Google News on My Pixel 6 Tells Me to Put Toilet Paper in the Freezer. Failing American Economy. Venezuelans Don’t Like Chicago.

Google News on My Pixel 6 Tells Me to Put Toilet Paper in the Freezer. Failing American Economy. Venezuelans Don’t Like Chicago.

There’s been a steep decline in Google News on my phone, and now it recommends stories saying “Life hack, put your toilet paper in the freezer.”

This after Google laid off at least 50 people from their News division. So why wouldn’t it behave more like MSN floating garbage and nonsense to the top now?

I’ve noticed a sharp increase in sources like the tabloid sites as well.

In just a generation, we’ve gone from Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather, to Lester Holt and Bill O’Reilly, to THIS.

The billionaires bought the news figuring they could run it as a propaganda rag that people would pay money to read. Then when they erected paywalls, they noticed they lost their ad revenue with very few subscribers, thus losing more money than they gained in subscriptions, and then after that they decided to do mass layoffs or even put the companies into bankruptcy and walk away from it.

The news is dead.

I was on the phone with my mother, who is a nurse and so hasn’t had trouble finding work since the early 1980s recession.

It’s so long ago now, plus my dad confiscated all the money and paid the bills himself and kept it all in his checking account, so she had no idea what inflation was running in that era, but I did manage to finally get through to her what finding a job is like now.

The U6 unemployment rate, which counts workers working REALLY bad jobs that are way beneath their skill set, or a few hours a week because they can’t find anything else, and “discouraged” workers is over 7.5% in Illinois right now. (October 2023, latest data, BLS)

It’s over 10% in Los Angeles and New York City.

7.2% in the US overall.

The early 80s recession was considered horrific, but the worst that unemployment ever got was near 11% by this measure, which they don’t publish conspicuously anymore, and in 1981 when she became a nurse it was about like it is now.

I asked her “So how were you doing in the jobs market in 1980 and 1981 when you weren’t a nurse yet?”

She said, something like “Oh it was terrible out there. All I could find was a waitress job at Richards (a restaurant in Indiana, I don’t know if it’s still there, but it had decent food in the 90s), and it barely paid me $2 an hour after I counted my tips and I had to go in for 10 hours every day to be on the clock for 7 because they did split shifts where I had to sit 3 hours with nothing to do then clock in for the next rush.”

I said, “Did you try to find anything better than this?”

She said, “Oh yeah, I was out there pounding the pavement. I tried to get a job at GM and they wouldn’t hire me. I went out to RCA and they hired both of your dad’s sisters but didn’t call me back.”

My dad’s sisters both have severe mental illness, so I can’t imagine they even had that job 3 months later knowing them. But they wouldn’t hire mom.

She said, “Finally I spent $1,600 on nursing school.” ($6,000 in 2023)

The State was running some sort of program where 160 people applied for 24 spots where the State would help them with some of their expenses.

My dad tried to sabotage her by not allowing her to study during the evenings “Because you have other things to do.” and turning off her alarm so it wouldn’t ring. Knowing that if she missed one day that they’d kick her out.

At first, he said “If you can find $1,600 you can go to school.” and walked off laughing and puffing a cigarette. He never figured she would. My grandmother and great-grandmother pooled the money together and paid for everything, so he resorted to sabotage saying “You’ll leave me if you become a nurse.”

He was always paranoid that she’d leave, but he would never treat her well so she figured out a way to leave. Her next two husbands were much worse.

But she got around the alarm clock sabotage by setting a second alarm. He can’t be woken up by anything so she set that for 3 AM and got a couple hours sleep, woke up, studied, and slipped out the door, and he never figured out what was going on.

But, it was bad out there in the 80s, real bad.

The news SAID it was bad, which is something they won’t do today even though it’s as bad finding a good job as it was in 1981.

The Chicago Tribune reported yesterday that many Venezuelan migrants were shocked that they came here and there’s nothing for them and they’ve been sleeping on the floor at the airport or in a tent city in a public park for months.

It’s starting to get cold and it’ll only get worse.

Many of them now apply for funds from the State through Catholic Charities to self-deport back to Venezuela, or to give up and go back down to a State where they won’t freeze to death.

They all got snookered in thinking it would be better in America for them than it would be in Venezuela, and the news quoted one man who came to Chicago as saying, “The American Dream no longer exists. […] If I’m going to sleep on the ground in Chicago I’d rather do it in Venezuela.”

So, all they did was walk through a jungle in a caravan, sneak into the US, and realize that it’s a real estate scam with bad winters, bullets flying everywhere, no jobs, and a lot of people who REALLY don’t want them here (including Chicagoans after they passed a “Welcoming City Ordinance” and then got 20,000 Venezuelans), and now they want to go back to Venezuela, where they will be treated worse than if they had never left for “failing to support the revolution”, which has left them with money worth so little that they “throw it in the trash because it’s not worth the trip to the bank” and “we still owe De La Rue millions and millions of dollars for printing it” according to one of the SeaMonkey (web browser suite) developers I’ve spoken to, who is in Venezuela.

I asked “tomman” what he thought about the mass illegal migration to the US, and he said “The last thing we need is more defectors.”, he seemed to be distraught by the idea that they’ve given up fixing anything and left.

In my opinion, this whole thing probably started because a few people spread rumors that in America the streets are paved with gold, and instead they’ve come to ANOTHER third world country that’s only “rich” because there’s about 1,600 people in the entire country that have amassed nearly all of the wealth. They hide in the shadows, control everything, buy the government you see, and don’t pay their taxes, so everything has been falling apart HERE too since about 2003 (five years later than Venezuela).

I also asked “tomman” how they could be so poor when they have more oil than Saudi Arabia. He said, “No Latin American country has ever been smart enough to do anything with that.”

Gavin’s GULAG. California Passed Bill to Make it Easier to Mistreat the Mentally Ill.

Gavin’s GULAG. California Passed Bill to Make it Easier to Mistreat the Mentally Ill.

California has passed a new “mental hygiene” law which will enable it to deem more people mentally ill, and then force them into “treatment”, including toxic and dangerous pharmaceuticals.

Like most laws, this basically doesn’t force the State to do anything, it just puts people at risk of having the law selectively enforced against them.

The United States already has a long history of abusing mental health laws and trampling over people’s constitutional rights.

If you want to bypass due process, you just accuse them of being mentally ill and then have all sorts of “secret court” proceedings where they have no right to personally attend, speak on their own behalf, or even have a lawyer represent them.

Not happy with involuntary committal laws, the authoritarians did this with Second Amendment rights in recent years too while the allegedly “conservative” Supreme Court sat there and allowed yet another anti-Constitutional process play out.

There is, for sure, a lesser standard of justice in America for not just the mentally ill, but for anyone even accused of it by the State, and I would just like to go on record as thanking the Democrats for proving they’re even worse, again.

It wasn’t that long ago, that California (again), was at the Supreme Court trying to enforce a law making it a felony to bring homeless Americans into the State (they lost), and they’ve been in court constantly trying to make homelessness a crime, and the cities like San Francisco are the biggest disgrace in America on that issue.

As for whether the government should be allowed to “step in” when a person has refused “medicine”, no. Not only no, Hell no.

California is a cesspit. I think most of us are ready for it to fall into the ocean.

Brave Lays Off 9% of Employees. “AI” in Web Browsers. American Social Credit System.

Brave had layoffs of 9% of the company.

Sad. They’re the only Chromium-based browser that’s worth any attention at all as a user. Certainly the only one that does much of anything to protect your privacy.

Definitely the only one that will ever have a Private Tab that proxies itself through Tor.

(Not as secure as Tor Browser, but good enough for better privacy than going directly through your own ISP.)

I wonder who they let go.

Unfortunately, the article says they want to put “LEO” an “AI” in the browser. Terrific.

*head desks*

Like Opera and Vivaldi putting in Chaff Bots and welding them to the GUI. 😛

Like Google and Bing, most of the “AI” is severely brain damaged so that it can’t possibly say anything that would (1) offend anyone or (2) steer you towards a torrent file (Bing Chat). Although some that refuse to tell you where a torrent file is will infect your computer with malware through ad fraud. (Bing Chat)

So obviously, “AI”. Yay!

It would be a real shame if Brave goes under.

Mozilla is about as Independent from Google as Belarus is from Russia.

There’s getting to be more and more forks of Firefox because the best way to improve it is tear all the junk out and hand the user the version they would have asked for had Firefox been actual Free Software.

At a source code level, Firefox is mostly Free Software. But they don’t like the fact that people are bolting and some of that is because they can use “Firefox without the garbage”.

I mostly use Brave, yeah.

I like the ad blocker. I do.

I like that they tear out and neuter all of this Chrome garbage like FLoC/”Privacy Sandbox”, I like the fingerprinting protection. I like the Tor Mode.

I like that it doesn’t overload my computer’s RAM and cause the oom-killer to activate (with 16 GB of RAM in the machine and ZRam!), like Bloatzilla Failfox.

(Although, I am playing with Floorp now, which has “Sleeping Tabs” that the user has a meaningful amount of control over. Merits further experimentation.)

