Notices by zip (zip@wandering.shop), page 2

@cstross fair point, hostile things aren't they

@cstross updating the Turing Test so it has to work on someone who, given an instruction manual, can successfully set the clock on an oven or VCR

I know I've been going on about preparing for the country's Internet getting islanded but this week it feels like the real thing to prepare for is major datacenter losses or one of your communication tools just geoblocking the UK.

A good time to build resilience in the form of self hosting.

There's dozens of data centres in LA. I wonder how many big company NOCs have realised the danger

Three or four years ago I decided to ditch music streaming and put my music budget towards buying CDs and unencumbered digital albums instead. No regrets. It can't disappear from your collection due to rights expiry if you've got the physical disk.

The civility has been illusory the whole time, but now we're heading well into the territory where people don't believe in it anymore.

Throw in people being killed, losing loved ones or otherwise losing everything to climate disasters and predatory insurance companies and you've got a lot of people who are angry, radicalised and convinced that nothing in the system can deliver them justice.

And now something anarchists like to call "propaganda of the deed": assasinating an unsympathetic target

From their perspective, the state absolutely has to get this guy and they will throw every resource into chasing him. The longer he evades them, the more of an advert it is for other people to try the same thing.

Either way, the conditions that undoubtably created this guy will continue. If the ACA falls, it'll be worse. The next city to be wiped out by fire or flood will add a dozen more.

We've got worse income inequality than the run up to the French Revolution. It's gonna get Interesting.

The cool thing about civil society is that when there's injustice, you know it's someone's job to handle it. Criminals are punished. Corporations are held to account. The government provides a safety net. There's no need to get spicy.

Now if people see a supreme court make blatantly partisan decisions, your incoming president pardons his allies, corporations have been fucking you for five decades and your healthcare costs more than rent and bankrupts you anyway, they might try other stuff.

@cstross technically true of all escape rooms

@cstross that's be the rather cursed anime GATE, which is about how awesome the JSDF would be at war and also about this one guy who just constantly picks up girls from long-lived species who look like they're fourteen

@cstross you'd be amazed how many online services refuse payment from pay as you go cards. I have tried this!

Question: how much of an internet citizen can you be without ever supplying a credit card or a phone number that ties your real life identity to something that can be subpoenaed?

Like, can you get an email address? Start a social media account? Own a domain? Rent compute?

Fun Simpsons fact! Hank Scorpio wasn't a parody of tech billionaires – we didn't really have those back then. Instead he was inspired by James Bond supervillains.

By the logic of capitalism the way to eliminate every undocumented migrant worker's job is to (a) remove ICE as a threat that bosses can use and (b) set the minimum wage for undocumented workers to 3x the minimum wage for citizens and make sure they can file a labor complaint nice and easy. Would-be exploitative employers would quite literally lose the farm.

The fact that the US does the opposite tells us that underpaying and exploiting migrants is the entire point.

Oh no, someone got so mad about me being mean about doctors that he felt the need to tell me he was blocking me. Pretentious twat.

My dude, I'm transgender and chronically ill. Even when they have the resources to spend time talking to me my relationship with the medical system for the last twenty years has been adversarial.

Also in this fantasy world there's enough doctors with enough spare time that they'll stand around explaining MRIs to patients and then watching them do the procedure

I'm watching this old fantasy show called House, MD. It's about a doctor who actually bothers to work out what's wrong with you

I wish I could figure out how to give people precise instructions without sounding like I think they're an idiot. Like. Please buy me some pseudoephedrine-based decongestant. Do not under any circumstances buy me phenylephrine-based decongestant. Specifically pseudoephedrine based, please. Come back with nothing otherwise.

Then they come back with phenylephedrine-based decongestant "because that's all they had" and I add it to the pile.

I feel a great disturbance in the force, as though tens of millions of people all had the same thought and then decided it was better not to post it

If you happen to be prestigiously-careered enough to be contemplating fleeing the US, you should have started months ago. It's a tight deadline even now and if you wait for November you'll still be in the US by February.

Visas take months, especially when everyone else has had the same idea. Ideally, pick a country and visa with a nice clean pathway to permanent residency that does not kick you out if you lose your job.

Remember your target country might turn fash too.