Yeah, I'm soon going to be testing out technologies like Meshtastic and ensuring I have a basic survival kit in case natural disaster, revolution, martial law, or some other shit hitting the fan.

If we can't trust the people we've put trust in to do good for us, then we have to re-make every aspect of our society from the ground up.

(Honestly speaking about my government, I have faith in my province and city, but if PP gets into federal office I will be very worried).

I mean, I want to have hope, but the major first world nations of the world didn’t build a god damned surveillance state over the last 40 years for nothing

Tinfoil hat

I'm 100% convinced the drones in the news lately are prototyping a new mass surveillance program to be kicked off after Trump takes office, likely funded by Musk, likely for purposes related to his planned mass deportations, and so little is being done about it because folks are being told Jan 20 isn't that far away, you better not.

/Tinfoil hat

My slightly less tinfoil hat option B is that it's only your garden variety mass surveillance program being piloted, kicked off under Biden, and that will be unlikely to be curtailed under Trump.

Because as a veteran, I refuse to believe that craft the military weren't intimately familiar with would receive nothing but a shrug in reaction to this, yet that's all that has happened.

They're watching, but here's the thing: at a certain volume, seeing everything actually becomes a detriment as the noise creates false positives and drowns out useful data.

If EVERYONE is pissed off, angry, and posting about it online etc then sorting out "angry enough to do something" gets harder. It'll be interesting to see what the "right to bear arms" folks in government come up with when they're the ones in the crosshairs rather than schoolkids

I am going to be extremely sad considering the amount of research and science that's about to become privatized. Not just NASA but other government agencies and research grants.

I work in the municipal office of a tiny city that's an enclave for the super rich. We're entirely surrounded by a major city, but we're a different jurisdiction.

Of course, I don't get to live there. Literally every resident is a millionaire or better. The average new house being built there is about 8 million dollars, and we have a lot of housing churn.

That is, people will buy a 5 million dollar house and tear it down to build a 12 million dollar house.

All that to say that I interact with these people all the time. They almost invariably don't realize how out of touch they are, because their neighbors are also millionaires.

You'd think it's a super nice city, but other than the houses it's fairly run down. They don't want good roads or sidewalks because then people would use them. The city was essentially founded to prevent bus lines from the major city from having stops near the fancy district.

Over half the municipal employees are cops, and their main job is keeping homeless people away.

All this work goes into isolating the rich from the poor, and it's worked so well that most of the rich don't even realize it's happening.

Mmm I think more will happen. There's some very organized groups who are armed to the teeth and unafraid.

We still out number them by hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, to one.

Im hoping the nutjobs who become school shooters for attention realize they will get WAY more attention if they are a CEO shooter instead.

It got snuffed, but it's worth remembering that 13 years ago, Occupy Wall Street did happen. The path from self education to understanding the real villains has been roughly identical for most of recorded history, and right now if you still read books the truth is pretty much everywhere and undeniable.

Ever since OWS was unceremoniously snuffed without actual reform, I've been waiting for a nice blue shell thrower to show up. It's been the only remaining path available the entire time. One person walks that road, and suddenly it becomes vastly easier for others to follow...

Yes the median income is something like 80k. The mode however is still firmly buried in the 35-40k segment. Fun fact, you only need 1% of the population for a region to conduct a viable insurgency. Less for highly concentrated places like NY and LA. You need 10% to provide material aid like money and shelter. Which is a different, lower level, of radicalization.

So NYC by traditional standards would need 82,000 people to be radicalized enough to commit violent acts. In reality because it's so dense they could easily do it with a thousand, and several thousand supporters. And this is for big boy insurgency stuff where the police have to engage in extended firefights just to get into a neighborhood. For terrorism campaigns the numbers are even smaller. 2 people paralyzed the entire state of Maryland and Northern Virginia in 2002. A couple hundred dedicated people not trying to hold territory could easily shut down wall street until the NYPD turned it into the Baghdad Green Zone.

The rich haven't even begun to find out yet. And they sent the working class for a 20 year premier education in asymmetric warfare. This is why some of us are so pissed at them. We're going to be living in the next Afghanistan if they don't take their boot off the neck of the working class.

Can't have kids. Can't have property. Nothing to loose than a comfortable meaningless life.

I think you're right but incomplete. There are idiots who vote for the same people no matter what, and there are idiots who place their lofty principles above getting results - in this case refusing to vote and blaming the Democratic Party for not supplying good enough options to click on - that's their reason Trump got back into office, not because all they personally did was bitch and moan online and stick their hands in their pockets when they could have stopped him. There are people dumb enough to delude themselves that way.

He acted out of pain. Literally.

I'm having a meeting this week to decide what we do next.

Educate, agitate, organize

It's been here for a while, smart phones were basically the nail in the coffin. Switching to GNU/Linux is not enough, there are proprietary backdoors in your BIOS firmware. Nearly everything we buy is bugged by default. Laws need to be in place and the education system needs to be required to teach about libre software. If we don't do this, all hope is lost for privacy in the future.