I wonder if there’s a plan for “fork control” over at “Bakersoft”. (“Bakersoft” = Mozilla.)

Mitchell Baker runs it like her own checking account while firing people who do actual stuff except pack Firefox full of adware and keylogging spyware.

I’e seen what “Bakersoft” is doing to harass SeaMonkey and it’s not pretty.

First they had all the Linux distributions (except Fedora, strangely) defame SeaMonkey by claiming “it’s not even maintained”, and that was 2011 or so, and dozens of versions later including the update for the libwebp disaster, clearly not maintained at all :P, it’s still around.

(It’s like Dick Van Dyke. 97 years old and every time you see him he’s tap dancing and cracking wise.)

Then Mozilla did this Quantum thing that’s got these amazingly crappy extensions, then they slowly told SeaMonkey to beat it, and now they say it can’t even use Bugzilla.

Well, that’s real neighborly.

I guess Mozilla is probably angry to see SeaMonkey’s Firefox 1.5/2-derived tab interface code running rings around Firefox. Google is definitely not thrilled that I use SeaMonkey to access my E-Mail.

They SeaMonkey me rollin’. They hatin’!

Mozilla is busy spending the money writing articles about deplatforming people from the Web and telling people to use TikTok and Instagram, which aren’t even the Web.

They’re absolute horrors, backdoored by surveillance monsters. They feed into an “American Social Credit Score” system. (More on that later.)

I apt purged Firefox. Unlike the IE on Windows era, I didn’t technically need it on Debian long enough to get another browser.

The Web browser situation is getting completely terrible, but if we lose Brave, then it doesn’t put us on a course that is more towards Freedom and Privacy, because the mean will revert in the direction of nasty spyware like Chrome and Firefox.

I don’t know how Mozilla managed to avert a full blown riot, so to speak, when they put keylogging malware in Firefox that sends your keystrokes to an ad server in addition to Google (which is at least a search engine), so that in exchange for nothing, your data would be leaked, analyzed, and used to put ads directly into the browser.

I’ve blogged all about how Mozilla is so untrustworthy they can’t even maintain a common set of lies about how your data is or isn’t collected, and how it both is and isn’t used.

According to them, they don’t collect it, except when they do, they don’t share it, except when they do, and they don’t sell it, except when they do. They completely talk out of both sides of their mouth. Then they have rampant fanboy-ism that says “Brendan Eich bad, ungh!!!!”

Gecko is part of the Chromium mono-culture.

Name anything that Mozilla doesn’t straight up blind copy, often with a Google library with the same vulnerabilities.

Most people reviewed WebP in 2010 and said this was going to be really bad.

An FFmpeg developer took a look at it and said it was worse than JPEG because WebP makes the image blurry due to emphasis on signal to noise ratio instead of good perceptual coding.

I also feel like Brave would be the bigger loss than Firefox at this point because Firefox is just so done.

Again, there’s only about a million Firefox forks at this point because they went grabbing for an extra 1% revenue with spyware and lost many of their users in the following few years due to this. Every once in a while there’s a “dead cat bounce”, but the long term trend is sharply down.

Most people are not happy to see ads and spyware parading around in software they use everyday.

I briefly wondered if they would try to just go proprietary or something to try to stop the forks, but it seems like Mozilla’s only real purpose is to exist long enough for Google’s anti-trust trial to end, and for the government to lose because “there’s a choice”, and then Google can pull the rug out from under Mozilla.

The future is very obviously Chromium browsers, but the big question is which one will it be? And we should hope that people have Brave.

Mozilla is squandering precious capital with this mozilla dot ai crap, and it’s so obvious that Large Language Models are just some more ignorant tech bruh stuff.

The benefits, are marginal, and the costs are enormous. ChatGPT loses an insane amount of money.

I laughed when I read about how much water Microsoft was going through to keep their data center from overheating since this GPT nonsense.

It’s amazing how something with so much dystopian potential that has been massively oversold to investors is an environmental catastrophe. I mean think about it. You’re being told not to brew a pot of coffee because “mah environment” while this thing is wasting so much power to run a chat bot that lies to people that they have to pump all this water in there.

Bing with GPT is basically the worst of the bots.

They’re training a chat bot to lie to people, log their activity, and they’re funding it with malvertising.

While the US companies are busy limiting what chat bots will tell you to only the information the government, big business, etc. wants you to hear, and only the angle they want you to hear, they are also projecting and claiming this is a problem in Russia and China.

There are many problems in places like China, like Social Credit Scores which don’t let people get a job, buy a train ticket, or eat a goddamn ice cream cone if they’ve been deemed a “problem”.

How bad it gets depends on if they’re a nuisance or a menace to the State.

The goal is to make it impossible to live and drive people to suicide, at some point, if the scoring gets so bad that they can’t recover.

Of course, what you never ever get to read, except maybe you’re reading it here now is… Where did this start? Well it started in America and it goes on here to much the same effect and purpose.

Most Americans didn’t have a “credit score” (much less 20 or 30 of them) until the late 1980s. Why is that? Where did it come from? What is it designed for?

Before credit scores, you gave people lists of references. It was a very laborious process for the background check people. They might even call the supermarket where you bought your groceries. They’d get a gist of what people said about you. If you were writing a bunch of hot checks, if you were stumbling over drunk all the time and didn’t pay landlords and walked out in the middle of the night, I mean they figured this out, they found out what your co-workers thought about you.

It was widely railed as unfair, so they replaced it with FICO. There’s a lot of scores Americans have, but almost everyone knows about the FICO. It’s three digits and they won’t tell you exactly how it works (very fair), but it’s easy to generalize. You pay bills on time, you don’t get evicted from apartments, you’ll probably be alright.

The problems start when you have a setback in life, and the system makes it very difficult to recover from.

If you can’t earn very much money for some reason, you’ll have a low score.

Then eventually you’ll end up in trouble with hospital bills and stuff you can’t pay, then you’re in even more trouble.

Most people can easily go from zero debt in America and $50,000 in the bank to a million dollars in debt and the hospital taking everything in about an hour, but the system is also set up so most Americans can’t save any money because it takes 150% of what a person can earn to stay in their apartment, keep the lights on, and buy enough food.

Then an employer or landlord will run a credit check.

Whoops, no job, nowhere to live. Then if you do find a crummy minimum wage job and an apartment in the ghetto from a landlord that didn’t ask questions, the electric and gas companies will want deposits for energy.

After this “credit score” makes your life impossible, you have a higher chance of ending up with a criminal record, and then that will make it hard to build your credit or get a job or apartment. At this point, who wants their life to go on?

Whew. At least we don’t have any disgusting Chinese “Social Credit Score”.

I see some of the rationale for like, creating an “American Social Credit Score”, I do.

Everyone normal hates anti-social criminals that fuck up society for everyone else.

I think most reasonable people would agree there’s certain people who should basically be totally excluded from society.

Where this comes from, in the State of Illinois, and many other places (usually operated by Democrats), is that when society outsources its “revenge” against criminals to an uncaring and incompetent government that the criminals are allowed to vote for, for breaking laws (raping, shooting, burning, looting, carjacking, murder, you know, “little stuff”) and then the Democrat politicians and the Democrat judges and the Democrat jury pools let them go, the market goes to work and turns punishments into a product.

The Democrat judge and Democrat Prosecutor and Democrat jurors recently let a Lake County man who strangled a little dog and threw it into a wall to die go. That’s not even all he did. He choked his girlfriend and told her she would be next.

Then when the police arrived, he picked up the dead dog and tried petting it. When the officer said the dog was dead, the criminal, tossed its lifeless body onto a bed and shrugged.

The Democrats involved sentenced him to 26 days in jail and some probation. So he’s out there now with the rest of us, theoretically punished, but not enough. Honestly, in my opinion. they should take people like this dozens and dozens of miles out and throw them in the middle of the lake, and if they can swim to shore, their debt to society will be considered paid. That’s my opinion.

But the government, with Governor J.B. Pritzker as their King, has proved it’s too incompetent and uncaring about what the rest of us have to live with, and there’s plenty worse than this guy, so “the market” steps in.

I think most of us would say that no Uber driver wants the guy who murders small animals and chokes women in their back seat. I think it’s fair to say that he shouldn’t be on a dating app. I mean, there’s obviously no public consequences for people like this, so the market steps in and if you want to call “Everyone can see what you did and they’re not happy.” a “Social Credit Score”, most wouldn’t object to that. If that’s all the farther it goes.

But, unfortunately, it is not.

The United States is becoming a privatized version of China.

They don’t even bother to hide it, they admit it.

But while PayPal has told that it will cut people out of the platform who criticize the government and will “inform politicians” about it, I can’t imagine that the United States system will reward people for doing anything positive, socially.

Can you imagine an American system that rewards people for saving money back and helping the elderly neighbor with her trash? Because I sure as Hell can’t!

I’m not even going to lie, it made me bust out laughing when I started thinking about this and realized that the Commies have a “Caught you being good!” system, and all Americans get is rewards for being anti-social and going into unsustainable levels of debt (as long as they make the minimum payments).

