General Motors Has a Very Bad Week Thanks to Shawn Fain of the UAW and the California DMV.
I’ve been delighted at the way the week is going for General Motors.
First, the California DMV has been taking their stupid “self-driving taxis” off the roads because they ran over a woman, dragged her 20 feet, and then GM tried to hide the video they had from the California DMV. This on top of driving into wet cement, slamming into a fire truck, obstructing ambulances while people die waiting for it, and other incidents.
The truth is that self-driving vehicles have never been safe. It’s just that California is such a bubble economy susceptible to bribery and corruption, that it desperately wants it to succeed. So maybe they’ll be back on the roads causing more trouble soon.
Convoy, an autonomous truck company, went under and fired 500 people this past week. Good. The goal of autonomous trucks is to put millions of truck drivers out of work. Better the hundreds writing software than the millions driving the trucks.
Then Shawn Fain, the President of the UAW, announced that they reached a contract with Ford Motor Company that gave in to all of the union’s demands, which means that Ford’s plants will be up and running and GM can either agree to the same deal or deal with the idling of all their plants while Ford dealers are full of inventory.
General Motors is a truly disgusting company. Everything from the “Don’t call the cars a rolling casket.” E-Mails, over the defective ignition switches, to Dex-Cool problems (coolant gunk screwing up cars), to trying to use every contract negotiation to starve and eventually kill the UAW (with non-union battery jobs and permatemps that barely make any money on the factory floors).
The Obama Administration let GM go bankrupt and keep the same fools in management and C-Suite that got them into trouble the last time, then once the US Treasury offloaded the shares, they killed their hybrid and compliance cars, which didn’t have the huge profit margins of gas guzzling trucks and SUVs, and went right back to doing what they were doing.
Shawn Fain stood up to all of the car companies, and he’s the reason why these battery plants that Biden is dumping billions of taxpayer dollars into won’t be non-union.
Joe Biden decided to lead from behind and show up on the picket line when it was obvious that he couldn’t just declare the strike illegal and send them back with nothing, like he did with the rail workers.
(Who is going to tell the President to beat it? But he does have a lot of nerve trying to pretend to be pro-labor after the rail worker incident.)
I would like to buy a new Buick next time, but it does very much depend on a lot of things, from where interest rates happen to be to what this deal with the UAW looks like.
My ex lost the Kia he got from me in the break-up back in May. He hadn’t even finished paying on it.
He said that “some crackhead”, I’m just quoting him, busted out the window, ripped the steering cover off, and hotwired it.
At the rate the piece of shit was falling apart on him it probably wouldn’t have made it to 100,000 miles.
Right after I bought it, the air conditioner failed and had to be warranty repaired.
He said before “the crackhead” made off with it, it was not starting when he went to turn the key, sometimes, until he turned it like five or six times.
I said, “Fired right up for the crackhead though, like the scene out of The Terminator.”
Quality has gone way down, prices have gone way up.
I remember when you bought most any car they made and you got a lot of car for $20,000 and it would run for 30 years or 500,000 miles.
Needless to say, that’s long gone.
They all use such bad parts and so much computerized shit now, you’re lucky if it lasts as long as the payments.
In 2020, I personally witnessed two Kias explode in the span of a week.
My uncle just bought a new one. Good luck with that, I guess. He should have asked the family and I could have told him all about Kia.
The Chicago and Los Angeles chapters of “Burn, Loot, Murder” (Black Lives Matter) say they support Hamas after the past week’s devastating attacks on Israel.
I was told to be ashamed of myself two years ago when BLM was burning and looting in Chicago and Wisconsin and all over America, using the death of George Floyd (which was terrible and unforgivable) as an excuse, for seeing BLM for what they show themselves as now. The mask has come off!
At the time, it was setting fires to stores to run out with TVs and expensive sunglasses. It was destroying an Indian man’s gas station in Chicago twice in one summer until he didn’t bother to reopen it, it was destroying Ronny’s Steakhouse in Chicago at the Thompson Center, a Black-owned business that I ate at frequently.
BLM is a terrorist group. It’s completely undeniable now. It should really surprise nobody that they support another terrorist group that has so much blood on its hands, which has committed such heinous crimes against humanity.
The United States Government should tear BLM apart using mafia control laws such as the Hobbs and RICO Acts if it has to. It is an illegal organization designed to promote hatred, racism, and violent crimes including mass murder.
When will President Biden do something about this? I’d say, probably never. Who do you think that BLM is voting for (any of them that vote)?
We need another election and we need one soon or America won’t last much longer.
American insanity: Black Lives Matter’s Chicago affiliate used Hamas paragliders—the ones who slaughtered 260-plus teens and young adults at a music festival—in their poster art expressing that they “stand with Palestine.” Black Lives Matter’s Los Angeles chapter proclaims that “when a people have been subject to decades of apartheid and unimaginable violence, their resistance must not be condemned, but understood as a desperate act of self-defense.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’ve done a reverse dependency lookup, and it seems that the only desktop meta-package in Debian 12 that doesn’t “depend” on Firefox -or- Chromium is KDE.
Last time I tried using Debian (11) and removing Firefox, I had GNOME. I was somewhat angry that the dependency sprawl of GNOME’s desktop meta-packages on Debian force the user to have either Firefox or Chromium.
KDE’s, however, do not, so you may remove Firefox without worrying that it will demand that you install Chromium or risk damaging other parts of the OS.
On Debian’s part, this is just not the best dependency management on most desktop environments, with KDE seemingly the only one where removing Firefox doesn’t mean accepting an even worse browser or damaging the system.
I say bad dependency handling because forcing a user to install Web browsers, much less a specific one, to have a desktop environment, is a layering violation.
It makes Debian more like Windows, where there’s basically no concept of separation and topology, where the user is not free to customize it to his or her own liking and needs, and must have Internet Explorer and Edge.
In Windows, their idea of “topology” in the Server product is you can install the “Desktop Experience” or not install it. And if you don’t, you don’t get any GUI stuff really at all. Just enough to start a command prompt or “PowerShell”.
This should not be the situation we aim for on GNU/Linux desktops by making Firefox mandatory software.
The user should be able to install or remove any desktop software, freely. Putting things like office programs and Web browsers in as mandatory components to run GNOME takes us away from perfection, and makes a system more like one from a proprietary software vendor which demands to throw in everything they think you should have.
Why would you uninstall Firefox? (A counterblaste to Mozilla.)
Mozilla has essentially turned Firefox into malware. They started going bad years ago, and consistently find ways to be worse.
It has keylogging spyware, ads, and plugs for other Mozilla “services” that most people have no interest in. It has contextual advertising driven by the keylogger, and it leaks your personal information like a sieve by empowering random malicious Web sites to run anything they want on your computer.
