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 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.

IBM Took a Man’s Voice, Pitting Him Against His Own Work, While Companies Profit from Low-Effort Garbage Generated by Bots and “Self-Service”.

IBM Took a Man’s Voice, Pitting Him Against His Own Work, While Companies Profit from Low-Effort Garbage Generated by Bots and “Self-Service”.

The New York Times finally posted something [paywall] worth stopping and considering.

In 2003, a man named Greg Marston did some voice work for IBM.

He signed a contract “figuring they would be on the up and up”, and then 20 years later, they took his voice and used it to make “Connor”, a digital clone of his voice, as a product that they could sell, without paying Mr. Marston anything.

He came across “Connor” when he was watching Wimbledon (brought to you by IBM), and heard himself as the announcer. He was not amused.

He and his attorney are said to be “in contact” with IBM, and he says he knows that he has lost work due to this “digital clone” of his voice which was made without his consent.

The question to ponder here, is whether the practice should be legal at all.

If we assume that all a company like IBM has to do is arrange for ongoing royalties, then eventually they won’t need any voice actors.

Without any need for new voice actors, a job disappears. Eventually, the ones that agreed to the contracts will die and the royalties will go to their heirs, which never did any work at all.

Another part of the article that I enjoyed, is that apparently, now there is a Web site (or maybe an app?) called Boomy which lets people crank out a bunch of low effort music, perhaps too nice of a word, let’s say “content”. They like “content”.

They’re always looking to fill up “streaming” with “content” now, and it doesn’t matter if it’s any good or not. If it costs basically nothing to make and you can get some people to stream it, hey, it’s a big world and you’ll make some money.

Of course, this leads people to copy and paste this crap into Spotify, which I’ve read tries to prune some out, but only if they prove that other bots are “listening” to it (streaming it for just barely long enough to get “royalties”.

So, the “Dead Internet Theory” is continuing to prove itself.

You have a bunch of “Chaff Bots” making garbage for other bots to “stream” over and over again until Spotify realizes what’s happening and boots the “content” off, but there’s so many ways to game this system, right?

It’s basically just a high bandwidth version of, “have curl grab your Epinions articles on a loop as the pennies pile up”.

Spotify is very much a DotCom Era 2.0 product. How much Internet bandwidth is this using?

The music “industry” has hit rock bottom. There is literally no effort anymore. I actually listened to one of these “AI” tracks called “Heart on my Sleeve”, I think, last night, and it was so bad that I turned it off.

I mean, it wasn’t discernible from other “mumble rap assclowns” I guess, so they’ll lose their jobs first. You’ve gotta start somewhere.

The vegetables who create this “content” will lose their jobs and the vegetables who listen to it will keep clicking, along with the bots.

I’m glad that there was a lot of good music for hundreds of years before it stopped, all at once.

My spouse wonders why I listen to, almost exclusively, music from the 1950s through about 2000, and I guess he just doesn’t get the whole “golden era” thing. You know?

Everything had a “golden era”, and for animation, in the US, that was like when my grandparents were alive and in their 20s or 30s, and again in the 90s.

Movies? Used to go twice a week. Now we go twice a year.

They had to haul Hayao Miyazaki out of retirement to make one more to have something fit to go to the movie theater over.

Nobody will easily replace Hayao Miyazaki, or at least not a robot designed to run a “content farm”, which is what Netflix and Spotify have been for a while, but even those get worse.

As long as people keep “subscribing”, nobody at the company cares if the “content” is good. A while back, Netflix laid waste to their animators and said that there will be “robots” for this now too. It’s a very “corporate” product.

They have “algorithms” to read the audience and what they respond to, then they go back and have robots to draft scrips to show the audience things they liked before, over and over, and then yet more robots to animate it.

I am pretty sure that Japan will not go this route with its animation industry for a long time, if ever.

The movie theaters are dying.

Marcus Cinemas has switched to anime and sporting events because they can’t draw in ticket sales with Hollywood crap anymore. The writers may be on strike. Who cares?

Anime and sporting events are how you get people in who don’t want to see all this junk from Hollywood. Nobody wants to see that. The theaters know it. They built all these multi-plex cinemas they can’t fill (look at that graph) and now they need to find people who have money in their pockets.

The reason anime is taking over the theaters in the US is because the United States is a culture that is in terminal decline and cannot compete on quality.

The society in the United States accepts, all sorts of garbage. Not just culturally, but it’s depraved in almost every sense of the word. Criminality is tolerated. People openly flaunting their corruption. The country is finished. Tent cities? The politicians made everyone so selfish and jaded and high on themselves that nobody cares until it’s them.

Anyway, the movie theaters don’t even charge for tickets for the sports. Sports fans are the other demographic with money to spend. You go in there and they hope you buy twenty dollar popcorn, ten dollar Pepsi, and seven dollar hotdogs.

Worth a shot, for the theater owner. There are people who don’t want to burn to death in the sun watching a game. Have you ever tried to go see the Cubs at Wrigley Field? I’ve lived close enough for years and it’s absolute madness trying to get in there, and out.

That’s if you can get tickets. They have robots that buy all the tickets at the list price, naturally, and then they can sell them much much higher.