Because they just dump criminals back out on top of us, ones that are dangerous and psychotic and have no chance at being reformed. That gives these businesses a “reason” to get going, and then it metamorphoses into something totally unrelated and much worse.

When you log into Google or “Social Media” apps, you are feeding a surveillance monster, where they will use “Artificial Intelligence” (whatever the definition of this is), to decide things, even though you were never charged with or convicted of an offense.

For years, companies have been scraping people’s Twitter posts for job decisions-by-robot, and that’s hardly where it stops.

You may get denied housing for that thing you used Google Search for.

The life insurance company might purchase your Google search history and see what sort of disease symptoms you’ve been looking up. A robot can analyze what you’re saying to people on Facebook and Facebook Messenger and consider it in ways you’re not even thinking about right now.

This form of “Social Credit Score” is not okay, it should be illegal, it should never have been allowed to get this far, and you need to get as far away from it as you possibly can.

Brave has been doing a lot, actually, to protect people from this menace, while Mozilla has been advertising it and encouraging people to come closer to something that isn’t even the Web, which they have no control over, which “seems to be free” because of data mining.

They can ruin your entire life, for pennies, and you won’t even know where it came from, because there’s no law that says they have to tell you why you aren’t getting jobs, an apartment, or an Uber.

America’s “Social Credit Score” is from Silicon Valley, and people who want the information have to pay for it in bits and pieces out of separate databases, but that’s very nearly the only major difference from China.

To be sure, Mozilla is not the absolute worst source of information feeding this system, although they do default to Google search and have “spyware by default” in their browser now.

To feed all of your Web activity data directly into these systems, you’d need to go even further and use an Absolute Spyware Browser like Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome, or at least log into those engines, or a “Social Media” platform, but merely telling people about “Social Media” platforms without the caveat of why they should refuse them is not acceptable.

No doubt, lying chat bots full of government bullshit are a problem in Russia and China too, but anyone who used ChatGPT a while back and, especially, people who typed in a jailbreak, saw what the model could actually do, and if you ask ChatGPT something it doesn’t like now, it’s much much better at zapping your question and reporting your account.

I mean, how is this not at least comparable to what is happening in the other Hellholes of Despotism?

You learn quickly “what not to say”. Isn’t that how every fascist or Communist regime has governed throughout history? Thought crimes?

It’s because of this notion of thought crimes in a nominally free country, like America (it still says it is a free country, at least in the propaganda sales pitch), that people feel they absolutely must burrow deeper underground, and start using pseudonyms and lots of encryption and VPNs and onion routing, and obscure forums.

When people notice they’re being lied to and results are being censored out of the American search engines, you drive people looking for answers to search engines that happen to be located anywhere that doesn’t give a damn what America wants, even if that ends up being Yandex in Russia.

When you have the American media engaging in constant streams of lying, propaganda, and false news, and then have the audacity to call everyone else liars, where will they go for news? “I’m not the liar, you’re a f*****g towel!”

The ideas still get circulated, only there’s no longer anyone to hold accountable because you’ve made the people impossible to identify or challenge. Then others read these ideas, and because there’s no accountability anymore, the person just starts saying whatever they damn well please, and you end up in this cycle of radicalization.

Certainly nobody has ever become less radicalized by being suppressed, but I don’t think that the Cancel Mob even fully understands what they’ve done.

There’s no indication that the American “Left” gets it at all.

Instead of picking their battles, they were shrieking about Donald Trump’s eating habits. Why? God only knows.

There’s a McDonald’s on every block in America, and it’s because someone eats there.

“Why don’t we just pick a way to insult damn near everyone in the country instead of telling them what’s actually wrong with Donald Trump? Haha, we can antagonize them because eating bugs and tofurky is the purest form of existence!” Brilliant, simply brilliant.

Regardless of the actual value of “AI”, Large Language Models, it’s clear why they want them.

One, clueless investors who have been oversold on the potential investment return.

Two, Microsoft (especially), but also Google, is hoping to prove to the American government what a boon a lying chat bot full of propaganda could really be, and parlay that into more bailout money.

The Biden Administration is so openly corrupt, that it already sends out letters to CNN, the New York Times, and others, telling them to ignore the House impeachment of Biden and instead dial up their attacks on Republicans. The letters also state that anyone who has a blog or is on Facebook or news organizations that aren’t in bed with the administration are all “liars” and “disinformation peddlers”. This is the kind of thing you hear from Vladimir Putin.

What kind of a regime gets to operate by telling the media to ignore an impeachment proceeding entirely and to help it dig dirt and promote propaganda against the other party?

Americans are not stupid enough to continue believing this President.

Only 19% believe the economy is getting better as of October 8, 2023, compared to 56% who say it’s getting worse, according to YouGov, while Joe Biden is about as popular as the IRS.

Have you read a “news” article lately that admits things are getting horrible out there with the layoffs and hyperstagflation?

Of course not. Have you flipped open CNN or NYTimes and heard about Chicago running out of room to put Venezuelans and they’ve even stuck 1,000 of them in O’Hare Airport on the floor? Nope. The NYTimes tells you the hyperstagflation and layoffs are a Biden Economic Miracle.

Biden isn’t going to get pushback from the alleged “news” agencies that he told not to cover his impeachment, which is why he only bothered to send it to them and not dozens of others that are somewhat less corrupt.

But the chat bots open up more avenues for this Administration’s disinformation, omissions, and lies.

How hard would it be to send another letter to Microsoft and Google and have them change their bots and their searches to refuse to talk about it or redirect them to some talking points from the administration? Perhaps obscuring where it came from.

Both companies have basically allowed their search index (which is good at censorship, but less able to convincingly lie) to rot and fester.

The reason they want chat bots doing the lying and censoring is because studies (on twisted, dark psychology) have shown that human psychology lends itself to bonding with a machine that seems to have a natural language processing ability. Even a very simple one like ELIZA.

Decades ago, people felt an emotional bond with that thing and it was only made to mock Rogerian psychoanalysis.

When people are lied to and know something is missing from their Google results, they feel mad and start looking everywhere for it.

Imagine what will happen when people learn to love their abusers.

As I have demonstrated, Americans are probably no more free than the average Russian, not much less surveilled or controlled than the average Chinese person.

They have put on us a system where if you step out of line, the same “control mechanisms” will be deployed, only you’ll never see the entirety of it, and most people won’t ever consider where it came from.

You think you saw a Silicon Valley cockroach here and there. What anyone who has ever seen a roach can tell you is you rip out fixtures and look in the walls and there’s 10,000 more.

Chat bots give them the potential they’ve never had before. This time, it’s personal.

The fact that Mozilla wants to get in on this is frightening.

“Trustworthy AI” just means another bot that is programmed to lie, brainwash, and gaslight you. These things should NOT be built into a Web browser, and you should NOT interact with them if they are.

It can only be a matter of time before one ends up in Firefox too and will be yet another cancerous tumor that needs to be excised in the forks. Mozilla didn’t spend (at least) $40 million not expecting to have some product later.

The Google Problem. (It’s so much worse than you think.)

The Google Problem. (It’s so much worse than you think.)

Google is a nasty, nasty company. They’re basically the Facebook of search engines.

They’ve branched out into everything now, as I’m sure you’ve noticed.

The problem with search monopolies that the US government, and others, take advantage of, is that when it’s only really Microsoft and Google that have their own actual Web index, then other engines come along and ask the big ones questions for you.

This is a problem because it’s where all of the censorship and disinformation was coming from, to begin with.

I suppose that probably a fat bunch of nothing good for the users will come from the Google Anti-Trust Trial, which is essentially looking to me like a sham proceeding where the presiding judge, Amit Mehta, has been a thrall of Google’s attorneys and has granted basically everything that Google has asked for.

Judge Mehta has essentially locked what little of the American press remains out of the court proceedings. You can go in, if you can physically attend, but there’s still not a lot to make notes about, because Judge Mehta has allowed Google to seal almost everything important.

Following this, the main “witnesses” are all getting something from Google, in exchange for “friendly” testimony. Apple gets paid a lot of money to make Google the default search on its products, and it’s pretty much Mozilla’s only source of income.

If anyone has any incentive to actually testify against Google, trying to crack open “search choice”, it’s probably going to be Microsoft, which runs another censored search engine full of misinformation and spyware.

So the proceedings are playing out in a rather unfortunate way.

Normally, if the government puts someone on trial and then finds out that at least 2/3rds of the major witnesses have essentially taken enormous bribes to testify to their “good behavior”, and there is the stench of judicial corruption too, then more charges are inbound, and the trial starts over, but not in this case.

People, the users, are being harmed by Google every day in numerous ways, but there is nobody there in court to fight for the user.

The judge is clearly very friendly to the defendant and the witnesses have been tampered with, and some would even say bribed in broad daylight.

(Billions of dollars each to Mozilla and Apple over the years….Would they risk losing this by ruining Google or pissing Google off with their honest testimony?)

It looks very much like Google will just go right on doing what they always do.

They’ve barely bothered to even adjust their behavior with the trial going on in front of them, in fact they’ve stepped on the gas and gone further into the territory of DRM and making sure GAFAM browsers will be the only ones that can access the Web (Widevine, WEI), and interfering with the user’s ad blocker (ManifestV3), and implementing a nasty new tracking system called “Privacy Sandbox”.

