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Joined 4 days ago
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Cake day: August 25th, 2025

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  • You should write to your reps that banking apps be mandated to support multiple operating systems outside the duopoly.

    Yeah… Good luck with that. This is beyond naive.

    Your rep doesn’t give a shit about monopolies or duopolies (if they did, Google and Apple would have had their collective ass Sherman’ed into a million itty bitty pieces a long time ago) and they don’t care about your privacy and how you feel about it.

    All your rep cares about - if you’re lucky - is more mainstream topics like taxes, employment, housing, education etc. And more likely, all they care about is lining their pockets and winning the next election to line their pockets some more.







  • But I thought Trump could declassify things just by thinking about it? His words, not mine.

    That’s where you’ve been had. Trump doesn’t think. He says any old shit that goes through his deranged mind at any given moment, even if it makes no sense or contradicts what he said 5 minutes earlier.

    Coherent thinking is done for him by other people - namely the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation. Those particular sonsaremoved never wanted a pedo president, nor do they want anything declassified. But Trump is the best fascist racehorse they could find in 50 years, so they put up with his shenanigans.


  • And that’s news?

    I’m old enough to remember spotting Michael Jackson’s first album in an obscure record store in SF and wondering if this guy was any good, and I’ve always knows rich people pay less taxes than working stiffs. In fact, I’m almost certain that’s where the idiom to get stiffed comes from.

    I also don’t remember a time when I haven’t thought the next time I come across a rich prick, if he’s enough of a prick, I might just slit his throat for the sheer satisfaction of doing it.



  • If you went through school without learning anything, it means you’re a normal person.

    Don’t worry too much. What you need from your school is a degree, not an education. You do your own education. The degree doesn’t mean you know anything: it only tells your employer you were patient and dogged enough to sit through boring classes and terrible teachers all the way through.

    That’s the real value for your future boss: they like someone who can withstand and survive the idiocy of the workplace. You getting your degree is reasonable proof that you won’t be a snowflake and leave them hanging when the going gets a little tough.

    But make no mistake: you know nothing out of school. Nobody does. All employers know that. The best you can hope to get out of school is the ability to learn all the rest quickly after you’re hired.


  • The way Google is actively on the war path against deGoogled ROMs and sideloading lately, I expect to have to install some sort of mobile Linux OS on my Fairphone at some point to do my regular smartphoning while preserving my privacy, while having to buy an ultra-cheap, small smartphone on the side with vanilla Google spyware just for my banking apps. In other words, carry two cellphones for nothing. Because Google.

    I guess now that fascism rules the land, Google isn’t worried about being getting broken up for being a monopoly anymore. That emboldens then to finally do what they’ve always wanted to do: lock down the Android ecosystem.

    Fuck Google.





  • I assure you that I had no special skills when I moved out of the US the first time 🙂 I was a decent but otherwise run-of-the-mill junior software engineer. The only “special” skill I had was being rather good at coding tight assembly - something that was in demand when embedded systems didn’t have gigabytes of disk and RAM and processors that would rival a Cray-I just to flush a toilet or something.

    I picked up skills that are quite valuable along the way (I am certified aero QA engineer on the white collar side, and I have a degree in a rather obscure but highly-specialized metalworking sub-field that I shan’t mention because there are so few people working that field on the blue collar side). So it helped to find new jobs for sure.

    But the relocating and moving countries was just me wanting to see the world before I was old by living where other people lived for real instead of being a crass tourist for a week, and it didn’t have much to do with my professional qualifications.


  • Lincicome lists a number of problems with this transaction, including (but not limited to!):

    • Intel making decisions for political rather than commercial considerations
    • Intel’s board prioritizing government interests over their fiduciary duties
    • Other companies being pressured to purchase Intel products, weakening their long-term position.
    • Disadvantaging the competitive position of other companies
    • Incentivizing the misallocation of private capital

    Here’s my biggest problem with the US stake in Intel, that’s not in the list: whenever Intel turns a profit, 10% of it directly finances the fascist Trump regime.

    People who want to fight fascism in the US absolutely need to boycott Intel from now on. That mean no Intel processors, but also no daughterboards or laptops with integrated Intel chipsets, or anything Intel-branded.