Again, fuck that.

“Sorry our trans friends. We would love to stop saying you are going to hell and are inhuman but doing so might mean we do even worse stuff in the future. Hey, don’t forget the alms basket, You… probably shouldn’t be in our churches but you can go to this website and give us money anyway”

You’ll understand if I honestly don’t care if a fundamentally hateful and harmful org broke up.

If “maybe we should stop supporting transphobia and rape and…” will kill an org… that org probably shouldn’t exist at all.

I mean… he spent some of his final hours with jd vance. Doesn’t get more hellish than that.

Friendly reminder: Great for a pope is still a transphobe who actively facilitated the rape of children. Not to mention all the horrific colonizer shit.

Rest in piss Frankie boy.

It isn’t quite that easy.

The US is a MASSIVE part of basically every luxury industry and isn’t insignificant in many others. So while alternate trading partners can be found to handle stuff like lumber, plenty of industries are going to be hit real hard and not have alternative customers. And they aren’t going to just want to lower their profits for national pride.

But yeah. I REALLY hope trump is just actively destroying the US either in the name of putin or just out of anger and spite over not winning in 2020. Because the alternative is that we are all going to suffer so fucking much because that piece of shit doesn’t understand what tariffs are.

… Okay. If you don’t think there is enough evidence and don’t like the explanation already given (the entire stock market is REALLY volatile right now because of the constant threat and enacting and repealing of tariffs) then… sure. I guess you can choose to make up whatever shit you want because it makes you happy?

That is totally not an incredibly problematic mindset and one of the root causes of the hellscape we live in.

You VASTLY overestimate how much anyone cares.

The president is a rapist with multiple high profile affairs and strong ties to epstein’s pedophile island. It took the better part of four years for people to decide that spending time on a twitter that was increasingly just pro-nazi rhetoric, snuff, and porn was a bad idea… and they only did that because a different corporate owned social media site finally switched to open registration.

It doesn’t matter what reddit leadership does or might have done. People will use the site until the Influencers switch to a different one. Simple as that.

I would need to verify the timelines but I am pretty sure this has jack all to do with Luigi Mangione

And… maybe look at the stock market as a whole. Again, grain of salt without a proper analysis, but this doesn’t look much different than the entire stock market that is constantly fluctuating as we wonder what industries will get hit the hardest by the hourly tariffs and which are going to get exemptions and so forth.

It is more than a bit of a fallacy, but the general idea is that any product worth using will distinguish itself. Whereas the products that spend vast amounts of money on advertisement “can’t stand on their own”.

Like I said, it is a fallacy that insists companies should pull themselves up by their bootstraps and ignores the reality of the landscape these days.

THAT said: nordvpn goes REALLY hard on the advertisements and is still one of the more popular/few remaining big sponsors for podcasts and influencers. And THAT gives me pause because it has generally been shown that those are horrible venues for “getting a product out there” and mostly exist to take advantage of parasocial relationships. And, based on the linus media group leaks and corroboration from various twitch streamers, the big outfits are asking for a LOT of money per sponsorship spot.

And considering there is no way to really vet a VPN and you are inherently trusting them to do what they say they do (or do the good version of what they don’t even bother to talk about)…

You assume that the republicans and oligarchs actually care about the US being a thriving economy or even country. They don’t. They are ripping the copper out of the wall (and the gold out of fort knox…).

Which will basically get it to the same state as Russia and China. The vast majority of the population will be in a really bad way. But those who benefit will likely stick around as they can feel good about being so much better off than everyone around them. And, more importantly the people who CAN consider international travel (temporary or permanent) won’t be incentivized to.

Like I said. I can definitely see a path to a North Korea level of lockdown. But we have the template for what “works” and it is Russia and China.

And the way that many (most? (all?)) private trackers implement their monitoring kind of requires an open port.

