Notices by gcvsa ⭐️🔰🇺🇸 🇵🇭 (gcvsa@mstdn.plus)

"Extreme fear is driving the US market." #USpol

Not that I disagree with the sentiment, but before we bother building more trains, we need to build more mixed-use apartment buildings in town and city centers. No point in trains if there aren't concentrations of populations to use them. #urbanism #architecture #planning #transit #transportation

@evan I don't usually say so, but yes. Usually I say, "well-being and self-actualization", but that includes "happiness", for me.

@skinnylatte I ended up living in Vermont because I was homeless and unemployed with nowhere to go, and this was the only place that a friend offered me a place to live.

Ten years later, I've been homeless in this town twice more, because of the extreme housing crisis and stagnant economy, but thankfully have been marginally housed for over 7 yrs.

I just ran for my first public office and won a 3-year term. I'm still living in poverty, underemployed, and brown and queer in a very white place.

@skinnylatte @chrisjrn Yeah, being Filipino, I don't mind the vinegar at all, since vinegar is one of the most important things in Filipino cuisine, but it's not always appropriate. Thanks for the info, I will try to track some down. I live in rural Vermont, so it's definitely not available locally.

@chrisjrn @skinnylatte I really need to know what sambal you are talking about. There is never enough chili in life.

This post makes me think of something that I've been pointing out for many years, and that is the fact that the government is permitted to make "mistakes" and ruin people's lives, pretty much with total impunity and immunity.

The government can place you under false arrest, cause immense immediate and irrevocable damage to your life, and there are almost never any legal consequences or compensation for it.

https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/114121067006477074

I could very easily spend an indefinite time in detention being tortured, causing irreparable damage to my life, my health, my finances, and my public reputation, as the result of the racist, sexist, or anti-LGBT whims of a DHS thug, and there would be no legal recourse for me, whatsoever. And if I attempted to resist in any way, I could be brought up on criminal charges or even summarily murdered.

All I'd get is a "sorry about that", while they sneer at me right to my face, if I even survived.

A side effect of this is something I have also pointed out many times. US Customs and Border Patrol claims very wide latitude in violating Americans' constitutional guarantees within the 100-mile border zone (in which I have lived, most of my life).

As a person who is frequently mistaken for Latino/Hispanic/Chicano, if they decide to harass me, no amount of documentation is a shield, because they can simply claim that my documents appeared to be forged or make up some other unfalsifiable lie.

And there wouldn't even be any consequences to the personnel involved for having "made a mistake", because as @whknott points out, there is a legal shield doctrine that presumes that officers are always acting in "good faith", and obviously trying to prove otherwise is effectively impossible, unless someone blatantly admits otherwise and directly implicates themselves or fellow officers.

There is no system of national identification in the US. We have a de facto hodgepodge of state-issued driver's licenses, state (and/or municipally) issued birth certificates, Social Security numbers (which by law are not supposed to be identification documents), US passports, and immigration/naturalization papers.

In all of these categories, there are Americans who do not have and have never had one or more of these documents.

I am a natural born citizen of the United States. Like most natural born citizens, the only actual legal proof of citizenship I possess, because that is how it is normally done, under the provisions of Amendment XIV, is my birth certificate.

It is not customary in the US for people to carry around their birth certificate, and as I've already pointed out, police can and will simply claim that my documents "appeared to be false identification", even if I did carry it.

The reality is, it would take a generation or more to establish a national identity system, if we even wanted to do that—AND WE SHOULD NOT WANT TO DO THAT MUCH LESS ACTUALLY DO IT.

The reality is, they will simply round up whoever they think doesn't fit the Aryan Nazi model, "and let God sort them out".

Selective and discretionary enforcement is one of the greatest dangers to Liberty imaginable.

Rescinding birthright citizenship under Amendment XIV would require the government to definitively establish the citizenship status of all 330+ million people in America.

This is obviously an impossible task, but the techie douchebag billionaires and their subordinate tech worshippers behind the Trump Administration (Musk, Thiel, etc, and their little douchebag hacker boys) want to believe they can do all this by computer, and they don't care about any errors.

Looks like we all need to find replacements for #Firefox and #Thunderbird.

I'm trying out LibreWolf on Windows, but what can replace Thunderbird that's cross platform (Win, Mac, Linux, at least)? SeaMonkey, maybe? Is that independent from Mozilla?

#Mozilla seems intent on profit at the expense of users.

Because racism. That's why. In America, if the answer isn't "because money", then it is almost certainly, "because racism".

#USpol

The obvious lesson that we need to learn from this is that the only reason the American system of government has survived as long as it has is not because of the Constitutional separation of powers, but because of the strength of broad social norms that mitigated the tendency of people intent on destroying the government from within from being elected, in the first place.

We can see this now, because there are no legal or constitutional constraints on what the Trump Administration is doing.

@ploum don't kid yourself, they will replace you with AI as soon as it's cheaper to do so.

@youronlyone This is why when I went to visit my family in the PH in 1999, I brought an MSR Waterworks II filter system. Only, I didn't actually end up using it that much. I probably ended up drinking bottled water most of the time (if I wasn't drinking Coca-Cola or San Miguel, lol), but it's been 25 years, so it's hard to remember.

@youronlyone OMG, I just watched the trailer, and it looks amazing!