ArmchairAce1944
@ArmchairAce1944@discuss.online
- Comment on Starlink tries to block Virginia’s plan to bring fiber Internet to residents 3 days ago:
Capitalism breeds innovation and advancement, folks!
Also didn’t Rupert Murdoch also stifle fiber adoption in Australia because better internet would cut into his TV and print empire there?
- Comment on Marie Curie 3 days ago:
Took me a second, but my god… that guy is a douche!
- Comment on Reddit will block the Internet Archive 4 days ago:
I wish his 2007 stand up ‘that ain’t right’ was still around. He was fucking hilarious.
- Comment on Reddit will block the Internet Archive 4 days ago:
I was on reddit for 11 years before getting banned due to zionists. I have a throwaway reddit account now for porn and other shit, but I dont post.
- Comment on This has happened to me 5 days ago:
Innovating new ways to fuck you over.
- Comment on Makes sense 6 days ago:
By whom, exactly? The states too weak to invade and take control of pirate havens?
If they landed in a legitimate port they will ask questions. States were weaker back then, but not that weak. BTW, much gold was brought back not as bullion, but as personal jewelry, because jewelry was not taxes, but stuff like gold nuggets or gold bricks were.
Also they didn’t care to tax pirates. If you were a ‘real’ pirate, as in someone who did not have a letter of marque, you were liable to hanged and everything taken from you. If you were a privateer you paid 10% of your ‘earnings’ to the crown and kept the rest. I should mention that earnings weren’t just precious metals and stones, they were EVERYTHING. If you plundered a ship full of sugar cane and tobacco, the crown got 10% of that.
It does depend on your time period, if you were active in the 1640s to the 1660s, the golden age of piracy, even if you didn’t have a letter of Marque, it was likely that nations did not care if you were a pirate as long as you didn’t rob THEIR ships. Political tensions were super high in Europe at the time and there was a doctrine of ‘no peace beyond the line’ meaning if you went to the West Indies, it was a free for all. So if you were an English or French pirate and robbed only Spanish ships, the French and English didn’t give a fuck and you go back to a French/English port and no one would bother you. But if you tried to do piracy in the 1690s to 1710s, you were going to get hanged. This era of piracy is when navies started to spring up and they didn’t tolerate any form of piracy on the high seas at all, and the concept of no peace beyond the line ceased to exist. Many of the most famous pirates we know, like Black Beard and Calico Jack were active during this time period.
The most successful ‘pure’ pirate (someone who did not operate with a letter of marque) was Henry Every, and he wasn’t in the Caribbean, he robbed a huge ass treasure ship belonging to the Mughal Empire in the Indian ocean and he and his crew stole a ton of treasure. The thing which is just as fascinating is that Henry absolutely got away with it. He fucking disappeared into thin air and was never found with his share of the loot. I know finding someone was harder in those days, but even back then being a fugitive was difficult, and a super high profile fugitive like him (his pirate action caused a huge diplomatic crisis between England and the Mughal Empire) would not have been allowed to stay on the run for long.
To give you an example of how that is different, Piet Hein, a Dutch pirate, also robbed a Spanish treasure ship, but due to the fact that it happened nearly 100 years prior to Henry’s action, he had the backing of the Dutch state (which was at war with Spain at the time) and he was richly rewarded for it instead of being hunted.
- Comment on Makes sense 6 days ago:
Gold was absolutely taxed and controlled In those days. Just because modern taxation didn’t exist, it didn’t mean that people didn’t ask ‘hey where did you get the money from?’
There have been cases as far back as Ancient Egypt where robbers were caught because they suddenly had access to large amounts of money they wouldn’t have had otherwise. I think it involved a group of people who robbed a Pharoah’s tomb. It has been decades since I read about it so I could be off.
- Comment on Makes sense 6 days ago:
Captain Kidd did claim he buried treasure, but he did it as a stalling tactic to delay his inevitable hanging. There are no confirmed cases of pirates burying their treasure.
The myth largely sprung up from the novel Treasure Island. Which birth a ton of adventure tropes.
