Where's the uncertainty? Individual police officers have direct access to real time E911 location data. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is well documented. There doesn't need to be a vast network of federal agents watching you, there just needs to be one cop who's an asshole.
A historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, ethnicity and/or psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.
The Roma are a nation without a country.
The Kurdish people constitute a nation in the Middle East
There are so many high quality open source apps on F-Droid that I honestly haven't touched Google Play in at least a year. I'm sure there are specific circumstances where someone might need something from Google Play but for the general smartphone user it's entirely unnecessary.
This is a weird understanding of post-modernism. It's not Foucault's fault that some SJWs, who don't understand what he was saying in the first place, have taken a few of his insights, decontextualized them, and (ironically) fashioned them into a political metanarrative. I have big problems with the inaccessible language they use, but the best of the post-modernists are just describing the world (as far as "just described" is possible). It's difficult to disagree with Baudrillard that Disneyland is an example of hyperreality, for example.
This decrying of post-modernism is similar to religious fundamentalists who think Nietzshe was being an atheist contrarian when he said "God is dead." That's not what's going on here.
Sometime in the 90s I had read about salvia divinorum on the druggy side of the internet. A few months later I was wandering around one of those witchcraft stores with a girlfriend and noticed they had diviner's sage - the literal translation of salvia divinorum. I asked some witch lady if that was salvia and she said "No, but they have some across the street." They gentleman there told me it was to be used for incense only but that it would be necessary to use a torch style lighter . . . on the incense.
I enjoyed occasionally smoking unenhanced leaf - laughing uncontrollably while slowly sliding off the cough is quite fun - but there was enough of a dysphoric undertone (a kappa agonist!) that I never had any desire to try the extracts. I'm glad salvinorum A is being studied, though, as it really is very novel and I'm sure there plenty of medical insights to be gained from such a unique molecule. There's absolutely nothing like it.
Bandcamp came along at just the right time. Mp3.com was a great idea but the infrastructure and the audience just weren't there for selling digital music at the time. Independent musicians limped along on myspace for a few years until Facebook made things even worse. Bandcamp really did everything right with a DRM-free, artist-friendly business model that integrated Creative Commons licensing directly into the upload process. It's entirely possible that it, like everything good, will eventually be slowly destroyed by business majors, but for now it's a really great model and I hope it sticks around for as long as possible.
These days, the choice is almost purely one of aesthetics because if you're going to be releasing anything physically it'll include a download code anyway. CD-Rs were pretty common in the early 2000s but dropped off as smart phones became ubiquitous. Although, they were always kind of seen as a bit low-effort. I don't know why more bands don't release CD-Rs with nice art and a careful presentation, but people tend to just burn them and scrawl their name in marker on a Maxell (or whatever) branded CD-R. It's certainly still an option.
As for factory pressed CDs, those are still pretty popular, but like you said, you need to be pressing at least 500 for it to make sense economically.
I'll admit that the cassette tape is undoubtedly sonically inferior, but it's a very accessible way for young artists to release music. As noted above, pressing vinyl has gotten exorbitantly expensive in recent years. It's a good way to lose money. Obviously mp3/FLAC is the logical way to distribute music now, but humans are sentimental creatures and they like to have a physical object to hold on to. It's also a money maker; no one's ever drunkenly purchased a download code. I'll always have a soft spot for cassettes.
I still remember one very long winter during which I worked in a food court with the most obnoxious Christmas tree. It had a cheap built-in speaker that played the Shrek version of "12 Days of Christmas" on repeat, all day, every day. "Five onion rings!"
The opioid crisis has caused politicians, and hence doctors, to become extremely skiddish about anything that produces euphoria, regardless of how helpful it might be for patients. People love easy answers to complicated problems, so prohibition and paternalism are the watchwords here.
I know a lot of people are decrying hipsters, which is entirely fair, but one place that's never given up on the cassette is the punk/metal scene. It's a great medium for demo tapes and small batch releases from smaller bands. There are a lot of bands that will form, release an album on tape, go on tour, and break up within 6 months. It can take longer (and cost much, MUCH more) than that just to press a single on vinyl now that hipsters have thoroughly tied up the process. And it still feels really nice to hand some kids $5 for a hand numbered tape they poured their hearts into. Yeah, you could do that with a CD-R, but no one's ever treasured a CD-R.
