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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • It’s also about making sure you can’t sue them, even if they did something wrong, even if they did it on purpose, even if they knew it was wrong when they did it.

    Instead you must agree to “binding arbitration”, so that if you lose they get to learn what strategy works against customers, and if you win they get to learn what strategy doesn’t work against customers (but in any case the details cannot be shared with other customers).

    Also, you can never participate in a class action suit, so even if they did do something wrong, on purpose, and you convinced a -judge- arbiter, you just get the $12 judgment, or whatever the value is of your actual damages. The corporation can keep the $12 they stole from each of their millions of other customers, who didn’t also start arbitration.

    It is shocking that it is even legal





  • It’s doublespeak, a la 1984. In this case many of the words used are inversions of their usual meaning.

    I’ll provide some translations:

    patriots -> seditionists

    biblical -> cloaked in the authority of God – which here must be explicitly stated because their actions are opposed to any God of justice

    open boarders -> following legal and ethical principles (remember, these people oppose ethical principles)

    peacemakers -> those who use violence, or the threat of violence, to obstruct peace. See also, terrorists

    besieged by dark forces of evil -> opposed by morality, ethics, or the law. The addition of “on all sides” changes the ‘or’ to ‘and’

    As a bonus, “globalists” is antisemitism. There’s an old canard that justice for minorities = communism = Jewish conspiracy. This is particularly common among nazis. The convoy organizer is signaling that their group is accepting of these ideas


  • I misunderstood what “war machine” meant.

    I heard phrases on TV like “it cost $1 billion dollars per month to keep the war machine running” and “the US captured 100,000 barrels of oil per day to feed the war machine” and I thought this thing must be some epic beast.

    The terrorists better watch out! We’re sending the war machine! It must have, like, sawblade hands and tank tracks and breathe fire and have machine gun turrets.

    Imagine my disappointment when I learned that THE WAR MACHINE was just a metaphor and not a Mecha Godzilla








  • Disclaimer: this was a long time ago so things might be different now

    I flashed the “international version” of Cyanogenmod on what turned out to be the AT&T version of my first android smartphone (Samsung Galaxy S2) and nearly bricked it.

    The install froze but I knew I should never interrupt a flash, so I left it there for about 2 hours until the battery died. However, the flashing process also replaces the battery manager firmware, so it was not possible to charge the phone until I flashed the correct ROM, and I couldn’t flash the ROM because the battery was dead.

    Thankfully, that phone had swappable batteries so I solved it by buying a second one online (and waiting for shipping). But today’s phones’ batteries are usually soldered onto the board, so if it happened today I’d be SOL.

    I personally wouldn’t chance it unless someone with the same device confirmed it was OK