(Sarcasm: Also, some of the enabling malware is “open source” on Microsoft GitHub, so it’s fine! There is also, apparently, an enormous difference in semantics about whether some of your information happens to be “sold” vs. “shared” with said partners, who are paying Mozilla to run ads in the browser.)
Aside from this, Mozilla can and does install Windows 11-like “studies”, which are extensions that can change the browser so that they can perform A/B testing.
Therefore, your copy of Firefox might have completely different settings than if I installed it. Even if they are identical to begin with, if I installed it for you (or it came with Debian), and I walk away, Mozilla can “reach in” later and change that, and then I wouldn’t know how to help you, because mine doesn’t work like yours does.
If they, for example, want to change some code related to the handling of graphics output and see that happens with different video drivers, they can.
This can mean that even if you and I have the same video card, my copy of Firefox may run fine, while yours starts crashing, and you can’t figure out why, but it’s reporting it to Mozilla along with everything in main memory at the time of the crash.
These are just some examples of power that they shouldn’t have. There are thousands of settings in the browser (swept under the rug in “about:config soup”), that the user is not even supposed to know about, but are there for Mozilla to change willy nilly, f***ing with the s**t until you have no idea what your browser is even doing.
Also, as a band-aid because “hamburger menus” that boil the system down to only a few preferences, do not work for programs as complex and vast as a Web browser.
This is sort-of related to something that Facebook actually did on purpose. They A/B tested by deliberately introducing crashes into the Android app to see how many users would uninstall it vs. how many would just restart the program and go on to get a feel for how “hooked” on Facebook they were.
Programs should absolutely never have the power to make one person’s copy of the software behave differently than another person’s copy. No matter why they want to do it, it will not serve the user.
A/B testing is basically a cop-out for not doing internal testing because the company making the software is too cheap to do anything but see if it compiled. This is how Windows updates roll out.
Mozilla almost never says no to anything Google wants.
Why would Mozilla say anything that could damage Google and remove 9/10ths of their revenue? Mozilla will be very careful about what it says on the stand. You don’t shit where you sleep.
Mozilla not only includes DRM software, as almost all Web browsers do, but unlike other browsers, they make it almost impossible for a casual user to turn off and disable the nag screen to turn it back on. (Which Brave at least accepts if you uncheck the box.)
To fully remove Widevine in a Mozilla browser you have to change three settingsin about:config, regarding eme and widevine CDM.
browser.eme.ui.enabled false
media.gmp-widevinecdm.enabled false
media.gmp-widevinecdm.visible false
If you don’t set all of this, then the only thing unchecking “Play DRM Content” does is set Firefox to nag you about it every time a page wants it until you break down or accidentally click yes.
The Widevine DRM module from Google is something that malware and fingerprinting scripts test for and try to load to figure out what browser you have.
When I caught a script on Reddit (nasty site) that was probing the browser, it asked to enable Widevine, so I figured out what was doing it and got it added to EasyPrivacy as a content blocker rule for uBlock-Origin.
This is like playing whack-a-mole. You always have to add another one because these creeps take out “random” character Web sites and try to load the script from dozens or hundreds of them, or even IP addresses.
This is one reason to use NoScript so you’ll know exactly which domains are loading scripts!
Mozilla does, essentially, nothing for your privacy.
This is the company that rage quit Facebook and wrote an extension called “Facebook Container” to keep “Meta” isolated from your other Web activity (good), only to go on and announce that they are present on TikTok.
(That’s like saying you quit your dependency on cocaine by moving up to methamphetamine.)
By defaulting to deleting cookies, history, and local storage, every time you exit the browser and encouraging the user to make few exceptions, and not keeping a disk cache, LibreWolf limits the data that anyone can store about you using your own computer, rather than try to play whack-a-mole with Facebook (while hiring people from Facebook and the CIA), as Mozilla does. There are only about an unlimited amount of hostile domains on the Web. What about Google? What about TikTok? What about Microsoft? What about Porn sites? These are just a few. Mozilla Firefox has no “containers” for them. Even if they did, “containers” only interfere with third-party tracking, at best.
Mozilla Firefox is an improper choice for default Web browser in a Free and Open Source Operating System.
At this point, it is so bad, so rotten, that it is dishonest to even include Mozilla Firefox.
They have made it clear that they don’t care about GNU/Linux users even though it is the only place they still usually are the default Web browser. They consistently sabotage or de-prioritize the Linux browsing experience, and force the user to set environment variables and about:config hacks to get a comparable browsing experience to Windows and Mac. It’s no wonder that people give up and switch to Brave vs. resorting to hacks to make Firefox faster.
Mozilla Firefox is really turning into “another Windows”, where there’s so much adware and telemetry garbage, that without it, you see how fast the thing can actually run.
LibreWolf is Firefox the way it could be without all of the adware and spyware Mozilla is tossing in, trying to make money for Mitchell Baker’s paycheck (which is growing every year while they lay waste to the developers). (The story fails to mention that an earlier round of layoffs sacked 70, for a total of 320 in 2020-21 alone. Then they went on a hiring freeze.)
In 2020, after returning to the position of CEO, [Mitchell Baker’s] salary had risen to over $3 million (in 2021, her salary rose again to over $5 million). In the same year the Mozilla Corporation laid off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues. Baker blamed this on the COVID-19 pandemic.
How many jobs could have been saved if one CEO froze her salary at $3 million instead of $5 million to avoid handing out layoff notices? How is this company still soliciting donations from the public? Do you want to donate to Mitchell’s heated driveway for another Ferrari?
If you give LibreWolf or Brave a chance, it’s really like a glass of ice water after you’ve been in Hell.
Of course, if you would like to install and run LibreWolf and demote Firefox to “backup browser” for when you need something more “normal” to deal with a pesky site or something, then close it you can do this. The two will run side-by-side and not conflict, but I can use Brave for this case.
As Brave has the Chromium engine, it also renders sites that are becoming quite hostile even to Firefox.
I would say that the Biden Administration’s censorship and de-platforming campaign compares to McCarthyism, albeit for somewhat different ends. Instead of suppressing Communism, they suppress anything that could get in the way of this vegetable “winning” another election. Their tactics are basically just updates to McCarthyism.
I don’t want software compiled by a company, Mozilla, that supports this authoritarianism, this censorship, and this un-American activity, on my computer.
The modern Web is really just the enforcement arm to this phenomenon.
It’s a culture of mass surveillance and censorship, and chilling effects (letting people know they’re watched so they’ll behave), and giving people enough rope to hang themselves (letting them upload crime evidence to Cloud storage and Social Media), and Mozilla is complicit with this.
I believe that this is probably the scariest time to be an American citizen since the Cuban Missile Crisis, and a lot of this isn’t just the geopolitics of an administration that is egging on World War III, it is the domestic spying, the feeling that you’re being watched.