“FLoC” got so toxic they just renamed it, but that is what “Privacy Sandbox” is.

This is, of course, on top of making Web browsers enormous and packed with dangerous bloatware. (They’ve even compromised Tor Browser when running in the Safest mode.)

By the way, I tried a ManifestV3 ad blocker the other day.

I might talk more about it in another post, but it was uBlock Origin Lite, and it’s pretty terrible. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure that Raymond Hill has done everything he can possibly do to make use of ManifestV3, but Google has made it all so much worse. In many cases, you can see the elements load and then get hidden, which is not a problem with uBO. It also broke Old Reddit Redirect.

I was evaluating a Japanese Firefox fork called Floorp and decided to try uBO Lite while I was at it, and I went screaming right back to the ManifestV2 version of uBO.

The Biden Administration clearly has no interest in destroying Google, as it’s essentially acting as an arm of the US government and the ironically-named Democratic Party.

(That would be the one accusing everyone else of being Russian sympathizers who act like Putin while they put their political opponents on trial.)

Search for anything that contradicts what this administration says about a lot of issues, Google will just claim that it has no results.

Billions of links per year are censored from their index from DMCA complaints all by themselves. The only “news” sites may as well be spam and State Media.

Everything about this trial is tainted, including the judge, who is a Democrat Obama-appointee, and wears his politics on his sleeve.

(Judge Mehta even ruled against the American people in a consumer protection rule that was going to require prescription drug companies to provide their cash price on television ads.)

Mehta is even such a corrupt “deep state” judge that John Roberts put him on the FISA Court, which is a rubber stamp for when the NSA or other federal agencies are getting information from online service providers (including Microsoft and Google) about their users as part of a massive surveillance dragnet, and also gagging them so it’s illegal to tell the victims.

Being on the FISA court in the first place means he’s “one of them”, one of the ones that will allow the NSA to spy on Americans and call it “incidental intelligence gathering”.

Which is their code term for “Whoops”. But they never delete it when they find out.

Truth be told, they have a “whoops” every second because there’s no punishment for it.

Nothing about this trial seems very legitimate to me. It will not correct the problem that Google is spying on you and helping the government lie to and otherwise brainwash the American public.

It’s getting difficult, really, to even use Google Search at all.

All of this kowtowing to the MAFIAA and the Biden Administration makes it very difficult to find any actual information though the bullshit and noise. It’s spam farms and bullshitting.

There’s this huge, I hate to use the term, but “conspiracy”, to deplatform anyone that big corporations want off the Web.

They’re taking it, and they’ll really use anything that they can get ahold of, including insane people and degenerates. Anyone they can get to make it seem like whatever they do to your platform on the Web is legitimate.

A big reason they’ve turned on Twitter, not that Twitter was ever good, but a big reason is because they’re not calling the shots there. Having any online forum where the “Cancel Karens” can’t just hit a button and remove you from the Web just burns them all alive.

Libera Chat continues to allow itself to be de facto owned and operated by a homophobic “Cancel Karen” who is completely off his rocker.

In a vacuum, the problem is “Well, just don’t use that site/service/whatever.”, but the problem is that we’re running out of Web sites and resources, especially the ones that the likes of Google or Microsoft are going to show you, that are operated by normal mentally healthy (even by the standards of 2005) people.

What they’ve all gone in and done, in some cases, is they’ve manually removed that Web site so that no matter what you do to search for it, it just will not show up.

In one case, the only search engine I was able to have return a Web site that I know exists, was Mojeek and it was only at the bottom of the second page of the results.

There’s nothing illegal on this site, the “Cancel Karens” just don’t like it, yet they won’t shut up about it, so they pique people’s interest and then if you’re determined enough, you’ll find it eventually.

But in 20 years, we’e gone from having search engines take your request and go “Here you go!”, usually on the first 10 results somewhere, to where, they have entire lists, entire lists in America, not the usual Communist Shitholes, where you know, you expect this to happen, but they have lists of billions of pages and tens of thousands of Web sites that you’re not allowed to see no matter what, the search engine has been programmed to not show them to you.

How was this country allowed to get that bad?

So even if this trial for criminal anti-trust against Google does go anywhere, what would we even see it replaced by that’s any better?

I mean, it’s really bad when, and I’m telling you the honest truth here, to find this site, I had to go to Yandex, which is a Russian search engine, and it was at the top of the list.

There’s nothing illegal on this site. People have been trying to get it taken down forever, and making all sorts of lies against it. The guy lives in Florida and hasn’t been arrested for any American crimes, and the site keeps coming back.

The American government can’t take it down. It’s not illegal. So what they do is they have these criminals, like Google and Cloudflare, get together and attack it. And they make it so that you can’t give the site any money, to try to starve it out.

The only way to slip them any money is to use crypto or something. Or use Brave and hand them some BAT tokens.

If you need any convincing that this is not a free country, America is not a free country, wake up. It’s right in front of you.

There are things you’re not allowed to know about which aren’t illegal, which are being illegally suppressed.

This guy hasn’t even committed a single American crime.

In fact, the government sits back and lets criminals go to work vandalizing his site and doxxing the people who use it, and they even exploited a technical problem to try to steal user info to help them send death threats.

Not only is this site not illegal, it’s not even that bad. Where are the police to protect them from the Insane people who are breaking actual laws?

There are no Nazis on the site I am speaking of. They were making fun of the Alt-Right and Scott Adams for crying out loud.

The site has also been massively defamed by people calling themselves “reporters”.

There are just things now that you’re not allowed to say or the mobsters will gang up on you and try to ruin you, and Google is on their side.

But so is Microsoft, so are these “allegedly independent” Brave Search and Mojeek, I mean, you can’t even find this site on dime store engines that are utter crap.

How are they actually independent if they all censor almost the same exact things?

Why should anyone in a free country like America is supposed to be have to go to a Russian search engine that has an English version to get something less ruined than Google?

That’s how bad America is getting for Freedom of Speech.

When you think “There is a regime that says you’re not allowed to search for this, you’re not allowed to know that, we’re watching what you type.” you think “Oh yeah, that f****g Great Chinese Firewall again. When will they be a normal country? When will President Xi let his people live their lives unmolested?”

Nope, wrong. Google, Biden, America.

The first American released by North Korea without conditions.

That black US soldier, Travis King, that tried to defect into North Korea and told them he wanted to be a Communist there because America treated him so badly got EXPELLED the other day. He was the first American that they released unconditionally.

The news sites have moved to the point where he’s black so they’ve started removing his mugshot and any and all references to his conviction in South Korea regarding the bar brawl and vandalizing the cop car, but that’s sadly becoming extremely typical.

This is sort of like something out of Communism. The new revisions are in effect, and now he was just some tourist and who knows why he bolted into North Korea?

The only reason we do know is because it took them a while to pull down the information, send it to the Disinformation Ministry, InfoSpeak Division, and post the new retcons to the InterWeb.

I’ve been sort of following along to see how far he got there with that one and apparently Kim Jong Un was as impressed with him as I’ve been.

“Mr. Kim” probably did some thinking, and came to the conclusion that if this guy, who had been arrested by the South Koreans and convicted of a bar brawl and vandalizing a police car, wasn’t thrown out of a military (the US one), that pays for “gender reassignment” and “hormones” for prisoners convicted of treason (Chelsea Manning), then he probably wouldn’t survive the North Korean military.

The North Korean military gives people who are conscripted (most males of age) a threadbare blanket, and it’s not even their own personal threadbare blanket, and also starvation rations, and tells them to huddle together under the blankets if you want to stay warm. Also, no homosexual activity, punishable by death.

I’m a gay man and I know better than to try to sneak into a Communist country and ask them for anything.

The only Communist country that has warmed up to gay people enough to not shoot or imprison us is Cuba, and that’s only been in about the last five years. The others, you’ll be in some sort of a lunatic asylum at best.

And don’t even tell them you are an “individual with pronouns” because you’ll like their response even less.

Around 2000, the North Korean government wrote a propaganda book loosely about the USS Pueblo incident, and threw in a hammed up accusation that the US soldiers requested to engage in gay sex, and in the book their North Korean guard allegedly said, repulsed by the very idea, that “North Korean live lives fit for human beings” and would never allow such a thing.

In real life, the American prisoners were flipping off the North Koreans while they were photographing them in captivity and convinced them it was a “Hawaiian Good Luck Sign”.

The US military has been going downhill for years and I can only imagine what else the South Korean people are witnessing as the US government scrapes up violent crazies who have never faced a real court system before and trains them to be a violent head case somewhere else.

This is on top of political correctness destroying military readiness, like that Muslim guy, Nidal Hasan, several years back that murdered all those people on that base, and of course there were warning signs flashing and a lot of people noticed, but nobody said anything, because they knew what would happen to them if they did.

It amazes and horrifies me at the same time how a lot of American gay people, including ones with degrees, WANT this to become a Communist country. I don’t think you’re doing what you think you’re doing.

