Mutual Aid is revolution.
The more we help each other, the more the state becomes obsolete.
OwOarchist
joined 2 months ago
If the search area for the necklace were 1/4 square mile to allow for drift
Your search area is perhaps a bit small.
Where, exactly, was the ship she dropped it from at the exact moment she dropped it? Ships move around quite a bit, even when trying to maintain position over a wreck. And how precisely do you know when she dropped it?
you would only need to search about 435,000 necklace-width positions.
Only, huh? That's still quite a lot when you're talking about one of the most difficult places on the planet to get to. And because the necklace would likely sink straight into the soft ocean floor mud immediately upon impact, it's likely not going to be just sitting there, easily found with a visual search. You will indeed need to use metal detecting.
One issue with metal detecting: the main body of the ship only broke into two large parts, sure, but the entire area is going to be scattered with a debris field of small parts and junk. Pieces that broke off as the ship was breaking up, pieces that drifted away as the ship sank, pieces that broke off when it hit the bottom, pieces that were buoyant enough or interesting enough to sea creatures to drift away over the years of sitting at the bottom... You're going to be getting a ton of false positives all over the place. A door hinge, a passenger's pocketwatch, little scraps of broken-off plumbing pipe, a fork...
Searching through all of that will be extremely tedious (and expensive!), with no guarantee of eventual success. For all you know, a fish spotted the shiny, glinting thing as it sank and instinctively swallowed it, and now your multi-million dollar necklace is 50 miles away, giving some fish a stomachache.
That might be a bit hyperbolic.
Bernie Sanders has his faults, for sure, but I don't think he's a nazi, a slaver, or an unrepentant pedophile.
Yep. A rich and powerful person's kid is kidnapped? Yes -- they'll be able to find them instantly.
A poor person's kid is kidnapped? Well, good luck with that.
That computer in the background is giving me anxiety.
How do people function with organization like that?
I kind of take objection to the entire concept of 'political capital', spoken of as if it's an exchange currency that gets used up and permanently goes away when you spend it. It stinks of corrupt and opaque backroom deals and quid pro quo. And, as is the case here, it creates and justifies self-defeating attitudes, where politicians very often don't dare to do the right thing, because they can't risk 'spending' their precious 'political capital' on the right thing when they're saving it up for something else they might possibly need it for later. How many politicians have ended their terms with 'political capital' still left unspent in their account? That shit has an expiration date -- it makes no sense to hoard it!
Instead, just do the right thing (to the best of your ability to determine what the 'right thing' is) immediately and unrelentingly, at every turn. Never hold back.
And I also only ever hear it as an explanation of why Dems "can't" do the right thing. When have you ever heard Republicans talking about how they can't do something because they 'don't have the political capital'? No, they just do it. And if their bill/resolution/whatever fails to pass, they just do it again. And again. How many times did they try to repeal the Affordable Care Act? They obviously didn't have the 'political capital' to pull that off, but it didn't stop them from trying over and over again anyway. Why can't the Dems have a bit of that energy when it comes to doing things that might benefit the country? (I know, trick question. The real reason they can't do that is because they're bought and paid for by corporate interests. 'Political capital' is just another convenient excuse they trot out in the all-too-frequent case of when the interests of their donors aren't aligned with the interests of their voters.)
Okay, and that tells them what, exactly? They could figure out which VPN I'm using, but they already knew that -- all they'd need to do is look up the owner of the VPN server's IP address.
I'd surely like to hope that my VPN isn't so ass at security that username/password information would be passed unencrypted during connection negotiation. So the ISP isn't getting that.
Maybe they could use that to determine what OS my computer is running and a few other technical details, if those details are part of the negotiation? That's the closest I think they could come to any private information to harvest.
And, of course, they can tell how often I connect, how long I'm connected, and how much raw data gets uploaded or downloaded. But that's absolutely unavoidable.
... But the biggest thing here is -- having a compromised router doesn't make any of this worse. They can try to spy on my data all they want once it's sent to their servers. I don't see how trying to spy on me through my router improves anything. The router already only sees things that are headed to their servers anyway. So what do I care if the ISP's spyware is on the router or on their servers (or, more likely, both)?
I suppose the only slight difference is that running their spyware locally might very slightly increase the power draw of my router. So it would be slightly preferable to make them run the spyware on their own server in their own server farm, where they're paying the power bill.
They want to harvest your data and sell it.
Well, yes. But they're doing this anyway. If you're paying with a card (and most people do), they're using your credit card number as an identifier to track you across all the purchases you made across all their stores. These days, they may also be using facial recognition for the same purpose, to even catch the people paying with cash. Making rewards program memberships and the like illegal would barely slow down their data collection at all.
Well, you (and everyone else) are paying for it through retail markups and profit margins ... but you're going to be paying that anyway under capitalism.
What the store gets out of it is:
A) They hope their rewards program will motivate you to shop at their store, rather than going to any competitor's, since you have a rewards card for their store and hopefully not the others. So the rewards program could increase their market share a bit, at the cost of a few discounts.
B) They're using it to track you, of course. It provides more analytics for them to further optimize selling you shit, and they might also be selling the data to 3rd parties.
Ye olde doomscroll.
Why only for groceries?
In the interest of keeping markets fair, it should be illegal across the board to change prices depending on who the customer is*. The price is the price, as it should be in a free and fair market.
*Though I think I'd still allow for rewards/loyalty card programs and coupons given to frequent customers and that sort of thing -- with the distinction being it's something that the customer explicitly opts in to. And a restriction that these programs can only ever lower prices, never raise them.
Then why are they still working for microslop?