The reason for irrational attack is right there in your comment. The narrative of civic engagement is dead. For good. Human beings do not have the agency to make decisions about their own lives. They haven't for some time, but the post-WWII social order promised that we would get there eventually, that things were getting better. The two dominant ideologies of progress, communism and capitalism, have each been put to the lie - and look at that timing! - just as the effects of climate change begin to become undeniable. Infrastructure will, even when not under attack, continue to deteriorate.
Maybe attacking a self-driving car is an apt analogy, as there's no one at the wheel.
The potency is definitely a large part of the commercial appeal of fentanyl analogs - similar to the way beer gave way to liquor during prohibition - but I'd argue that an even bigger driver is that it's fully synthetic. Heroin, oxycodone, hydrocodone, etc. all rely on access to large quantities of poppy straw. Combine that with the proliferation of grey market Chinese and Indian labs and you've literally got a recipe for disaster.
There could be a time in the near future where it will be possible to "home brew" traditional opiates with genetically modified yeasts. I don't know how viable or realistic that scenario is, but it does sound like it will at least be technically possible very soon.
Meanwhile the FDA is spending a lot of time and energy trying to ban kratom, a plant which researchers hope will point the way to new analgesics that don't cause respiratory depression. Y'know, the thing that kills people.
Let's not forget that there are other internet archives out there. I'm thinking specifically of archive.is, which has less willingness to acquiesce to takedown requests and robots.txt exclusions, but there are others out there that could surely use our support. A patchwork approach of several archives with differing approaches and goals (general, academic, scientific; text, image, video, etc.) could provide a more robust backup of the web. A single archive is a single point of failure.
It's probably not all that dangerous on a micro leve, but in the age of social mapping, personalized psychographics, and cybernetics, data brokers are becoming better and better at quantifying every data point. Metadata is much more valuable to them than any particular personal secret or private thought.
I remember watching all kinds of crazy stuff on the local public access channel before it was axed in the late 90s due to budget cuts. Like, real weird stuff. There was this goth chick that would paint with used tampons, and a clown that danced in front of a green screen showing straight up porn. I don't know if that was great stuff for a young me to be watching, but there was no censorship.
It's the idea that people who don't share a particular narrow worldview are programmed bots, regurgitating scripted lines, like non-player characters in video games. It's not a new idea, as this kind of elitist solipsism has long been common among what we now call "neckbeards," but it's been updated for the 21st century. It's similar to the "wake up, sheeple" cliche from conspiracy theorists of years past. NPCs, in this cosmology, are those that haven't taken the "red pill." It's the product of a mind buried deep in ressentiment.
Twitter is whatever you want to hate. Conservatives think it's liberal, radicals think it's centrist, liberals think it's alt-right, etc. And they're all, to some degree, correct. It's mirror in which you see your enemy. This is the nature of a feedback loop that runs on instantaneous emotionality. If one believes there's an existential threat to one's people, ideology, way of life, whatever, they'll spend time on the platform reinforcing that narrative. There's a bogeyman right outside all of our houses.
The sad thing about this is that, as far as I can tell, no one is disagreeing on individual data points. It's an abstract, shifting logic with no center. Climate change is being used as a proxy, an opportunity to publicly disagree with someone else's political opinions. This is how far political ideologies have removed us from any kind of reason. It's a circular shitshow where demonstrable fact is subsumed into the ephemeral logic of political performance. There's no need to make this so complicated. Let's just try to lessen the scale of mass human misery.
This is clear distillation of the move from the late 90s internet that escaped AOL's walled garden–idealistic, DIY, open-standard based, focused on the free (and I do mean free) flow of information, naive but hopeful–to the modern internet–cynical, monetized, closed platform based, focused on emotionally charged political (of all stripes) outrage.
I don't care one bit for this development, but I don't think that top-down solutions, whether technical, monetary, or bureacratic, could be successful. This is a social issue, a reflection of our collective values of convenience over all else. We could very easily find the way out of this, if we cared to.
Slashdot Mirror
I imagine VPNs will become pretty common, but streaming porn over TOR sounds like an exercise in frustration.
Where's the uncertainty? Individual police officers have direct access to real time E911 location data. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is well documented. There doesn't need to be a vast network of federal agents watching you, there just needs to be one cop who's an asshole.
