southsamurai

It’s not a surprise though

Nah, don’t have to go that far.

There’s a dozen ways to inhibit, remove, or otherwise negate underlings.

Observation is a big one. Nobody is perfect. Watch, find weak links, compromise them that way. Apply social pressure from the edges, use the same tools they use if necessary: misinformation. Rumors, innuendo that weakens their position as underlings. If you do that one enough, then nobody gets trusted, it applies pressure upward as well because someone has to do the grunt work, and the higher you push that up the ladder, the more stress it places on the system.

But it all starts with knowing who it is and finding ways to move based on that, what position they hold, what ties they have that can turn into knots that bind them.

It doesn’t even take organization. It just takes people who can stay in the pocket, stay cool, and observe instead of doing stupid shit. Gather information, spread it via trusted contacts only. Hope that it reaches someone that can apply it usefully. Let a network build that way and form a good opposition from beneath.

It doesn’t have to, or even best work by, going hard. Yeah, there’s no such thing as a bloodless revolution, but you push that off as long as possible to as few targets as possible. But the way to do that is to find levers to pull, and those names are a start for that.

I mean, that’s one avenue to go.

You can’t strike at the top, not without a shit ton more resources and planning than most people have access to

But slowing it down by taking out the underlings? That’s feasible. They can’t protect everyone all the time

If they’re established, yeah. But you have to wait until you’re contacted because it isn’t something that you’ll have an easy time finding a buyer for.

I have, however, been offered a few grand for my oldest account there, as well as one of my niche subs that was private long before they decided to be assholes.

That, apparently, is valuable. It’s not as easy to make a sub private now, so one of the older ones is attractive for some reason. The person that contacted me wouldn’t explain what/why, which is part of the reason I told them to fuck off, but they had offered two grand for it.

That’s actually a thing. It isn’t super common, but there’s a weird feedback that links between the gut and the brain…

Been over a decade since I read the paper on it, but it was something related to serotonin, colinerase, and another neurotransmitter I can’t remember.

The pressure in the gut being relieved makes the brain release a batch of chemicals, even for people that don’t experience the hunger surge. But for people that do, the combination and amounts are different, and set off hunger. Usually before the person is even finished, they’ll have the first sensation of hunger.

Plus, some people interpret the feeling of an empty bowel that was previously putting a good bit of pressure on as hunger, even though they aren’t the same.

No, big guy, it would just make a mess.

See, the belly isn’t one big pocket, there’s a bunch of stuff in there. The parts that tell you if you’re hungry or not are way at the top, so putting things in your bottom isn’t going to make you less hungry, no matter how fun it is.

Well, just glancing at it, it isn’t discord. It doesn’t connect to discord servers at all.

What it does is replicate discord, in a way that allows users to still make use of things that discord users are already into. Bots in particular.

So discord won’t have access to anything that goes on at all, unless you’re using something that also connects to discord.

Pop-ups and fake notifications would have more to do with the client you’re using than the back-end would, so if you use a client that does those things, I wouldn’t bet on that changing.

The caveat: I’m no dev of any kind, so I can’t say anything about the actual code, I’m basing this on their own description. I linked the page to my cousin that sometimes will give a quick scan for hinky shit for me, but there’s no telling if or when he’ll do so nd get back to me.

That would be a hell of a virus!

But people would notice, and pretty quickly. Even if this megavirus could somehow manage to do it without data loss, mimicking every aspect of windows perfectly, making file structure work the same, etc; it couldn’t do anything about the programs that simply don’t work on linux yet.

Once the first person noticed, it would be a huge deal

Well, as others have covered, the us has engaged in imperialism directly, in the past, and indirectly even now.

But I don’t think that answers your question.

The “modern” US, and I use the word modern to represent the post ww2 era, has a very different place on the world stage than it did before ww2, though that place started shifting after the first world war.

You simply can’t ignore ww2 and the effects it had on global politics any time something like this comes up. Most of what we think of as the way things work go back to that time even more than the nations’ individual histories. There really wasn’t any nation that wasn’t deeply and radically changed by that.

After ww2, there was a global desire for peace and stability, with stability being the greater goal. The UN, NATO, all the major alliances and blocs stem from that.

Nukes played a huge role in major nations not being willing to just go out and conquer. It forced everyone to play a bit less overtly, so we ended up with proxy wars and coups and other fuckery when world powers wanted to extend their influence.

But, there’s also another big factor. You go out and conquer somewhere, you have to manage it. You take over Columbia, you now have to run Columbia, protect your ownership of it, and deal with the people there being your people. That’s a heavy burden for a world power. It’s one thing to maintain a small island as a territory (think Guam as an example); it’s a whole nuther thing to try and take over a nation that not only isn’t going to be done without worldwide resistance, but is harder to maintain control over because it isn’t contiguous.

