knfrmity 4d ago • 100%
Local (and ideally offline) backups are great, but I also have remote backups to mitigate the risk of a catastrophic event happening at my home and destroying the hard drives. I have offline backups because then hacks and viruses are mitigated. With an always-connected hard drive a malicious actor could access it just like the primary drive.
Of course you don't have control over cloud storage, but you can encrypt the data that's sent there, and unless you have really poor internet connectivity I don't see that being an issue. In the worst case you have to wait a day or so to be able to restore something, but better that than it being lost forever.
knfrmity 4d ago • 100%
Many backup apps or scripts create differential backups, so even Office documents and whatever else doesn't play nice with Git is still backed up an additional time when there's any change detected in the file.
knfrmity 5d ago • 100%
Don't worry, the late crack smoking former mayor of Toronto Rob Ford's brother Doug Ford will just privatize healthcare and that will fix everything.
/s in case that wasn't clear.
knfrmity 5d ago • 100%
He definitely is. SpaceX started with help from InQTel (CIA venture capital) and Starlink is a military + intelligence project.
knfrmity 1w ago • 100%
I wanted to point out the same quote. Germany has been on the same ride, with absolutely laughable "anti-AfD" protests last winter giving way to the ruling socdem-conservative coalition proposing AfD immigration policy. Everyone missed the part where the AfD people said their most successful tactic has been moving the consensus on migrants towards their perspective.
knfrmity 1w ago • 100%
It's subjective. Some people have education or a lot of experience with the art and technicalities of filmmaking, some people just like what they like without thinking about it too much.
Speaking for myself, I rate movies based on how much I enjoy them and how often I watch them again. Which puts Resident Evil and Jean-Claude Van Damme movies at the top of my list. Movies commonly cited as the greatest ever made (like Casablanca or whatever) don't interest me at all.
knfrmity 2w ago • 100%
knfrmity 2w ago • 100%
American Exception is one that comes to mind, but it's still more about the deep state in general rather than specific actors. Great man theory is liberal hogwash so most ML podcasts tend to avoid discussing how one person in particular is bad and spend more time on a system, policy, or event.
Also Robert "leftist with libertarian tendencies" Evans worked with CIA cutout Bellingcat and while he was at Cracked worked closely with the founder of NAFO.
knfrmity 2w ago • 100%
I overheard someone in public recently saying that "Putin blew up the pipeline." Most people who consume very little news, at most state sanctioned news, are completely clueless about the whole thing.
knfrmity 2w ago • 100%
Just wait until the government proposes MAiD as a solution to homelessness.
knfrmity 2w ago • 100%
When "there is no such thing as society," but "it takes a village" to raise children, it's obvious that many choose to simply not have children. There is also a correlation between improving material conditions and lower birth rates, but that only partially explains the current situation in the west.
I learned something interesting about the average gap between children in different mammal species recently. Great apes, I think it was orangutans specifically, have babies roughly eight years apart, as that's how long it takes for an orangutan to mature enough to not need constant care. This being while orangutan babies are more mature and capable at birth than human babies. Whereas in hunter-gatherer human communities the gap is more like four years, not because a four year old is mature enough for the mother to have time to care for another infant, but because child rearing is a communal responsiblity; she has help. In the US this gap has been reduced even further to just two years, even though the average mother in the US has essentially no help with domestic labour and likely has to participate in wage labour as well.
knfrmity 2w ago • 100%
In a manner of speaking, yes.
Yeltsin was more than happy to let American capitalists buy out Soviet industry and resources at fire sale prices. He was, as you can see by the GDP numbers as well as other metrics like excess deaths and life expectancy, absolutely horrible for the Russian people, but Washington never cares about the people so he's still upheld as a positive figure in the west. Putin was picked, with input from powerful people in the US, as a successor to Yeltsin, but then took a more resource nationalist and import substitution track which means Wall Street can't get rich off Russian production. (Ironically this is how western empires were built.) He tried for about eight years to get into the US' good graces but finally realized in 2008 that Russia will never be an equal partner in anything the US empire does.
knfrmity 2w ago • 100%
Fascist rage bait videos get the most engagement time, and the topics happen to align with the interests of the bourgeoisie, so they're recommended for both economic and ideological reasons.
knfrmity 2w ago • 100%
Chinese call the period from approx. 1850 to 1949 the century of humiliation for many good reasons.
knfrmity 2w ago • 100%
That would require a lib to consider and conceptually grasp what a proletarian revolution means in the first place.
knfrmity 3w ago • 100%
... it's part of why every country on earth [...] has been very "No nukes! Not for any purpose!" all throughout until today. Like everyone understands it's doomsday shit.
