It’s both, but the honey trap provides both motivation for the traffickers and it means everyone involved should be considered compromised by foreign states. If it were only a pedo ring, it would be bad but that’s pretty much where the conspiracy would stop.

But with a verified honey trap, it needs to be assumed that the named people are now (and have been) acting on behalf of a hostile foreign nation who has mountains of blackmail on them. And reframing those implicated peoples’ motivations from “they’re just seeking power for themselves” to “they’re aiding a hostile foreign nation” shifts things from “selfish and power-hungry” to outright “high treason”.

Home Assistant is entirely self-hosted. No third-party required. It can run in a container or on a raspberry pi, but it’s typically easiest (and most functional) when you use a dedicated Home Assistant Green. It connects to Zigbee, Matter, etc via USB adapters. Or if your devices are networked (instead of using a hub), it can often find them directly on your network via local device discovery. It integrates with Alexa really well, so you wouldn’t need to immediately ditch your existing smart speakers.

If you really want to get fancy, you can even set up a local machine to do local LLM processing for self-hosted smart speakers.

I personally started using it after my smart light provider (Sengled) had a few extended outages. There was no communication from the company, and lots of people were speculating that they had gone kaput. It was literally cheaper to just get the HA Green and a Zigbee dongle, and set that up (instead of replacing all of my lights with a different brand). And since it’s entirely self-hosted, it even keeps working when my internet goes out during storms.

The funny part is that blue LEDs were historically the hardest to make. Engineers tried for years, but the shorter blue wavelength was elusive. But one Japanese dude managed to figure it out, and they exploded in popularity because they were the new futuristic thing. And now they’re actually one of the cheapest colors available, because every single manufacturer was rushing to jump on the bandwagon and has the equipment to make them. Sort of like the flatscreen TV crash in the early 2010’s, when TV prices suddenly crashed because every manufacturer was getting better and better at making the (historically very expensive) screen panels cheaply.

And to answer the question on why they’re so fucking bright, it’s because blue is a very short wavelength. It takes less power to produce shorter wavelengths. When you compare the relative brightness of two different colored LEDs, shorter wavelengths will be brighter. Like if you send 1 watt of power into two different LEDs, a blue LED will always be brighter than a red one (if everything else about them is the same). That’s why so many of the cheap RGB LED lights tend to be sort of blueish when they’re set to “white”. The “white” is just all of the individual diodes at 100% brightness, which means the blue tends to beat out the other colors.

But the engineers who design those things don’t stop to consider that a blue LED needs less power. They’re just checking the “has a power light” item off of their design punch list. They could undervolt the diode to make it dimmer, but that requires extra circuitry. Just get a diode that works on the same voltage as what you’re already using (probably 5v or 12v for a wall charger) and hook it up to the same voltage that you already have. And use a blue one because they’re the cheapest option. Congrats, you’ve just designed a charger that has a fucking blinding blue LED. The whole “people will want to use this in their bedroom in the dark” thing was never even a consideration.

This is also why red (and infrared) light is better at heating things up. Longer wavelengths carry more energy, which means they heat things up more when they come into contact. The wave takes more power to make, which means it is able to carry more energy to whatever you’re trying to make. Trying to design a blue heat lamp would be an exercise in frustration, because you’d be fighting physics. It’s also why the sky is blue during the day but sunsets are red. The blue light tends to get scattered by air molecules, (which is why the sky looks blue) but red light is able to punch through and reach the surface when the sun is at a steep angle (like during a sunset).

Yeah, my linked comment was actually in response to an earlier comment I made, basically saying “this app’s explosive rise in popularity feels astroturfed.” I caught a couple of downvotes for that original comment. But the more I tried using it, the worse it got. It will 100% contribute to the normalization of Nazi viewpoints.

Yup. Privatize profits, socialize losses. It’s the way the capitalist machine is able to keep grinding up orphans for the 1%.

Yeah, I tried to give it an honest shot. Made an account and opened the Discover page. The very first post was an antisemitic “the Jews are secretly running the world” conspiracy theory post. Whatever, it’s inevitable on an anti-censorship app. Not a great first impression, but I’m willing to shrug it off as a fluke.

Then three or four posts later, there was a blatant “Hitler was right about the Jews and the holocaust wasn’t enough” post, made by an account that was dedicated to glorifying Hitler. Again, this is on the Discover page for a brand new account. Meaning it’s what the algorithm is serving to users by default.

I made another comment about it (with screenshots) a day or two ago. Here is the link.

Yeah. Sort of like holding two ends of a chain and dragging it back and forth. Even if the chain isn’t traveling the full length, it’s still moving and you could still extract power from the system if you attached something to the middle of the chain.

More Epstein stuff. A document mentioned he was going to get his wife to start taking antibiotics because of an STI he picked up. The joke is that he wouldn’t want to tell her it was an STI, so he’d have to find some other way to justify the antibiotics.

My big concern right now is actually the fact that the “no censorship” part is already being weaponized by Nazis. I suspect it will quickly fall prey to the Nazi Bar Problem. I gave the app a fair shot. Opened it up, and the very first post was a “the Jews are secretly running the world” post from an account named something like @ItsAlwaysTheJews. It had a caricature of a Jew (big nose, long sideburns, and yarmulka) reaching out of a TV to steal a watcher’s brain.

Okay, not a great first impression, but that’s inevitable on a free speech app. Let’s keep scrolling. Three or four more posts down, and I was met with a “Hitler was right about the jews” post. Yikes. The fact that those were up front and center (on the default “Ranked” sort) for my brand new account was… Not a great sign.