And it’s not just about the mass surveillance, it’s not just about corporations censoring us, the US government is under a court order to stop going to tech companies and implying bad things will happen unless they de-platform users. It’s the Hollywood Blacklist on steroids!
These algorithms, tragically, work. It’s turned the brains of so many of my fellow Americans into Swiss cheese. You can’t even have a discussion anymore because they go straight to the “talking points” the regime handed them.
Isn’t the LibreWolf fork pointless? You could just change all of the settings in Firefox and get the same thing! Why would I use this, or Brave?
For the millionth time, no, the LibreWolf fork is not pointless. You couldn’t ever get them all and even if you did, Mozilla changes things, and you have no idea what’s actually in the binary.
They demand that it is built a certain way approved by their lawyers to be called Firefox, so it’s impossible for your operating system vendor to help you out of this mess and still call it “Firefox”, due to trademark issues. It must do all the same nasty things a binary compiled by Mozilla themselves would do to you, or it can’t be branded Firefox.
Debian used to keep Firefox’s version “stable” throughout a release by backporting security fixes to it, then Mozilla’s lawyers came calling. So Debian called the package “IceWeasel” and kept right on doing it.
Then eventually this rapid release nonsense came about and Debian gave up and installed “Firefox ESR” to at least keep the incessant version proliferation at bay, but it has all of the nastiness like DRM and Mozilla’s adware and spyware.
There are so many things that LibreWolf changes or compiles out that it’s got to be in the hundreds or thousands by now. So a fork is warranted, because the other option is allow every user who wants to make Firefox better end up compiling it themselves and apply profile hardening.
Whether you choose LibreWolf, or Brave, you can be assured that your Web browser is not a piece of malware from the Biden Administration’s “political office”.
You do not get this from Mozilla. Firefox is a terrible browser, and the reason it is terrible is more political than technical at this point, but the same junk that spies on you to sell ads can also sell more of your private information to government.
Installing Brave.
Brave basically invents new ways of screwing around with Web tracking technology and makes them part of the browser, even substituting tracking libraries from many Web sites with substitutes (Sugarcoat) which implement the minimal API for the site to function while removing the functionality that spies on the user.
This option (as of this writing) works for Debian 11 and 12, as well as recent releases of Ubuntu, and Linux Mint. (Possibly Linux Mint Debian Edition, as that one is built atop Debian Testing? I’m not sure. You may need to mess around with the apt sources or just use the Flatpak.)
The Apt option is superior to Flatpak if you don’t want Flatpaks or don’t want the Flatpak “Sandbox” to prevent the Video Download Helper CoApp from functioning properly.
The Apt (DEB) version also appears to have been mostly built with bundles (Mozilla’s copies) of the libraries that *could* technically be “system” as an option. My guess is that this keeps it as “universal” as possible so there don’t have to be as many builds.
The Debian package also appears to start a bit faster and, of course, it will use the system’s copy of certain libraries whereas the Flatpak version needs all sorts of “platforms” which may not be properly maintained by Flathub.
Can you use Firefox Sync in LibreWolf?
You can if you want. You would need to enable it and restart the browser.
It would be smart, were you to go this route, if you made a new Firefox Sync account that you only use for LibreWolf and possibly Fennec F-Droid, so that Mozilla doesn’t end up stomping your LibreWolf settings with ones from Firefox which are less private or secure.
To help start over, you could go to about:config and enable password import from a CSV file by setting signon.management.page.fileImport.enabled to true and then exporting your password from Firefox or another browser as CSV, and then importing them to LibreWolf’s password manager. LibreWolf also supports moving bookmarks over as an HTML file you exported from another browser.
If you don’t need to sync with Fennec F-Droid on your phone, it would be advisable to leave Sync turned off and just stomp your passwords and bookmarks files on your backup drive now and then to make sure you don’t lose them.
While your data is apparently encrypted on your device before it’s sent to Mozilla, it is still stored on a Mozilla server, in the US (a jurisdiction hostile to privacy and where the government does what it wants), and your Firefox Sync password is also the password to decrypt the data. Ouch. Be advised that it is NOT safe to rely on Mozilla’s sync server.
I’ve been using Privacy Browser more often on my phone anyway. It’s Chromium-based, but more secure as it defaults to not even turning on JavaScript.
Short of disabling JavaScript and other active content, all you can really do is patch it over and over again. Google and Mozilla stuff their browsers with unnecessary security holes to give the Web sites more power over the users that they shouldn’t have.
The fix was an emergency, as malware was already utilizing the flaw.
SeaMonkey can be installed on Debian 12 KDE.
They removed it from the software repository a long time ago, as did Ubuntu. But there’s nothing stopping you from installing it manually and running it.
I like SeaMonkey as I’ve configured it (NoScript, uBlock-Origin, no WASM, etc.) for quiet Web browsing. Occasionally, I need a more “full fat” browser to run a site that just will not let me in, and Brave fits the bill nicely.
I especially appreciate SeaMonkey Mail and News because I hate WebMail and SeaMonkey’s interface has not changed in years.
WebMail is horrid and full of advertising. If you open GMail with their official app on Android, you get phishing messages from Google that look like they’re E-Mail, but they aren’t.
Go to the SeaMonkey Web site and download the tarball (compressed archive) for 64-bit Linux. (“Linux x64”) Choose the one that is in your preferred language. In my case, English (US).
Once downloaded, unpack the “seamonkey” directory from the archive using Ark. You should now have a “seamonkey” directory in your “Downloads” directory.
Optional: Install SeaMonkey for all users on the system.
In the Downloads directory, right-click on a blank space in Dolphin (the file manager) and choose “Open Terminal Here”.
In the terminal, Konsole, enter the command.
sudo mv seamonkey /opt/seamonkey
To make shortcuts for the desktop in KDE:
Right click the “Application Launcher” icon on the far left side of the taskbar. Choose “Edit Applications”, click on “Internet” then press “New Item”.
Name: SeaMonkey Web Browser
Description: Web Browser
Program: /opt/seamonkey/seamonkey
Command-Line Arguments: %U
To make an icon click the icon placeholder “Select Icon”, “Browse”, then make your way to /opt/seamonkey/chrome/icons/default and choose “default32.png”.
To create an icon for Mail/News:
Highlight the “Internet” category again. Press “New Item”.
Name: SeaMonkey Mail
Description: E-Mail Client
Program: /opt/seamonkey/seamonkey
(Note: WordPress changes two dashes to a single long one. This should be two dashes before mail.)
Command-Line Arguments: –mail
To make an icon click the icon placeholder “Select Icon”, “Browse”, then make your way to /opt/seamonkey/chrome/icons/default and choose “messengerWindow48.png”.