Nice big movie theater screen. Just pay for expensive snacks, which you’re going to do at the stadium.

Some say that a culture in decline excessively values entertainment.

Entertainment is always valued. When a culture is in decline, it will accept lower and lower standards of entertainment because the entertainment is a reflection of the culture.

I suppose the tl;dr version of this article is a depressing “shower thought”.

There’s never been more people in the world than there are now, and there’s never been less creativity in it.

We’re finally at the “Give up on life.” chapter of the species.

There’s really not a lot left to do on the Web.

The companies have turned it into a sky high garbage dump with bots, walled gardens, and DRM.

Every year, the legal landscape in the US gets worse as well, and then we export it through trade deals. They think that threatening everyone who is utterly broke will make them suddenly want this garbage they’re producing.

I refuse to participate in this race to the bottom with garbage written by robots, designed to be “consumed” by idiots.

I have the privilege of knowing what’s going on, and if we don’t ever get good original works out of the American entertainment industry again, well, it was nice while it lasted, but there will always be voice acting to dub over foreign stuff, or at least subtitles.

Ironically, the resistance to the “bot garbage” is coming from the US copyright and patent offices, which are normally the enemies of Freedom.

Which normally issue all sorts of bogus horseshit that people in the Free Software world are threatened by simply due to being less moneyed than the people who get the patents and copyrights.

Even the purveyors of this bot-generated smut and garbage are hitting a wall with the authorities because the law pretty clearly states that only a human being can “create” a work.

So, we can expect the purveyors of garbage to use the money they are obtaining by the imbeciles consuming crap to lobby to extend the laws to apply to low effort “content” generated by bots.

Whether they succeed or not is, at this point, unknowable, however it would be the worst thing to happen since the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

One reason the music labels and Apple stopped “selling” music files that were yours to keep and pushed Apple Music is that eventually everyone who wants a copy of music, from when it was good, has one, and this market ultimately becomes self-limiting.

If you pay Apple $13 a month plus tax to keep listening to 70s/80s bands (80 cents per CD when bought 7 at a time at the thrift store), then you never own it, and the market is not self-limiting.

Meanwhile, your kids can listen to trash generated by robots.

If the United States public schools were interested in giving children educations befitting a human being instead of a head full of mush, we may never have reached this point. Every time we let rich billionaires “reform” the schools, the next generation comes out worse.

McDonalds doesn’t want to pay people to take orders.

So they have a “robot” to take your order now. A kiosk, which runs Windows, apparently.

This one has been broken for a few visits now. Apparently, Windows can’t handle “showing pictures of hamburgers for people to tap on”. Big surprise.

McDonalds punishes people who go to a register. You can’t use a coupon. You need the app or the kiosk for that. If you go to a human, they punish you with a 20% surcharge.

They portray this differently. They turn it around on you. If you use the app or the kiosk you get a 20% off coupon or occasionally a “free hamburger”.

It actually works out to what the price used to be before they fired people and forced you to do the unpaid work of navigating through an app or a kiosk to do the unpaid menial job of telling someone what you would like to eat and paying, and then sitting down.

Other companies, like Walmart, did these a long time ago. The customer gets no discount and has to do physical labor that a cashier used to be paid for.

The company is now finding out that shoplifting has gone through the roof due to self-checkout fraud. Some of it isn’t fraud, some is that the user didn’t scan something right and could be arrested anyway on the way out the door.

Richard Stallman has an easy solution to the “self-checkout” problem. He said when he goes to the grocery store he walks past them and mentions that people are doing free labor and taking a paying job away from someone.

The McDonalds/Walmart GULAG. One more way people are getting screwed with robots.

There are so many examples of how companies are using this stuff to offload work onto others and not paying them, that the only real value of all of this technology is stolen labor and unjust profits. We should reject the bots. Especially in the case of the supermarkets.

When I go to Jewel-Osco and check out, I have my digital coupons loaded and they work at a cashier register when I enter my “loyalty” number. I’m not wild about this. You used to just go in and get the sale price.

But it’s better than going to “self-check” and busting your ass bagging $300 worth of food while the thing goes “bonk bonk bonk please wait for assistance unexpected item in bagging area bonk bonk bonk”, and of course everyone else got that too so wait in line for your chance to pay after the other dozen people who got jammed up just trying to remove full bags when they ran out of room on the scale.

How long does it take me to bag and pay for these groceries?

Even at minimum wage, I would have made about $2-3.

If everyone in town uses them, this replaces at least two dozen full time jobs per store.

Instead, we have homeless, jobless, people living in tents.

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.

COVID and Vaccine Jingoism. The Politics of a Plague.

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.

The Observations of Leaving the House Contradict Paul Krugman’s “Robust America”.

The Observations of Leaving the House Contradict Paul Krugman’s “Robust America”.

Yesterday when driving my spouse to a medical appointment in the south suburbs…

I noticed that there are miles of abandoned offices, and businesses that closed years ago and have not been replaced by anything else.

For a 50 mile stretch in the Chicagoland area, things are dead. The city proper apparently even has several empty Sears Tower-equivalents of empty office space.

The other day, Grindr (the gay sex app) made the news for a “not layoff layoff” whereby half the company (over 80 employees) resigned en masse over a “return to the office deadline”.