Everyone except the arch-ghoul Kissinger and his merry band of war criminals. IIRC his initial political rise had to do with the book he wrote about "tactical" nukes. His thesis was something like, "ok, maybe big nukes are bad, but we can use little ones. As a treat".
knfrmity 3w ago • 100%
German entry ban for Celtic fans in three, two, one...
knfrmity 3w ago • 100%
German socdems being like "we have to save democracy from the far right" but then let the far right write all their election platforms and policy proposals.
knfrmity 3w ago • 100%
A nominally leftist party (probably actually socdems) won the French elections at one point, maybe in the 70s. They got to work raising taxes on capitalists and their means of production. It took about two years before they rolled it back cause the capitalists just said "oh alright, we'll just leave and take our money with us then."
knfrmity 4w ago • 100%
I'd read that!
I don't even have words for this right now. Please excuse the trot publication, I didn't feel like looking for another English article. [German Article - Junge Welt](https://www.jungewelt.de/artikel/478190.reaktion%C3%A4rer-staatsumbau-kein-like-ist-illegal.html)
www.mintpressnews.com
Not sure if this one has been posted in the last few weeks, but this follows up previous MintPress reporting on the links between western TikTok and the US military-intelligence apparatus. It was probably clear to us from the beginning, but the crusade against TikTok has been an entirely cynical ploy for the empire to gain even more control over the internet. Previous articles: https://www.mintpressnews.com/tiktok-chinese-trojan-horse-run-by-state-department-officials/284353/ https://www.mintpressnews.com/nato-tiktok-pipeline-why-tiktok-employing-national-security-agents/280336/
www.tagesschau.de
German politicians have been discussing making applying for citizenship easier for a couple years now. Today the Bundestag (Parliament) approved the draft legislation, with two surprising new additions. In applying for citizenship a person will now not only have to say they agree to and respect the German constitution (standard practice for gaining citizenship anywhere), an applicant will also have to agree to a statement "on Germany's special historical responsibility for the unjust Nazi rule and its consequences, especially for the protection of Jewish life." It's reasonable enough if taken literally, but we all know what this means in practice: Zionism is the law of the land. There could be an additional statement regarding the "illegalty of wars of aggression" required as well. If a person is found to have lied during the application or even behaves against such statements in the future, their newly gained German citizenship could be revoked. To be fair, all of this is based on press reports and I haven't seen the law directly yet, so it may only be half as bad. But things are going in a really worrying direction.
I have been having such a difficult time getting a 2018 Dell Latitude 7930 to run any Linux distro stably. Maybe there is something obvious I am missing or maybe it really is dying hardware that's the root cause of the issue. The silly thing is I had a stable install of openSUSE Tumbleweed running for a few months but because I made some poor choices on disk partition when I installed it I was eventually backed into a corner where I had to wipe the SSD and install from scratch. I since then have tried Tumbleweed again as well as Ubuntu, Mint, and finally Manjaro to no avail. The Debian based distros completely freeze at some point, either immediately upon login and loading the desktop or when running apt update. Tumbleweed gets a kernel panic within an hour or so, even though I changed kernel options to a previous known-good config. Now after quite a frustrating time installing Manjaro it freezes within an hour as well and the diagnostic light code indicates a CPU issue. Strangely enough none of these issues are apparent when running from a LiveUSB, but occur on two different M.2 SATA SSDs with proper installs. At this point I don't really care which distro I use, as long as it doesn't crash constantly. Does anyone have any suggestions on other things I can try? Edit: seems to be solved with the kernel options I already mentioned. For whatever reason it didn't work for the Tumbleweed reinstall but Manjaro has run for a couple days without crashing. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Intel_graphics#Crash/freeze_on_low_power_Intel_CPUs
Back in October I found a really cool book containing the speeches delivered during a Marxist theoretical conference hosted by the SED in the DDR in 1983. In the meantime I have started to transcribe some of these speeches with the intent of sharing them here and with the international community of working people. There are three speeches up at the moment and I am working on more. There are 140 in the volume so a complete digitization may take some time. I plan to post my own thoughts on this site, as well as some more materials I have found. I may also consider cross-posts as well where appropriate.
I'll be in Berlin for a couple days soon and I'd like to see some DDR stuff while I'm there. The DDR Museum looks interesting, even if it's just to look at the visual representations of everyday life while ignoring the lib remarks on Stasi oppression and whatnot. Also happy DDR annexation celebration day. /s
I've been back into reading fiction over the last three years or so after a long time away. It's been really nice to slow down and read a book for entertainment rather than always going for a series or movie (when I'm not reading theory of course). For somewhat nostalgic reasons I'm missing some easy reading spy thriller type novels. There's plenty loaded with CIA/MI6 propaganda but I've had a hard time finding anything with similar pacing from outside of the imperial core. Most of the "best translated / English Chinese authors to read" lists are chock full of liberal emigrants and the like, which isn't a perspective I'm terribly interested in while reading for fun. I also enjoy sci fi, but there it seems to be a bit easier to find non western authors. Does anyone have anything to recommend? Unfortunately it's gotta be available in English or maybe German at the moment.
