It’s exactly the opposite of what created Putin. He came out of the KGB state security service with control over the elite and the powerful.

How did those elite powerful get to be elite and powerful?

They were the product of a powerful central government giving them said power.

When the people are afraid of the government, there is tyranny. When the government is afraid of the people there is liberty.

You are wildly off base if you think I have any love for that monster.

You are also completely wrong in that oppression is the natural state of power.

i2p

Them: “We need a strong central government to protect everyone!”

Me: “Don’t do that! If bad people get control there’s gonna be trouble!”

Them: “You just hate people!” votes for strong government

Them when that strong government is then taken over by bad people: 😯

How would you stop them from doing this?

By dismantling as much of the power structure as I can. As often as I can.

Burn.

It

All

Down.

The problem is that government even has the power to do those things.

And to paraphrase you, you can’t solve government problems with more government, I’m sorry, man.

Rofl. Your god can eat a dick. I’ve seen exactly what your god does.

It’s easier to start a competing company than it is to start a competing government.

You need a powerful standing army for the latter, and standing armies are part of why we’re in the trouble we’re in.

How naive can you be? You think your vote matters here?

When every single district has been gerrymandered to death for 100 years, nobody’s vote really matters anymore.

So you want Trump and MAGA politicians to be able to deny your payments instead?

The problem with “just let the government do it” is when the government is run by people like this.

Did you even read the article? It clearly states a core SOFTWARE component. Not hardware.

“I know millions of people use their service because it’s the only real option they have, but because it’s associated with this one guy I don’t like, they can all eat a dick!”

Insane that it wasn’t, “Oh, you’re trying to blackmail our government? Here, have an airstrike.” TBH

Thing is, the Senate wasn’t supposed to be elected by the people as that’s the states’ reps. The people’s reps are the House.

Changing that screwed things up, too. It was originally set up so that smaller states couldn’t have their wishes completely drowned out by the more populous ones.

We also have lost sight of the fact that the president wasn’t supposed to be elected by the people, but by their representation, similar to how a prime minister works in many Euro nations.

The nation was designed to be controlled bottom up, with the most control being the people themselves, then their states, and finally the feds, who while they had the overall lead, only had a few enumerated powers, and EVERYTHING else was to be by the state or lower level. Hell, that’s the entire point of the 10th.

But we’ve corrupted the entire thing.

There are more guns than people in the US, and contrary to belief, they’re not all owned by the magagotts…

What I find most disturbing about the Republican party is how quickly they shift from “small government is good” to “we need more government so we can enact our brand of authoritarianism! But those guys over there? They’re the big government ones!”

Which is nuts, because you can’t have an authoritarian government without a government large enough to enforce said authority!

I’m at the point where I am leaning more and more into the “just burn it all down and start over” side of things.

Yeah we have a camera pointed at our driveway from our garage door. It isn’t close enough to the road to trigger movement from people walking or driving by.

But if they come inside the fence it’ll pick em up.

Also have a couple of cameras watching other random parts of the yard. We live on just under 2 acres, and it’s all enclosed in chain link fencing. Next to us is an automotive maintenance shop owned by a buy here pay here lot a few miles closer to town, and they don’t always hire the most trustworthy individuals to work on cars…

Because of porch pirates.

Not really. Look up Ford Bluecruise. Difference is, Ford wasn’t out there for years promising to have it all perfected in an unreasonably short timeframe. They just quietly worked on it until they felt it was ready. THEN they announced it.

https://www.ford.com/technology/bluecruise/

I have just shy of 8TB of data on my home file server.

That’s not including my NVR (for security cameras) which has a single 6TB SATA drive sitting around 40% capacity.

I had a single red 2TB in an old tivo roamio for almost a decade.

Pulled out this weekend, and finally tested it. Failed.

I was planning to move my 1.5T music collection to it. Glad I tested it first, lol.

I know. Isn’t great? When there’s no party in true “control” then whoever wants to think it’s the other guy’s fault can easily do so.

I was already an adult in 1996. It was definitely a bipartisan thing. Despite many tech insiders warning how it would cause the exact opposite of what it was intended to do, Clinton didn’t just sign it. He and Al Gore, for years, claimed it as their own.

Hell, it was this exact act Al Gore was referring to when he claimed he “invented” the Internet.