Schadrach

…and he very, very carefully threaded the needle and chose his words to avoid perjury. It’s why he had questions like asking them to define “sexual relations” (the definition they gave didn’t include oral, so he did not have sexual relations with her by their definition) and what the definition of “is” was (specifically does it mean currently or does it include at any time in the past).

Is it? I went to a state college to take advantage of in state tuition, commuted because gas for my Geo Metro 2-seater was cheaper than a dorm room, etc to cut my costs down to where I wouldn’t need to put myself in debt and got a small scholarship/grant (that in turn came with an in-state work commitment that shaped my choices after graduation). Other people my age made other choices related to college that landed them in massive amounts of debt that I avoided.

If I had known that I could borrow as much as I wanted and expect someone else to pay it off instead of being stuck holding responsibility for my debts, I likely would have made different substantially less frugal and less restrictive choices.

Tell, you what, nix an equivalent amount of my debts, and we’ll call it a deal. You don’t mind paying off my mortgage, right? Just because you didn’t take out a mortgage doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be responsible for mine, right?

What’s the best way to do that, presuming I already have access to a Usenet server but that’s really all I know?

I mean I’ve used Usenet before, but that was back in the late 90s using Netscape Communicator and I was mostly (but not exclusively) reading text groups. Most of my piracy back then involved trolling IRC channels to either find DCC bots or get access to FTPs. And even then was limited because, well, dialup.

She is quite important in contribution to the society, but when we talk just about working people, we overlook her.

…even then, since her contribution is to her own household should that marriage collapse society decides that not only is she owed a share of their produced assets to date but also a share of his future production for her part in enhancing it to date (alimony), including the requirement that he must continue to produce at that level at a minimum (aka alimony is based on what a judge believes you can earn, not what you actually are earning). Sometimes this also includes a share of any future retirement income as well.

Everyone should be able to live without poverty.

Ultimately, what you would consider living without poverty requires the labor of some number of people to maintain, and eventually the question of why they do that labor for people who don’t do that labor will be asked, by them if not by you. Usually the answer is that those people are doing other labor which benefits the first group, usually abstracted out to some generalized representation of debt (aka money).

If i invite someone out to dinner I pay. If someone invites me out to dinner I expect them to pay.

expect the man to pay

…they’re the same picture. Seriously, given the general dynamics of how straight dating actually ends up working most of the time IRL, these are basically equivalent statements, because the man is also generally expected to be the one to do the asking.

ghouls with more remaining brain cells.

Heritage.

…they’re the same picture.

Was going to be my second pick after the considerably more niche VR.5. Which involved the MC entering the minds of people via modem because it was 90s scifi about virtual reality. It also tended to be trippy as hell in a way that is just amazing. Also basically impossible to find without sailing the seven seas, and not easy even then.

Was going to throw Kindred: The Embraced in as a third choice. Also considerably more obscure than Heroes, it was basically a White Wolf Vampire: The Masquerade TV series.

Nobody has direct evidence of the shooter’s motivations or political affiliation today. Nobody.

From the texts between him and his roomate that have been publicly released. Source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/16/charlie-kirk-shooting-prosecutor-utah

“Roommate: ‘Why?’ Robinson: ‘Why did I do it?’ Roommate: ‘Yeah.“’ Robinson: ‘I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.”

So, we have his direct statement to his transwoman roommate as to his motive, either you can take that at face value or claim it’s some carefully crafted lie intentionally meant to deceive us as to his real motives. You do you.

Likely based on his texts with his transwoman roommate.

Meh, no process is perfect and sensitivity and specificity are often enemies. Basically, in a lot of cases the more sensitive you make a test to detect something, the more likely it is to accidentally catch false positives.

Sounds like they’ve vastly improved it’s ability to detect, hopefully that didn’t come with false detections for people running unusual hardware or software combinations.

Actually truth social would be the perfect example, but again, how many people do you hear talking about how much they enjoy truth social? It’s true nobody wants to be sued by Trump, but that’s not really support as much as fear and its own form of censorship.