Some of them said that they wondered how, without their presence in the office, an app where people have been kidnapped and stabbed to death by a stalker, which the app told their location to, will “remain safe”. Yes, I wonder.

Roy Schestowitz commented that this is getting fairly common.

The managers impose deadlines and anyone who doesn’t come back is not technically a layoff and doesn’t qualify for any benefits.

We spoke of Walmart cutting people’s hours and how pressuring them to quit “also isn’t a layoff”.

I told him, Walmart absolutely lays people off and gives them severance, but only when they’re closing the entire store down with three days warning and they stick up a sign that says ‘Dear Shoplifters and Arsonists, valued Chicago customers, the store will close on Friday. Employees who can’t commute three hours to the nearest store will get a little bit of WARN Act Money. It’s been real, and it’s been fun, but it ain’t been real fun. C’ya!’.

(Not what the actual sign says, but it’s the thought that counts.)

Then we discussed the movies. I said, they wheeled Hiyao Miyazaki out (for those who don’t know, he’s been called the Japanese Walt Disney, because everything he touches sells like hotcakes) to make one last movie and the local theater has been hitting my email inbox hard with it because they know if people like me and my spouse go out to see a movie twice this year, one of them will be that one.

It’s just getting harder to justify movies.

It’s not only that barely any of them are worth watching at all, it’s that money is suddenly so tight for many Americans that something that costs $12 for two people on Tuesday isn’t even justifiable on a weekly basis anymore. You look at what’s out and 4-6 months goes by before you even consider watching the movie.

The local Marcus Cinema theater used to do $5 movie tickets on Tuesday, now it’s $6 and you have to use an app, and no Holidays, and some movies (the good ones) are special and are never $6.

So the “$6 Tuesday with an app that has dozens of spyware libraries in it” is a way to make theaters showing bad movies “not empty” so that they might sell a bucket of popcorn.

What I see unfolding in America right now is like the Second Great Depression, but even during the Depression the federal government admitted to everyone what was happening and enacted programs to help them muddle through.

Today, they cut programs. They tell disabled people in their late 50s “Go find work, bum!”, and with the cost of everything spiking, those lucky enough to have any work find themselves with almost all their money going out to rent and food and gasoline.

This last couple of months my electric bill was running 10% higher than it normally does this part of the year. I looked on my bill this month to find that the Democrats added $10 a month to my bill to save us from “the carbon”. Oh no, not carbon!

My extra $10 a month on the electric bill will certainly make the smog in India and China that’s as thick as pea soup better, and save the planet, the trees, the bees, the whales and snails, and the endangered horny toads.

His Excellency J.B. Pritzker, Lord above us in the high castle, is a very Progressive man.

He made $5 billion the old fashioned way, by inheriting a hotel fortune.

He strongly and earnestly believes in redistributing the wealth to people who don’t do anything except make babies.

Not his own wealth, but if I have an extra five bucks in my pocket that week, not for long if Morbidly Obese 400 pound “Health Expert” Lord Farquad (Seven COVID Shots and Counting) has anything to say about it.

This country is basically dying. What’s going on is the Democrats benefit from people who are too illiterate to understand the issues finding their way into a voting booth, so they enact policies where people who litter the place with unemployable children who will shoot at each other, deal drugs, and scare the taxpayers out of the State don’t have to use any of their own money to reproduce.

They then reduce school by getting rid of the arts and literature, and replacing an increasing amount of actual education with propaganda.

Then they make college so expensive that most people can only dream of going there, even though you’ll also be poor if you don’t.

They’re also the Party of Lockdown Fetishists who basically have wet dreams of killing more businesses, which still employ a few people, with taxes and another winter of discontent, because once all the businesses and taxpayers are gone, you can run a corrupt welfare State on nothing but loans from the Central Bank why not?

It’ll be paradise. Just wait and see!

The Democrat answer to the criminals shooting up the place is to make it difficult for law abiding citizens to arm themselves and shoot back.

The police around these parts are so dumb and corrupt, that the other day, a black man was shot in the head, and the cops ignored the bullet hole in his window, and the bullet in his head, dumped him on the funeral home, and wrote down in the police report that he fell and hit his head and died accidentally.

Yes, they will protect us all from the bad criminal people! You do not need a FOID card, dear friends!

Anyway, there’s hardly even a reason to leave the house anymore.

They’ve ruined just about everything you could possibly want to see. I mean, some people still walk around in the forest preserves because the Democrats only took the trees in open air parks away from people during “COVID Lockdowns” which they want to bring back this winter. But trees are still there. They don’t employ very many people, but the trees are still there.

At least the ones that didn’t get knocked over to make the suburbs, which are now rotting malls and empty offices.

It should be very interesting to see how long anyone keeps reading the KrugmanBot3000 in the New York Times and doesn’t wake up and see with their own eyes what is actually going on in America.

The United States’ Internet Faces Growing Resemblance to China’s Great Firewall as the Crooked New York Times Acts as the Party’s Mouthpiece.

The United States’ Internet Faces Growing Resemblance to China’s Great Firewall as the Crooked New York Times Acts as the Party’s Mouthpiece.