- Comment on Schools are using AI to spy on students and some are getting arrested for misinterpreted jokes and private conversations 1 week ago:
The countries where this is not happening is narrowing so seriously that there is no where left to run.
- Comment on Schools are using AI to spy on students and some are getting arrested for misinterpreted jokes and private conversations 1 week ago:
I am Canadian, how can I help? Because this shit is coming to Canada, too.
- Comment on Age Verification Is Coming for the Whole Internet 1 week ago:
There are companies to store and process IDs on behalf on the sites. Also it will give a hell of a lot more information to marketers who will pay tons for it to sell you crap they think you need. They already have far too much information on everyone already, but this will give them even more.
- Comment on Age Verification Is Coming for the Whole Internet 1 week ago:
I worked in tech support. For some people Facebook is the internet
- Comment on Age Verification Is Coming for the Whole Internet 1 week ago:
What sucks is that once these laws are in place repealing them will probably never happen. There are far too many people who will benefit financially from this to allow that to happen.
- Comment on Tesla withheld data, lied, and misdirected police and plaintiffs to avoid blame in Autopilot crash 1 week ago:
Information to be used against you and never for you.
- Comment on Spotify fans threaten to return to piracy as music streamer introduces new face-scanning age checks in the UK 1 week ago:
They want to scan your face to get as many images of people of stated ages to feed into their facial recognition system. Do not for one moment think it is for anything else.
- Comment on hygiene 2 weeks ago:
It is literally a small bottle with a folding spigot thingie. I do clean mine with soap and water every once in a while, but it is kinda hard to get dirty.
- Comment on hygiene 2 weeks ago:
So you know that ice cold water sprayed into your ass can give you brain freeze, right?
- Comment on hygiene 2 weeks ago:
I use a portable bidet. It is a rubber squeeze bottle. I use it to wash my asshole and a little toilet paper to dry.
The thing paid for itself many times over in toilet paper saved.
- Comment on Microsoft suddenly bans LibreOffice developer's email account, blocks appeal 2 weeks ago:
Eat shit, microsoft
- Comment on Lemmy is a tech literate echo chamber 2 weeks ago:
I lived in a tech echo chamber until I was in my 30s. This is because my dad is a baby boomer computer engineer who was working with computers since the 70s and we always had a computer at home (no consoles, just computers). First was a c64, we even briefly had a c128 (that didn’t work) and then we got a 386 followed by pentium machines and we first hooked up to the internet in the 90s… and before the internet we went on dial up BBSes run by ultra nerds.
My dad still keeps up with tech and is probably better with computers than many recent CS graduates. It wasn’t until I worked in tech support that I realized… Holy shit! There are people who have no idea their computers have directories! As in, if the shortcut isn’t on their desktop, then their program might as well not exist.
Also one thing I learned that if you tell someone to go to a site and you spell the URL to them, then 99.9% of the time they will Google it, because they don’t know what an address bar is.
I used to think those ‘how to use a computer’ courses in college were a giant waste of time (and an easy A for people like us) but I realize that these people could absolutely benefit from something like that.
And that is when I was working with people who had laptops mostly. When I worked in mobile tech support… fuck me! Do you realize that for a sizable chunk of the population the only computer they have is their smart phone? Those people are far, far worse. When I worked in mobility we were not allowed to hang up on clients for any reason (it was grounds for immediate termination) but at least a few times a week I had to deal with a client who did not know how to hang up their phone! No joke. They were accustomed to the other person hanging up and they didn’t know how to do it!
This is doubly frustrating when those people are using flip phones rhat have a clear hang up button on them.
So yeah, acknowledging we are in a bubble is a good thing. But it isn’t a bad thing to hang out with fellow tech nerds either.
- Comment on Microsoft admits it would have to let Trump spy on EU data if demanded 2 weeks ago:
People keep forgetting that.