Truth Social is always there if you want it, but is it really censorship that keeps more people from using it or is it to some extent capitalism working?

Truth Social wasn’t subject to the same pressures and attacks, largely out of fear of Trump. It’s mostly Trump and his fans that are why anyone cares, but most of the sorts attracted to a site like that came rushing back to X post-Elon.

If you have a truly free market people will just go to another platform bc there’s no reason they have to use X, or Truth Social, or Mastodon, or BlueSky unless one person (or a group of oligarchs) buys all of them and controls the market. If one of those platforms fails, can you really blame it on censorship?

There isn’t, outside of network effects. But the ones being barred from Apple devices, and only able to be sideloaded on Android (at least until Google removes that feature, which they’ve announced is coming) aren’t operating on the same footing as the others, and not because of a failure to draw an audience, but by being restricted by, well, a bunch of oligarchs…

Musk bought X bc he claimed he wanted to have free speech and to get rid of all the bots, but he did neither. Now that place is mainly a bot fueled echo chamber. It’s just not an enjoyable platform to use anymore, and most users have switched to an alternative like bluesky.

The range of rhetoric that won’t get you banned from the site has certainly expanded, even if most of what is actually there is deceptive bullshit. Probably 1 in 10 current Xitter users would be banned for saying unacceptable things under pre-Musk Twitter.

Apple and Google didn’t want to lose business by associating with something the majority of people found off-putting, but is that really censorship?

Tech oligarchs cut a competitor to other tech oligarchs off at the knees to control the span and spread of online discourse - this is the kind of thing that supporting feels like supporting the face eating leopard party.

Again you’re relying on an existing platform to take on supporting your messaging instead of just promoting it yourself. Couldn’t you just rely on a user base sharing a link to download an app rather than putting it in one of the stores?

Build your own entire tech stack from the hardware up, got it. Those leopards do seem hungry for faces though.

But that is also why so many users or instances block instances like .grad and to a lesser extent .ml, and some people do argue they should be de-federated.

I don’t think that’s really necessary. I’m glad to have the ability to talk to and interact with people I don’t agree with on everything. There’s .ml users here that have been very helpful with things nobody else was able to help me with. (I’m actually glad we’re able to have this conversation we’re having.)

I find a certain irony here, given the instance you come from and the instance I come from. Yours has defederated from ~95 other instances, including some for being too left and some for being too right. Mine has only defederated from one, an instance essentially abandoned by it’s admins that was posting spam and actual csam.

But, I’ve also been blocked from .ml communities without any warning bc I shared images of Xinnie the Pooh. So, i’m sure there are some people on the left who willingly identify as tankies, and would enjoy a completely separate dedicated safe space on the internet for communism or leftist authoritarianism. If they made one, it would very likely end up running into the same issues as Gab/Parler, but I still wouldn’t believe that censorship is to blame for its failure.

Far left fediverse instances exist, and can moderate as strictly or not as they please. No third party is actively preventing you from connecting to one with an appropriate client, including client devs. Let alone tech oligarchs cutting them off from major platforms entirely.

It’s just difficult to create a market for a very niche and exclusionary product that a lot of people find off-putting due to extremist content.

Yet, their problem wasn’t not being able to get members organically. Gab was doing pretty well until it got big enough to be noticed and it was forcibly cut off from the mobile market by Google and Apple, migrated their backend to Mastodon as a way around that, and then had Mastodon client devs block them at the client level. At the time of migration, they were the largest Mastodon instance, so it wasn’t a matter of lack of interest. That’s kinda my point - the barriers they faced aren’t organic or a lack of interest but coordinated moves against them.

Now lie detectors don’t work at all…

Meh, they do work. They just measure stress response, not truthfulness. The idea being that you’ll have a heightened stress response to a question you are lying about the answer to, which may or may not be accurate depending on individual and situation.

