Court is adjourned. I’ll be in my chambers ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

My wife doesn’t let me bring the Thinkpad to bed anymore

Such is the nature of the hacker spirit, for better or worse.

That’s giving too much credit. He probably saw the IDF doing it and thought it looked cool.

I’ve noticed recently that our European family and friends have this pattern where they’ll call it America or the USA when they’re saying something positive or hopeful about the country, but then they’ll say “the States” or “the US” when being critical or showing concern. It’s very interesting and I wonder how common that is.

Apple users are already locked into the whole vertical stack. The friction in that ecosystem comes from trying to use other hardware. Every design choice in the ecosystem serves to keep users corralled. They aren’t installing apps from outside the app store because Apple ensured that the thought never occurs to them in the first place. The tech stack of an Apple user is a continuous, gapless monolith made of glass and brushed aluminum. Unblemished by third-party vendors, it keeps them safe, serves their every need, just works and has “designed by Apple in California” stamped on the bottom. The Apple devotees even think they’re unique and “creative”. They freely open up their wallets for that feeling. They would gleefully volunteer to get fucked sideways with a MacBook Air™️ – as long as it will be Apple doing the fucking.

Meanwhile, in Redmond, Microsoft roots around desperately in the same bag of dirty tricks they’ve been using for decades looking for something, anything, that will give them a fraction of that brand cohesion and devotion from users. They continue to not get it, it will continue to not solve their perpetual identity crisis, and half their user base will still not even know what their browser is called.

No stress old man, snatch Z’s.

That’s not far from how the wealthy actually operate.

They also use life insurance products in unique ways. Normies buy regular term or whole life insurance and pay out the ass in premiums, whoever sold it gets a big cut. The whole focus is on the death benefit for family in case you die, no benefits in life.

Wealthy buy specially designed whole life policies and don’t care about the death benefit. They will max out their contributions and paid-up additions, then just open more policies to dump more money in. They can borrow against their contributions at a low interest rate, say 5%, for as long as they want. At the same time (and this is key) all their contributions are earning a higher interest rate plus dividends (say 6-8%) uninterrupted even if they borrow from it. Compound interest does its thing after a few years.

This is like if you had a savings account at a bank that you have full control over, earning higher interest than anywhere else. You can make a “clone” of your money at any time and use it for as long as you want at a low cost and do whatever with it. Put that cash to work in investments, buy real estate or cars and boats, start a business, pay employees, anything. While you’re doing that, the “original” sum in your savings account is working away earning interest the whole time. As long as the “clone” of your money plus interest makes it back into the account (paying yourself back) you can do it all over again and continue piling it up. An infinite money machine.

If an LLC owns this vessel where all your wealth is, and an LLC formed in, say, Wyoming – a state which allows registrant anonymity – owns that LLC and you have everything under a living trust, now you have governance over it, can create rules for how it operates, draw up contracts governing who can use it and stipulations for that access, avoid it going through court after you die, etc. You’re now shielded from personal liability and no one can figure out who owns the assets underneath that umbrella trust entity without a court order. On paper, you own nothing and control everything, you’re nearly impossible to prosecute, you have 0 income that has to be reported to the IRS. You have all the power and control and reap all the upside, while suffering none of the usual downsides or responsibilities written in the social contract the rest of us follow.

It sounds to good to be true, but the wealthy and powerful have been following this playbook for centuries, almost as long as insurance has been a concept. If that doesn’t describe a sovereign citizen, I don’t know what does! The stereotype of the methed up poor white guy who drives around baiting cops and argues baseless logic in court that they got from some other methed up poor white guy they met in some godforsaken chat room that is Totally Not a Honeypot Run by Feds is a red herring imo.

It’s fax, deadass.

Squad’s high-key in our AI-maxxing era and I’m finna get pressed and go off.

Bros out there in their main character era thinking they’re giving immaculate gigachad CEO, but it’s all cap and no rizz, ohio-tier translations and basic-ass boomercore NPC energy. It’s low-key giving mid vibes, fr fam, on God. Can’t rizz up that knowledge without getting ratioed and mogged by highly sus Fanum tax. Doesn’t pass the vibe check, fr. 🚩Like fr, fr, with no cap. 🚩 Squad’s finna lock in and take the L for a while.

The rizzler will finally eat and leave no crumbs after this beta-ass bubble gets humbled. The fam will be flexing their drip. I’m talking hella bops and pure sigma vibes for days. Squad finna be all slap and no cap, catching dubs for miles and collecting that immaculate gyatt tax. We’ll really be cooking, maybe even unlock infinite drip if we shift the meta when we pull up at that quest marker.

periodt.💯

Y’all real ones keep flexing that secret sauce and stay goated. don’t crash out chat, fr ong 🐐

deleted by creator

Spotify has been shitty from inception IMO. I’ve tried it a couple times at different points and first off, just didn’t like the UX at all.

The “free” tier is unusable if you’re an active listener and not the type to just have something, anything, playing as background noise.

My biggest pet peeve with Spotify and most of the other big modern streamers: There’s a tenuous connection between the listed artist and a “real” artist, so there’s no way to tell if you’re listening to something intentionally created that can be found elsewhere, or just procedurally generated slop uploaded by some rando. Google is just as bad if not worse with this since merging Google Play Music with YouTube. Apple seems to get this part right, but I have no other reason to switch.

Anyway, that’s not even touching any political/ethics/business aspects of Spotify. It’s hard to imagine it becoming any shittier, and I’ve always wondered how they have the market share they do. At some point I realized that it’s kind of just the default option for the more casual listener who isn’t already slotted into Apple or Google for everything. Plus it has official, polished integrations with a lot of other apps/ecosystems (e.g. Discord, Xbox).

I’d sooner bring lossless versions of all my stuff local and tag every track by hand than give them any amount of money, but it’s clearly not made for me so that doesn’t mean much.

I’ve been driven more to web radio stations, even terrestrial radio (streamed or actual FM). there are some great free/non-commercial choices out there still with human DJs. (Shout-out to kexp). Human-curated radio is still viable for discovery and going out of your comfort zone musically, and human “taste-makers” still have a place, which is reassuring. There are a few newish low power FM stations around me which are actually good, which is an interesting and unexpected development.

I would guess it has a healthier impact on artists as a group than Spotify does, yeah.

It’s not a matter of if the actual truth comes out, but when. At least that’s what I reckon.

There are just way too many people caught up in the web – and orders of magnitude more who have a non-zero investment in the outcome, emotionally or otherwise – for it to quietly fade away like they’re wanting it to.

This is like, the last reliably bipartisan thing we have left if you don’t count eating, sleeping and shitting. I would say it’s even beyond that - pretty much everyone who’s not a pedo (which I would hope is, like, at the very minimum 99%) wants the same thing – for the truth to come out, and for comprehensive justice to be served.

I’m not going to make it part of my personality and larp as an activist, filling the Internet with low-effort spam, or claiming that everything else that ever happens is “a distraction” from this, no.

The dam will break, the ticking thingy eventually explodes, and I can be very patient. I just hope we still have a functioning justice system when it does.

hup

Interrobang: now that’s power

Do you think the people who will end up owning all this arable land will be smart enough to avoid fucking it up? Mono cropping, climate change, pollution, pesticide runoff: these can turn your once arable land into useless acreage nobody wants right quick. I understand we have a lot of it, but look what happened in Brazil.

Guess you just have to cancel your whole Internet then, aw shucks

C:\PROGRA~1

Go away, batin’!

Just watch out for those lemon-stealing whores