- Comment on Think about what today is considered next level vs what it used to be 2 weeks ago:
raises hand
- Comment on Steam Users Rally Behind Anti-Censorship Petition 2 weeks ago:
Large cash payments may be needed in places and during times where non-cash are difficult or impossible. I have family who live in countries where having bank transfers would be cumbersome and are riddled with corruption, so I bring them cash. I once did get 9,500$ in cash (below the 10K limit) and they were paying for repairs for their home and the workers could only accept cash. Having a digital platform would have made all this impossible.
- Comment on Steam Users Rally Behind Anti-Censorship Petition 2 weeks ago:
Ow and btw Mullvad can be both by sending them an envelope with cash
I am afraid I don’t understand. You can buy credit cards by mailing cash to Mullvad?
Using your bankcard with chip to pay is already obfuscated in most situations on the receiving end since a lot of cash registers will group the transactions together and way out once.
I actually rarely pay for things with my bank card. I usually buy with credit card and that will always leave a trace. But it is good to know that.
The whole no cash purchase over 3K or 10K is honestly crap. They did that in Quebec last year and are going to do that throughout Canada. I never paid for anything with that much cash, but I still find it shit.
- Comment on Microsoft admits it would have to let Trump spy on EU data if demanded 2 weeks ago:
I have been saying this for more than a decade. Shit like this is why privacy laws and stuff regarding warrants and other stuff need to be expanded to private entities as much, if not more so, than government agencies. In the past the idea of a company having that much access to people’s information was unthinkable, and in almost everyone’s mind it was governments we needed to be worried about.
But that hasn’t been true since the 90s at least with credit cards being used for most stuff and internet purchases being the norm for almost everything.
Governments in the past needed something to ask for permission to look into you… but companies never did, and since the only thing governments need to do is either buy it or ask nicely it makes many protections kinda moot. The fact that many countries want a strict surveillance state over everyone means even the classic protections we had for a brief while are disappearing, too.
If there ever is a 2nd enlightenment with protections for people it needs to make the stuff written in the 18th and 19th century look like children’s toys in comparison.
If you say ‘but what about terrorism and bad people?’ Look around you. They still exist and still rarely get caught unless they fuck up badly. Most of the time it still due to informants and people talking to authorities. In the US the murder rate resolution is only 50% (and that is just arrested and charged, not convicted) and this is because there is a massive distrust of the police. In other countries people are more likely to assist the police and/or they take their jobs far more seriously in terms of forensics… and on top of that they usually have a far lower murder rate which allows more time and resources to be funneled into solving major crimes.
Better to let 100 guilty men go than 1 innocent person convicted is the usual motto, but they don’t believe that in practice. In reality they are very much kill them all and let God sort out his own. And we can’t keep allowing that shit to happen.
- Comment on Steam Users Rally Behind Anti-Censorship Petition 2 weeks ago:
I have been exploring ways to pay for things anonymously… in Canada and the US they do have prepaid credit cards (rhat are sadly visa or Mastercard based) that can be paid for in cash and activated without the need for a name or anything. Meaning unless you activated it on your phone or clearnet without a VPN it will be difficult to link it to you directly. Doubly so if you wait long enough for the store’s surveillance footage to be cycled through (few places keep security camera footage in perpetuity, many delete stuff from a few months back or a year or so back unless something suspicious happened, meaning the footage of you buying the thing will be gone.)
So that’s one trick to be able to pay for something with a credit card without it being immediately obvious who you are. Much like paying in cash, another thing i am getting back into.
- Comment on The Age-Checked Internet Has Arrived 2 weeks ago:
I actively avoid those. I used to go on the chan forums but after seeing people just posting random attachments and someone saying ‘get that kiddie shit out of here’ before it stayed up for a while I turned tail and ran from those and never looked back.
- Comment on Mastercard and Visa face backlash after hundreds of adult games removed from online stores Steam and Itch.io 2 weeks ago:
I feel like a dipshit for not participating.
- Comment on The Age-Checked Internet Has Arrived 2 weeks ago:
I am aware of many, I am just saying looking at the dark web is not a good idea because… well… OK we’re all adults here. That’s where all the CP is and I have no interest in seeing that shit.
- Comment on The Age-Checked Internet Has Arrived 2 weeks ago:
Unfortunately there is truth in what you are saying.