Click “Save”.
Then click “Sort” and “Sort all by Name” and click “Save”.
Then, if you want to, you can pin the icons to your taskbar, or make them default handlers for Web Browser and E-Mail in the Applications area in System Settings.
SeaMonkey will occasionally check for updates when you are running the program and offer to install the latest version.
How to backup your passwords and bookmarks, import them to Brave, LibreWolf, and SeaMonkey, and COMPLETELY UNINSTALL FIREFOX from Debian 12 KDE.
Firs off, you may which to delete your FIrefox Sync account if you don’t plan to use that again. Why leave it dangling?
You have no idea if it really does get deleted because “Cloud”, but you should at least hit the delete button on your way out.
First, make sure you have exported your bookmarks and passwords to HTML and CSV files, and backed them up multiple places to storage you control.
(I suggest putting the Bookmarks and Logins CSVs and a backup of the actual key4.db and logins.json in a ZIP file, dating the file, and backing that up, periodically.)
Then we can begin the process of moving the data to other browsers.
In Firefox, open the “hamburger menu”, click “Bookmarks”, “Manage Bookmarks”, “Import and Backup”, “Export Bookmarks to HTML”. Pick a name and a place to put them, and make sure they got saved.
Then “hamburger menu”, “Passwords”, in the password manager, press the button “…” and select “Export Logins”. A warning will pop-up saying your passwords will be saved as readable text.
Click Export (the red button). Name the file and select where you want to put it, and verify that it got saved there.
(CSV extension can open with LibreOffice Calc as a Spreadsheet. You can verify that the data was saved properly by looking at this and closing Calc.)
Go to LibreWolf and enter about:config and change signon.management.page.fileImport.enabled to true to enable CSV password import, then go to the Password Manager and Bookmark Manager (which will be the same place as they were in, in FIrefox), and import the Bookmark HTML and the Passwords CSV files you backed up.
If you installed Brave, then on first opening, have it import your data from “Firefox” or “Firefox ESR” (ESR should be shown if you’re migrating from Debian’s Firefox), and verify that everything made it over. Firefox will need to be closed for the migration process to be successful.
If you want your passwords and bookmarks from Firefox moved to SeaMonkey, you can import the bookmarks HTML file, but SeaMonkey’s password manager cannot import from CSV.
Luckily, SeaMonkey uses the same, directly compatible, key4.db and logins.json files that Firefox (and LibreWolf) use, so you will need to open your profile directory for Firefox or LibreWolf (they’re hidden, so press Ctrl+H to unhide them in the file manager…for Firefox, it should be under .mozilla/firefox/(a bunch of random letters)firefox-esr on Debian.
Copy the key4.db and logins.json over to the SeaMonkey profile (if you need to create a SeaMonkey profile, just open the SeaMonkey browser and then close it), and it will now be under .mozilla/seamonkey/(bunch of random letters).default and then just paste in the files you stole from Firefox and then restart SeaMonkey and open the password manager. You should see all your site logins there.
For importing Bookmarks, just click Bookmarks/Manage Bookmarks/Tools/Import Bookmarks from HTML, and point it at the backup file for the exported bookmarks from Firefox.
Finally, to delete Firefox Sync.
In Firefox, open the “hamburger menu”, and click on the e-mail address that should be the first item in the menu. Click “Manage Account” and log-in if prompted.
Scroll down and press “Delete Account.” On the next page, agree to all the “Facebook-like account deletion page” warnings, and click “Continue”. Your Firefox Sync account should now be deleted.
Warning! Read what Apt actually proposes before you agree to run any commands I’ve given you. These are for informational purposes only, and “worked for me”.
To fully remove Firefox ESR from your Debian 12 KDE system, open Konsole and issue the command:
sudo apt purge *firefox*
You should see a long list of packages that will be removed, along with ones that will be leftovers as automatically installed with Apt telling you to “run apt autoremove” to remove these leftover packages.
If all you see is a bunch of Firefox and Firefox internationalization packages, maybe some Firefox extensions, *and* it does not propose ripping out anything important/unrelated, you might choose to continue.
Then you can remove leftover orphan dependencies with:
sudo apt autoremove
This will delete the remaining dependencies that nothing else on the system requires.
Now that Firefox is gone, you may want to remove the profile data. This uses a ton of disk space.
WARNING! Make sure you have BACKED UP any of your passwords, bookmarks, and other data before proceeding.
Also, be advised that it is YOUR RESPONSIBILITY to make sure these commands actually refer to the proper directories to be deleted. As a safer alternative, you can open your file manager (Dolphin in KDE) and go to your /home directory and press Ctrl+H to unhide hidden directories, and simply follow the path to move them to the trash.
To remove the Firefox profile and cache directories:
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.
Speculative Tech Nonsense in California Paid for My Cat’s Surgery.
My cat had her surgery yesterday, and they removed two masses and did a dental cleaning and extracted one bad tooth while she was under a general anesthetic anyway.
Recently, I had a bunch of class action settlements come in from various ways tech companies in California violated the law, usually the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, victimizing me and stealing my facial imagery data.
These settlements keep going out for years after you’ve actually used a thing, because you weren’t considering at the time how the thing used you.
Lemonade insurance had an app that required me to use a video statement during a renter’s insurance loss claim.
Veriff (which just had a huge layoff), verified my driver’s license data so I could use an account to trade some securities.
There were others.
It occurred to me that this is a life changing amount of money for me. I could get a car repair or save my cat’s life, but to them, they just go right on breaking laws and paying for it later. Why not? It’s all “venture capital” nonsense.
The point of running companies on VC and juicing the stock with press releases of things that may lead to a profit “someday”, but not now, is so that the people running it can pay themselves handsomely and then fire everyone and announce that the company is bankrupt.
With higher Fed rates seemingly here to stay for a while, and the focus is on making people unemployed and popping large bubbles, damn the human cost (yet again), we’re “closing the business cycle” and with almost no new products.
Essentially most of what tech workers do is throw their labor “into the sea” on things that never benefit anyone except the scammers at the very top who made a lot of money issuing press statements about imaginary future profits.
Then they get laid off and their visas lapse and they have to go home. Some people end their lives. It’s tragic.
This is the kind of economy that America has because it refuses to have a real economy that is sustainable and producing real goods and services.
Instead of using what happened in China as a lesson on why it was a bad idea to make your population unemployable and strung out on drugs, while the suicide rate doubled, Bonehead Biden was off in Vietnam, an enemy country that 68,000 Americans died trying to keep at least part of “Free” from horrific Communist oppression, and lost.
Although we did manage to evacuate some people that I know and give them a better life in this country, the Communists overran South Vietnam and raped, murdered, starved, and disappeared many thousands of people. Which is very typical in Communist revolutions.