Like basically all tech companies, the leadership are libertarian tech bros. It sucks, but whatever. The problem is also that the CEO (?) has been making public statements to try and cozy up to the trump administration over the past few months

Some of that still falls under the LTB effect (These policies benefit the company so fuck everyone else, etc) and it DOES make sense for a company to try and earn themselves an exception for the upcoming hellscape in a market that will REALLY want VPNs. But it still leaves a really bad taste in my mouth.

Not in an “I MUST LEAVE PROTON NOW” state since I like the products because they tend to be pretty honest about what they will and won’t do when the goons come a knocking and that mostly boils down to “cooperate. So do X Y and Z to protect yourself by preventing us from having the information they want”). But that, plus protonmail being kind of a shitshow if you want to keep offline copies of your emails, is motivation to shop around.

The US is following the (modern) russian model.

Outside of war time concerns over draft dodgers (which is not restricted to totalitarian regimes), there are no “extra” restrictions on citizens outside of needing a passport. There ARE restrictions placed on “political opponents” but that can be considered an extension of the “normal” restrictions on people with pending legal issues and so forth and gets into a greater discussion of the role of law in a society.

No. The big restriction is monetary. Which is also how control is maintained and oligarchs are protected.

The US is rapidly speedruning a christofacist oligarchy. But that is still going to be a lot closer to a Russia or a China than a North Korea. The latter is possible and should be feared but would require a massive shift that takes away the “Things are bad for me but they are worse for Them” that conservatives globally depend on.

To my knowledge, there is nothing indicating this is the plan at this time.

And I sincerely doubt we’ll “ever” have that policy. Because the people most likely to go on leisure (or even work) international trips are generally middle/upper middle class who need to be kept placated to make sure they still post memes on reddit but secretly cheer that the fbi is going to protect their teslas.

Whether other countries are going to block our access is a different conversation but is also unlikely.

That said: Anyone who CAN get out should work on getting out.

Unlikely.

There are plenty of ways that statements and planning related to military operations and diplomacy can be indefinitely immune to FOIA. And anything sensitive (of which this definitely was) will be automagically immune for a duration depending on the kind of discussion it was.

Nah. This is just sheer and utter laziness. They didn’t want to have to meet in person, go to a few VTC rooms to have a conf call, or sit at their fancy computers to send emails over a secure line. They just wanted to text on their phones while doing whatever else (dime to a dollar: at least one of them was in public).

I could see an argument to that in that this is pretty rapidly distracting people from how “Liberation Day” on the 2nd is now not going to be tariff day while they figure out what tariffs they are actually doing.

But this happened on March 14th/15th and, historically, people sit on this until they can write a tell all book eight years after it mattered.

So unless we are going to argue that Jeffrey Goldberg is actually a magat asset and they were sitting on this, it is highly improbable, bordering on impossible, for THIS to be staged.

Is it weird that the most shocking thing to me in all of this is that they all act like facebook boomers even in “private” operational meetings? “I will say a prayer for victory,” coming out of fucking vance’s fingers (and then prayer emojis from everyone else) is just fucking insanity. Like, I expected that behind closed doors they all call it nonsense and act like 4chan dipshits.

The mass leaking of operational information is totally to be expected. Just look at russians and Telegram.

… the business of Arlington Cemetary?

Not just sued and put on a shitlist: Outright listed as an enemy of the state to the masses of fox news watching gun nuts.

You’ve kind of keyed in on one of the things I was hesitant to say:

There are two big uses for an “offline” media library.

Some people just use it for all the stuff they grabbed off the pirate bay (probably avoid TPB in 2025 but…). You don’t really care about quality and just want to consume media.

Others, like myself, primarily use it to rip/back up their blu rays and UHDs and the like. If I am watching on my TV in the living room? I want that to be the highest quality I have available and I want to revel in every shadow gradient and so forth. If I am watching it on my computer? I don’t need anywhere near that much detail. And on a tablet? Compress that shit like an exec at netflix just saw the storage arrays.

That is the benefit of transcoding and offline caching. It means you, as a “server”, just focus on backing up your library/finding the best quality rips or whatever. And you, as a “user”, don’t have to worry about figuring out how many different versions to keep so that you always have an appropriate version for whatever your use case is that week.