When Edward Snowden revealed that the United States government basically spies on everyone and logs their Internet activity in case they ever become interesting, it should have been a Five Alarm Fire wake-up call to Americans everywhere to do more to safeguard their privacy.

You could read anyone’s email in the world, anybody you’ve got an email address for. Any website: You can watch traffic to and from it. Any computer that an individual sits at: You can watch it. Any laptop that you’re tracking: you can follow it as it moves from place to place throughout the world. It’s a one-stop-shop for access to the NSA’s information. … You can tag individuals … Let’s say you work at a major German corporation and I want access to that network, I can track your username on a website on a forum somewhere, I can track your real name, I can track associations with your friends and I can build what’s called a fingerprint, which is network activity unique to you, which means anywhere you go in the world, anywhere you try to sort of hide your online presence, your identity.

-Edward Snowden answers “What could you do if you would use XKeyscore?”

However, even as these shocking revelations became public information, the response was just like the RIAA v. The Internet era, where copyright lawyers working for filthy rich executives and multi-millionaires like Metallica, sued poverty-stricken single mothers over some MP3 files they found on KaZaa, and extracted millions of theoretical dollars, (due to driving someone who was already too poor to pay the damages into bankruptcy).

Americans hit the Snooze button yet again. “Remind me Later.” What did they do to increase their privacy? Nothing.

Now, the corrupt New York Times is backing Apple and Arkansas in their War on the Internet.

Apple is trying to use threats of being booted out of the App Store against Reddit, to force them to clean up the porn.

Even though Reddit’s porn content is not enough to make them covered by the Arkansas “card people to use this site” law (it has to be like 51% or something), Apple’s threats of booting them from the App Store carry serious weight behind them, as useds of the iPhone have no Freedom to simply go around Apple and install Reddit themselves, like Android users can with things that are not allowed in the Play Store, or when we want Free and Open Source Software from F-Droid.

Reddit’s business is advertising, so they will balance the threat of being booted from the App Store (where they can spy on people’s iPhones and gather tons of useful information about them for selling ads) with how many ads they can plaster everywhere around the pornography, and try to figure out which is the least damaging route for Reddit.

If they cave, which they are starting to, and delete the porn or make it difficult to casually access, then they’ll go the way of Tumblr, which gave into Apple’s threats and deleted the porn, and that’s the last anyone ever heard of Tumblr.

On top of Apple, which has this sick, almost clinical, fascination and disgust about porn on the Internet, the “Republicans of Gilead” in States like Arkansas have implemented laws that make porn sites (defined by arbitrary amounts of content) demand to see government ID to get in.

Only a few sites are even complying with the Arkansas law, but one of the ones that is, is PornHub, which detects if you have an Arkansas-based IP address and blocks you if you do.

Laws like this are stupid easy to bypass. If the person gets a VPN and uses a VPN server that’s not in Arkansas, they can see the site again.

If they don’t have $4-5 a month in their pocket for a VPN, they can just install the Brave Web browser, and open a Private Window with Tor, and load the site in the Tor Window.

Or even use the Tor Browser itself.

These laws are comically ineffective, because Tor is doing what it was designed to do.

“Route the victim of an oppressive regime around the censorship.”

Once these people “go dark”, the government will actually have a harder time monitoring them at all, and so will the sites that are tracking them all over the Web.

So the government doesn’t “clean up the Web”.

It just makes it so everyone who wants to do another legal thing on the Internet, without forking over their ID, goes encrypted and routes their traffic through something else.

The people using Tor and VPNs to get around the Arkansas law aren’t committing any crime.

The law doesn’t claim to make it a crime for the user to bypass the ID check. It just lays out penalties for sites that should know that a person is in Arkansas, who don’t check for IDs.

There’s really no strong incentive for the site to figure out if a Tor or VPN user is in Arkansas. The only thing they could do is ask the user.

For my part, I usually browse the Web through a VPN server in Sweden, Switzerland, or the Netherlands, where there are laws regarding privacy. It’s horrible, sometimes, trying to access American Web sites, because there’s no privacy laws to protect Americans, so they just shut out anyone with an EU IP address and say they don’t comply with the GDPR.

It also causes a lot of cookie screens, that I have my browsers configured to swat back down with the ad blockers, so that I can never consent. And then, just in case, my browsers toss the cookies and local site data, with limited exceptions for half a dozen sites or so, on exit.

Google kind of messes with you if you do that, but I don’t use Google search.

I use Searx Belgium, and here’s why.

Google does a lot of annoying things to lean on VPN and Tor users to “log in” and identify themselves for searches. (Never log in to a search engine.) Then they’ll know it was you and record it, even if they can’t currently see your real IP address.

With Searx Belgium I can go to the Settings and persistently prefer United States -English results.

The United States Internet is basically becoming unusable.

I don’t own any Apple devices. I certainly never consented that Apple could decide what I can see on my browser on my computer, because I’ve never agreed to any Apple licenses for any Apple software.

(Except for that one time I agreed not to make any atomic bombs with Safari on Windows, a long time ago. Seriously, this was in the license file.)

However, their corrupting influence is affecting what sites feel free to host.