Communists are brutes. You see that when people risk running across mine fields to get to South Korea and have bullets in their back and tapeworms in their guts, and haven’t eaten anything in weeks if they make it.
You see people agitating for Communism in the United States. Usually these are spoiled brats in their mommy and daddy’s house, in their 20s, never had a job, don’t know how Communism will treat them. Hint, it ain’t gonna be iPhones and Xboxes and laying around all day taking pictures of your food for Instagram.
Also, 50 or 70 years after the revolution, you still get “rich Communists”, however that happens. Theoretically impossible, but you do. These are usually people high up in the good graces of the government officials, who get to go to hot spring resorts and have Macs and Steam accounts while there are food shortages and dirt floors in the country for everyone else.
Essentially everything Americans complain about and worse happens in a Communist state. The social stratification.
North Korea has an economy the size of Indiana’s, but there are several times as many people. It also has to support a huge military, a nuclear weapons program, and some party officials and “rich Communists”, who have brought nothing but dire poverty to millions while they enjoy most of what there is, for themselves.
“Communism makes everyone equal!”. Let’s test that. Just have the other 26 million North Koreans show up to that hot spring resort and see how equally they all get shot for trying to use something that no more than a few hundred are supposed to have.
Now, according to Old Bonehead, who can’t even make it through a paragraph if it’s late enough in the day that he starts sundowning with the cameras on him, we’re “exporting AI”, whatever that is, to a regime that functionally isn’t a lot different than China or even North Korea.
Biden’s term in office has been yet another slap in the face to Americans. Instead of building a more prosperous future for America, in America, we get more of these deals with corrupt enemy nations to make sure that we get Happy Meal Toys.
It’s actually very sick and depressing to watch how the media spins this whole situation.
I was talking with my dad over email again, and some of what he thinks about Joe Biden and the Democrats is actually quite right and I would like to quote him.
In your article you said “What does amaze me is how a country that takes away everything from people and leaves them homeless or dying from lack of food or medical care, has been so good about suppressing revolt.”
What they do is watch all the time, and then do really evil and painful things to anyone that steps out of line.
Total control. Total suppression.
They monitor and restrict communication. They prevent group activity that can allow political activism. They get them watching and reporting on each other. Now, facial recognition, AI, and “social conformity scores” can bump that up a notch.
The US leftist Democrat stranglehold on the government is taking the steps you would have to succeed at to turn this government into that kind of state. Subversion of the DOJ and FBI. Control of the courts and DAs. Domination and control of the voting system, including at-will manipulation and unaccountability. Vicious attacks on any opposition. Reinterpretation and substitution of social values. Manipulation of culture. Redefinition of ethical behavior. Control of news and reporting. Control and subversion of the education system for youth – mind control. They are building all this in plain view.
As America falls over and stores complain about how much they lose to theft, I have some more musings on what’s going on with Capitalism in America.
Capitalism, makes bad products, ones that even violate the minimum safety regulations that theoretically exist in America, and nobody does anything about it.
About 10 years ago, I was broke, and I was looking for ways to save money on almost anything I could. When I went to the Dollar Tree, where everything really was $1, I bought some bags of coffee.
They said, “Product of Vietnam”, but they were $1. So I bought several bags and figured I was done buying coffee for the month.
When I got home, and brewed a pot, it left a plastic-like residue all over my coffee maker carafe, and I had to chisel it apart with a butter knife before I could use the coffee maker again.
I have no idea what that stuff was, but needless to say I did not drink the coffee.
I’ve bought a couple other products there before I realized completely what Dollar Tree actually was. It’s not a way to be frugal, it’s a false economy.
They aim for low prices, because so many people in America can’t afford anything better, and it does not matter at all if any of the products are “good”, at least on some level.
When I read that Dollar Tree is complaining about rampant theft, I became quite concerned about the current situation in America and what it means for the future.
Previously, for an item to be considered worthy of theft, it had to appeal to people who would see it as sort of a “religious artifact”, yet didn’t have the money that a Capitalist economy demands for such a thing.
Consider the $300-600 Air Jordan shoes, and how there are so many ways people get them. From smash-and-grab retail theft, to working a lot to buy just one pair of shoes, which cost 10-20 times what a perfectly good unbranded pair of shoes cost, to even using rent-to-own, and paying $1,200 for the shoes, eventually.
Marx gave us the concept of “Commodity Fetishism”.
It’s when an object loses its appeal over its utilitarian value to the consumer, and takes on, sort of a life of its own, being given an, almost mystical or mythological qualities in the person’s mind.
Consider Apple products. They have very little utilitarian value. If you want a set of earbuds, you can get something as good as AirPods for no more than $40, yet Apple charges up to, I think $300 for a codec with a battery and a little plastic.
This is commodity fetishism. People are encouraged through advertising, to pay for their own brainwashing, and a premium for an otherwise limited-value proposition.
People who fall victim to fetishism of commodities will end up paying too much for everything from coffee to computers.
While there is definitely a point where things get too cheap to possibly be good in a Capitalist economy ($1 coffee or $1 3.5 oz frozen ribeye steaks at the dollar store), there’s also a point where you get a good product, but you’re paying 10 times as much as you should, because there was a point where the utilitarian value of the purchase leveled off, and it was a long time ago.
So now you’re in debt to the “credit card” people and the “finance company”, and reality sets in that the product did not raise your standard of living, but you are paying for them fooling you.
Commodity fetishism leads to high levels of debt and dissatisfaction.
When people say that nobody in America is poor because they all have flat screens and nice shoes, that’s what this means.
You have no….money, per se, but Capitalism has made you rich in flat screen TVs, BMW cars, Apple phones, AirPods, Air Jordans, and Kirby vacuums…
(I know, you just opened the door and before you knew it, the guy had you signing papers, and you don’t even have any carpet!)
If a product is actually so much better that it earns its high price, then this isn’t automatically commodity fetishism, but this is a rarity.
“A religion may be discerned in capitalism – that is to say, capitalism serves essentially to allay the same anxieties, torments, and disturbances to which the so-called religions offered answers.”
“Capitalism is probably the first instance of a cult that creates guilt, not atonement.”
– Walter Benjamin, Capitalism as Religion
Most people born in America engage in Commodity Fetishism.
It’s almost inevitable thanks to the cradle to grave brainwashing that you’re only one product away from happiness.
Hell, I don’t know ONE person who isn’t affected by this lunacy, except me, and I must confess there have been times. But it seems everyone else I know has it so much worse.
70 hour work weeks and the whole Amazon warehouse in their closet. They don’t even open the boxes anymore. It’s rather disgusting.
But human nature is to be greedy, and advertisers like this.