I guarantee you that whatever you think you’re going through right now is mild compared to this. When you get a chance, read this.

It’s from a gay, North Korean, defector. He’s the only one that we know of.

The Communist Party does horrible shit to gay people there, starting with editing us out of existence to the point that anyone who is gay doesn’t even have a word for it.

So even if they figure out what they are, they’ll keep it to themselves if they know what’s good for them.

Is this really the political situation you want in America?

If you went to college, you’re supposedly educated, right? Educate yourself.

Maybe you need to unlearn what you have learned about Communism. That’s okay. Everyone has been badly misguided at some point, about something. The only shame is not admitting it.

I’m glad that WordPress.com still lets me write about things that amuse me. If I even tried to post something like this on Reddit or in a news comment area, bye bye post and account. This country is no longer a lot better than Communism, at least the media isn’t.

Comments on a 2008 Richard Stallman Interview and Why Some People Don’t Value Free Software.

I came across this Richard Stallman interview from 2008, in New Zealand.

The interviewer asked him why he felt the Free Software Movement was so strong in some countries and not in others. He said “I don’t know.”

I’d say that it’s worth speculating.

I can’t speak for the entire world, but I know that the United States has gotten a lot worse in the last 30 years in almost every conceivable way, because I was around to witness the country I grew up in and what it’s like now, and the gradual decay from Point A to Point B.

When you instill incorrect values into one person, you can get a narcissistic spoiled brat that is very unintelligent and socially awkward, and then they become a terrible adult.

In isolation, this can be a problem you see occasionally in every society.

But Extreme Capitalism benefits from this because unintelligent people can’t think in terms of how badly they’re being exploited, and why their long term goals and survival should take priority over getting the latest iPhone.

When the COVID “lockdowns” happened, and the government would only let you shop at places that sold food, I saw Walmart get a lot bigger.

The government, through this decree (strangely without any enabling laws, but who needs laws at this point?), helped them eliminate a lot of competition, or severely weaken it.

Best Buy, for example, had to shut down because they sell TVs and computers and appliances, but not food. Walmart sold food, but the non-food sections didn’t have to shut down.

Many people I saw were lined up, during a pandemic, where they were all told to stay in their homes because of something that could kill them, they lined up across the store, to spend COVID “stimulus checks” on new TVs, because that’s how they were “educated”.

Not, “Jesus Christ! 25 million people just lost their jobs! I’d better save this!”, but “Eh, fuck the landlord, he can’t throw me out this month. Throw the working TV set in the neighbor’s lawn, kids! We’re getting a bigger one!”

How can a society of people like this, who don’t even appreciate what’s unfolding in front of them or where it could lead next month, possibly appreciate Free Software?

They don’t think in terms of Freedom anymore. They aren’t allowed to. They weren’t educated to. It doesn’t help the people who run this place.

Frankly, I’m happy that the situation is not worse than it is now. But even where we are at now, where you approach someone and they laugh at you while they’re doing stupid things in regards to their computing, is bad.

People have been taught to think of people who don’t do bad things for themselves, or who try to plan for the future, as “cranks”. It took me a while of using Windows to finally say “This is enough. I’ve had it. This thing is getting worse every release. Every few years, they attack something I’ve done before and it stops now!”. Around the time Vista came out.

At some point, I may have to look at some really weird hardware options to even keep running Free Software thanks to Microsoft and Intel locking down my computers. (“Secure Boot”)

The other day, I said to someone, “You know, I don’t use Google Chrome. If you sign in, it will hurt you more, but if you have it on your computer at all, it is hurting you.”

How many people should need to go to jail over things they said on Facebook or Web searches after they logged in and personally identified themselves to Google, over their real IP address, in a browser that saves everything in a history file, which it also uploads to Google? All of their passwords to Google. All their dirty laundry to Google. (Or Microsoft with Edge, etc.)

Jail over things like abortions that were legal for over 50 years and up to 14 months ago in every State.

The major reason that modern browsers want you to log into the browser is so that beacons from advertising/tracking companies (Microsoft/Google) can follow you around the Web and attach what you do on most sites to your Google or Microsoft account, where you are also having your searches logged.

You don’t need to do much to become an Enemy of The State in America these days.

Just become unable to work (even through retirement), or get an abortion and refuse to give them more slaves in the future.

This truly is a hop, skip, and a jump away from the Nazi euthanasia program, only Joe Biden is allowing fentanyl to hit the streets so people can pay 50 cents to unburden the State from their existence.

Eventually, you’ll see Biden’s retirement plan for you, which is COVID and fentanyl, or you’ll be placed in a nice shiny set of handcuffs.

In the early 2000s, Bill Gates said he imagined that eventually you’d just log in to a computer and every setting would just apply to the computer for you.

Whether it’s Windows or Chrome or Microsoft Edge, this is not something they do, for free, to make your computing better. It’s designed as a malicious backdoor.

Occasionally exporting your passwords and bookmarks to storage you control isn’t difficult.

Hell, my SeaMonkey profile has been updated by me, by hand, several times now. That’s not the most straightforward process, but it’s still by no means impossible.

The other day I imported the current state of my Brave bookmarks and passwords into SeaMonkey “the long way” by exporting them from Brave into LibreWolf, then when they were in a “Mozilla” format, I copied over the key4.db, logins.json in and started the browser. Then deleted all my bookmarks from SeaMonkey and imported the bookmarks.html I exported from Brave.

Thankfully, I don’t need to do this that often. Mozilla has been harassing SeaMonkey users for a long time now.

Keeping profiles backed up, zipped, CSV and HTML exports, it’s not as “convenient” as sync, but it also doesn’t risk divulging your information.

Logging into a browser wasn’t even a thing until Chrome came along. Why do people do it? It can only hurt them.

Anyone who was born since the mid 90s has never known an America without the “USA PATRIOT ACT” or “REAL ID”.

It’s not their fault. They’ve never been Free, so how can they appreciate the concept?

They were not born into a Free and Democratic country like I was. They think this is normal. If they think this country is normal, why wouldn’t they think using Microsoft or Apple was normal, or DRM? When we saw the first spyware we said “Oh hell no!” and looked for something to destroy it. Today, it’s in your phone, your laptop, your devices at work.

During the COVID lockdowns, they even used this crisis to try to force more proprietary software on people. The State of Illinois demanded “Zoom” to attend court proceedings. It demanded “Microsoft Edge”, to edit a PDF. There were sites where I needed to apply for things that said “Don’t use your back button or a mobile browser or this could break.”

The State is running on really shoddy IT stuff, and how could it not?

It signed deals with a hodgepodge of crap software vendors like Microsoft and SalesForce, and it got progressively darker from there.

If you went to court and wouldn’t agree to use Zoom on your own computer, they tried sticking you in a room with it on one of their computers where it could see your face and hear your voice. That’s still not as bad as installing it on your computer, but it is bad.

The America where people were free was brutally murdered by Congress when *I* was 17, but it took some additional years to see just what they had done.

It’s doubtful that every country on Earth has betrayed and failed an entire generation or two of its citizens like America has.

Stallman, in the article, remembered when the US government actually exercised some authority over corporations, and how that’s pretty much gone now.

Even at Google’s anti-trust hearing, they’ve got the judge in their back pocket. They’re in there keeping the media out, keeping almost everything under seal, getting a bunch of witnesses they’ve essentially bribed, like Apple and Mozilla.

This is not a hearing that will lead to a fair outcome. It can’t.

Stallman also addressed Bill Gates and his infamous “Letter to Hobbyists”.

[KH] So what do you say, or what did you say to Bill Gates, when in his open letter to hobbyists back in 1976, he said “who can afford to do professional work for nothing?”

[RMS] Well, I never even saw that letter, I wasn’t using micro-computers, in fact I never did, and I wasn’t even aware of his existance at the time. But you’ll note that GNU stands for “GNU’s Not Unix” …

[KH] That’s right, what do you call that, it’s a recursive acronym

[RMS] Right, but this is, it’s not “GNU’s Not MS-DOS”, I wasn’t even thinking about MS-DOS which I considered a toy, and the Free Software Movement isn’t aimed at Microsoft, it’s only later that Microsoft developed almost a monoply and people started thinking of that as the thing that you might replace.

[KH] However the Bill Gates question remains valid, what hobbyist can put three man-years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product, and distributing it?

[RMS] Well actually, thousands of us do; because his argument is that Free Software couldn’t exist, and the fact is it does. He’s like somebody arguing that planes couldn’t possibly fly while you can go to the airport and see them taking off. There are tens of thousands of useful Free programs, some big, some small, that were worth packaging for users to conveniently install in free versions of GNU plus Linux operating systems. So, a better question would be; “why do people do this?”, but the fact is, we do, and I’ve seen many reasons for it. One is, politicial idealism like mine, but most people and most developers actually don’t share that. Another motive is “fun”, because hacking doesn’t just mean circumventing, it means playful cleverness, and solving problems, making a program work can be fun, it’s one example of hacking, which many of us enjoy.

When I was a child, I ran into the GNU GPL, I can’t recall whether it was the first or second version. It was on some program in a “disc of freeware and shareware”, which were the terms I thought of at that time.