Not that any of this is in defense of Reddit. They’re bad too. They have every reason to pressure people to sign in so they can track them. They’re an ad company.

If you sign into Reddit, you should put Reddit in a container where it can’t see your Web activity outside of this, or use Private Mode with Tor in Brave or browse over a VPN, give them a fake email you don’t use for anything else.

That way they don’t know who they watch.

For now, you can get around the “log in or get the app” nonsense with Old Reddit Redirect, but who knows how much longer they’ll let users opt out of the New Reddit mess.

Increasingly, the way to deal with the US Internet is “Don’t browse without a VPN or Tor.”

Bill Gates has lobbied for the end of encryption and privacy for everyone except rich criminals.

They’re finding it hard to control and monitor people when they disappear from the radar.

The government doesn’t belong in people’s homes. Especially not to decide what (otherwise legal) things they are doing or watching.

If parents really have a problem with things on the Internet, they need to step up, be a parent, and take control of the devices in their own home.

But increasingly, this issue is just a distraction to legitimize government spying, like the programs that Snowden revealed.

This is because they know nobody will dare say anything about it if they say it’s to protect kids.

Protect kids? Which kids and what are the government protecting, and from what?

In Illinois, where I live, kids tend to be habitual offenders by the time they’re 14 or 15.

There’s no career prospects in the State and only 70% of the kids where I live can even graduate high school. It’s almost like something out of Somalia.

In the news, every day, they’re shooting people, dealing dope, stealing cars, and mugging people.

Gangs in Chicago use kids as soon as they’re old enough to hold a gun and reach the gas pedal in the car they stole from you.

Maybe the government should focus on this.

I strongly believe they should bring back the electric chair, find the adults who are putting kids up to this crap, and have the adults ride the lightning for it. You turned the kids into monsters, you pay the price.

But no, the government isn’t worried about this or they would do something about it.

Instead, they have crooked Apple, “Conde Nasty” (Reddit), the corrupt New York Times egging on a moral panic about pornography.

When I was a teenager, I saw porn on the Internet. I think everyone I know did. We’re in charge of the world now. I mean, my parents’ generation is thinning out and can’t be blamed for everything.

We should never allow the government to become so tyrannical that they start mandating laws against privacy, encryption, and what software we are allowed to run, and I believe it’s sick that we’re allowing them to use children as props while they’re not cleaning up the mess in Chicago.

What the Crooked New York Times proposes is far worse than what we have now.

The article suggests not one, but two Supreme Court decisions (Reno v. A.C.L.U and Ashcroft v. American Civil Liberties Union) should be reversed, and that instead of the essentially open access to the Web we have today, we would have something even more restrictive than the Arkansas law imposed on every American.

Under this proposal, any person who wants to access legal material would be forced to provide their driver’s license or credit card information, essentially allowing porn sites, credit card companies, banks, and advertisers to track exactly who is viewing what content.

In Russia, such information is frequently used for blackmail (they call it “Kompromat”), where they compile a list of a person’s online activities and use it to portray them as a demented pervert, even though a majority of the country views such content every day.

The fact that this idea is being discussed in The New York Times suggests that it’s on the Democrat Party’s agenda, although the Republicans may have arrived at similar proposals earlier.

The proposal by the New York Times is even worse than it sounds in yet another way.

Because part of the Child Online Protection Act that the US Supreme Court took issue with in their Ashcroft verdict, was that the law tried to censor things that could be considered by reasonable and logical people to have serious literary, artistic, or scientific merit.

If Ashcroft were to be reversed fully, then the entire law would go back into effect, having a chilling effect on our First Amendment rights. Far beyond what most normal people would agree is pornographic.

So you can also consider this another attempt by the Radical Left to gather around a bonfire of books.

Perhaps the liberals are hoping for what Darth Vader asserted, “There will be nobody to stop us this time!“

Entire Front Page of New York Times Nonsense About “China Failing” While US Military Recruits Die of Drug Overdoses Following Failed Cover-Up.

Entire Front Page of New York Times Nonsense About “China Failing”.

The entire front page of the New York Times as of August 29, 2023 is about “China failing.” This is called projection.

“She Rose From Poverty as China Prospered. Then It Made Her Poor Again.” -New York Times Headline

The United States was prospering, at one point. Most people living in it today would say they miss how things were 20 years ago.

I’ve been personally wiped out by “recessions”, hyperinflation, and “enemy action” (the government, directly) and I don’t personally feel like I’ll ever truly recover. My country has abandoned me.

“Mr Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: ‘Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action’.”

-Goldfinger (James Bond)

There’s also another one from a Sean Connery movie, which many suspect was an “unofficial James Bond”.

General Hummel (Ed Harris):
“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Thomas Jefferson.

John Mason (Sean Connery):
“Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious,” according to Oscar Wilde.

*Hummel punches Mason*

John Mason:
Thank you for making my point.

-The Rock, 1996

“U.S. Commerce Secretary Meets With China’s Economic Czar Amid Tensions”

-NY Times Headline

America crumbles while it likes to pretend it can tell China what to do. I believe the British found themselves at this point in the 1980s when Margaret Thatcher traveled to China to tell them how they would be “extending the lease” on Hong Kong.

