It’s such a disappointment. We try to build a system with people to entrust our well-being to and help those in need, but it always goes wrong.

From ancient times and the king’s guard, to modern cops in some town. It always becomes corrupted.

That’s how it always starts though.

People use any device or service they want. It’s a mix of crooks, tinkerers, journalists, etc.

A company or government makes some moral panic and pushes some privacy or civil rights erosion in the name of “security”. The actual security benefit may or may not exist.

Then other companies do the same to keep up.

Then there’s only a handful of companies not doing the thing, so anyone who doesn’t want their privacy or civil rights eroded uses that, including crooks.

Then politicians and the other companies point to the holdouts as “PROOF!” their changes were good, because look how many crooks use that stuff! (The number of crooks hasn’t changed, they’ve just been concentrated to a single location.) The moral panic deepens.

The non-criminal population that cares about their privacy or civil rights speak out, but get accused of secretly being criminals, or some other crap that can be used to dismiss their concerns. “If you have nothing to hide, why are you so upset?” and all that.

Now laws get passed to force all companies to do the same thing, to stop the criminals! But let’s not worry about anyone else. The tinkerers, journalists, privacy-advocates, etc. They don’t matter.

The law gets passed, and now all toasters are legally required to record your breakfast conversations, for a silly example.

Show off. I have 12 GB of DDR3, and a swap partition on spinning rust.

(save me)

“I’m so used to getting fucked by Chrome and Edge that I just feel like something’s missing if I don’t.”

I wish mine did that. I said one thing about Trump not having as much money as he claims, and my mom got all insulted. She said that maybe we shouldn’t talk about politics, etc, and I agreed to be nice. I don’t like to talk politics at all, even with like-minded people. But she’ll blame a company getting hacked and losing my personal info on democrats, and tell me that she can’t wait until all democrats die off.

But now she just spouts of any shit that comes to her mind without a care, while I’m keeping to our dealt and shutting up. I doubt she even remembers our promise, because the moment it wasn’t convenient for her, she dropped it.

Ah yeah, propaganda and stereotyping.

😆

The fact that Chiropractic is pseudoscience; realigning your spine to allow magical spirit energy to flow better, because they think every single aliment from acne to cancer is caused by blocked chi flow, isn’t enough?

When companies tell you they respect your privacy and you should give them your data, you tell them it doesn’t matter. Because policies can change, and at the end of the day, your privacy isn’t always up to an single company.

Wait. This was last year, so not the capitol riot. What happened in January last year? I’m in a decent mood today. Just going to skip looking deeper into this one. I have Factorio to play!

Oh! I think I see what you mean now. I think I get it.

No worries. The appointment was set for me by a local government agency. That’s about all I wanna say about it, though.

Nicely done. The best case scenario is sugar. Most of the time, it’s nothing but water, and maybe a single drop of 100x already diluted more water, that maybe once had something non-water in it. That is, of course, assuming the machines doing the literal magic shaking didn’t spill the “active ingredient”.

Trust me, it wasn’t my choice.

I honestly thought I might have to, but it took months to get the appointment, and I didn’t want to have to wait all over again and just hope I got a better location next time.

I hope so. It’s more likely something infected Firefox itself, and didn’t get into the OS. But when I checked the modem logs, it happened up to a couple of months after the fact. That’s worrying.

What’s even more worrying is that a couple of websites told me I had an IP address that didn’t match my home IP, but would provide the correct one if I refreshed the page a couple of times. So some kind of covert proxy or VPN type of thing was happening.

I ended up just wiping everything, to be safe. Still a bit paranoid though.

Oh, this reminds me. I was asked to go to a Chiropractic “doctor” this weekend for a check up. That’s nonsense to begin with, but I went anyway.

She asked about my back hurting, and I mentioned that I threw it out really badly when I got COVID a year or two ago, and was stuck in bed coughing super hard for a week. Her immediate response was “I’ve heard the vaccine can do that.”

… Like, fucking what? How god damn stupid do you have to be to hear “I threw my back out coughing really hard.” and instantly try to insert your anti-science bullshit into the conversation?

“BUT MAH FREEDOMS!”

You’re not wrong. But also keep in mind that headlines prime readers to think in a certain way before they even get a chance to read the context. No one will admit it, because headlines make money, but all it takes is one carefully worded headline to change how people interpret, feel about, and react to a story. Even when you’re aware of this trick, it’s impossible to avoid all the time. That’s just how our brains work.

I’m not seeing the downside here.

“Bless your soul.”