A preprinted study by James Hansen and collaborators suggests that we've all but locked in 2°C warming by 2050. They go on to calculate a likely equilibrium warming of 10°C considering current GHG levels and known feedback loops. I know we need to take this as yet another call to action, but at the same time I think so many of us feel absolutely paralyzed by the enormity and incomprehensibility of the situation.
This is a bit dated by now, but the recent post about some failed US weapons systems reminded me about this absolute doozy of a Spanish submarine. >Years ago, the S-80 submarine suffered a major engineering setback: It was overweight and at risk of not being able to resurface after submerging. In the latest hitch, first reported on Wednesday by the newspaper El País, it can’t fit into the port of Cartagena at the military base in southeastern Spain where the submarine will be stationed. The article wraps up with a lame attempt to normalize spending billions on military equipment.
If this isn't a dire indictment of the ability of the capitalist mode of production to solve pressing problems, I don't know what is. > Seize property to build wind and solar farms, says JP Morgan chief > In his annual shareholder letter, Mr Dimon said: “Permitting reforms are desperately needed to allow investment to be done in any kind of timely way. > “We may even need to evoke eminent domain – we simply are not getting the adequate investments fast enough for grid, solar, wind and pipeline initiatives.”
How should new countries be handled, where the people have clearly chosen that they would like to be their own sovereign nation, with all the rights and responsibilities that comes with? Besides the people withing the territory agreeing that they're a new sovereign country and establishing the institutions thereof, what should the global community expect? As things stand currently, it's simply up to the imperial core countries as to whether or not a territory is recognized as a country.
This story is incredibly strange and unnerving. How can a relatively well known and respected journalist simply disappear for six months before other journalists finally notice and start asking questions? Meek isn't even meaningfully anti-establishment although he's pissed off the military from time to time. It looks like he's pretty tight with the military and intelligence communities. It's clear to all of us that we cannot trust bourgeois media, but this is really something else, especially with new conspiracy theories of Chinese and Russian public figures disappearing being generated seemingly on a weekly basis yet nobody publicly stated that they noticed this guy's disappearance for six months.
In memory of the destroyed project of socialism in Germany, what better way to spend October 3rd (Germany's so-called German Reunification Day) than to discuss the successes, mistakes, and lessons of the DDR. Putting such a positive light on this topic is still beyond taboo in mainstream circles, and anti-communist mythology runs deep in Germany even today. One way we can make revolutionary inroads in any capitalist nation is to educate the working people about the successes of their socialist peers and all the tried and tested ways we can work towards making life more meaningful for all of us.
I really stepped in it last night. My partner is livid with me for suggesting Stalin wasn't the evil dictator he's made out to be in the west. For a German who grew up with anti-communism and went to some very liberal universities for political science it was too much. They said something to the effect of "this feels exactly like if you said, oh Hitler wasn't that bad, he was actually a good guy." We're in the midst of planning our wedding and they were suddenly at the point of doubting that they know who I am and if this is a relationship they want to maintain. We have a hard time discussing politics as it is. We are still not so great at interpreting the nuances of way each other speaks, and our background knowledge is very different. So we have to figure out what we do from here. I can't come at this from the direction of "trying to convert them." They already think I have gone into a conspiracy theory ridden and propaganda laden hole, and believe me, I ask myself the same thing every day. It really weighs heavily on me, as some of our close family members have fallen into conspiracy theory echo chambers. We've decided we need to go back to basics and make sure our core values align, which I genuinely believe they do. They're an anti-capitalist as well, although don't have a strong idea of what to would be better, just that it shouldn't be communism. I'm not sure where to go after we sort out what our shared values are. There's a certain condescension I sense when it comes to the leftist sources I read, many on recommendation from GenZedong members. I'm often met with "leftists just make up all kinds of stuff to suit their narrative," or "how do you know that's a primary or reliable secondary source, it's so easy to fake anything these days." Meanwhile they go to Wikipedia and see that Stalin killed millions and signed a treaty with the Nazis, even as they understand that much of western capitalist media is propaganda as well. We can't have any useful discussion on current events at the moment because we have vastly different knowledge of what's happening, as well as entirely different analytical tools to pick it apart with. They're also terrified I'm going to say very extreme things in front of their family (privileged petite bourgeois liberals). I try to be careful but at the same time I won't pretend to not be a communist. We have political discussions often and I'm not one to just sit those out. I'm sure my family would react poorly as well, but with the geographical distance to them it's not as present an issue in our minds. How do you all deal with this? How do you have these discussions and share these ideas with the more soc-dem or liberal minded people in your lives?