There was a point where the New York Times was a legitimate publication, hard-hitting, journalistic integrity, publishing even leaked US Government classified documents and standing up to authoritarians.

These days? It’s just CNN with a paywall. Also, a KrugmanBot3000. Very reliable for spitting out anti-Chinese propaganda.

I guess the government is still working on Liberty Prime.

All this “China failing, China failing, no trouble in America, no siree Bob!” stuff would go down easier except…

America is failed. Its own military recruits, young ones, die of drugs.

After a failed cover-up attempt by the US government, word got out that the US Naval Station Great Lakes in Illinois has been having soldiers drop dead like flies due to fentanyl and other crap.

“Fentanyl takes lives at the Navy’s boot camp base”, reads the Yahoo! News article, from Navy Times.

Original article.

Archive.org Mirror.

Archive Today Mirror.

As America grapples with a fentanyl crisis, multiple junior sailors have died from the drug aboard the base that houses the Navy’s boot camp in recent years, and investigators have been probing efforts to smuggle drugs onto the installation, including through the U.S. mail system, since at least 2020, according to records obtained by Navy Times.

Two other sailors are facing criminal charges in connection to one of those deaths, records show.

[…]

Those substances include fentanyl, cocaine and the opioids hydrocodone and oxycodone, as well as the hallucinogen LSD, Xanax and THC, the psychoactive component in marijuana.

These incidents and sailor deaths, which the Navy has not publicized and which have not been reported before, raise questions about how young sailors have been able to use and distribute drugs there.

-Navy Times

This is obviously the stuff of the very robust America, not the very obviously “failing” ZOMGCOMMUNIST RED China. 😛

The media narrative of China’s situation is very much exaggerated, and our own dirty laundry is always either not talked about, or squirreled away with their henchmen at the modern New York Times and similar “mainstream” sources.

Look, people say the mass media in the US isn’t credible, because it isn’t. The people running these psyop campaigns made “fake news” a “Trumpism” so they can always have a red herring.

Most people in the US join the military because of lack of social mobility.

It’s that, a job at McDonalds (at least until they can work with IBM to automate the place, albeit IBM is so incompetent they haven’t had much luck so far), or prison.

The Republicans sued to stop Biden’s student loan forgiveness because they ADMIT that the GI Bill is one of the few reasons people go into the military.

When the only way to go to college free is to join a gang of war criminals, and perhaps be ordered to murder people and blow up their home, that’s certainly some country, isn’t it?

Who has China done this to? It wasn’t China that attacked Vietnam. It wasn’t China that invaded Iraq.

The fact that the American military is getting people to join up who are in their teenage years and already so done with everything they’re dabbling in hard drugs and killing themselves shows the state of rot going on.

Past generations had the world by the balls when they were 18.

Now it’s over before it begins thanks to crooks and liars having been in charge of America for so long.

Maybe old Bonehead Joe can have Kamala set up a commission to study this or something.

Mozilla Fully Corrupted and Assault on the Internet Archive While America Crumbles

More on the corruption of Firefox, along with a social commentary regarding the assault on the Internet Archive and American Decline.

16 years ago, Robert Strong “They/Them”, proposed removing the Gopher protocol from Mozilla Firefox.

This is a form of vandalism and the start of giving Google total control of the company.

The Gopher protocol is very simple and contained no known security holes. It was implemented in Gecko with code inherited from Netscape, which was not huge.

The “proposal” was more outrageous than their removal of File Transfer Protocol support, which could have been beaten into better shape by dropping support for old and weird server implementations that nobody used.

It was surprisingly low maintenance as evidenced by how few iterations of the code there needed to be despite the fact that it was over a decade and a half old and ported from another browser at the time it was deleted.

In fact, Mozilla basically ignored community offers to help refactor it to be even smaller.

Interesting that they call something a security hazard when they merge entire systems to run proprietary binaries (WebAssemblies) into Firefox now because that’s what Google told them to do.

WebAssembly code is not well-written and it’s not a well-written specification, and it is impossible to properly secure without turning it off in about:config.

I still use Gopher protocol, many of the times I use it it’s to cut bloat out of Reddit or even Wikipedia and just read the text.

We all know why Google and Mozilla drop things like Gopher and FTP. It’s a power grab. If you can drop something from a Web browser, to many people it simply doesn’t exist.

They have been conditioned to think of the Internet not as a suite of protocols, dozens of which are not the Web, but “whatever some stupid Web site wants to run on my computer” which is normally a very insecure and bloated “Web App”.

I wish I could report that Mozilla and Google’s vandalism of Gecko stopped with Firefox, but I can’t. Rust modules and the deletion of Gopher have even made it into SeaMonkey. ChatZilla still recognizes gopher:// as a link, but when you click it, it says it can’t open them and to try the extension, which is OverBiteFF, which is broken, replaced by a “WebExtension” *barf* which does not work.

Lagrange (a Gemini and Gopher browser) is fantastic.

It is beyond the reach of Mozilla and Google. (Like Belarus and Russia, respectively.)

