Last Notes
The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
The refusal of advisors to adapt advice about the 60/40 portfolio feels more and more like a social injustice.
Don't worry, it's going to get worse.
I'm not trying to make you guys wrap yourself in tinfoil— almost nobody needs to be as paranoid as I am, and even I am tremendously lazy about opsec these days. The key is *awareness*: to simply be cognizant of what kind of records you're generating as you go about your life, so you can make informed, reasoned judgments about how much of it you can leave hanging out, and what parts of it you'd rather pay an effort-tax to shield from appearing in somebody's (or everybody's) database.
If you take your phone between even just your home and work —doxxed locations— it is trivial to associate it with your true-name identity even if all of the hardware and services are perfectly anonymous. Even journalists have managed these kind of investigations. "Anonymized" location data is unfortunely not anonymous — it *can never* be anonymous. And yet it is sold like any other product.
Your phone's movements through physical space are unique. Even if you live in a building of 400 people, the movements of 399 of them are not going to match the tower records of your phone's movements. Even if you work in the same office. People's geographic movements are unique—and identifying.
GrapheneOS is good if you've got to carry one. The point is never to forget that if you're carrying a phone, you're still being tracked, even if you're limiting the damage from app-based threats. It is baked into the design oftheinfrastructure: if you can see the network, the network can see you. And it takes notes.
Your phone could be made of magic, but it's still gonna leave a record of your movements with the cellular towers.
People really don't realize how utterly dependent modern surveillance is on the idea that everybody is carrying a phone — which is always tracked. Their car has a cellular modem in it — which is always tracked. 99% of investigation is one guy and a search box. If you're not low-hanging fruit, you aren't gonna merit the Eye of Sauron of manual, well-resourced, focused team attention—and if you did, you probably planned ahead for it, right? Because it's not a mystery what would get you on Santa's Naughty List.
Anyway, the point is that even in a big city, the phoneless guy in a "covid" mask is going to be invisible to anything less than that exhaustive manual investigation — at least for a few more years. That may go away once they start networking all the cameras and having AI start trying to match up clothing sets moving from camera to camera, butthat capability is hard to hide, so it'll be in the news. And it won't work that well in places with less camera density and, perhaps, for people who wear the most-common outfits (the visual equivalent of a "shared fingerprint").
Remember: Phones are useful, but dangerous. And the people who will still wear covid masks to the beach are helping to normalize facial obscurity—regardless of their intention. Don't be mean to them. Encourage them to wear them everywhere. For passport photos. In police booking photos. At the customs desk. Family portraits! The sky is the limit—let them push the boundaries so that you don't have to.
#note1duf…4lrc
i will never abandon itshappening.gif
Happy Halvening to those who celebrate.
Read just the first chapter of John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty" (free via Project Gutenberg etc) and tell me that he didn't have his finger precisely on the pulse — in the 1850s — of the root cause of the authoritarian war for majoritarian supremacy that we're witnessing today. Censorship, the compelled worship of an ever-shifting orthodoxy, the construction and desecration of idols before the temple of consensus— it's all the same thing, arising from the same source, and awaiting a similar solution. In times of trouble, we should look more to our history.
Read your Mill, brothers.
Thirty-pound brain on you, king. Thanks for helping us all!
I'm suddenly getting traffic from damus now. Thank you both! Other relay operators should take a look at this:
#nevent1q…q5fq
Thank you. Fwiw I hate cloudflare too. But I get it.
Looks like I was able to get this working again, sort of. It says I'm connected to 9-11 relays, but only shows that I have 100 followers (and even Jack only about 40, so it has to be a data gap), and very few notes on timelines (with obvious gaps even for hugely active accounts). Relay.damus.io never seems to pass me any data (0kb both up and down) to me, which j assume is due to my connection coming via Tor, but honestly I don't know. I'm connecting using Amethyst, if anybody sees this and has any ideas—what's the best, biggest relay for Tor users right now?
Secondly, and most importantly for anyone who sees this note, please make some noise to try and stop the passage of RISAA (the FISA 702 reauthorization) that's about to hit law as soon as this Friday. Please read about it and push it out on all of your socials, if you agree it's a problem. It's going to be hard to stop this thing, even with all hands.
