Autist here:
Holy shit, an actual good joke, half revolving around Autism?
Damn.
Don't see that often, hahah!
sp3ctr4l
joined 5 months ago
Europe's markets generally more resemble 'free markets' (which really means: competetive markets) because they are more heavily and properly regulated.
So, they're more like 'fair markets' than they are 'free markets'.
You cannot naturally maintain competetive markets over time without some kind of system for counteracting the natural tendency of such markets to consolidate over time.
'Free markets' don't exist, as that phrase is an intentionally vague and confusing propaganda term, that means whatever to uneducated and naive person wants it to mean.
Are they free as in free beer, free lunch?
Are they free as in, free to enter, free to leave?
'Free' is a word that has many different, distinct meanings, and it is a hallmark of con artists and cult leaders to use such words and switch from one definition/meaning of the same word, from sentence to sentence, sometimes even within the same sentence.
Look at how quantum mystic type gurus use 'energy' to waffle between and conflate the actual, physics definition of 'energy' and the colloquial 'overall emotional disposition' meaning of 'energy'.
Its the same thing with 'free market' peddlers.
No, that's completely meaningless as a working definition, and also just broadly false.
Monopolistic companies often rank high in public polls of 'most hated / least trusted' companies.
Monopolies are more accurately described as using and abusing trust, by building up a reputation, and then betraying that trusted reputation once they've grown to become actual monopolies.
Enshittification can basically be described as the latter half of that process.
Its a slow motion bait and switch.
In some sense yes, but:
If your TOR entry exit node is comprimised, you are basically fucked.
I've seen estimates that roughly 1/3 of them are comprimised, run by State actors of some kind.
People seem to forget that TOR was originally invented by the US Navy and used by them and the CIA and shit to move sensitive data around in the early 2000s, possibly late 90s.
Then they handed it off to the public.
Do you really think they do not know how to defeat it, when they really want to?
...
Also... I2P traffic is more anonymized/encrypted than TOR traffic is, in that each chunk in each packet is anonymized and encrypted... each packet is kind if a sausage of a bunch of people's data being moved around all at once, the whole point is you can't tell whose data ia whose.
IIRC, TOR packets do not work this way, they're specifically addressed to a single encrypted and anonymized person.
So, its easier to reverse engineer who is the actual person using the network.
Whereas with I2P, you're always routing for others as well as receiving your own data, albeit much, much more slowly.
What does nth grade reading level even mean?
Very broadly, a lower grade of reading level means:
Less broad vocabularly,
Less ability to use and comprehend more complex grammar and sentence structure,
Less critical analysis capability,
Less ability to understand context and domain specific, different meanings of words,
More reliance on nebulouy defined, vague slang vocabulary.
In the context of adults I can understand, but I think I've heard things like Xrh graders having an average reading level as Yth graders.
This means that say, a typical 8th grader now has reading/writing abilities on par with a 6th grader.
In other words, kids keep failing classes and getting passed onto the next grade anyway, instead of being held back, or sent into some kind of 'catch-up' or 'remedial' classes to get them up to standard.
...
Teachers and the education system broadly have, you know, rubrics, standards, lists of concepts that a kid is supposed to be taught in each class and grade.
This is how 'grading' works, the idea is that your test is supposed to evaluate how successful the student was at learning, how succesful the course was at actually teaching the student new concepts.
The main problem is that we underfund teachers and schools, and also punish teachers and schools when they actually do the right thing and refuse to pretend a kid has learned things they haven't.
So, the result is, kids don't learn.
...
Semi-relevant rant about smart phones in the class room
Another recent contributor to this is just pandemic levels of kids on their phones in class, all the time, not paying attention.
What you should do is something like ok, if I see your phone in class once, it gets taken away for the rest of the class, two times, the rest of the day, 3 times, you have to surrender your phone to the office when you get to school and get it back when school is over.
But students and parents literally respond like feral zombies when you propose this, despite this being the norm throughout the proliferation of cellphones, and early days of smartphones.
There's nothing stopping you from using a phone responsibly. Set it on vibrate, if you get an actual important txt or call, ask to step outside the class and take the call/message.
Schools also have landline phones for emergencies.
Another thing is that short form video content addiction does actually cause brainrot, it is real, its been shown in numerous academic studies.
Lower attention spans, lower impulse control, less control over emotions, and shortform video content platforms in particular also spread misinfo and disinfo like wildfire.
Its also a (nearly?) 10 year old paradigm at this point.
TOR is 'experimental' in the same way I2P is.
I2P works, though it is more technically complex for an average user to properly set up than most VPNs.
This is a joke, right?
The US is currently economically collapsing, nearly every company/corp is firing and laying people off, an entry level job requires 3 to 5 years of experience, and something like 60% of companies freely admit to posting ghost jobs, fake online job listings that never actually result in a hire, or are just done to pretend an internal promotion is actually being competetively sourced to the whole job market.
It is extremely difficult for young people to find a job right now, one that ends up paying more than they'd lose in the costs of buying a car and gas and insurance to get to said job.
If you are broke and cannot afford a VPN, I suggest you use I2P.
I2P is basically an internet protocol that treats all kinds of internet activity in the manner a torrent works.
Basically, you run a local node.
Traffic is routed around in a bunch of anonymized, encrypted chunks, from many different users, which are then bunched up together into packets and encrypted again.
As a client, you can only decrypt the parts of a packet that pertain to you...
But as a node, you help move packets along to every other person who is running a node, in a sort of meshnet like fashion.
The result is a free, but very slow, but also pretty well anonymized way of passing net traffic around...
...and it is also arguably more private/secure than a VPN, which can simply hand over its server logs if legally asked to...
...and it is also arguably more private/secure than TOR, which can have de-anonymization attacks run on it if enough onion nodes, or your entry/exit nodes, are either comprimised or just outright run as honey pots, which is a thing various law enforcement agencies do.
However, another downside to I2P is that it is... considerably more technically complex for most users to actually set up and use properly, than just a basic VPN for switching your geoip to watch Brazillian netflix or w/e.
But, it does allow torrenting and portforwarding, and is totally free.
Don't expect to be able to stream any media with it though, it is again very slow.
I am fairly confident with my semicolon usage; it's often properly used to connect two indpendent, yet related clauses.
According to ancaps, unironically yes, rofl
In addition to my already present uh, biographies...
I would nitpick this actual meme on one point:
Broadly, monopolies and colluding oligopolies do not collude to artificially increase demand.
They collude to artificially increase prices, and that artificially high chunk of prices is also called a monopolist rent.
...
Monopolists grow till there are no alternatives to them, often by first offering a price discount as compared to other competitors...
... then, when they have driven their competition out of business, or just purchased them...
Then they raise prices to the max the consumer can bare.
...
Monopolists notably maximize their own profit often to the point that it actually reduces overall demand.
They can do this because they still have enough people who now just have no alternative, and they can extract so much monopolist remt... maybe we'd call that greedflation in more modern lingo... that they don't care if they lose a few customers, the astounding margins more than make up for it.
(until the entire system collapses sometime later, because OOPS, turns out everyone was going into debt and gambling on wildass longshot investments to be be able to pay those higher prices.)
(but of course then the monopolist just lays off employees to reduce overhead, and hey, now you understand why and how recessions and depressions happen, and why capitalism is fundamentally inequitable and unstable!)
Meanwhile most autists have been aware of this since they got to roughly middle school age, and have just long since given up hope of neurotypicals ever broadly figuring this out, as well as gave up hope they'd ever stop being bullied as kill-joys for pointing this out.
But, nontheless, hey, good that more people may be catching on?