The term "nation" is commonly used to refer to a legally defined nation-state but this is not its first or only meaning.
From Wiktionary:
nation (plural nations)
A historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, ethnicity and/or psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.
The Roma are a nation without a country.
The Kurdish people constitute a nation in the Middle East
There are so many high quality open source apps on F-Droid that I honestly haven't touched Google Play in at least a year. I'm sure there are specific circumstances where someone might need something from Google Play but for the general smartphone user it's entirely unnecessary.
This is a weird understanding of post-modernism. It's not Foucault's fault that some SJWs, who don't understand what he was saying in the first place, have taken a few of his insights, decontextualized them, and (ironically) fashioned them into a political metanarrative. I have big problems with the inaccessible language they use, but the best of the post-modernists are just describing the world (as far as "just described" is possible). It's difficult to disagree with Baudrillard that Disneyland is an example of hyperreality, for example.
This decrying of post-modernism is similar to religious fundamentalists who think Nietzshe was being an atheist contrarian when he said "God is dead." That's not what's going on here.
Bolt Thrower's Realm of Chaos is the platonic ideal of the death metal album. There is none before it.
"+1 Troll" would definitely be a great addition, as would "-1 Funny." These labels can have wildly different connotations depending on context.
Sometime in the 90s I had read about salvia divinorum on the druggy side of the internet. A few months later I was wandering around one of those witchcraft stores with a girlfriend and noticed they had diviner's sage - the literal translation of salvia divinorum. I asked some witch lady if that was salvia and she said "No, but they have some across the street." They gentleman there told me it was to be used for incense only but that it would be necessary to use a torch style lighter . . . on the incense.
I enjoyed occasionally smoking unenhanced leaf - laughing uncontrollably while slowly sliding off the cough is quite fun - but there was enough of a dysphoric undertone (a kappa agonist!) that I never had any desire to try the extracts. I'm glad salvinorum A is being studied, though, as it really is very novel and I'm sure there plenty of medical insights to be gained from such a unique molecule. There's absolutely nothing like it.
Bandcamp came along at just the right time. Mp3.com was a great idea but the infrastructure and the audience just weren't there for selling digital music at the time. Independent musicians limped along on myspace for a few years until Facebook made things even worse. Bandcamp really did everything right with a DRM-free, artist-friendly business model that integrated Creative Commons licensing directly into the upload process. It's entirely possible that it, like everything good, will eventually be slowly destroyed by business majors, but for now it's a really great model and I hope it sticks around for as long as possible.
These days, the choice is almost purely one of aesthetics because if you're going to be releasing anything physically it'll include a download code anyway. CD-Rs were pretty common in the early 2000s but dropped off as smart phones became ubiquitous. Although, they were always kind of seen as a bit low-effort. I don't know why more bands don't release CD-Rs with nice art and a careful presentation, but people tend to just burn them and scrawl their name in marker on a Maxell (or whatever) branded CD-R. It's certainly still an option.
As for factory pressed CDs, those are still pretty popular, but like you said, you need to be pressing at least 500 for it to make sense economically.
I'll admit that the cassette tape is undoubtedly sonically inferior, but it's a very accessible way for young artists to release music. As noted above, pressing vinyl has gotten exorbitantly expensive in recent years. It's a good way to lose money. Obviously mp3/FLAC is the logical way to distribute music now, but humans are sentimental creatures and they like to have a physical object to hold on to. It's also a money maker; no one's ever drunkenly purchased a download code. I'll always have a soft spot for cassettes.
I still remember one very long winter during which I worked in a food court with the most obnoxious Christmas tree. It had a cheap built-in speaker that played the Shrek version of "12 Days of Christmas" on repeat, all day, every day. "Five onion rings!"
*shudders*
The opioid crisis has caused politicians, and hence doctors, to become extremely skiddish about anything that produces euphoria, regardless of how helpful it might be for patients. People love easy answers to complicated problems, so prohibition and paternalism are the watchwords here.
Is there a name for that? Peacedriving perhaps?
