I’ve spent a career in places with very little rule of law or effective governance.

The only thing that can give you a sliver of hope is to physically be close to a community that is tight-knit and competent homesteaders. This is African village rules. Force and money are all that matters. Life is cheap. Food is scarce and untrustworthy unless you farm it yourself. Cities are nightmares of abuse with pockets for the super-wealthy behind walls.

Real life examples like Lagos are hard to explain to Americans. Parable of the Sower gets close and is a book worth a read.

Sept 17 and 19, 2024.

There’s a great Behind the Bastards episode about Curtis Yarvin that really fills this all out.

The Broligarchy is real and Vance is the gateway to the fallback. Elon is just a willing idiot to be the tip of their spear first.

If you read the bill, heavily sponsored by the MPA, part of it is about forcing ISPs (and presumably US based VPNs) to block the DNS/URLs of “foreign criminal” sites.

It’s laying the groundwork for a Great American Firewall.

I don’t use the internet with less than a hazmat suit.

You’re right, I should take a Uboat.

I had a chortle, and then checked the prices for flights to Argentina.

Noting really one you get on the groove, but this was also before smartphones existed.

All you need is something reliable that sends and receives data.

Game of Thrones/ASOIF used ravens.

You could use specially trained rats in underground tunnels.

Relays of lights or fires in hill tops is always an option, as is smoke signals.

Lasers or spotlights projected on clouds could work. Or the dark of the moon. If everyone just agreed to a patch of lunar dust and projected binary flashes there, encrypted to respond to others, a crazy flashing dot covered moon would be the equivalent or a public internet.

Or same concept with blimps.

If you poke around on sites like Nightcafe or AI image subreddits, there’s a lot of generic oil paintings, a lot of 1 or 2 subject matte paintings, and stuff that looks like the covers of bad fantasy novels.

Did a 3 day fast once.

It was actually amazing. The last 8 hours were where it got rough, but from hours 12 to 66, I basically wasn’t even hungry because my body entered ketosis. Did full keto for a month afterwards because I was already there. Dropped 15lbs and felt like a golden god for months afterwards. I’ve done some 36-48 hour fasts since then, but even 48 hours isn’t the same thing.

2 years. Lived in a village of about 400 people in West Africa.

It really is terrible. I’ve tried a dozen times to get it to do anything that the free version of GPT can do…fails every time on the few things it even tries.

Tuta is fine, but very basic.

The stuff with Proton… It depends on what you need. Just an alternative to degoogle your life, it’ll work for now, but they may slide into a more pro Broligarchy stance in years to come. For some people, they’re still a little too invasive for what they want.

Email is inherently insecure, so its best to lock down a few and just fluidly transition around as you need.

Heritage wrote them. They’re even writing the new OPM memos, they don’t even bother taking the author names out of the metadata.

I actually really like Ian as well.

His name is Lemmy…Lemmy? Do we say Lemmy like last name and first name? Or just once, like Madonna?

I don’t disagree with you. There are trade offs is the thing. I’m not getting a digital ID until I’m forced, but many people are fine with it.

The other commenter from Ukraine explained it well, and to add, the Diia app they use is open source. Other countries can use it if they pay a one time “licensing fee” that is basically a donation with the from line “we’re not shitbags.”

According to people super into digital IDs: In terms of trade offs, especially for Americans, interoperability means unifying state and Federal systems so that you can renew your driver’s license, register a car you just bought, file your taxes, and renew your passport online in the same portal. You would rarely set foot in a government office ever again. Your ID hash can be used online and IRL to validate only a part of you identification, like age, so a bouncer at a club can’t take a photo of a young woman’s ID and stalk her later. So there are some added privacy benefits…in theory.

Obviously, there are the same downsides to any consolidation of digital anything. A stolen phone, even a dead battery, means you have no identity anymore. Data leaks are inevitable. This likely opens the door for far less privacy online when LinkedIn or Reddit starts asking for an age or name check. But plenty of people are oblivious to that anyway. Andb the same argument was probably made in the 1950s and 1960s about paper ID cards. So once there’s utility and pressire applied to having a digital ID, adoption will follow.

Mmm, I’ll decide that myself much later. I’m going to be a crypto bro, Elon sent me a message on Facebook saying he was going to help me invest my money.

Hmm…maybe. Can I make money with auto-generated clickbait headlines?