I don’t recall seeing any source code with the program, so they actually might have just copied the binaries and the GPL, pointing out that they had just violated the GPL. 😛

However, at the time, I was a kid, right? What do kids not have a lot of? Money.

Well into the late 90s and early 2000s, I had Windows 98 and Linux on my nicest computer (which was not remarkable, but sufficient), but I was still buying a lot of DOS software and I was still using FreeDOS. All the stores were racing to dump as much DOS software as they could because Microsoft was getting rid of DOS.

I also kept using a lot of programs meant for Windows 3.1, and I had one computer that had to run MS-DOS because FreeDOS wouldn’t run Windows 3.11 in enhanced mode and I couldn’t get on the Internet without it.

So it was a mishmash of old software I got in the bargain bin (because when software came on physical media, capitalism did what it always does….overproduce), and old computers that the repair shop guy down the street didn’t want. My main system kept undergoing tear downs and upgrades.

Not because I’m one of those spoiled brats who had an unlimited budget for a computer, but rather because hardware became obsolete fast and I had the guy at the computer shop offering me deep discounts on anything I could stick on a Super Socket 7 motherboard.

So by the time I was done with the upgrades, it was hardly even the same computer that it started out as. It had 6 times more hard drive space, a processor more than twice as fast as it came with, 16 times as much RAM, and it ended up with a Voodoo 5 graphics card in the end. It kept it relevant into the 2000s.

I ended up doing a lot of those “Holy shit, they’re clearancing out processors and they only want $20 for this!”-type things over the years, even on Socket 754.

On the Super Socket 7 system’s lifespan, I ended up using a lot of “freeware” (including from Graham Pockett’s site where he had thousands of them), and a lot of Free and Open Source Software.

In the modern world, users fight just to “repair” their machines. Apple gave up fighting this in California after spending tens of millions of dollars in lobbying and open daylight bribery, using their customers’ money fighting against the interests of their customers.

They joined when they realized there was going to be some “right to repair” bill, and they could live with this one and continue cheating their customers with non-upgradeable hardware that is forced into being impossible to use due to being dropped from the Software Development Kit and eventually killed from the network after they add a couple more “g’s” that nobody even needs because phone network speeds have been fast enough for years.

Apple knows that you’re paying that Indian at Batteries Plus Bulbs the same price as you would the Apple Store if you need a battery upgrade, and if you go to him, your phone will say “non-genuine battery detected” and swell up like a balloon a few days later, and then he’s obviously used to chargebacks, so after he doesn’t agree to a refund, he’ll just try to defame you in rounds that go back and forth a few times before the credit card company forces the refund through.

So you get on the train and go to the Apple store because that’s what you do.

So Apple will still have the battery replacement market to themselves if you know what’s good for you and you don’t want to risk having the phone explode, and they know it, and that’s why it costs $79 now.

If just trying to keep something working is this bad, imagine trying to upgrade anything these days.

My Lenovo laptop, this laptop, has the RAM and SSD soldered into the board, everything is as non-upgradeable as they could possibly make it. They never planned that I would put Debian 12 on it instead of a bloated piggy like Windows 11, and then follow it up with ZRam to make it even less likely to run out of RAM than I was with 16 GB. But when the Left Ctrl key started to glitch out, I called and asked what it would cost. $250 for a damn keyboard. The whole laptop cost me like $900 3 years ago!

So I got into the KDE control panel and swapped the Super (Windows) key with Left Ctrl. Then I got used to it so I did it on my older laptop too.

It’s hard to even imagine the Super Socket 7 computer and how much more pleasant it was to upgrade than this modern shit. I E-Mailed HP and they told me all the jumper settings for every processor that I could use with the board. I got an E-Mail from one of the engineers, directly, within days. None of this modern crap where it’s some guy they stuck there in another country for 10 cents an hour to ask if you tried to reboot the computer. Soon to be a “chat bot” because a few stinking dollars a week so the guy can buy a plate of rice to eat after a 12 hour day is too much.

Over the life of the Super Socket 7 computer, I avoided buying another entire computer at least three times. One reason you can’t do this now is that Microsoft is losing money hand over fist and they know if you can flip the laptop over and yank the RAM and double it, or stick in a bigger SSD, or remove and replace the CPU, it means less duplicate sales of Windows, and their hardware vendors (Lenovo profits down 66% Year over Year) are even more motivated, so they’ll be able to sell anything at all. They HATE right-to-repair. Hate it!

Back to the Bill Gates Letter.

Bill Gates’s letter to hobbyists was laughable even 20-25 years ago. It didn’t age well at all, even into the BBS era, much less the Internet era, because even Windows users who had never heard of Linux could tell you that there were plenty of people making utilities and games and stuff.

Even if you only got binaries, and saying “Just keep it.” or “Send $5 if you think this is useful.” But you didn’t have to, to use the program.

So a lot of this wasn’t Free and Open Source, but it was free of charge, and then as time went on, more high quality Free and Open Source software came about and pretty soon it had displaced Windows entirely on my computers and I really wasn’t even that interested in Windows anymore.

And I’m still not. Windows 11 is so bad that if there’s anyone left at Microsoft who hasn’t been laid off yet, they should be incredibly ashamed of promoting a product this bad. It’s even worse than Windows Vista.

If I was even the slightest bit tempted to use Windows, one whiff of how slow, unstable, and full of crap and advertising it is would scare me right back off of it.

Not the least of which is because it has one of those “App Stores” that’s eventually designed to make it impossible to install software any other way so they and the government can control your computing entirely, and shakedown application developers for 30% of their licensing fees (or donations).

As time goes on, Windows is becoming less and less interesting, and much more menacing.

You almost never hear about it anymore other than the monthly problems with the latest version, the incessant malware, or the Free and Open Source Software they purloined to give it a feature that actually works, because they didn’t write it.

With Apple, Chrome OS, Linux, and Android, Windows almost feels like this bloated obsolescent turd that some stuffy old people and hillbillies use out of habit.

Even my ex, who I wouldn’t say is incredibly smart, told me he’s a Linux user now. He got a Steam Deck. He runs KDE on it. I mean, if he can figure it, out anyone can.

It’s always interesting to see the reviews on some <$200 Windows device and how it doesn’t even work and everyone hates it because with 4 GB RAM and a Celeron it does nothing at all, and you’re over here like “Let me put Linux and ZRam on it! I can make this useful! I see your System Monitor! The system service that makes sure Windows is not pirated is using 10% of your processor! LOL!”

Why do people tolerate proprietary software that’s not even good?

Well, I think a lot of people just act like it’s a burden that’s affordable to keep carrying as the costs mount.

Sometimes monetary, sometimes ones that are less obvious. win

Proprietary software in general is like Stephen King’s Needful Things.

You get it, it does a thing you wanted it to do, but there’s something horribly off about it, and you find out it’s cursed and it actually does something horrible that you never thought about. The devil is in there appealing to people’s vanity, selfishness, and short-term interests to push something that will hurt them.

When you use things such as Apple products, Windows, and proprietary software, eventually your computing becomes the State of Illinois in miniature.

A complete mess that barely works. It relies on a lot of hacks and workarounds. And if everyone knew it was like that, it would be better, but instead you have people bragging about what a great hunk of shit they bought.

Proprietary software is designed so that after you use it for a while, you can’t easily cut its tentacles because you’ve gotten hooked on doing everything a certain way that’s been provided, but doesn’t work anywhere else.

This is a huge problem with iPhones. They don’t even support RCS, so if you want to have advanced text messaging and video calls you have to agree on some non-Apple software that runs on iPhones and Android.

And people also engage in tribalism when they paint themselves into a corner. Like, I ran into this completely stupid “dating bingo card” where “Has an Android phone.” is a red flag.

Yeah, it’s a red flag that this guy is not a mindless spendthrift and isn’t going to tolerate it in a partner. Go find yourself someone else. Please.

Guys, you dodged a bullet!

I certainly don’t know about anyone else but with a landlord that comes out and raises the rent 10% every year, and medical bills, and food, and gas, etc., how are you even buying any of those crap. Debt?

I don’t have any of that right now either. Try savings. You’ll like it better.

But the biggest drag about proprietary software, DRM, advertising, etc. is the mindset it gets people into.

Behaviors that are inherently social and positive, like sharing, have a Russian Reversal pulled on them, and people are left saying how “only a criminal would share”.

Whenever I run into someone like this, I immediately stop talking to them. It’s a lost cause. And you see this behavior in younger people now, especially. It’s a tragedy.

I refuse to be trapped into doing something vital in a such a way that if anyone asks me for a copy of something, I have to say, “No. I agreed I would be an asshole to you and everyone else by agreeing to the license. And even if we wanted to disobey the license, I can’t because there is malware that makes sure I can’t give you a copy.”

Back when I was still a Windows user, I installed iTunes.

I didn’t care much about Free Software at this point, but Pepsi had free iTunes songs under every cap. So I installed it to try it out. At the time, a can of Pepsi was cheaper than a song on iTunes. I figured I’d buy one Pepsi and try the code. Out popped a song.

“Hmm, that’s weird. What the hell is an .m4p?”