I know a lot of people are decrying hipsters, which is entirely fair, but one place that's never given up on the cassette is the punk/metal scene. It's a great medium for demo tapes and small batch releases from smaller bands. There are a lot of bands that will form, release an album on tape, go on tour, and break up within 6 months. It can take longer (and cost much, MUCH more) than that just to press a single on vinyl now that hipsters have thoroughly tied up the process. And it still feels really nice to hand some kids $5 for a hand numbered tape they poured their hearts into. Yeah, you could do that with a CD-R, but no one's ever treasured a CD-R.
The reason for irrational attack is right there in your comment. The narrative of civic engagement is dead. For good. Human beings do not have the agency to make decisions about their own lives. They haven't for some time, but the post-WWII social order promised that we would get there eventually, that things were getting better. The two dominant ideologies of progress, communism and capitalism, have each been put to the lie - and look at that timing! - just as the effects of climate change begin to become undeniable. Infrastructure will, even when not under attack, continue to deteriorate. Maybe attacking a self-driving car is an apt analogy, as there's no one at the wheel.
The potency is definitely a large part of the commercial appeal of fentanyl analogs - similar to the way beer gave way to liquor during prohibition - but I'd argue that an even bigger driver is that it's fully synthetic. Heroin, oxycodone, hydrocodone, etc. all rely on access to large quantities of poppy straw. Combine that with the proliferation of grey market Chinese and Indian labs and you've literally got a recipe for disaster.
There could be a time in the near future where it will be possible to "home brew" traditional opiates with genetically modified yeasts. I don't know how viable or realistic that scenario is, but it does sound like it will at least be technically possible very soon.
Meanwhile the FDA is spending a lot of time and energy trying to ban kratom, a plant which researchers hope will point the way to new analgesics that don't cause respiratory depression. Y'know, the thing that kills people.
Interesting times.
Let's not forget that there are other internet archives out there. I'm thinking specifically of archive.is, which has less willingness to acquiesce to takedown requests and robots.txt exclusions, but there are others out there that could surely use our support. A patchwork approach of several archives with differing approaches and goals (general, academic, scientific; text, image, video, etc.) could provide a more robust backup of the web. A single archive is a single point of failure.
It's probably not all that dangerous on a micro leve, but in the age of social mapping, personalized psychographics, and cybernetics, data brokers are becoming better and better at quantifying every data point. Metadata is much more valuable to them than any particular personal secret or private thought.
You must be a lot of fun at parties.
I remember watching all kinds of crazy stuff on the local public access channel before it was axed in the late 90s due to budget cuts. Like, real weird stuff. There was this goth chick that would paint with used tampons, and a clown that danced in front of a green screen showing straight up porn. I don't know if that was great stuff for a young me to be watching, but there was no censorship.
It's the idea that people who don't share a particular narrow worldview are programmed bots, regurgitating scripted lines, like non-player characters in video games. It's not a new idea, as this kind of elitist solipsism has long been common among what we now call "neckbeards," but it's been updated for the 21st century. It's similar to the "wake up, sheeple" cliche from conspiracy theorists of years past. NPCs, in this cosmology, are those that haven't taken the "red pill." It's the product of a mind buried deep in ressentiment.
Twitter is whatever you want to hate. Conservatives think it's liberal, radicals think it's centrist, liberals think it's alt-right, etc. And they're all, to some degree, correct. It's mirror in which you see your enemy. This is the nature of a feedback loop that runs on instantaneous emotionality. If one believes there's an existential threat to one's people, ideology, way of life, whatever, they'll spend time on the platform reinforcing that narrative. There's a bogeyman right outside all of our houses.
The sad thing about this is that, as far as I can tell, no one is disagreeing on individual data points. It's an abstract, shifting logic with no center. Climate change is being used as a proxy, an opportunity to publicly disagree with someone else's political opinions. This is how far political ideologies have removed us from any kind of reason. It's a circular shitshow where demonstrable fact is subsumed into the ephemeral logic of political performance. There's no need to make this so complicated. Let's just try to lessen the scale of mass human misery.
This is clear distillation of the move from the late 90s internet that escaped AOL's walled garden–idealistic, DIY, open-standard based, focused on the free (and I do mean free) flow of information, naive but hopeful–to the modern internet–cynical, monetized, closed platform based, focused on emotionally charged political (of all stripes) outrage.
I don't care one bit for this development, but I don't think that top-down solutions, whether technical, monetary, or bureacratic, could be successful. This is a social issue, a reflection of our collective values of convenience over all else. We could very easily find the way out of this, if we cared to.