Good thing they got rid of all those pesky regulations or the poors would be using the power.

I wish I could watch the exploding heads at the NRA right now…

I look forward to his mugshot.

The fiction of the last 30 years is revealed to those with eyes to see.

All this time the capital class and their lackeys have been saying “Russia is a our superfriend now and China wants to be democratic so we are helping them by using their slave labour and don’t you feel guilty for questioning our supremely good intentions here!”

And meanwhile it’s the same old global power struggle, but you can make SO MUCH using slave labour, it was just too tempting to send every bit of our labour - even our high tech - over to their factories.

Unless I’m greatly misunderstanding the last panel, meme is also wrong.

Hey everyone, go outside and find some grass and take your shoes off and put your feet in it. Stand there for a minute or two and just feel the grass on your feet. Have fun!

People can help you, but there is a way to ask, and learning how to ask is part of learning the OS. We are fascinated by problems actually.

The problem is that people come and say things like “I tried to setup a fleegbat server and it doesn’t work!” and so for the helper it becomes a process of pulling the information out of the asker in a long and painful process of interaction and we just move on. Users who say things like “here is the error message I’m getting when I try to start up my fleegbo server, anyone understand this?” get way better help.

Those who really want to learn it come to understand these things, those who just want to do something neat and not work their ass off will complain that it’s too hard.

Those who do the work are rewarded in many ways. I drove a dump truck ten years ago, now I make twice what I used to, working with people who aren’t racist sacks of shit. They were my motivator to learn, I was tired of being among pigs every day.

I will be one of many saying this: if you want to self-host you need to learn Linux. It can be done, but this is not like taking a pottery class and you don’t really get to show anyone, the only people who will understand are people who are also able to do what you do. It’s rewarding on many levels, but pleasure and sociality are not among those rewards. :>

I must be the fortieth to advise you to install Linux.

This is reach Kim levels.

GenX here. Spotify came long after my youth. It came during my regression into second childhood.

TLDR: You don’t need a spotify/tidal/whatever, a personally curated collection of music is awesome and not being able to instantly play anything is not a death sentence. It can make things more fun by introducing things like anticipation.

I was once a music-obsessed child whose only access to most music was the random chance of hearing it on the radio. There were a few magical tunes that I wasn’t sure what album they were from or even who it was that would sometimes come in from the universe and give me a lift.

Then my mom got me a Woolco stereo for a birthday, 6th or 7th I think, and I now had the incredible ability to buy a 45 for a small amount of money - my allowance covered at least one, I remember, with money leftover for a large stash of candy to last out the week - and be able to hear any (one) song I wanted, anytime (that I was near my stereo). At used record stores I could get whole albums.

At some point I discovered that some record stores (I’m talking mall record stores in Saskatoon here, not hipster record shops on the lower east side) had a sort of 45 backlog, a section of older hit records you could still order, with a book you could look through for titles. Back then, it was understood that sometimes one hit tune was all an act was ever gonna have, and there was not a need to shove 9 remixes down your throat as an excuse to pump you for the price of an LP.

When you bought an LP, you got this 12" square of cover with it, big enough for detailed photos of the band, or lyrics, sometimes you’d even get a gatefold sleeve (so four broadsides instead of just two in full color, occasionally they would do this even without a second LP being included). Sometimes even high concept stuff, like Styx’s “Kilroy Was Here” in the mid-80s, a concept album which featured still shots and narrative segments of a 20-minute movie the band had shot of the Science Fiction storyline, which was a response to the various shenanigans of the political establishment of the time. These included the Satanic Panic, which has been thoroughly explored in podcasts in recent years, along with Tipper Gore’s P.M.R.C., which started with she heard Prince do Darling Nikki and by the end had elevated Frank Zappa, Dee Snider and John Denver as an unlikely triumvirate of free expression champions who spoke eloquently and with no uncertainty as to their message against this nascent fascism, and which I believe was the real reason Al Gore lost his election.

Anyone who loves music or freedom remembered.

Anyways I remember on many boring car rides where all I got was, you know, Aerosmith for the billionth time, that I wished there was a kind of car radio that you could just tune in by artist name and song and it would just play anything. As I saw it, we had telephones that I could talk to our relatives in other places with, why couldn’t I just tell the radio station what song to play electronically as well?

And about forty years later, we did indeed have that. More or less. All we had to do was murder the idea of music as art that is worth paying the artists for. We can quibble over rates and such, say this streamer only shaves the skin down to a few quivering nerve endings whereas Spotify skins the artist alive, but we all know that flogging the artist until they have no skin left is not the way to produce great art.