Breath analyzers aren’t exactly accurate. There’s a bunch of things that can give them false positives, they often aren’t properly calibrated, and the science behind them is kinda shaky. They got challenged often enough in certain states that in at least one state if an officer has you breathe in a machine and that machine produces a number higher than the legal BAC limit, that’s proof of DUI regardless of what the machine may or may not do to result in that number.

Homelander, from the comic then Amazon Prime series The Boys. He’s basically Superman, if Superman were raised in a lab by a literal Nazi super-soldier program, then used as the face of a giant corporation with massive influence in the media, biotech and social media spaces, to start with that also buys up contracts with the highest profile superhumans (and also on the sly are responsible for creating them). Then just think what the realities of that would look like. And yes, he is at least as horrible as you think.

The eponymous Boys are a group of normies trying to take down superhumans, with the main POV character’s inciting incident being when A-Train (think the Flash) runs through his girlfriend directly in front of him.

That and their cops are paranoid as fuck and would rather overspend than risk getting a scratch.

Police can get decommissioned military equipment on the cheap, so long as they can basically write a grant proposal justifying why they want it.

Why did nobody just make an exclusively right wing alternative to mastodon?

…but they did, and were broadly prevented from growing organically. See Parler and Gab.

Gab actually changed it’s underlying backend twice. They started with their own thing, Google and Apple cut their app off from the app stores so they switched to something that was a common protocol rather than a dedicated app and moved to Mastodon as a way to route around censorship. Most Mastodon servers promptly defederated them for being right wingers, and several of the major Mastodon clients built in client level mandatory blacklists causing their client to refuse to connect to Gab (in some cases Gab was the entire blacklist) - you can see which ones because they have some older store reviews about “refusing to connect to the largest Mastodon instance” because for a time that was Gab. Later on, they moved to something involving crypto somehow, I’m not really sure about the details.

Parler appeared, got big fast, got kneecapped by Google, Apple and Amazon and by the time they recovered had lost most of any momentum they ever had.

They even produced their own Reddit-alike, spread across several .win domains - that was a thing that happened in response to the biggest Trumper community getting banned from Reddit. That original community migrated to TheDonald.win and later rebranded as Patriots.win.

Truth Social is basically what Gab/Parler wanted to be, but big Tech doesn’t want to fight against Trump because he’s exactly the kind of petty asshole to fuck them over for considering it. Truth Social is of course Mastodon under the hood with federation disabled.

But if we presume fediverse apps are a protocol rather than a proprietary product (which is usually how they are sold to users, making analogies to things like email or the web as compared to a proprietary system) why would you need to reinvent the wheel? No one is arguing that we need an exclusively communist alternative to email or the web.

Did they actually build their own alternatives that anybody wanted to use,

Right wingers functionally excluded from major platforms more or less until Musk bought Twitter actually did create their own spaces. Several of which got made functionally inaccessible from mobile devices, or removed from search engines or otherwise actively prevented from growing organically, many of them eventually being quietly put back after any buzz around them had died down. Think Gab, Parler, various .win sites that are reddit-like, etc.

Hell, at one point the largest Mastodon instance was literally one such space that had had it’s own app banned from the app stores for being an uncensored far right space, and then several of the major general Mastodon clients made their clients refuse to connect to that specific instance at the client level as well. If you’ve ever seen a Mastodon client on say the Play store with negative reviews saying that it couldn’t connect to the largest instance, that’s because at the time the largest Mastodon instance was technically Gab.

I was thinking more or less the same thing - if you are here illegally it’s probably both cheaper and easier to pay you $1k per person and a free flight back whence you came than to track you down, go through the legal process, and remove you against your will.

3 is best. And also ISO. Most notably because if you have dates in that format, alphabetical.sort and sort by date are the same thing. You can also continue from there to increasing degrees of precision, like 2025-09-01 23:02:35 and that remains true.

…and yet the elevator pitch “Seth McFarlane wants to be Picard” sounds like it would be awful. But it works.