Even in the Soviet Union, where you could get into huge trouble for having an underground dance club with Western music, booze, cigarettes, and clothing, they happened and the government was never successful in shutting them down although some did get raided.
One of the latest, and weirdest, phenomenons of Capitalism is their belief that they can eventually replace most workers with “AI”.
The third world…the third world….the southern hemisphere!
The computer is rebooting NOW….Reason: User pressed Ctrl-Alt-Del 5 times…..hangs.
*sigh* *Holds in the power button.*
-Joe Biden’s Brain and Karen Jean-Pierre
When Bonehead Biden was in Vietnam the other day, where his brain took another dump on him mid-sentence and he started saying “The third world, the third world, the southern hemisphere.” followed by a word salad and Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre quickly rushing the demented old coot off the stage, it was said that the United States will have Microsoft “export AI” to Vietnam.
One does wonder what a “Communist worker’s state” will do with “Microsoft AI”, which has lost its novelty, and which people here don’t really use much anymore.
As soon as people got tired of ELIZA on Steroids, they started leaving “ChatGPT” alone.
The barely noticeable uptick in Bing market share quickly evaporated.
Again, what are Communists going to do with a chat bot?
Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?
The closest thing we have to a Communist Party in America is something called “RevCom” for Revolutionary Communism.
I only became aware of it while I was in South Chicago for a while.
I don’t think any of them have been brushing up on Marx. It’s a bit, uhm, dry reading, and the people calling themselves Revolutionary Communists don’t strike me as big readers who know a lot of five dollar words.
I’ve never encountered, actual Communists, in America.
The label is so toxic that the only people using it officially are derelicts who have nothing and are pissed.
Even people who are basically Communists here swear up and down that they’re not.
They’re Democrats, or Socialists, or Democratic Socialists, or they make up new words.
Anything but Communism.
What does amaze me is how a country that takes away everything from people and leaves them homeless or dying from lack of food or medical care, has been so good about suppressing revolt.
The United States has been unbelievably more successful with violently suppressing dissent than the Soviet Union was.
There came a point where so many people in the Soviet Union were so dissatisfied with it that it broke apart, and instead of murdering EVERYONE eventually the powers that be let it go.
That rather says a lot about America, I think.
We have long since crossed the point where people would replace it with something else if they possibly could. If they had the power to change things.
Except that our government always credibly threatens “the most vicious dogs” and “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” (two of Trump’s best), and people just quietly go back inside their home (or tent) and quit “causing trouble”, again.
There’s something different that’s happening this time, though. More people are just going into the stores and taking things and they don’t even care if the police are watching them. They have no job, despite the fake government statistics saying everyone is flush with cash, well fed, and gainfully employed.
Communist governments would be too ashamed to produce statistics such as the ones that the Bureau of Labor Statistics has gotten away with.
When Trump had them make a “math error” to not count a million unemployed people, Barack Obama stepped in and claimed nobody at BLS would ever lie to us. Oh sure, right.
(The same BLS that says the dollar has only lost two-thirds of its value since I was born in 1984, through 2023, when I’ve seen it lose at least that much as it pertains to rent and food since 2003.)
They’re all swamp monsters. Trump was just one that didn’t get along with the rest.
Everyone who has been paying attention to this country knows that this is not a happy crew and that our current president is basically full-on Weekend at Bernie’s because his mind is so gone. Turns out, we don’t even need a president, because they can put documents in front of a confused old man and have him sign ’em.
Maybe that’s how they got him to say Microsoft will export AI to Vietnam.
One of the only things that a lot of Communist governments did get right was basing a national operating system on GNU/Linux.
This isn’t actually just about Communism trying to provide affordable technology for its citizens. It’s a national security issue. Windows is horribly architected and impossible to secure. It’s also got built-in spyware for the US government.
You would have to be retarded to rely on something like this from an enemy country that wants to keep tabs on you.
It’s not just Communists that are ripping Windows and other US tech out of their computing, and a lot of it is because Microsoft is also an economic drain on their country’s economy. But that’s not even the main concern.
I just fail to see how wasting money on some Microsoft chat bot is going to help them when their government throws Windows out because it doesn’t want to be the victim of espionage.
Maybe they just don’t actually plan to use it for anything but had to do something to get the corrupt Bernie Lomax Biden Administration to open talks with Vietnam.
COVID and Vaccine Jingoism.The Politics of a Plague.
There was a strange phenomenon during COVID, well, a lot of them.
It wasn’t just every two-bit politician in America acting like a dictator with unlimited authority, sweeping the feckless courts and legislatures aside, ruling by “public health decree”. Forcing everyone into ineffective Hygiene Theater, including “sanitizing surfaces” and “masks”, whose sole purpose was psychological. (So the economy wouldn’t collapse.)
Oh no, there was a lot of noise in the “media”, like NPR, BBC, and NYTimes, regarding “Chinese” and “Russian” vaccines, and “What’s even in them? Who knows? They probably have lousy quality control because, again, Russia and China.”
In the mean time, as we in the Northern Hemisphere go into the Cold, Flu, and COVID season yet again, I’ve decided not to take any more of the “COVID shots”.
I’ve stopped calling them vaccines. I took four of them.
The fourth being the “bivalent booster”. So did my spouse.
Just 6 weeks after the bivalent booster (all doses were Pfizer), we both got COVID at the same time.
COVID actually made my spouse less sick than the COVID shot. The COVID shot made it impossible for him to get out of bed for nearly 4 days.
He ended up calling into work, losing most of his sick time, and then when he did get COVID, having to take unpaid Family and Medical Leave Act time off, which they only give you when you have COVID, not “COVID shot side effects”. Which they gaslight the public and claim don’t even exist.
I wasn’t even as lucky as him. I ended up very sick with COVID, and then developing chest pains that dragged on clear into this summer and didn’t stop for for EIGHT months.
We both took the “COVID antiviral pills”, he got the Pfizer ones, I couldn’t take them and had to take Molnupiravir. Just as soon as I was starting to come around, 4 days later, the COVID weakened my immune system to the point where I had a Shingles outbreak, and spent another few weeks taking pills to stamp that out, as well as painkillers three times a day (the maximum safe dose!).
I’ve decided this year, we’ll skip the shots, because they clearly do nothing and they can make you sicker than the damn bug.
I don’t feel like a repeat of last year where my spouse risks getting in trouble with his job, over a defective COVID shot, for absolutely no benefit.
So we will be taking the flu shot on Monday and calling it.
We are not anti-vaxxers. We have taken all of the CDC recommended vaccines. Most of them were put through a legitimate Scientific Process.
The clear and only point of Pfizer and Moderna’s COVID shots is to make money for Pfizer and Moderna, while the government sweeps all of the information under the rug about how badly they can hurt you.
