Guardrails are only enforceable by the state. Without the state to smash capitalism and enforce guardrails against corruption and the power of greed, capitalism and authoritarianism will always step in to fill the power vacuum.

This is why communism has always failed within a few months to a few years of initiation: lack of guardrails and laws that are effectively enforced against capitalism or authoritarianism. It’s why every “communist” state in history devolved into an authoritarian, anti-communist political structure very, very quickly. Hell, even in Russia communism was effectively dead by 1918.

We are so close to having the technology to implement direct participatory democracy (A.K.A., political communism), where things like presidents and premiers and politicians in general just don’t exist, and only minor functionaries and coordinatinative councils remain to carry out the people’s directives.

What is still needed, however, is a highly educated and literate population that values education, facts, and meritocracy - thereby suffocating conservatism and strangling it to death - and for that population to have an exceedingly tiny level of economic inequality, such that the wealth is returned properly into the hands of the Working Class that created it, and most people can then acquire the mental headspace to focus on more than just daily survival needs (as in, focus on community-level or even nation-level subjects).

A strong state is not necessarily a dangerous one. What makes ours dangerous is that power is concentrated at the top, with those who have money (capitalists) calling the shots. A distributed, citizen-directed state that is utterly immune from money and power hierarchies can be built that will only ever feel oppressive to those who are inherently abusive, greedy, and malicious.

OpenBSD does not have a docker engine. Can this be installed without docker?

My goodness, I do love multi-layered jokes.

Fellow Canadian here, was desperately trying to find the words for a similar sentiment, and here you are being all sorts of fucking brilliantly erudite.

Nicely done.

I mean the commonly-repeated theory that there “won’t be an election” next year.

Oh, there WILL BE “elections”. They need the circus spectacle to justify their existence.

But with Trump’s cronies in control of ballot machines, where votes can be deleted or altered after the fact, future elections are likely to be entirely performative; a thin veneer of legitimacy papering over a massive edifice of fraud and rot.

Trump could legitimately get zero votes and the voting system will still show him with a landslide victory. That’s their objective, after all. It’s torn straight from the Chinese and North Korea and Nazi Germany playbooks.

Cool theory.

Not a theory. (2) (3) There are now lawsuits in motion due to this.

Adorable that these people don’t think that this election won’t see even more voting fraud than the last one.

I mean, if the last one was stolen, why wouldn’t the next one be, as well? He’s going to have three more years to build systems that ensure a permanent Republican ascendency.

This was all a calculated strategy to make independent farmers go bankrupt and into foreclosure, so that the big agritech companies could snag prime agricultural land for pennies on the dollar.

At some point, most food will be grown by corporations that can set whatever price they want for that food, and people will have to pay that price or starve to death. It’s the definition of “captured audience” that makes the Parasite Class extract so much wealth from the working class and become so fantastically wealthy.

Jerry: if you don’t think Israel is evil, it’s because you are, too.

Genocide is never OK, which is why I stand with the Palestinians.

I kept reading about people having trouble during the restore process.

It is Duplicati, and IMHO restores work best if they aren’t restores-in-place. As in, dump the restores in a central location then drag-and-drop the data into place. Most of the issues I have heard of involve restoring data and settings back to where it originally was backed up from, and restoring directly back to those places - other than fully user-controlled directories, such as Documents or Photos - seems to be problematic.

Other than that, I have been using it for nearly a decade and have done a number of restores - after total drive deaths, so not just accidentally deleted files - to great success.

The downside is that tweaking backups from within the hidden C:\Users\[username]\AppData\ directory involves many days of whack-a-mole to exclude untouchable normally-in-use files so you don’t get scads of errors in the backup process. Plus, there are a fair number of entries in there that don’t really need backing up. But once you get that to settle down, it’s largely smooth it’s-set-so-forget-it sailing.

British Columbian here, what part of Canada was that? Because it wasn’t this end…

Maybe Alberta, the Trump-loving Texas of the North?

Since a long press on any key doesn’t bring any of those up, my method involved going to the text replacement section of the system settings, and doing a replacement entry. I copy the glyph from wherever I find it on the Internet and assign a unique string (the “shortcut”) to have iOS insert it. I’ve used a reliable pattern, such as (degc) (yes, including the brackets) for ℃. You need to choose a string that you will never otherwise use, otherwise you’ll be fighting against the text replacement.

Using this method I’ve added all sorts of special characters like fractions ¼ ⅙ ⅛ mathematical symbols ± « ≈ ≠ and even text emoji ಠ_ಠ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and other random symbols № ® ™.

Fun fact: if you have an AppleID-linked Mac, this will all sync over, letting you use these shortcuts on the Mac as well.

They’re trying to be edgy and use the obsolete thorn character (þ) everywhere you would normally pronounce “th”.

While I usually enjoy rifling through the UTF-8 character set for better/more-appropriate glyphs such as curly quotes instead of straight quotes and the numero glyph instead of the hash/pound symbol, the thorn character ain’t going to be making a comeback.

Edit: fun fact, even the temperature symbols have their own fully-assembled glyphs — Fahrenheit ℉ and Celsius ℃ come fully assembled as a single character glyph that you can use without having to cobble together shit. One of my biggest annoyances is seeing the degree glyph (which a math glyph, and has NOTHING to do with temperature) mashed together with a letter in a wholly inappropriate Frankensteining.

If America has another legitimate election before it has another civil war, I will be shocked.

Because evidence is oozing out of the woodwork that the last election was stolen.

Conservatism: where suffering and pain is the purpose.

It’s become a cult of evil.

Never owned a single vehicle - or even knew of one - where this was a thing. And yes, I’ve had my share of dilapidated 70s and 80s vehicles when I was young and poor.

“We OwNeD tHe LiBs!!1!”

Even up here in Canada, I’m getting similar vibes. Fucking disgusting, it is.

Deaths by firearm, per 100,000 people, are about 1/7 the number in Canada as it is in America.

America has over 200 school shootings a year. 2024 saw a near record with 330 school shootings.

Canada? 6 in its entire history. To get to the grand total of 9, you would have to include post-secondary institutions.

If you truly want to “think about the children”, firearm control comes wwwaaaaaaayyyyy before banning books and taking away lunches.

And I self-host precisely because of the money I save using surplussed hardware. I have a symmetrical 1Gb SOHO fibre connection from my ISP, so I can host whatever the hell I want, I just need to stand it up. And a beefy older system with oodles of RAM is perfect for spinning up VMs of various platforms for various tasks. This saves me craploads of money over even a single VM on cloud platforms like Vultr. Plus, even if I were to support a “heavy” service sufficiently in demand to warrant its own iron, it still costs me less than a year’s worth of hosting to obtain a decent platform for that service to run on all by it’s lonesome.

My only cloud costs end up being those services which are distributed for redundancy and geographical distance, such as DNS and caching CDNs.