This was all a calculated strategy to make independent farmers go bankrupt and into foreclosure, so that the big agritech companies could snag prime agricultural land for pennies on the dollar.

At some point, most food will be grown by corporations that can set whatever price they want for that food, and people will have to pay that price or starve to death. It’s the definition of “captured audience” that makes the Parasite Class extract so much wealth from the working class and become so fantastically wealthy.

At this point, I wouldn’t blame any company that immediately ceased expansions in America and started to consider moving existing production facilities to adjacent countries, like Canada.

Aside from the Rotary Un-Phone, there are pretty much no dumb phones anymore. Those that market themselves as dumb are just reskinned full-fat platforms.

Even almost all flip phones are smart phones with a dumb skin, as they run either Android or KaiOS.

The main reason why I would switch is for device security - a true dumb phone OS that operates purely out of the ROM and has no ability to install anything that could survive a reboot.

And for something that primitive, it would be a flip phone on par with the Motorola StarTac. Simple black-on-green screen, low-res display, with a calendar and address book as the only non-phone, non-SMS functionality.

Jerry: if you don’t think Israel is evil, it’s because you are, too.

Genocide is never OK, which is why I stand with the Palestinians.

I’ve never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.

- Clarence Darrow

there’s a lesson hidden somewhere in here

“People should be careful what they wish for.”

Particularly, his own admission that the deaths of innocents should be perfectly acceptable for 2nd amendment rights to be upheld.

Well, he sure set an example, now, didn’t he?

British Columbian here, what part of Canada was that? Because it wasn’t this end…

Maybe Alberta, the Trump-loving Texas of the North?

It’s almost as if rampant corruption, greed, and cowboy economics have consequences.

Have the day you voted for!

Before you reuse it, please crack open an image editor and correct the last word in the title by removing the apostrophe. Anyone who took English classes past Elementary school will thank you for that correction.

Apostrophe is possessive. The facts do not possess themselves.

When there are a number of them, however, they are just facts, without an apostrophe.

Sure, it takes a bit of effort. But if you replace your routers with ones that have open-source firmware or actual workstations acting as gateway routers and running business-class open-source software, you can create a personal VPN between everyone involved that shows only one exit point to world+dog.

The trick is with ensuring that all YouTube stuff gets properly and comprehensively funnelled through this exit node - VPNs can easily leak data if not configured properly, and sometimes do so despite good configs - and implementing this even on other devices that require individual VPN connectivity (roaming, like phones).

Plus, having a mobile device’s VPN auto-recognize when it’s connected to a known good network, and have it automatically disable itself in favour of the VPN on that network, is not something that’s easy to do.

Finally, doing so without a high-quality, high-speed ISP plan can easily lead to an unusably slow VPN. The “mothership” exit node, in particular, would have to be gigabit or better - and symmetrical as well, so fibre and not cable - because it has both the node and connections to other homes and devices. If everyone started suckling the YouTube teat at the same time, things would likely slow down pretty fast on anything significantly less than a symmetrical gigabit connection.

What is a business going to do, eat the cost of the tariff until the company goes bankrupt? That’s stupid.

I see any business as having only two real options for continued operations:

1. Roll the tariff into the overall price
2. Explicitly add the tariff as a separate line item, like shipping. And make it VISIBLE, beside everywhere the price is, along with a net, pre-shipping total.

At least the second highlights how Trump is hurting the average American. Pick one and move forward.

Have the day you voted for!

Abandon your monetarist goldbug worldview, the gold decoupling and subsequent floating of the international exchange rates are downstream of the actual policy decision that have emiserated the population.

I never said they were directly related, I just wanted to point out that they both occurred in the same year, in 1971.

This needs to be exactly reversed, the poorer you are, the easier it should be to acquire but the more you have the harder it gets. Up until a point where it becomes nearly impossible to go beyond the “capital horizon” some kind of equilibrium state where wealth can lo longer be acquired faster than you lose it.

👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

Absolutely.

if you think a “regular bed” on a 70s/80s/90s full-size pickup is 8’, just how long do you think a “long bed” is?

It’s the 9ft bed you could get as an option on full-sized trucks above the base model. So for Ford, the F-150 was stuck with either the regular 8ft bed - which was the default - or could go down to a 6.5ft short bed, but for the F-250, F-350 and higher, you could go for a 9ft long bed.

In some model years, the F-250 & 350 even had its rear axle shifted further towards the rear by a few inches when choosing the long bed in order to get better balance for loads.

This 9ft long bed was even marketed as a “large camper bed” for those oversized slide-in campers that were too long to allow a standard 8ft bed to raise its tailgate. This was a problem with 8ft beds, because a permanently-lowered tailgate could obstruct the license plate, necessitating its removal so the plate was more visible. The long bed didn’t have this problem, and the tailgate could stay on.

The 80s were already the second decade of the decline after the gold standard was revoked in 1971 and wages became decoupled from productivity. Everything was on a slowly accelerating slide downhill from there, although it took until the 90s for the first people to truly notice things were going sideways.

You want a real economic golden era? Try the 50s and the 60s, where a single wage earner could work a low-end service-level job (selling shoes, for example), and make enough to own a detached SFH, a car in the garage, support a SAH spouse and several children, go on modest vacations every year with at least one more ambitious one every few years, and still have enough left over to save generously for retirement.

A “regular bed” has always been an 8ft bed for the last 60-odd years. Look at any full-sized Ford, GMC, AMC, or Chevrolet pickup from the 70s, 80s, or 90s – it’s nearly impossible to find one with anything but an 8ft bed. If you wanted anything shorter you went with a “toy truck” like the Mazda B2000 to B2600i, or a Toyota Tacoma.

It’s just the utter lack of 8ft beds in full-sized modern (last 10-15 years) trucks that has had the industry reclassifying uselessly lobotomized truck beds as “regular” and normal-length beds as “extended”

• Your code will be significantly more insecure. Expect anything exposed to world+dog to be hacked far quicker than your own work.
• You will code even slower than if you just did the work yourself.
• You will fail to grow as a coder, and will even see your existing skills erode.

Once again we see the Parasite Class playing unethically with the labour/wealth they have stolen from their employees.

“Microsoft Excel is testing a new AI-powered function that can automatically fill cells in your spreadsheets.”

Every year, Microsoft gives me more reasons to permanently leave their products.

Unfortunately, due to compatibility with financial and other Windows-only software I still need to run Windows, but I am down to two rigs and it might go down to one in the new year.

Fascism always attacks education so that the people don’t know what is true or not, and are not taught the tools to figure things out on their own.

Oklahoma is a prime example of fascism in action.