Time will tell. I do hope it succeeds, because TikTok is clearly an awful choice. But it needs to succeed for the right reasons, and not just become a Nazi cesspit.

Edit: I just opened the app again after posting this comment, and the second post on my feed was a white pride “they’re trying to replace us/white genocide” (common white power talking point to recruit new members) post:

Edit 2: Looking at the account’s follower list, it looks like users are largely using the Palestinian genocide to justify Nazi imagery. Equating Israel’s actions with Jews in general. There are a few straight up Hitler glorification accounts on the follower list, which have “the Jews are genociding Palestine” types of posts right alongside 1488 posts, swastikas, and Nazi salutes. Here is a quick screenshot of some of the followers:

And here is a screenshot of how those followers are using the Palestinian genocide to justify the holocaust:

The upper post is a bunch of dead Palestinian kids and babies lined up in a row. The lower post is obvious. Both (re)posted by the same @HitlerTheHero account.

I mean, it’s charted #1 on social media on the app stores. It’s an explosive rise in popularity, but that’s not unheard of. If anything, I suspect that the popularity is manufactured. It’s likely some company running an astroturf campaign to capitalize on the fact that people are tired of TikTok’s censorship BS.

Yeah, I gave it a shot. I opened the app, and immediately scrolled past a “Jews are secretly ruling the world” conspiracy theory post from a user named something like @ItsAlwaysTheJews… Okay, maybe a fluke. Not a great first impression, but let’s see what else the app has to offer. Then a few posts later there was a “Hitler was right about the Jews” post.

So yeah, it has definitely fallen prey to the Nazi Bar problem.

Saw “no censorship” in the description, and had suspicions because it’s a common dogwhistle for “we’ll allow the most vile people as long as they’re not technically breaking the law”. Got the app, and immediately scrolled past a “Jews secretly run the world” post followed shortly by a “Hitler was right about the Jews” post. Yeah, the problem with “no censorship” is that it inevitably falls prey to the Nazi bar problem.

This is the country that wants to have the soccer world cup. Who in their right mind would go watch that? Watch soccer, get arrested and sent to a concentration camp.

Something something “Nazi Germany hosted the Olympics” I guess.

It’s also ineffective in the short term as a strike, because the rich will just wait it out. One day of slightly lower productivity isn’t going to grind things to a halt. What makes a strike powerful is that it continues until grievances are remedied. A true strike takes months or even years to organize, and it takes a lot of unionized money to keep people from going broke during an extended strike. After all, the strikers need to be able to wait out the rich and powerful. Those union dues are largely to allow the union to pay striking workers.

However, with all of this being said, this kind of thing is good for normalizing strikes. America largely doesn’t strike. But if you can establish a new normal for protests, it makes the larger things much much easier to organize in the long term.

Make it more than they earned, plus a large percentage, and factor in how likely they were to get caught. At the size of Google, companies are essentially just big statistics machines, doing risk/reward calculations. Imagine you have an illegal business opportunity that could make you $100M in profit per week. Your risk of getting caught is estimated at ~25% per week. And your fine for getting caught is $150M per week. Even though the fine is higher than the expected profit, your net profit per week averages out to +$62.5M.

That is the original $100M, minus the $150M*25% (or $37.5M total). Yes, some weeks will be a loss. But if the numbers stay consistent, you’ll make more in the long term simply due to the fact that you don’t get caught every time. As long as you manage to avoid getting caught for at least two weeks, (which shouldn’t be difficult, considering the 25% estimated chance of regulators catching on) you’ve already made enough money to cover the fine.

Of course the company will do the illegal thing, because the math says it will likely be profitable. And even if they’re caught, it was just the price of doing business. As long as they made more than the expected fine over the given time period, they have profited.

Hey, I noticed you downvoted. Care to justify that? After all, people need a good reason to do so, right?

Hey @[email protected] care to explain the downvote, and why you deleted your comments after you were buried? Didn’t feel like I was contributing to the conversation? If that’s the case, why did you delete your own comments that were “contributing”?

Kinda annoying when someone else does it, isn’t it?

Imagine being angry with people for engaging with content using the tools they were given… I don’t typically downvote… But fuck it, I’m downvoting every single comment you posted in this thread just because you’re whining about it.

My buddy’s parents used to own a comic book store, and they regularly had to turn away Magic The Gathering players for smelling too bad. They even had a sign that they’d put up on the door on Fridays (Friday was MTG night) that said something along the lines of “we reserve the right to refuse service if you smell like you haven’t showered all week”

Yeah, my mom actually did some work to try and educate truckers about modern slavery, because truckers are often the ones who interact with victims the most. Basically, there is a thriving sex slavery industry in America (and I’m sure in most of the rest of the world), which is propped up by truckers.

Truckers are sort of the perfect John when it comes to sex work. They don’t have any local connections, they don’t have any evening plans, they’re often lonely because they spend lots of time on the road by themselves, and they’ll be leaving town in the morning so you don’t need to worry about them hanging around. So a large part of the sex trafficking industry is actually focused on prostitution for truckers. Truckers call the prostitutes who target truck stops “lot lizards”… And pretty much every trucker has a lot lizard story.

My mom was doing work to try and educate truckers on the signs of sex trafficking and slavery, because oftentimes the lot lizards are sex slaves. People tend to think of slavery as chains and hard labor, but modern slavery tends to use leverage and/or addiction instead. Kidnap a teenage runaway, (or fool her into coming into the country with the promise of a good job), take away her money and ID, force her into doing heroin or meth until she’s hooked, then tell her that she’ll only get her fix after she has fucked enough truckers to earn it. Keep her perpetually broke by charging her for things that she has no way of ever realistically repaying.