I swear someone wrote the plans for the operation 20 years ago and they just never bothered to update them.

Would love it if they were making a sedan or a subcompact. Not everyone needs or wants a truck.

Agreed about the DSA. When the time comes, some small number may splinter off, but I expect the bulk of them to be fighting against us, not with us.

They have a lot on their github, but I have no idea if it’s current: https://github.com/orgs/gl-inet/repositories

If my ISP tries banning my router, I’ll be finding a new ISP. Of course, that’s not going to help if they all fall in line.

I hear you about the panopticon - I figured getting a Gl.iNet router is some protection, as I know what’s running on it and I can keep all my network traffic behind a VPN with a killswitch. Of course, they could try to make those illegal down the road. Who knows.

GL.iNet’s devices come with their own fork of OpenWRT pre-installed. The UI is easy to navigate and it does everything I need it to, so I haven’t felt any need to install OpenWRT proper, but if you want to, I believe you can easily find instructions to do so online.

And that’s why hand sanitizer is no replacement for masking, but given that the vast majority refuses to mask, I’ll stick with using both.

Currently reading about all the horrors of the CIA - finished The Jakarta Method and Washington Bullets, currently reading through Killing Hope, and next on my list is Operation Gladio.

I’ve had one of GL.inet’s routers for over a year now and I’m really happy with it. I surprisingly did not have my ISP barking at me when I replaced my old one with it, which was a relief. I don’t use a mobile carrier for my home internet though, so I don’t know if they’re more picky about what you use.

Seconding this for anyone looking to buy one. Their pre-installed OpenWRT firmware is easy enough to use, and you can also set up AdGuard Home on some models (like a pi-hole but on your router).

I would never, ever use the router or modem an ISP tries to stick you with. They charge you monthly for those, for one thing. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had monitoring stuff on them, for another.

It seems to me that Apple products would be the most susceptible to this, as there are a limited number of hardware variations as well as a walled garden for software.

The article mentions it technically being possible to do on a Linux machine, but I doubt it would be as easy to get conclusive data from it, when the SSD could be any size or brand and the software it could be running is nigh-limitless. I don’t doubt it could extract some data, I just don’t think it would have the level of granular detail they’re saying they got on the M2.

I’m wondering whether having separate partitions on a drive would be enough to defend against this, or whether you would need actually physically separate drives.

I wish they’d channel that energy into developing class consciousness instead, but then they’ve been heavily disincentivized to do so between propaganda and the desire for wealth of their own.

Agreed, but until people start moving to PeerTube, we’re stuck with half-measures.

Invidious or another front-end of your choice, presumably.

And no I am not going to do the research for you.

Cowbee brings the receipts, and you don’t. You do understand this is an argument being made in a public forum, and not your DMs, right? I can only assume that your goal is to feel intellectually superior, and not to actually persuade anyone to adopt your point of view.

It does seem like it’s either allow Isntreal to finish its genocide (unconscionable) or risk it retaliating with nuclear force. There are no good options here.

Opossums are essentially immune to rabies and eat ticks.

It is plastic, though. The exact formulas tend to be proprietary, but they use a plastic rather than a natural gum base unless explicitly stated otherwise on the packaging. Even a lot of the ‘natural’ brands still use a plastic base.

They’re just getting them younger and younger, aren’t they?

Or literally any age between the two, because yes, the US education system sucks and has for a very long time.

Your claim that party members or state administrators in socialist states are automatically not proletarian because they administer is nonsense. Class is not determined by whether someone performs administrative labour or exercises authority. Class position is determined principally by relation to the means of production, particularly ownership thereof.

I’m going to take this as a jumping off point to explicate the nature of the administrative arm of the state further for any lurkers out there.

What exactly do state administrators do? Administration is the enforcement arm of the state - they exist to see the law carried out. People think of cops when they hear the term “law enforcement,” but ‘the law’ is greater than just the criminal code; it also contains regulations on worker wages and hours, food safety, and energy usage, to name a few things.

In the west, discussion of this tends to begin and end with “bureaucracy bad.” The libertarian framing of needful regulation as “restricting freedom” has infected a lot of the western working class with bourgeouis ideals and convinced them to act against their own class interests. It should be obvious that clean air, clean water, functioning infrastructure, and higher wages are in the working class’s interest. Capital, however, will always seek to maximize profit, and regulations will invariably cut into those profits. Whether that’s indirectly in the provision of vital services paid with taxes, or directly in extra costs to capital in the form of higher wages or complying with environmental regulations. And in the sense that more regulations require higher cost of compliance, these can be seen as suppressing the petite bourgeoisie by making entering an industry require higher investment which pushes out would-be ‘small business owners.’ The working class can be tricked into supporting deregulation by their desire to escape wage labor by joining the ranks of the petite bourgeoisie.

As capital controls the government in capitalist “democracies,” it has a number of tools at its disposal to undermine its own administrative arm. These include underfunding their enforcement or setting the penalties as mere fees that companies consider the cost of doing business, but also more structural methods, such as privatizing as much of it as possible so that even these necessary functions can be subordinated to producing profit - infrastructure (both physical and digital) in the US is built not by the government itself but by contractors. Likewise, healthcare, transportation, energy production, and even weapons manufacturing are handled by private companies instead of by the government. These things become expensive because they must produce profit.

In a socialist state, these functions are performed directly by the government itself which serves both to keep costs down and protect the interests of the working class. This is necessary because even after a proletarian revolution, the capitalist class continues to exist. As long as it does, it will continue to try to maximize its profits, and it does so by cutting corners in manufacturing, abusing workers, and will always attempt to regain the power it has lost. As such, the socialist states must maintain a strong administrative arm to keep the capitalist class constrained.

Let’s examine how violators are handled between the two systems to make it clear how these differ in their functioning. There are many examples of US corporations cutting corners - consider the Ford Pinto, that was knowingly designed in such a way that increased fatalities from rear-end collisions. Ford was eventually fined in a lawsuit, but no one went to prison or suffered any greater penalty. This is typical of US enforcement actions, and leads US corporations to cut corners and budget for legal penalties. If the corners cut save more money than projected legal cases will cost, the corporations will put out products knowing they will prove fatal for some number of people who use them.

By way of comparison, let’s look at a Chinese case. Most of us over a certain age probably remember the melamine scandal back in 2008, when a Chinese corporation named Sanlu Group adulterated powdered milk with melamine in order to artificially boost the protein content, and 6 infants died as a result. Several public officials were stripped of office, the corporation went bankrupt, several executives went to prison, and 2 people were executed.

The differences between the two couldn’t be more stark. In a capitalist country, regulation exists at best as a “gentleman’s agreement” between capitalists, while as in a socialist country, it is the strong arm of the state, able to constrain capital and punish it for failure to comply.