This year, the Biden administration, allowed both companies to increase the price of each dose from $16, which the government paid and led to record profits for both companies, to $180 per dose, which is going to make insurance companies raise premiums again, to pay for shots that are dangerous and don’t even work.
Naturally, to grease the wheels on Phase II of the Great Heist, Moderna has said they’ll cover the shots for the uninsured, for now.
Given that these things very clearly don’t work, given the media gaslighting, which I’ll admit even got me until I had to experience the fact that they don’t work myself, and just the level of dishonesty and corruption about the entire thing (including anti-Russian and anti-Chinese propaganda that didn’t even leave the COVID shots out of it), I can’t justify accepting more.
It was the Democrats, as usual, who had such a horrible program, that they had to bribe and threaten people. Through their employers, naturally.
Take it, you get fifty bucks, don’t take it and potentially get fired.
Biden tried his best to make everyone who refused the heart damage and other oddities unemployed, during a recession, with hyperinflation.
This America is a dystopian Hell, and despite the rare media mention of COVID anymore (because they took their “emergency powers” and never gave them back, thank you very much), and now they want you out there shopping, rumbling of the Lockdown Fetishists are starting to make the news again.
This whole thing was an exercise in raw power.
After they eased up a little and like half of the jobs lost to the Lockdown came back, the corrupt New York Times spun up the KrugmanBot3000 to proclaim the Dead Cat Bounce as the Economic Miracle of Biden.
A “recovery” that brings back half the jobs, and puts the government in twice as much debt is a Miracle.
Hallelujah. Praise Be! I saw the light, I saw the light, no more darkness no more night! Then Jesus Biden came like a stranger in the night. Praise the Lord Joe Biden, I saw the light!
Ironically, after encouraging people who know how to knock a fence down and enter a place illegally to come to Chicago, ex-Mayor Lightfoot of Chicago was horrified when they did the same thing to her chain link fences around open air parks.
What public policy sense did it make to lock down open air state and local parks when there’s this germ going around mostly killing people who don’t even go out and walk?
(Of course, in Chicago, that’s defensible since not exercising is more healthy than being shot while exercising, I suppose.)
Also, true to Democrat form, we had to spill reams of digital ink, chiding people for going to church, and not say anything about the vandalism, looting, and the “house parties” where someone shows up with a machine gun, which were spreading COVID, but it wasn’t the people you CAN berate in the media doing it.
Excusing open and outright criminal actions while condemning people for engaging in their Constitutionally-protected right to freedom of religion did not weigh well on me. I think we deserve better than this from our government.
Calling rioting and arson and looting “mostly peaceful” while people are dying, the city is on fire, and businesses are being destroyed is never okay. But the Democrats and their pet media did this.
At the same time, the Civil Alert System was going off telling me not to enter Kenosha, Wisconsin or Downtown Chicago. Mostly peaceful, you know.
I’m planning to take my spouse to some Libertarian Party meetings.
It’s only right that if he’s planning to become an American that we should do this right.
I find it very ironic that the government universities, who basically load people up with so much debt they’ll never see the light of day again, most of them, and at only 18, would brand the faculty as such “Progressives” while actually promoting so much actual wealth inequality. Sure, yeah, finance it all and hand it to them. Whatever.
I don’t respect them. There’s nothing to feel good about when you’re a “university” and you load a bunch of rubes down with $60,000 in debt at 6%+ interest, knowing what you’re doing to them, and then you tell them that they’re a victim of “evil White people”.
Yeah, a lot of those “evil White people” are running the university. Ever stopped to think about it?
Those are the ones saying that the “evil White people” are the ones who are too poor to buy a bag of beans, and aren’t even threatening anybody.
The elitist “Left” is too stupid to realize that by openly mocking and slandering people who are on hard times, portraying Rural Americans as the Great White Satan, that they are making people like Trump and DeSantis more palatable.
They won’t do anything for the poor White rural voters, but they say they have the answer to everything, and point out how toxic and stupid the “Left” is all the time to score points because the last part is….not untrue.
You won’t like their answer to the problems though. Keep pushing, you’ll find out.
You thought Trump was bad the first time? Just wait and see what he does next. And if not him, someone like him.
Vivek Ramaswamy Represents the Rodrigo Duterte-ing of America.
(This article makes heavy use of sarcasm and so requires a certain level of intelligence and familiarity with the English language.)
I have to say that I am very impressed with the Republican Party of America.
They have finally found an even bigger tyrant and an even bigger piece of trash than Donald Trump. It took a lot of years and hard work to get here, and they should be congratulated for this, in a way.
While the Democrat machine is figuring out all the ways it may be able to imprison Donald Trump and is masturbating publicly about using the 14th Amendment to disqualify him from office, something worse than Trump is out there now.
Vivek Ramaswamy
One look at the Wikipedia page of Ramaswamy’s political opinions make it very clear that he is like some sort of clone of Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, a man so vile he may yet face an international arrest warrant from the Hague for crimes against humanity.
(In Techrights, Roy and I call Duterte supporters the “Dutertards” as we both have spouses from the Philippines and so are somewhat familiar with the issues, including his police as death squads and the lack of a functioning court system.)
Nobody took Vivek Ramaswamy seriously until recently, but then something happened and suddenly his Republican opposition suddenly feels a need to talk about him. So far they are dismissive.
They dismissed Donald Trump too. All of them did. The mass media made fun of him, his opponents never took him seriously. The result was that The Wrecker (as Richard Stallman calls him) was the President for four years, and now they have to scramble to figure out reasons he can’t run for office again, and even try to imprison him.
They’re making such a concerted effort to subdue Donald Trump because Biden’s term hasn’t been going a lot better and the Democrats are scared that if Trump comes back it will be a close election where the Republicans have had years to regroup.
While Trump was awful, even his judicial picks have made rulings that have expanded gay rights.
What does Ramaswamy say about gay people? Well, he’s the biggest homophobe of them all. He says gay people “are a cult”.
He also says he would “govern almost exclusively by executive action”. Something so extreme that Trump and Biden have limited the number of times they were willing to dabble in it. Neither Obama, Trump, or Biden had total success once it reached the courts.
The problem with courts is that it takes forever to have things play out there, meanwhile the policy may be in effect already. All you need is for a guy like Ramaswamy to bury us alive in “executive actions” and wait about 1,000 years for the courts to try dealing with all of it. By the time they manage, the damage will be done.
And what might Mr. Ramaswamy’s actions be? Oh nothing obscene, nothing grotesque, nothing terribly unreasonable.
He only wants to do things like invading Mexico and stripping people under 25 of their voting rights.
Like I said, nothing huge. Invading Mexico without Congressional approval. Laws? Hah! What laws! International relations? What are you, some kind of a chump?