So I got off. I’ve started to collect up my old physical collections as flac files, which my phone has plenty of room for. I make playlists like I used to make mix tapes to entertain myself on my drives.

Now in my case I can point to having spent about $20 in 90s-00s money on most of the albums I’ve amassed so I just put it together how i could. I bought LPs, I bought cassettes, I bought CDs and I even bought some itunes downloads, and in many cases I did it twice for the same record over the years. In other cases I never bought the record, sure. Some of those allowance weeks I bought blank tapes instead of 45s OR LPs.

But basically, pick the artists you actually like who are working and signaling that they need help, and make a point of sending them some money. Buy a shirt, buy a physical media, LPs are still a lot of fun but pretty pricey. But just, take your music into your hands and your hard drive. Don’t stream anything. Carry it with you. Figure out how much space you’ve got on your phone, or get an SD card for it. Phone doesn’t have an SD card? You picked a bad company to buy from I guess, cause now you’ve started to play the game of triaging.

In the 80s, if I was going out of town for the weekend to camp or whatever, I had to decide how much collection to carry with me. Do I just bring a few mixtapes? Do I bring a box of tapes to cover every musical necessity? Do (gasp) just listen to the radio? It was a whole part of your packing, deciding what music to have at the ready and what to not be able to play if you don’t think of it now. It was a game you played with yourself. Later on it was burnt CDs, then CDs full of MP3s when the stereos got smart enough. But same game, until Spotify “solved the problem” by just making everything available everywhere, at a price you won’t believe (because someone’s been skinned to get that price, and it wasn’t the scumbags at the head office, I assure you).

Get off the streaming. Take your music into your hands. Build a collection of your favorite music and cherish it. Support artists directly. Stop pretending that paying for a streaming service is doing anything but murdering music as art and making you lazy in the soul.

I think I recall reading now that they had implemented it here. The whole “what happens there, happens here” dynamic made me cancel it out when they cancelled it down there I guess.

Did we ever have it in the first place? :>

There are those of us who were on the Internet before the capital showed up, and all of us said that it was a bad idea to use these corporate silos, that there were implications that were not great to handing what we knew would one day be the public square over to private interests. We were not listened to, of course, and for the thirty years that the government kept the house of cards propped up with zero interest they created a real illusion that it might actually work.

But maybe I have to reassess Elon. I have heretofore considered him something of a bad man, a Senator Palpatine with his “saving the world through capitalism” schtick, but with an Emperor lurking in his twisted mind. And here we have that very Emperor, taking off the mask. But perhaps… perhaps… perhaps Musk is actually Vader. Perhaps in revealing, to all with eyes to see, the very problems we Libre’d zealots have been crying out in the wilderness about, perhaps he is the one who will restore balance to the Internet.

Nah he’s just an apartheid rich boy who talked a good line while he could keep pulling free money out of the bag, but now that he has to put money back in the bag he’s taking whatever work he can get.

They repealed that anyways.

Well, I’m already on the record as to my view of what constitutes child abuse; the fact of the matter is that we have to live with a lot of people doing a lot of things that we don’t like to children in a free society in 2023.

What is kinda good from my 50-odd year perspective is that people are not quite so entitled now as they were when I was a kid.

Cosigned!

Time for Jello to write “We’ve Got An Even Bigger Problem Now”

When they steal food, I cheer. When they steal jewelry and snearks and whatnot I lol

That’s a much more difficult one to defend, from a legal or ethical or moral stance.

My opinion is that teaching a child religion as the only truth is child abuse, without telling the child that there are also people who believe there are no supernatural phenomena in the universe and explaining their best arguments for their viewpoint. It’s no different than existing in a society of hunters and not teaching the kid to hunt. We win by knowing more, not by being stronger or tougher or purer in dog’s eyes or whatever.

But my opinion is no basis for passing laws and such. When you’re talking about who should take care of orphans, or of kids who have been subject to treatment that the law agrees is abuse, the mere having of bad viewpoints which are nonetheless legal is not sufficient grounds, if you ask me. Many religious people would consider my above opinion to be bad at best and hate speech at worst, for instance, but I think my wife and I would do alright taking care of a kid, if we had the time and resources to give.

But IF the people proposing to take a child into their care are regular attendees of the meetings of an organization that is known to protect pedophiles, that is definitely grounds to turn down that application on very solid legal footing, if you ask me.