For a while, you could put Gopher back into Firefox yourself with “OverBiteFF”, but eventually Mozilla threw out powerful XUL extensions and replaced them with trash modeled on Google Chrome’s, and most of the good extensions simply were impossible to replace correctly and have never re-appeared. So now you need a special “browser” for Gopher, and Gemini protocols. Sure there’s a WebExtension, with no helper app for Linux of course, so that’s just swell.

It’s so much easier to read Wikipedia and other Web sites through a proxy to a simpler protocol, where you can get at the text and optionally load images (usually stock images you didn’t want) without all the hassle.

Though I usually use the newer Gemini protocol. There’s a Gemini proxy of Reddit at Gemi.dev along with the weather and a News site proxy.

That way I can keep an eye on the propaganda. It’s amazing that people actually pay to read propaganda.

There are times now, where I have three Web browsers open. SeaMonkey (which I use mainly), NetSurf without images or JavaScript (so I can view text-only in a graphical application), and LibreWolf (a Firefox fork minus the malware and mountain of trash from Mozilla). Three. This is not reasonable. I wish Mozilla would go back to making a good Internet application like they had prior to “Quantum”.

I (only) want to read the New York Times because it’s amazingly corrupt to the point where it’s a never ending source of amusement.

And there’s really no easy way to stop me, even over the Web, because I can always use a browser that simply couldn’t run their paywall code if I wanted to, like Links or Netsurf.

Mozilla not only removed Bypass Paywalls, but they also removed support for turning off JavaScript, even to just certain Web sites in the site permissions menu.

Why? They’ve always taken the side of people who want to tell your computer to work against you, the user. “Take back the Web?” Hardly. JavaScript is almost always there to do something harmful. (WASM too.)

It doesn’t surprise me at all that Google and Mozilla have killed alternatives to the Web as far as their browsers go, and are turning them into an operating system (and a really bad one).

The New York Times is functioning as an arm of the Biden Campaign. Parroting mindlessly, happy happy thoughts about a very sick American economy and running the KrugmanBot3000 for more “Doom Porn” articles about China.

Today, I read a new funny that I simply have to share. They said that “China has made all the easy gains it will get by moving workers from farms into factories.”

The American government moved factory workers to unemployment checks, and then varyingly dying of drugs (while blaming the Chinese, naturally), living in a tent and begging for change, or living with their parents, who might have had some savings or at least a check from Social Security, and who are now nearly dead.

Where is the “news”? Last I could stomach it, they were saying youth unemployment and living with parents was “The Charm of Multi-Generational Housing.”

Other “news” sites aren’t much better. The oligarchs have warred against the Open Internet for years, and won major victories through courts and corruption of Web browser companies.

This is coinciding with the assault on archive.org, which actually has nothing to do with a copyright lawsuit.

The propagandists must first wipe out all traces of any information they’ve said previously which is no longer convenient.

Then they can go ahead and deploy the new revisions and nobody will ever be able to prove it was ever different.

It’s exactly the same as Winston Smith’s job at the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Burning the old documents so The Party could retroactively change what it said.

It happened so often that they needed people incinerating their prior statements, full time.

Biden’s Ministry of Disinformation within the Department of Homeland Security laid it on very thick, too thick even, to pass muster, even in this Brave New World of iPhone zombies who barely know how to read and write, but have college debts, but they accomplish the same thing without official Disinformation Ministers now.

Very quickly, nobody was talking about the Disinformation Ministry, like COVID. Like all of the illegal and unconstitutional things they used COVID as an excuse to do, and it all vanished. The government courts standing there, fecklessly watching and and stalling, and aiding and abetting places like Illinois turning into a dictatorship where rule of law collapsed. It’s like it never happened.

The same people who have made the Illinois Constitution and the American one effectively cease to exist, most recently with their assault on the Right to Bear Arms, are now trying to pass a huge amendment to give the thing that no longer restrains the State government anyway “gender neutral language”. I won’t vote for it. Hopefully there are enough other people who haven’t lost their minds, who wish to preserve the majesty of the document, even though it doesn’t give them any rights anymore.

Back to censorship…Ah yes, when they’re finished with us, they can just delete the articles, neuter Wikipedia (Wikipedia Neutering is something government and PR firms do a lot of.), and plug the “Internet Archive” so that the former revisions and deleted whole articles will no longer ever prove there were such things, or at least such revisions as the initial ones.

The lawsuit against the Internet Archive is better to think of in the terms of billionaire oligarch Peter Thiel’s attack on Gawker using Hulk Hogan’s sex tape as the nominal focus of the lawsuit. The powerful and wealthy wanted to remove an embarrassment, and they did.

But the Internet Archive will obviously be a much greater loss. A tragedy.

The commons is being narrowed out of existence, because the propagandists don’t want a well-informed educated public. You can’t rule them if there are too many.

The Internet Archive’s fair use argument was very strong, and the oligarch-owned American courts smacked them down anyway.

It’s not as-if there was some sort of rampant piracy happening at the Internet Archive, although piracy is certainly less objectionable from a moral standard than Digital Restrictions Malware.

But even using a form of DRM to control how many copies of a digitized work could be used, to remain compliant with copyright law did not satisfy the courts, so far.

Considering how corrupt American courts are, I don’t expect their appeal to get much consideration. Hollywood backs the Democrat Party, and in return they give the major copyright interests whatever they want.