He says he wants to “gut the FDA”, which is hardly perfect. But why don’t we just shut that down and start buying mystery meat out of a barrel again? Certainly nobody ever got sick from doing that. It can be Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” all over again.
How bad did food get before the FDA and USDA? Here’s a clip from the History Channel’s article showing a couple examples.
“Food manufacturing was unregulated. There was a license to do whatever you wanted to maximize profits,” says Deborah Blum, author of The Poison Squad: One Chemist’s Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. “There’s nothing that could be done to the food that’s illegal because there [were] no food safety laws.”
And Americans were dying because of it. The chemical-laced “embalmed beef” fed to soldiers during the Spanish-American War proved more lethal than combat. And by one estimate, writes Blum, food and milk tainted with formaldehyde killed 400,000 American infants a year.
-History.com
It sounds like your food really will be an exciting adventure under President Ramaswamy. (Bring a toilet for when it starts coming out of both ends.)
Why do you need a regulatory framework for prescription drugs? It’s not like powerful chemicals designed to treat complex medical conditions need safety reviews and efficacy studies. What are you? Some kind of a hippie?
Mr. Ramaswamy also promises to abolish any agency he feels like, without waiting for Congress naturally, and also plans to fire every career government employee who reaches 8 years. Because who needs experienced people writing regulations that carry the force of law?
Mr. Ramaswamy has already figured out the cause of the 9/11/01 attacks. It was FBI agents and a false flag operation. This is a very mainstream view and not utterly remarkable at all.
Mr. Ramaswamy, perhaps rapping like Eminem as he has been known to do on stage, said that he supports major concessions to Vladimir Putin. Putin is the very democratically elected President for Life of a famously well adjusted country, you know?
Mr. Ramaswamy supports the Independence of Taiwan. Well, sarcasm aside, so do I.
Unfortunately, Mr. Ramaswamy believes that throwing guns at everyone in Taiwan will keep the Red Chinese out, and then we can abandon our promise to protect them from Communist aggression. Mr. Ramaswamy says we should abandon Taiwan after America is “semiconductor independent” in “2028”.
America only supports freedom in exchange for oil and semiconductors, and a lot of them.
I doubt anyone ran it by Ramaswamy that the reason we don’t have semiconductor capabilities is because treacherous neoliberal politicians, including Bubba Bill Clinton, signed NAFTA and got the ball rolling. (And then put cigars in Monica Lewinksy’s vagina.)
Immediately after, 11,000 people in Indiana lost their jobs making TV sets and obviously it didn’t stop there, and now the US is a broken drug-addicted, poverty-stricken Red Chinese debt colony.
America has a severe problem with college-educated adults who have no useful skills and mop the floor while acting like they own the company they mop the floor at and are better than people who didn’t take on student loans. This comes from most colleges operating as de facto diploma mills whose sole purpose is to load adult teenagers who don’t understand what they signed with debt.
So there are problems with the entire semiconductor thing too.
Moving on, Mr. Ramaswamy says he’s not a climate denier, then denies climate change.
While there is room for debate on how bad this problem actually is or what priority it should be, there should not be a debate on whether or not it’s happening, with yourself, with one sentence following another. This shows that Mr. Ramaswamy can’t help but to directly contradict himself in the same breath.
But who needs politicians that can remember what they said in the same sentence?
Mr. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would be in the running for Vice President, according to Mr. Ramaswamy, so wait, there’s more. You and your children can be massively exposed to vaccine-preventable childhood illness!
“Whats’s an iron lung between friends?”, I say.
So as you can see, Mr. Ramaswamy is clearly their best candidate in all of American history and I hope you enjoy four years of this by the time anyone takes him seriously.
Absolutely none of the serious issues America face can be fixed by one man, and people should be skeptical and scared-as-hell by a person running for president who claims they can fix things in a short time span without any actual collective effort.
Mr. Ramaswamy is nothing more than the latest politician who plays to the lowest IQ members of our public trawling for votes.
Our black and white “tuxedo” cat is sick with hyperthyroidism and a tumor. The vet figures the tumor is probably benign, but we’re not going to wait and find out. We’re going to have it surgically removed.
She also did the labs and found hyperthyroidism starting to develop.
She informed me that my cat was probably older than I guessed (~9 or ~10) and that most cats don’t develop this until they’re around 12.
She said that for the hyperthyroidism we can do pills, which are cheap, or surgery to remove a different growth (which is almost exclusively benign), which is expensive. Like $3,000, which is a LOT of pills. More than the cat will ever need.
Fortunately, I bought a handy dandy secret weapon. A pill giver you load and then push into the cat’s mouth and pop the pill in with a plunger so you’re not getting bitten twice a day trying to keep the cat alive.
Twice a day, come pill time, it’s like the opening of Ghostbusters. “GRAB HER!”
Things are going in a bad direction economically due to the “Economic Miracle of Biden”, as told by “KrugmanBot3000” (with a Volvo) in the NY Times.
I too am sick, of being told of this “Miracle” that is unfolding, as people lose jobs, get their hours cut, and have to wonder how long they can even afford to take care of their pet cat or fill up the tank of their car.
It makes me depressed to read it even though I know it’s propaganda that would make Goebbels or Stalin blush.
The other day, they went so far as to blame people with low interest fixed-rate mortgages for still being able to spend a lot of money while the Fed bangs the poor into bankruptcy due to the wealthy panicking about inflation. This situation with the American media has never been worse.
What level of Freedom and Capitalism are we in where the media gleefully shouts “HAHAHAHAHA!!! It’s all working as planned. The Central Bank is killing American families with rigged interest rates. They can’t afford to buy a can of beans and they are losing their jobs! This will bring inflation to a very manageable 3% eventually!”
A troll in IRC told me he believed copyright should be abolished.
(If it was to be, then Microsoft can commit more code theft using Plagiarism as a Service, AKA CoPilot.)
Then another sockpuppet in IRC shamed me for reading the Times via Links or the Newswaffle.
I mentioned that their paywall is pretty much just there so that people on a Mac with Safari, or on an iPhone, can’t do anything about it. It was never going to stop smart people who can just drop to the terminal and type “links nytimes.com”.
The WEI “attestation” of Chrome is there to stop people from doing this. There will be two or three Web browsers that are “trusted”, and they will be “trusted” to prevent the user from doing anything at all to alter the display of “content”, on the client-side.
So in layman’s terms, no more “KrugmanBot3000” and “Miracles” because the browser has to attest that you have not done anything clever.
The only benefit is that these sites tend to be so bogus that nobody should pay for them anyway which is why they’re really dying.
Let me be frank, that considering that these places only ever post propaganda that benefits the wealthy elite and the American government’s gaslighting, you’d think taxpayers would be on the hook to directly subsidize all of them and not just NPR.
They could have packed it into the “Inflation Production Act” or something.
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