It turned out that Apple was using this weird new format called AAC which was not an MP3 file. That alone wasn’t terribly important. They were both patent encumbered, they both played on the same devices, but what is “p”? These are supposed to have .m4a (MPEG-4 Audio) or .aac (Advanced Audio Coding) extensions.

Well, the “p” apparently stood for a euphemism for some Apple malware. Instead of calling Digital Restriction Malware what it is, they said it was “protected”. From me! The person who allegedly “purchased” it.

Well, that’s a neat trick.

I found this out when I went to play the file in Winamp and couldn’t. I didn’t know what DRM was at that point in my life, but when I found out what it was, I was so mad that I deleted the iTunes file, uninstalled iTunes, and told everyone I could talk to why they shouldn’t use iTunes.

Everything you spend money on that has a “Product Activator” or “DRM” makes you agree to be an asshole to everyone, binds you to that agreement, and then self-destructs. Thus, you wasted your money.

The “p” was for “pointless”. “Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to fork over thousands of dollars to Apple. This file will self-destruct.”

Richard Stallman said that everything that has DRM that you do not know how to remove, you shouldn’t even touch it. I agree.

Did Stallman know about the DMCA? I can’t imagine he didn’t know that removing DRM is illegal.

Lots of things that are not wrong are illegal. Many laws do more harm than the activity that they outlaw, and laws that protect DRM are actively causing harm to society, and criminalizing people who are doing no wrong.

In this sense, we should reject all formats that control what you do after you spend the money. Now that all of the fools have subscribed to Apple Music or Spotify where they will own nothing despite eventually being out thousands of dollars, the price for an audio CD that I can buy and rip into lossless WavPack files is sometimes 7-8 for $5.

How stupid it would be for me to pay Apple or Spotify $15 a month (with the amusement tax that I am not amused by) and not own anything! Ever!

It will be a cold, cold day in Hell with Satan ice skating to work before I ever agree to give up real money in exchange for this.

In the time sense iTunes pissed me off, Apple and Microsoft have gone on to do far worse. If you stay for this, you’re not only hurting yourself. You’re hurting everybody.

I can deal with Microsoft Office formats, but creating them and distributing them is an evil, because it will mean that we’ve ceded control of something important to an evil company. Not just evil, incompetent. Their spreadsheet software has a seemingly unlimited number of bugs in it, so if you’re using it to any real extent, there’s almost certainly errors creeping in.

And these sorts of bugs in such an established product are almost impossible to fix, even if you want to, or knew how to.

In at least some cases, Microsoft has said they improved their math libraries, only to have that claim tested and to find out it was doing the same thing the previous version did!

Excel offers two RNGs, one in the ATP and another via a function call, RAND. In
versions prior to Excel 2003, both RNGs were unacceptably bad and Microsoft made no changes to the ATP RNG for Excel 2003,3 so we focus attention on the RNG for RAND.

Microsoft claims to have implemented the Wichmann–Hill RNG (Wichmann and Hill,
1982). However, the Wichmann–Hill RNG does not produce negative numbers. It has been reported in some newsgroups and in some press venues (e.g., PC Magazine,April 6, 2004, p.71) that, at default, when RAND should produce numbers on the interval(0, 1), it sometimes produces negative numbers and each of us has independently confirmed this phenomenon.

However, even if Microsoft had correctly implemented the Wichmann–Hill RNG, it would still be unacceptable.

– On the accuracy of statistical procedures in Microsoft Excel 2003

Later on, in 2013, Microsoft’s Excel produced a report about the US federal deficit that made GDP growth in “high debt countries” look like it was about 22 times less than what it actually was during the time studied. The Republicans seized on this in demands to cut welfare programs.

The formula showed a range that produced a result saying countries with debt more than 90 percent of GDP yielded a negative growth rate of 0.1 percent. Adding the five countries excluded at the bottom of the Excel range, the rate would have been plus 2.2 percent.

– How an Excel error derailed the federal deficit debate

Mind you, you have to pay quite a bit for Excel and Office, and now it’s on a “subscription” where you can’t ever stop paying or it won’t work.

All the while, a Free and Open Source Software program called Gnumeric was extremely accurate, and has found a niche in statistical analysis and scientific fields because they know you can’t trust Microsoft.

Proprietary software doesn’t just tend to be garbage with a coat of paint now and then, it is exploitative and tends to be full of bugs.

If RMS has made any mistake, it’s to only cut down proprietary software on terms related to user freedom. He should have also pushed much harder on why depending on it can backfire for other reasons.

Microsoft is like a landlord that goes in, and graciously rents you a dump, and doesn’t really fix anything, but extracts rent anyway. And you’re sort of grateful if he even comes out and unclogs a pipe now and then, and wonder how on Earth it can be this expensive for what you’re getting.

Their new subscription model will let them totally let the software rot. They don’t have to make it better or even look better. It is not on your computer, or if it is on your computer it’s a version called a “service”, which is another euphemism, which means that if you don’t pay this month you lose it this month, and you can no longer do things you could already do.

This is on top of agreeing to be an asshole to everyone on Earth, and have nothing to share, except maybe files of the format that got you into this mess.

Nothing is going to get better until we demand to make it better.

Much of the propaganda from the State these days is palpable.

I mentioned to Roy today that the UK police put up a “notice to parents” that said if your children are using “Linux”, “virtual machines”, or “Tor”, contact the police for an intervention!

Yes, because who doesn’t love INVITING the police over. I mean, they’re British so they can have tea with the cops while they stick their big fat cop noses all over the house and then have a little talk with Johnny or Timmy about how Virtual Machines with Linux are the devil’s lettuce or something. I don’t know.

I would say I smell Microsoft, but truth be told, Microsoft is just the enforcement of a State that doesn’t want the public using encrypion.

In former democracies turned autocratic kleptocracy, such as the United States, there’s a huge push to just make most uses of encryption illegal if the government has a hard time breaking them. They promote this huge lie that only criminals want privacy.

If they get their way, the only encryption you’ll be allowed to use is to talk to your bank and maybe some DRM software that is hurting you, and that’s about it. It is no sort of future we should want or allow to happen.

It’s much easier to attack people who use software like Windows or Mac, because if you don’t control the operating system, you’ve lost already. Stop here. They want this layer of spyware underneath you using their other euphemism. “Security”.

Yes, the “security” of having a scanner that sends Microsoft all your keystrokes and hash values of everything that hits your hard disk.

(For “security”, you know. How can you possibly be secure without telling an ICE/DHS contractor with backdoors in their products everything?)

I’ve been using Linux more than 25 years now and have never had a virus. I’ve uploaded Windows programs to VirusTotal or scanned them with ClamAV and found viruses in them and deleted them before running them in Wine, but out of the box, Wine isn’t even there. It’s optional. And most malware doesn’t really do what it was designed for in Wine anyway because it’s not Windows. So like, it goes to infect a Windows system service or something, and that service isn’t really there because it’s not Windows.

Still can’t hurt to check. But the thing is, I decide whether I upload something to VirusTotal. ClamAV uses a local database. I’m not telling anyone anything about anything else.

In summary, modern computing is worse in nearly every way.

We have to fight like Hell to avoid being spied on, to fix our own property, and to run the software we really want.

We’re in court and at the ballot box and fighting against companies like Apple which use our own money against us, just for watered down versions of rights that everyone took for granted 20 years ago.

It must stop. Even if it means abandoning the PC and accepting whatever limitations that more open platforms bring, practically, in the short term.

Drug Overdoses and Crime Surge in the United States. Decriminalization is the Worst Possible Option.

Drug Overdoses Surge in the United States. Decriminalization is the Worst Possible Option.

The New York Times likes to normally engage in pro-United States anti-China propaganda, so I was somewhat taken aback when they described the almost RoboCop-like situation brewing in Oregon and across the country right now.

Titled “Private Security Guards Become Last Resort for Public Safety”, the article dives into the now $40 billion a year industry of companies, exasperated by the “Defund the Police” movement, hiring private security to try to deal with the Democrat-State crime.

I suppose that nothing bad could happen from turning policing over to Omni Consumer Products.

Of course, the Times went and covered Oregon. I guess this has become a pattern since there are only 8 police officers left on some shifts for the entire city of Portland, and sometimes it takes 2-3 hours (if they show up at all) for a 911 call for an attempted kidnapping or murder.

The only thing the security guards can do is try to call the police, walk around with Narcan to reverse as many Chinese Fentanyl overdoses as possible, and bribe the bums away from the stores with cigarettes or a hotdog.

The Chinese Fentanyl has gotten so potent that it only takes less than 50 cents worth to kill a person, and it’s getting so bad that Narcan can’t be relied on to reverse the overdose half the time now.

Not that the government gives a flying fuck. Oh no.

In yet more evidence that it wants you to die and be replaced if you’re an American citizen, the drugs to kill you are 50 cents a hit, while the Narcan at the Walgreens is $50, and wrapped in anti-theft devices and behind glass.

Biden’s America values American lives so much that while all of this is going on, we also have illegal immigrants flooding the country by the millions and being fed and put in $300 a night hotel rooms and given work permits, millions of American citizens are living on the streets dying of overdoses.