Whoever sees this, thank you for hearing me. https://image.nostr.build/b5731965f417b631e9ea74c27ce4d5f9bb91f9e2a96fefb1547146266ab89fb5.jpg
It was a long time ago, but when I lived in JP, the McD's were always top shelf compared to the standard suburban ones back home. And they had a local specialty — Shaka Shaka Chicken — that was great
It looks handsome on the shelf.
Oh man, that's insightful. I overlooked entirely the possibility that they could keep a patty the same size and weight, but change the gruelpaste/additive/filler ratios on anything not advertising-locked as "100% real beef" or whatever. Hell, even the definition of "beef" these days may have loopholes.
Music saves the soul. Pulled me out of holes moretimes than I care to remember.
OK, so you guys showed me McDonald's jacked prices at least 130% on the core budget item: the mcchicken. Mentally recalculating McDs as "literally more than twice as expensive is a doozy, sure but what I really wanna know: did they do any shrinkflation on top of that to really wring out the margin? Smaller patties, cups, fries, cheese or something? Or was it all just pure price action?
130% inflation on the mcchicken. Fortunately, of course, I'm sure the all-wages index is up at least 130%. Average schoolteacher is probably pulling down $150k post tax, right? It's just a banana, Michael.
That better not be Wonder bread
The Year is 2023. Micky D issues a harder currency than Uncle Sam. A young woman goes about her day without taking notice. Within the locket she wears, the soul of her Austrian grandmother cries out in warning.
2001:
https://image.nostr.build/6fb21dab5431dd6e47d9ad30c6ffcd27f66ab04359fbb8d602e7242799abbba7.jpg
The replies here are crazy. Mom, Pop, and two kids getting hit by McDonald's for $30. You used to be able to get McChickens and Double Cheeseburgers off the dollar menu. I remember it being a lifeline for broke teens. We need a burgers-per-labor-hour inflation metric.
#nevent1q…y7w2
bro $8 for cereal? i've been gone a long time. next you'll be telling me they got rid of the dollar menu
It just occurred to me, due to a nostr bug, that it might actually be pretty cool to have social media hide *who authored* the posts on your TL to force a kind of double-blind perspective. You'd know the post or reply is (or probably is) from one of the people you follow, but you wouldn't be so quick to agree (and perhaps might even be more willing to disagree) if you aren't just smashing the heart button as a reflex because you like the guy. It might make discussions more communal and disagreements less personal if you knew that you're still talking to someone you generally like and respect, but you don't know whether it's "that one guy on the internet" or, like, your actual Mom.
(Nostr, due to ramshackle Tor support, often displays notes from people without correctly fetching their profiles for me, so I find myself liking or replying or following people without having any idea as to their nym or avatar)
I think inertia is leading us toward a quantified state, in which the costs of tracking and categorizing objects — primarily people, phones, cars, and money — as they move from place to place becomes so low that most institutions are doing it by reflex, without either considering or caring for consequences. Eventually, somebody is going to exploit the gap in information (between what is available to ordinary people, and what is available to organizations) in a way that causes enormous, historic harm, as happened in WWII when a particular state realized that IBM had compiled a database that was perfect for populating a list of names of those who would soon be marched off to camps. And that was just census data. Now they know what you read, where you go, who you're with, and how you'll vote.
The unfortunate reality of contemporary political thought is that consequences do not exist until they are felt. Rare is the chicken that fears the farmer. That means we've got two options: we either wait for the pain, or we stop waiting for political consensus.
#nevent1q…cnxw
Little-known fact: I don't drink! Just not my thing.
"Stop resisting, Stop resisting!" is one of the most instantly recognizable phrases of the new American century. When you read the words, you can probably still hear them shouted in your head, the echoing memory of a generational trauma, the indelible recollection of the moment that the citizen became subordinate to the state.
If I had a Bitcoin for every time the FBI said that, Satoshi would look poor.
Compliance is a dirty word.
Starting to see some nice lifestyle photos on nostr. Gentlest touch of an Instagram vibe, but less commercial. Positive.
