumn or winter I’ll be mostly back to my previous level of mobility, and able to rent a car or moving truck or something and move to a less shitty area.
Put at least one of them in a microwave.
Pretty neat light show!
Technically, kind of, you are… burning the disk, in a sense, lol.
Thank you!
Starring this and saving the links to my bookmarks!
I am no stranger to seasoning, but uh, mostly with eggs and potatoes and meat and various baked bready things.
My only real experience with vegan cooking… beyond learning how to make a few interesting salads… is utterly, totally failing at attempting to make tofu into something edible.
Failed quite badly at that lol.
But I will definitely see if I can orient more of my next grocery run (delivery, really, yay disabled) around any of this, see if my arm and wrist can handle the prep.
Thanks!
Ok, that makes sense and generally tracks with my own experiences.
Particularly:
Ironically being vegan is pretty big in punk spaces now too.
The handful of folks I knew who were actual punks, in actual punk bands, played at local bars, were among the most genuinely kind people I’d ever met, and were the most dedicated, and also non-sanctimonious vegans I knew.
Unfortunately, I was more often around corpo yuppie types… bleck.
If you could link me to some kind of seitan or blackbean uh… patty making guide? I have no idea how that works, but I’d love to learn, love to switch over to something less meat intensive as I slowly recover and can handle more involved cooking procedures.
I appreciate the answer, I expanded on my own… non vegan status and thoughts about this a bit more under another replier.
Could I ask you?:
How common is it among the vegans you know to apply the kind of, do as little ecological harm as possible mindset…
How many of them apply that to… other kinds of economic activity?
Like, how many vegans do you know who say, own and drive a car, that may be powered by oil from say, a fracking field?
I’d imagine most who are serious enough to be as ethically vegan as possible are also very much anti-capitalist as possible…
But at the same time, I’ve personally known a good deal of self described vegans who… regularly drive their own car to work, despite living near a transit line that would totally get them to work… and also, their work is for the corporate office of a highly exploitative (in many ways, of many things) corporation… like Amazon, or MSFT… and then get very aggreived when I just… work remotely, and tell them they should probably take the lightrail/bus.
(I’m from Seattle if you can’t tell lol)
I appreciate the answer!
I myself am not a vegan at all, in practice, though I am familiar with … many of the frames that you can look at meat consumption through, and, correctly, imo, conclude that it is a wasteful, destructive, and morally dubious practice… and I do try to minimize my meat intake, but its fairly difficult when I am disabled, don’t have a car, can’t do significant meal prep due to injuries, live off of disability pay alone, can barely afford to get groceries delivered to me, because no local food banks or charities that I qualify for do actual home delivery.
I’ve been moving toward a lot more shelf stable, basic type stuff lately, rice and beans… but also crockpot soups with meat, spam is fairly simple to cook…, so, yeah, I am not a vegan.
But uh, the ‘if it tries to run away’ metric seems to be roughly where I would land on this as well… I guess I would just the line a bit higher than … a clam… I personally would think that… basically most insects (ararchnids are another story)… from what I understand of their neurology… they do not really seem to be capable of suffering…
https://www.sciencealert.com/insects-probably-do-feel-pain-similar-to-how-we-do-scientists-argue
Well fuck, I am generally apparently wrong about that.
Thank you, and again the other replier, for spurring me to give this subject more consideration.
Thank you, I appreciate the answer!
They probably are not broadly lying about AI replacement being the main factor.
Turns out… Amazon runs AWS for businesses… and also Amazon.com the online retail megastore and logistics service.
Every other business is laying people off?
Less B2B AWS demand.
Everyone is now unemployed?
Less consumer demand, downsize all aspects of Amazon.com storefront and logistics.
…
I’d actually argue that any serious modern economist should be paying attention to AWS and other enterprise level, scalable server solutions…
… That’s a leading indicator of at this point, of broad economic conditions.
If AWS and similar departments at similar companies… stop expanding so much, when the rest of the economy seems to be doing ok?
Yeah, that means growth in demand for basically core business software infrastructure is stalling, and it’ll take 6 to 18 months to filter through to the rest of the economy and become apparent in other metrics.
I mean… the FBI and INTERPOL/EUROPOL routinely do things like infiltrate dark web black markets for physical things, services, hacked data, hacks themselves, that exist mainly or only on a .onion site, then honeypot the users for 6 to 12 months, then crackdown on as many as they can at the same time.
They also go after rom hosting sites, they go after the sites that host torrents and trackers…
Sure, call those ‘Law Enforcement’ agencies instead of ‘Intelligence’ agencies if you want to, fact of the matter is they often collaborate and share methods, practices and just direct intel.
Kinda like how US police have largely militarized after getting all the surplus guns from Iraq 2 and Afghanistan.
…
Have you never seen a website with a:
“THIS SITE HAS BEEN SEIZED AND SHUTDOWN”
Banner replacing the main site?
If not, you must not have been pirating anything for very long, or even just following that genre of news.
Happens all the time, and its often a big smorgasbord of collaborating LE/Intel agencies with their logos on the banner.