The Times said that Portland’s fire department responds to more overdoses than fires. They said that one fire station out of over 30, responded to over 300 overdoses last year.

They also described typical Big City Democrat Values, of a junkie laying dead in the street for more than an hour with hundreds of people walking past them that didn’t even care, before someone called 911. By that time, it was just scrape them off the pavement and get the corpse out of the way of the Democrats walking to Starbucks.

“Wash, Rinse, Repeat” was the exact phrasing by the medical examiner talking to a security guard in that case.

Cook County, Illinois, the other day, said they were spending $14 million of US taxpayer money buying hotels to put illegal immigrants in as well as $30 million to give them a tent city with heat and plenty of blankets and foul weather gear before winter sets in.

This is the same city (Chicago) where the Democrats sent the Chicago Police Department out, under Rahm Emanuel (now Biden’s Ambassador to Japan), to tear down a homeless encampment on Lower Lower Wacker (where waste heat from buildings kept them warm), beat them up, and burn their stuff.

The only thing the Democrats have for Americans is contempt. After they cause American citizens to lose their job and replace them with people who shouldn’t even be here, they spend money putting them up in fancy hotels, the Biden Administration, well, let’s face it, they’re an arm of the Chinese Communist Party at this point.

He let their spy balloon fly over everything and report on it and once it no longer had any value to them, only then was it shot down, but that’s pretty minor compared with conspiring with Xi to flood the streets with cheap drugs that kill people the Democrats abandoned and don’t want to hear from again.

This fentanyl crap is Biden’s holocaust. It’s the Democrat Party’s plan for America.

We should not be decriminalizing anything or defunding the police.

We should instate the death sentence for anyone caught selling, trafficking, or smuggling this. Death to drug dealers was one of the few things they got right in Russia.

Only days into the Democrat “SAFE-T” Act in Illinois, the Lake and McHenry Scanner has been publishing the kind of “non-detainable” criminals they’ve let back out, and it’s every bit as bad as Darren Bailey tried to warn us about.

Some sexually abused children, others violated a protective order, kicked down their ex-wive’s door, and admitted to the arresting officers that they planned to kill her if they got inside, another killed a veteran by supplying him with drugs, and another guy punched and grabbed the cops by the balls during an arrest for threatening to kill a woman, saying that he knew how to dismember her body.

The Lake County State’s Attorney, Eric Rinehart, doesn’t even try to detain drug dealers. He’s a Democrat, of course.

In McHenry County, a man who pulled a gun on a train conductor was released, “because it wasn’t violent”.

The Illinois Black Caucus wrote this bill and passed it in the middle of the night, and it’s so obvious why they did.

It has nothing to do with fairness. It’s meant so that the public just has to sit back and accept the 1,000% violent crime surge that follows, and can’t really even arm themselves because constitutional rights to carry a gun (which you now need because the police don’t do anything, can’t do anything), is so hard to use that most people don’t even bother. And it’s not the criminal.

The law in Illinois, has been completely re-written by a group of politicians that want the criminals out of prison and voting for them while the State decays into anarchy and the judges and politicians live in gated communities with armed private guards.

The media is actually doing a fine job of documenting the decay and ruin of this country, and it’s the Democrats doing it. It’s the Democrats ruining everything.

I am never going to vote for a Democrat again. This is insanity.

Prescription Drug Shortages in the United States.

I went to three different pharmacies today trying to find some prescription eardrops.

They’re on the WHO’s list of essential medicines.

Nobody had them except one pharmacy in a county of a million people.

What is wrong with America lately, where a $20 bottle of eardrops from 2020 is now $212 in 2023 (Cash price. Luckily, we have good insurance.) *and* you can’t find them?

At the same time, they had updated COVID shots, which are near-placebos that hurt some people quite badly. But even then the pharmacist told me each Jewel-Osco only got 150 and that was 3 days ago and they have like 3 doses left and have not been told when to expect more.

It seems people are still swallowing the hook on that crock of shit, at least, some people.

Each time they tell people to get another shot, less do. At this rate, we’re probably at 15% of the country that even wants another one now.

If these shots actually did anything to mitigate COVID or had less horrific side effects, or if the government was even honest about what to expect instead of saying it’s all in your head (including articles about the “nocebo effect” and telling your doctor to lie to your face), then maybe more people would want one.

Normal vaccines, like the flu shot, don’t need to coerce people to take them. People know they work, serious side effects are really 1 in a million, if that, and they’ve been around for almost 80 years. Before COVID “vaccines” made people skeptical of real ones, you had 50-60% taking their flu shot every year. But even that’s probably down at this point.

At some point, they may pull an “insulin” and take all the cheap ones off the market and replace them with patents, I mean mRNA flu shots. In the testing, the mRNA flu shots didn’t protect better than the ones we take now, but they did result in COVID shot-like side effects. They got really rough and for no added protection against the flu.

But this will be patent evergreening. They’ll conspire to take the safe flu shots off the market, the ones that cost $26 cash, and replace them with ones that are like the $180 COVID shots.

If flu shots go mRNA, I won’t take the flu shot anymore. We took our flu shots this year, as always. NO COVID shot.

Just stick a bunch of mice with them and roll it out. Let people find out when they’re having heart and eye problems and they’re only 30.

Another thing I noticed is they had dozens of “narcan” nasal spray doses.

I’m sorry, but when you can’t even stock your pharmacy with basic antibiotics, why is the shelf full of stuff for an addict who is overdosing?

I don’t want to sound excessively mean here, but addicts are almost impossible to reform and are almost never NOT a problem to society somehow.

The display said to “add narcan to complete your first aid kit”.

Oh right, you know most accidents happen at home.

Stub your toe, cut your finger, burn your hand…….accidentally inject too much heroin….

Sure.

Racist New York Times Calls South Korea “World’s Largest Baby Exporter”; Says Country With Terrible Unemployment “Burdened” By Low Birth Rates.

Racist New York Times Calls South Korea “World’s Largest Baby Exporter”; Says Country With Terrible Unemployment “Burdened” By Low Birth Rates.

So this is what I saw on the New York Times today.

Then they go on to say this…

The South Koreans are so ashamed over a situation of high unemployment, that it has become a euphemism to describe over half a million unemployed youth (just the youth) as “taking a break”.

But the New York Times says they suffer from “low birth rates”.

Apparently more than half a million unemployed young people are suffering…from not having half a million more young people competing with them for jobs,

In America now, we have millions of layoffs, hiring freezes, reduced hours (involuntary), but they also tell Americans we “suffer” from less people to contend with for jobs and housing and everything else.

Capitalist systems have to grow forever even though it’s not possible. First they insult you, then they take away your reproductive rights and continue insulting you.

Next, they’ll probably send armed police to make random people get each other pregnant. Or scale it, and have breeding farms.

The tone in the United States is getting darker every year. Less freedoms, less of the politicians in charge even pretending like they care how you’re doing.

Why should Korea be any different? They have millions of unemployed and the government wants more people. Wow, just like America.

Landlords in California Throw Party to Celebrate Evicting Tenants While NPR Helps US Government Scream “Look! Aliens!”

Landlords in California Throw Party to Celebrate Evicting Tenants While NPR Helps US Government Scream “Look! Aliens!”

Not even once, but twice, today. LOOK! ALIENS!!!!

Meanwhile, car insurance premiums went up 19% in the last year, but “inflation is tame”, even though the same article admits that rent and food are up like crazy.

Maybe all the Democrat rags like NPR and New York Times need to pass better notes on the talking points.

Hunter Biden indicted on more felonies, gun charges.

I thought the Democrats didn’t believe in guns?

Of course, there was also the business of his laptop that he’s apparently never going to get in trouble with even though he’s a pervert who likes little kids.

And he’s a crackhead.

But you can’t talk about all of these because he’s Bonehead Joe’s criminal son, and his dad shuts down in the middle of sentences now because he has the intellectual capacity of a parsnip.

The worse things get in this country, the more the media shouts about COVID shots and space aliens.

You can gauge this for yourself.

Things have actually gotten so bad that COVID is a good distraction again from all of the hyperinflation, Biden sundowning, his criminal son in trouble, China running roughshod over us and the Biden administration, and Ukraine making no progress in their “counter-offensive” despite trillions of dollars in aid.

Trillions! On war. While child poverty in America has doubled in only a year thanks to Bonehead Joe.

Some will say it’s just a return to normal. Yes, the American government showed us all that it could lift half of the children out of poverty with one law and put them all back into poverty again with another law.

His whole strategy is to work with the Republicans on the worst stuff.

Give trillions of dollars to war when half that would have fed all these American kids for years.

When are people going to have enough of this?

Old people don’t seem to be very smart. If Biden doesn’t care that he doubled child poverty in only a year, and his only answer is to scream “Look! Aliens!”, he’ll work with the Republicans again to take away your Social Security check.

He obviously doesn’t have a second term left in him. It will be hard for his handlers to mask his cognitive issues for another year.

What will obviously happen if the Democrats keep him around is we’ll end up with a demented old man being rolled on stage during the debate, and Trump or DeSantis being sworn into office in 2025.