Ah, gotcha. That makes sense.

The first half of the book is the fall of House Atreides, and then the rest of the book is Paul living among the Fremen until the end where he leads them in a coup against the emperor. The first movie ends with the House falling and Paul and his mother meeting up with the Fremen.

Ool

I am a little annoyed about phone going to exclusively eSIMs. My Linux phone that I try to boot up and update every so often to see if we’ve “made it” yet only takes physical SIM. Which I’ve read you can download an eSIM onto a physical card, but it sounds like a convoluted process, especially when your current phone only has eSIM. But I agree, that has little to nothing to do with open-source.

Ah yes. The good ol’ “I told you my ambition in advance” defense against “You SA’d my girlfriend!”

I feel like removing his humanity minimizes the evil of this. If an animal kills someone, it’s unfortunate, but it’s hard to blame the animal. In fact, it’s often the victim’s fault when an animal attacks. But this is a human. He is capable of such immense goodness and kindness, and instead he chooses to do this. The worst horror is an intelligent being choosing evil, not a mindless creature acting instinctively.

I don’t much care for violence either, but it certainly seems as though one side has no qualms about using it. If there were a peaceful solution, I’d advocate for it, but more and more it seems that political power grows from the barrel of a gun…

Isn’t there footage and/or photographs of him getting arrested at protests in his younger years? Did he just live to see himself become a villain or maybe was he a stopped clock? It seemed like he used to better, even if he was just a lib. I guess years in a comfy politician’s chair can change a man.

Fuckin hate it. Food is awful. I’d much rather photosynthesize. (may have an ED? for me it’s not super severe though, I just really don’t enjoy eating)

As far as I understand, the managed capitalism is for interacting with the predominantly capitalist world. My hope is that it withers away once revolution across the world finally happens.

Oh absolutely. I’m not putting proprietary tech in my head. (Says the gal who takes proprietary psychiatric meds…)

Hm. I trust China with this more than Musk, but still not quite sure what to think of it. This is not a tech that can coexist with capitalism (China not a problem, but other countries importing or copying it) without the absolute worst outcomes.

I guess if you’re eighteen and they’re seventeen, then sure? But also if you’re in college it’d be kinda weird to be with a high school student like that. Maybe on some technicality, but let’s err on the side of don’t do that.

Ah yes, vanity is infamously described as putting yourself in danger of losing everything in order to make a statement in favor of people who are hurting.

I don’t know that AI will reach the same level of quality as workers unless it reaches the same level consciousness as humans or, at the very least, as non-human animals. At which point we need to start considering the rights of the AI, which will lead to the same workers’ rights arguments except the Right will claim AI should have no rights because they already do that to living humans in the present.

It would probably depend on the person and their symptoms. My voices have mostly been threatening, but when I get delusions of conspiracy and such, it’s on a literally cosmic level. When I’m psychotic, I’m rarely concerned about the state of the US apart from worrying something is coming for the whole earth. But different people’s symptoms come up differently. Experiences are probably too varied to be generalized like that very easily.

Ah, so everyone else should work 60 hours a week for minimal pay, but he, since he gets his pay through stocks and such and therefore gets no regular wage despite making loads more than the average worker, shouldn’t have to work at all.

A few eldritch abominations here, but charm has to be me.

There is some precedent for this sort of thing. Being some in ham radio, I’ve worked with and learned about a few different emergency communications systems. And some that are unrelated to ham radio. An interesting project is I2P, but it mostly just piggy backs onto the main internet. Mesh networks are closer to your “our own internet” idea, but they would need to he fairly widespread to be effective. There’s Meshtastic which is an existing mesh network using LoRa tech. Each channel has its own encryption key, and for peer to peer, comms are end-to-end encrypted. There are public channels (which just uses a null encryption key like AA== or something) but if you specify a key, only users subscribed to the same channel with the same key can use that channel. You could technically set up a TCP/IP network over Meshtastic, but it’d be ridiculously slow. But an upside is that there’s already a lot of people and infrastructure using Meshtastic, so you already have a difficult part of building a mesh network done. Unfortunately to guarantee full coverage, you’d have to use an internet gateway to link distant users. There are other mesh networks, but most of the ones I know about use ham radio bands which, legally, need to be unencrypted. (at least in the US) And if you were to try to encrypt comes, nosey hams will be able to track you down and report you. And that’s not a vague threat, a lot of hams are just chomping at the bit to track down violators.

Musk suddenly discovers that his “cost-cutting” task force was convenient to get voters, but ultimately did not serve the fascist cause. He did get rid of a lot of public services and programs, though, so he wasn’t an entirely useless pawn.