The U.S. has a pretty major advantage by stretching across the entire continent. We’ve got entire oceans as borders, and entire nations that also stretch across the continent as neighbors. It’s a nation that’s damn near impossible to invade, blockade, or otherwise use direct methods against. Why would a nation give up those advantages by taking over somewhere else?

It’s way easier to use other methods to control other nations rather than own them. Fund groups inside the country that are friendly to your nation, let them take over the country, and profit (literally, since there’s a long history of the U.S. interfering with other countries’ governments for nothing other than capitalist gain).

If the other country doesn’t have an economic value, but have strategic positioning, or can serve as a puppet state or as a distraction, it’s still easier to just stage a coup, rebellion, or otherwise put the country in a condition that’s better aligned. It isn’t and wasn’t just the US engaging in this kind of activity, but the U.S. was pretty dominant on the western side of such activity. Our allied nations backed those plays, but the U.S. often called the shots.

In other words, the U.S. has never wanted or needed to conquer anywhere else after ww2. There were better ways to achieve goals.

The headphones, and any other gear, probably make some difference; I’m balling on a budget, with some tin t2s for iem, and beyer 770s (80 ohm) for cans, through a fiio DAC for the cheaper devices (but my main player is an old lg g7). Now and then I’ll break out the portapros, and it’s more prevalent since they tend to be a little muffled in the mids and highs no matter what they’re plugged into.

But just the difference between something like gmmp, phonograph, musicolet, vanilla, etc, it can be a huge difference for me. Gmmp is decent, but there’s static where there shouldn’t be, and using the eq tends to distort on the low end even at low amounts of boost.

Can’t recall if vinyl stood out from the rest of the pack or not, since it’s been a couple of years since I did an extended comparison. All of the ones using the standard android audio processing were prone to some degree or another of mudiness to my ears. Some would get distorted playing through anything other than headphones, particularly with hip-hop and house tracks. That was with multiple aux cables, Bluetooth, and on multiple devices.

But, yeah, I would love it if max ported his eq app to other platforms.

Poweramp

There’s nothing else out there that’s really an equal, foss or not. The closest it gets is neutron, and that’s a hot mess of an app.

It’s the sound quality that’s standout. It doesn’t hurt that it’s a decent player in every other way too, but even apps built for audiophiles don’t match it in real use, in every situation.

None of the foss players are worth a damn sound wise; might as well use whatever comes with the device on that factor alone.

Oooh! I was just talking about this with my wife, who I met gaming online. We’ve had the conversation with each other, and other people a lot, including cheaters.

So, most of the cheaters I’ve known tend to look at it as entertainment rather than competing. It isn’t that they want to beat other people, and think cheats are an acceptable way to do that. It’s usually that, regardless of their skill, they get bored with the slower pace of play, but still want to play.

I’m not saying it makes sense, or is acceptable, but that’s the most common explanation I’ve heard.

The next most common is the jerks. They do it either to mess with people, or to “troll” people that the cheaters think are too serious, or too invested or too “tryhard”, or whatever the excuse is. That kind of cheater does indeed wnat to ruin things for other people.

The next one that I’ve run into enough is the nerds that are just looking for ways to cheat as a hobby. They’re the ones that end up developing cheat tools, whether or not they let others use them. It’s about figuring out the game, its code, and how to manipulate it. Those players tend to stop using cheats once they’ve done what they wanted.

The other significant grouping I’ve run into are the ones that only cheat on PTW games, where they’ll say that if you can pay your way to winning, the game is already a cheat. I actually agree with them, but I just refuse to play those games, even if they’re otherwise very good. In theory, I would maybe cheat in those games if I knew for a fact everyone playing was cheating too.

I’ve actually done that once, but on a private server where nobody could play without an invite. It was actually kinda fun running an over powered character by virtue of a ton of free “pots” that would buff you in both pvp and pve play. Everyone was juiced up and one-hitting each other. Wouldn’t be fun all the time, but the free pots were only on weekends, and outright unavailable any other time.

And, I will sometimes run cheats in single player games for the same reason; it gives a different play experience that’s fun as long as you can turn it on and off.

But you’d be surprised how many people in all of those groupings will cheat if they think there’s other cheaters, no matter if there’s proof or not.

I kinda figured that was the point of the post

Preach!

My block list is long enough it lags my browser when I try to scroll through it.

My one and only bit of advice is for a first timer to only use a live usb/disc for a week, doing the most common things.

That assumes they don’t know anyone willing to put the time and effort into helping them migrate. If you have help, I don’t believe you’d have to have as long a trial period. A day or two at most.

Reasoning is that you never notice everything that might need troubleshooting the first few days. Making sure of that is much better done before trying to install and jump in, even with a dual boot set up.

Poweramp

The way it handles its own audio engine is pretty much the best available.

Stealth works, but you have to do a fresh install for some reason.

Damn! That’s sweet!

Lmmfao!

Lmmfao!

The brilliance in this is wasted on the masses.