At various times, they’ve gotten close to copyright bills passing that said everything was copyrighted “forever” minus one day.

Their DRM systems have always failed, so their counter to that was the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which makes it a felony to try to evade DRM.

In the America the corporations and the government propagandists built, drugs are plentiful, homelessness abounds, and information is cracked down upon.

Many years ago, most people had VCRs. Video Cassette Recorders.

If you had one that was older than the law requiring it to recognize Macrovision (copy restriction technique for analog tapes), or bought a “Macrovision remover” device, you could just take one movie and copy it to a blank tape.

Blank tapes were cheaper than a movie, so practically everyone I knew growing up had a house full of movies on blank tapes. You went to the rental store, rented a movie overnight, copied it to the other VCR with a blank cassette, made sure the copy worked, and then returned the rented tape.

Did Hollywood go under? No. They made a fortune in the video tape industry. They just always want more. So they arrange to get more, and for software and legal enforcement to that end.

Today, the nasty schemes from Google, Apple, and Microsoft, which include DRM, are meant to enslave people, take their access to information and culture away and dole it out only to people who can pay, and then get them to agree to be a jerk to everyone on the planet by saying “I can’t give you a copy.” as well as themselves, are marketed as “desirable goods”.

This is what Richard Stallman meant when he called Apple a “crystal prison”.

When I get new statistics showing Microsoft laying off, Windows usage eroding, and iPhone shipments down double digits, I feel great. More, please!

Their products are such overbearing tyrants that they even disable taking screenshots while a DVD is playing.

You may not be able to take pictures of windows in some apps, such as DVD Player.

-Apple

The manufacturer of brainwashing devices, the iPhones, don’t deserve success. Apple will continue to be praised in the media regardless of what’s really happening in there, because we know what the “news” is.

The iPhone may be very pretty, and it’s very bad.

At least few people really like their jailers at Microsoft…

The clocks are striking Thirteen in America, and a few large “tech” companies, useful enough to be bailed out as much as necessary with government indebtedness, will control everything you see and hear.

Everything that you see around you now is unreliable and must be questioned.

They have all day, all night, all the time in the world, to keep coming up with more garbage. Your sanity will be broken eventually.

The New York Times Spins Up the KrugmanBot3000 to China-bash.

The New York Times Spins Up the KrugmanBot3000 to China-bash.

The crooked New York Times has made the KrugmanBot3000 write another article.

This time, the alleged Mr. Krugman, if indeed he is a person at all, and not just a Large Language Model for the Inner Party, claims that Chinese debt levels are unsustainable.

While the KrugmanBot3000 has unwaveringly said that the American federal debt that keeps growing and is about $33 trillion dollars right now is “manageable” and even recently blew off the fact that interest rates are rising and the interest on the national debt is going to crowd out more and more of the federal budget.

In fact, this will force deep and unpopular cuts to everything, including Social Security and Medicare, because there is no appetite to raise taxes on the rich.

The Democrats, which the KrugmanBot3000 is a tool of, did not repeal the part of Trump’s tax bill that gave the wealthy elite their bailouts, even though the debt explodes and there is no end in sight to the misery being suffered by the American people.

But in a China-bashing (and paywalled) article, the KrugmanBot3000 claims that Chinese debt is different, somehow.

I’m not confident enough in my understanding of China to judge whether it will manage to contain its Minsky moment, the point at which everyone suddenly realizes that unsustainable debt is, in fact, unsustainable. In fact, I’m not sure if anyone — including Chinese officials — knows the answer to that question.

But I think we can answer a more conditional question: If China does have a 2008-style crisis, will it spill over in a major way to the rest of the world, the United States in particular? And there the answer is pretty clearly no. Big as China’s economy is, America has remarkably little financial or trade exposure to China’s problems.

-Paul Krugman (KrugmanBot3000)

Now, I want you to stop and think how stupid that quote is from top to bottom.

So, American debt, which is horrific, is sustainable. EU and UK debt is horrific, but sustainable, Japanese debt is almost 300% of their annual economic output which is truly awful, but sustainable.

But Chinese debt is unsustainable and will push them over the edge into a massive economic failure? Oh boy. Maybe if they hurry up and be our allies, they too can have “sustainable (horrific) debt”. 😛

Then the alleged Krugman continues, by claiming that America, which is basically pretty much fully dependent on China for, oh Jesus. Have you ever LOOKED at the country of origin on anything at Walmart?

“Very little financial or trade exposure.”

Well, other than making almost everything you buy here, or increasingly what people set fire to the store and steal here because they can no longer afford Dollar Tree, after Bubba Bill Clinton signed NAFTA and put millions of Americans out of work (and put some cigars in Monica Lewinsky) and got “Free Trade” going, and other than owning so much of the US debt that they pretty much could ruin us by just letting it roll off the books and refusing to buy more “Treasury Securities”, sure. Awesome Possum.

I ran into a video the other day, should have saved it, about how the American media has been publishing Doom, Gloom, and Boom articles claiming China will come down like a sack of bricks in short order, for over 50 years.

As the United States has become an old age colony floating around in debt and Fentanyl, the shrieking and insistence that there’s no problem with us, only with the Chinese, has only gotten louder.