An excellent argument to be made when arguing about the

STop Unrelated Crap Killing budgets act.

STUCK(b) Act. See? Even has a cool acronym.

And if they take a few dozen sessions deliberating over it while the government keeps funding and running on previous bills, that’s OK. That’s the point. There should not be an easy path to leverage government’s ability function to force a vote in your favor, bypassing traditional debate, compromise, and processes.

Y’all need to get a word in with your representatives that what’s needed is legislation preventing budget bills from containing anything other than budgets.

That would solve this problem real quick. It’s been sounding stupider and stupider using the budget meeting to force unpopular agendas down throats or else the government is held hostage.

I think it would fit the bill if budgeting was held up over allocations, one side wants more border spending, one side wants more educational spending, etc, that would make sense but “allow us to attach this whole other unrelated law to declare the sky is actually green(which also contains a tag along that I get to be emperor), or nobody gets paid” is just ridiculous.

Tomorrow? Oh, so you already forgot the announcement from last month? Well, I mean I guess we have a lot of our own stuff going on right now…

/s?

Yup. Or anything held against them is now just fakery.

Like this gem from the news today.

Sometimes it feels technology may doom us all in the end. We’ve got a rough patch in society starting now, now that liars and cheats can be more convincingly backed up, and honest folk hidden behind credible doubt that they are the liars.

AI isn’t just on the path to make convincing lies, it’s on the path to ensuring that all truth can be doubted as well. At which point, there is no such thing as truth until we learn yet a new way to tell the difference.

“They don’t need to convince us what they are saying, the lies, are true. Just that there is no truth, and you cannot believe anything you are told.”

One thing I can think of is an overzealous corporate security solution blocking or holding back your email purely for having an attachment, or because it misunderstands/presumes the cipher-looking text file to be an attempt to bypass filtering.

Other than that might be curious questions from curious receivers of the key/file they may not understand, and will not be expecting. (“What’s this for? Is this part of the contract documents? Oh well, I’ll forward it to the client anyway”)

Other than that it’s a public key, go for it. Hard (for me anyway) to decide to post them to public keychains when the bot-nets read them for spam, so this might be the next best thing?

Are you installing needed libraries?

For example, the installer runs because it doesn’t need any, but then your app needs say VCRedist 2010, and so won’t until run until you add the vcrun2010 extra library with Winetricks or the menu in Bottles.

What happens next? A wave of even worse disregard for things.

After all, if we can bring back the mammoth, who cares if we off <insert species here>, they’ll just bring it back next rotation. /s

It’s not really because it fell over. It’s because it wasn’t supposed to fall over. Consumable launch materials don’t contend with this because failure to return is a success. This is a failure. This must be learned from and fought against/prevented going forward.

If you’ve got a VPS at your disposal, many of the homepage softwares I’ve tried over the years have some amount of caching to make them quite fast or even operate offline(“Homer” for one required me to deeply purge my cache as it would still appear when my site was offline…despite having replaced it long ago! 😂). Or, if you wanted to roll your own static HTML page, you can absolutely add a Service Worker for your own offline caching.

That’s where I’m at now. I use a custom ServiceWorker static HTML for my homepage and tab page on all my devices. This page is a bouncer, checks if I’m at home or not(or if my local dashboard is offline) and either redirects me to the local homepage which has all my HomeLab services on it, or if it fails just tells me I might be abroad or offline and lists a few public websites.

And yes, this works offline or over a shitty connection. Essentially the service worker quickly provides the cached page from the browser storage, then tries to take the time to check the live version. If it gets one, it updates the cache, if not, enjoy the offline version.

Might be a bit over the top, but I set up a custom homepage startpage, and then grabbed the New Tab Override extension so that it opens on new tabs as well as being my homepage.

So if you can think of any websites that might do what you want like cardd or link tree, or are interested in making your own little webpage and hosting it somewhere free, that might work and as a bonus will be the same across all your browsers and devices. Could even load it up on someone else’s computer if you remember the link.

Birds of a feather. Joe isn’t great about Palestine, trying too hard to be politically delicate about it I think, but Donald is absolutely going to support Israel without hesitation.

After all, only thing that matters to the Don is whether you can pay for his support…

willing to ignore

Ignore? I have it on unfortunately good authority that at least a decent chunk of his base agree with what he is spouting and are loving how he “speaks the truth” or “says what they’re all thinking”. Sadly he’s enabling more and more of them to feel comfortable saying the quiet part out loud and acting on their impulses.

We vote. We get our friends to vote, we get anyone who will listen to vote. Because that’s the only proper method we have. If it works we get ready to do it again next election, local, federal, all of them. If that fails?

All we can do to cope is hope they keep to the “State’s Rights” platform, and avoid making federal policies.

Then we watch which states become a problem and which do not, and considering moving if we need to while we still have freedom of travel.

From there? Anyone’s guess. Things get too divided we might be talking about border walls between states rather than just countries. Or it could all be bluster.

Now would be a good time to look for a .com you like, or one of the more common TLDs. And register it at Namecheap, Porkbun, or Cloudflare. (Cloudflare is cheapest but all-eggs-in-one-basket is a concern for some.)

Sadly, all the cheap or fun TLDs have a habit of being blocked wholesale, either because the cheap ones are overused by bad actors or because corporate IT just blacklists “abnormal” TLDs (or only whitelists the old ones?) because it’s “easy security”.

Notably, XYZ also does that 1.111B initiative, selling numbered domains for 99¢, further feeding the affordability for bad actors and justifying a flat out sinkhole of the entire TLD.

I got a three character XYZ to use as a personal link shortener. Half the people I used it with said it was blocked at school or work. My longer COM poses no issue.

“White House”

“Neat, more spam….wonder what they’d try to get me with this time, send gift cards to save the country? Wait, no, that’s not a thing…could it be the actual White House?!?!?…Too late.” 😂

Maybe I’m just in the generation so burned out in spam and junk calls that it’s just me, but that’s about how I think that would go.

Y’know, that does put a thought in my head.

How do you know the President is calling? If I saw a caller ID saying anything like that I’m going to assume spam. Unknown DC number, also spam.

Does an aide come to my door and hand me a phone, or warn me that the next call is official?

Otherwise of course I missed the call, guess the President gets to leave a voicemail! And we can play telephone tag with his staff until there’s another moment in his day…?

Is there a list anywhere of this and other settings and features that could/should certainly be changed to better Firefox privacy?

Other than that I’m not sure I’m really going to jump ship. I think I’m getting too old for the “clunkiness” that comes with trying to use third party/self hosted alternatives to replace features that ultimately break the privacy angle, or to add them to barebones privacy focused browsers. Containers and profile/bookmark syncing, for example. But if there’s a list of switches I can flip to turn off the most egregious things, that would be good for today.

Sadly, this is not an isolated opinion. Not just one fringe crazy that can be talked over and ignored. There are many more like him, that want to see things like these be reality again, and [insert Trump’s current polling numbers] percent of Americans that seem to agree at least in spirit or are somehow very, very unaware.

I fear for the future.

I think the polls are close because only a certain subset of voters are in them.

Did you participate in the poll?

I ask because I didn’t. I’m not even sure how I could but can’t be bothered to figure it out, and it doesn’t seem like it means much.

I also asked my coworkers if they were in any of these polls. Out of the whole lunchroom, one old guy said he used to do them, years ago when they would call him and ask questions. But they haven’t in a long while.

So that’s a whole lunchroom not represented in the polls, and I doubt we’re the exception. But we will all be voting come November.