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Joined 18 days ago
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Cake day: August 10th, 2026

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  • Tbh you should just get a mac.

    You can have privacy on them with a little less effort than on windows and they’re already decently secure. They can play cyberpunk and you already have the linux (bsd) toolkit. They’re already the kind of computer you like with the good trackpad etc.

    I would drop your “be European” requirement.



  • I don’t care about whatever argument you’re having. It’s extremely inaccurate to claim Americas entry into ww2 was diplomatically motivated when Japan was taking by military force islands that had been part of an extractive zone contested by them and America. It’s literally two imperial powers low key fighting over their periphery then one goes PISS NUKE INCOMING.

    Again, I do not care about whatever argument you’re having. If anything I want you to be able to integrate more information into your understanding of imperialism. It’s really hard for us as westerners to do that when so much of the groundwork of our historical understanding is jingoism and great man and it’s good you’re interrogating your own ideas.

    Also you should probably start with the Spanish American war as your American point of entry into imperialism (you say here “global interventionism” but idk wth that means.)


  • Hey I don’t have time to do a whole infodump style reply but off the dome Washington profited immensely from the revolutionary war because he was a land speculator and the us needed to get into ww2 so it could stop the empire of japan from taking control of all the island territories it chased Spain off of.

    I wouldn’t personally call the first example imperialism because you gotta make a distinction between Byzantine and American somehow and the one from imperialism the highest stage of capitalism seems appropriate and answers a lot of questions but the second one is literally imperialism by any definition you wanna call it.

    Also even if you fully reject Lenin’s work you gotta grapple with the historical facts that the eastern states didn’t really create a program of mass import of raw materials from the western expansion states and complete control over the western states government to the detriment of the people who lived in them to the extent that the nation they represented did to the Philippines for example. The distinction between imperialism and colonialism for the modern age helps with that and fits many other modern examples, most notably israel. Israel isnt doing imperialism to Palestinians, they are doing colonialism.

    Regarding Americas western expansion I am compressing a million pages of history and some really powerful counterexamples into a did they didn’t they statement here and I know that.

    Like I said I don’t have time to do the other two without referring to a bunch of books to get my claims perfectly exactly irrefutably correct on the (no offense intended) Redditor instance.




  • That’s only true for some environments.

    E: this is the first time I’ve read that blog post since it was published (or at least a long time ago) and there’s now a comment specifically referencing the actual behavior I observed in the wild when I tried to sub other things in for “normal” uses of dd:

    Nobody says: 2016-12-30 at 15:17

    cat /dev/cdrom > myfile.iso

    Works

    cat myfile.iso > /dev/cdrom

    Won’t – dd allows you do handle writes in various block sizes, so if a device can’t handle a one-byte write, cat could well end up writing your byte followed by zeros (and because of where the pointer now is, do it again for the next byte).

    Still, all your other points stand – nice piece.

    While that comment was written seventy years ago, in this age of people with questionable intent, capability and integrity rewriting system tools in rust there’s no better time to linger thoughtfully over cp or cat or any number of other commands that begin with the letter “c” before grabbing the ol’ reliable footgun whose fifty years of script backwards compatibility ensure that no one can get their dd replacement accepted in normal use until it behaves as expected.


  • Secure erase just drops the ssd controllers table of where logical blocks are in the physical memory and trims the disk. Which is good and you should do.

    That means a person would have to address the memory directly with flying leads or a bed of nails or something. Or have special software that makes the controller tell them what’s on each physical block and then put that data together into a bunch of files.

    If that worries you, do dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/<disk> before you secure erase.

    Then everything on the drive will be random static before the secure erase drops the block table and trims, so even if someone uses magic power to read the block contents directly they just get to see static.

    That has the benefit of speeding up the drive by resetting read fatigue at the expense of one layer of writes which is always worth it.



  • Here’s an alternative view, one that perhaps you haven’t heard:

    You are living in a world that has become less stable or secure every day. A world with rampant inflation no matter how it’s measured. Guarantees of survival from government have been eroding away steadily and with the advent of llms those same guarantees from private business are already gone.

    Family is a safety net you still have access to. Property and possessions held by family empower this safety net.

    Consider having a serious and painful conversation with your dying loved ones regarding how to preserve the family and ensure that wealth paid for by the lifeblood and sweat of its members remain in control of the family for as long as is possible and further the needs of the members of the family when disposed of or used.


  • You’re way off.

    There were fuel economy requirements for c4c, your trade in had to be low mpg and your new purchase or lease had to be higher mpg. So it was never econoboxes. In fact they changed the rules in the middle of it and blacklisted a bunch of engine and model combos so you couldn’t get the rebate if your trade in was good enough on gas.

    If a person was coming in to get the c4c money then the dealer had to record the vins to prevent fraud. They made a system in some of the vin check websites that made it so you could look up and make sure you weren’t being sold a salvage car like after Katrina. There was still a really small amount of insane bullshit but it was one of the first times back then that you could get a free title check across state lines instantly and online.

    When a dealer gave someone the c4c money they had to record what title it was for and destroy the engine and body. So there was only the car salesman who’s employer wouldn’t be footing the bill for the payout standing between some prospective buyer correctly recognizing it was their one chance to get more for their trade in than any dealership would ever give them being way more willing to sign an onerous lease and signing off on putting reliable vehicles like the box Cherokee and blazer (and f150 and 1500 and and and) on the conveyor belt to being destroyed.

    And c4c cars never got scrapped. They were destroyed and then junked. After the most expensive part was destroyed as a requirement of the program the yard that did the job had 180 days to destroy the body. American scrapyards aren’t like European or Asian ones where the car is disassembled into its component parts that each get tagged and put on a shelf in a big warehouse, they drag the car out into a field and let it sit there. A car with no usable engine isn’t even worth handling because it’s taking up space that one with an engine could occupy. It’s not even worth putting in a spot because you have half a year to get some value out of the accessories that weren’t damaged in the engine destruction process (no water pump, no manifolds, no radiators or oil coolers, when the engine blows its seals externally it might even take out the alternator!) and the interior before you gotta move it on. Better to never mess with it in the first place.

    Even if none of that were true and it wasn’t actively destroying the parts, engine and chassis availability for two decades of vehicles people could have been driving for dubious environmental and economic gain, c4c specifically incentivized the poorest drivers to take on debt in order to juice the economy. It was fucking evil.