I have a TrueNas system locally with periodic cloud sync jobs to backblaze B2.

I was trying to do this recently and learned that, I guess certain bluray drives have been identified as compromised by the powers that be. As a result newer bluray disks ship with a list of those drives, and when your drive’s firmware sees that it is on the list, it will refuse to open the disk. I have an old bd drive from ~2008 that was ~60% effective at ripping my library.

I also tried my best to use fully open source tools in combination with an up-to-date KEYDB.CFG, but never had as much success as just using makemkv.

The most extreme route I found is to refer to makemkv’s list of drives that can have their firmware flashed to prevent it from refusing to read a disk. I haven’t gone that route, but would definitely consider it if I was looking for a drive.

Porque la izquierda libera, la derecha oprime.

(We say “lefty loosey, righty tighty”, but a similar rhyming phrase in Spanish translates to “the left liberates, the right oppresses”)

Or ducks. For clarity.

Either way, just remember to support artists when you can. Bandcamp Friday is one of the best ways I know of to fund artists in exchange for FLACs that you can legally listen to however you want to.

But I was a broke student in the heydays of torrenting, so I’m not judging using any means necessary to listen to music.

Subscriptions for everything. Especially hardware.

I already hate my always-online, have to use their shit app robot vacuum that gets worse after each update. I can’t imagine buying a new, overpriced car these days and having it do all the same shit.

Regan really did a number on the US. Broad privatization of public services, with all the wrong incentives in place. Which was then a vicious cycle of people hating their experience with public services -> politicians cut their funding -> service gets worse -> people hate their experience -> repeat until all your taxes have been siphoned to private entities and your govt is in shambles.

I admit I am misusing the term “cartel” here, given that it refers to a group of independent interests acting cooperatively, not a single entity. And legally recognized corporations already attempt to form cartels whenever possible, which is the entire purpose of anti-trust law.

And I agree that govt legislations each have their own definitions for what constitutes a “corporation”, but it’s the same for “marriage”. Yet we wouldn’t say marriage only exists if you have a govt.

I don’t think it’s useful or interesting to end the discussion at “a govt defines a corporation, therefore a corporation doesn’t exist without a govt”. Because I maintain that if the US govt disappeared, all the entities you currently consider “US-based corporations” would not disappear. Similarly, corporations currently operate internationally in many different countries with many different legislative requirements and many different definitions of “corporation”. Yet we don’t think of them as existing exclusively in the context of any one of those countries.

A corporation can never do that - government laws set out very clearly who controls what

Corporations do have infighting, and Hostile Takeovers do happen, and we are in agreement that ONLY reason they’re not bloodier is because of governments enforcing their laws. But also, I shouldn’t have made “cartel” analagous to “corporation”, since the analogy for a cartel civil war would be multiple businesses or corporations having a falling out.

But we also already have a sordid history of US “corporations” operating outside the laws of other countries, oftentimes with the help of the US military. So how do we square that circle?

But you understand that everything you linked are examples of why a govt can’t actually print infinitely and can’t just pay interest to rich people…right?

Also it’s a red flag to me that all of your sources are youtube videos.

The purpose of government securities is not to fund spending but to give the rich a safe place to park their capital with interest.

You have a source on this? I find it difficult to believe that it is ever a good idea to just take out a loan for the sake of making the interest payments. Especially using public funds, that sounds pretty close to embezzlement.

Rather, a country’s budget should always make use of debt, because its reputation has value and should be invested, not left sitting on the table.

There’s no formal structure, shares or board meetings

This is an arbitrary list of things and I don’t agree that all corporations have all of these, but I guarantee most cartels have a formal structure, a clear description of ownership, and what qualifies as board of leaders. Most wouldn’t be able to function without it.

sometimes they do just descend into civil war

They compete with rival cartels in all the same ways corporations would if they could (or already do when they can get away with it).

They’re businesses

I’m curious why you’re willing to call them businesses but not corporations.

Corporations try to all the time. It’s only through an effective use of law that they don’t. And lately, it hasn’t been very effective.

But also a government can’t print “unlimited currency”. Eventually it would be worthless. They are effectively only permitted to print currency proportional to what their creditors allow.

Drug cartels do all the things any corporation would happily do without laws to restrict them. So I don’t see any distinction and I don’t believe a govt is necessary for a corporation to exist. Just like with any other crime by any other citizen, a govt uses its monopoly on violence to prevent corporations from doing harm.

Lol I don’t know what you want man, i didn’t realize this was one of those “digging my heels in because I don’t know how to be wrong” threads. I’ll let you do your thing, peace.

Who is “we”? I’m responding to your top level comment. You just asked the creator of an exclusively client-side app whether they support encryption. Not only is it reasonable for me to assume you mean client side encryption, it’s unreasonable for you to ask for server side encryption, because there is no server. It’s a BYOBackend situation.

Now if you’re asking for client-side encryption, something like Keepass where the file itself is encrypted, you have to use some form of auth to decrypt it on use, and you can store this file using whatever backend you want, that’s perfectly reasonable. I would still consider that encrypted at rest, but at least you could maybe separate encrypted reads from writes and limit the attack surface in the event of a breach.

All phones are already disk encrypted these days. If you want disk encryption on your PC, you should enable it. Otherwise, it’s the responsibility of whatever backend you choose to handle encryption over the network.

He truly was

I would be happy with one guideline: taxpayers should see and feel the impact of their tax dollars.

It feels like that’s currently not a priority at all. The govt can just hand the money to some middleman who pockets 90% for a job worth 10%, and no one checks on it. DOGE was the pinnacle of this practice; honestly felt like Elon and Trump said “hey, you know what would be funny?”

Honestly don’t know if that’s worse than the protestant message that “god is omnipotent, all knowing, created good and evil, created you in his image, loves you and wants you to go to heaven, buuuuuut sorry, he can’t unless you “freely” choose to accept him into your heart. Yep, the heart he made, the mind he gave you, yeah, those are going to send you to hell. Nothing he can do about it, it’s on you. Totally not a weird, abusive, logically inconsistent relationship we have with him.”

Then stack on top of that “the woman should serve the man in the same way the church serves the Lord”. Just problematic all the way down.

If it was as simple as, “the man hates the woman just as god hates us” then the next step is easy. Fuck that guy, I’m out.

Let’s be clear, getting rid of trump doesn’t stop anything. If anything, they WANT someone to target trump, because that gives them justification to be more tyrannical. What you are advocating for is called a Civil War, and if we started one now, Trump would win.

Like all countries, we have a system of government in place. When it comes to removing the president (executive branch) over objectionable behaviour, we have a process: it falls on the judicial and legislative branches to conclude that the behaviour was objectionable and that the president should be forcibly removed (a process in the system called impeachment). Trying to remove the president using means outside this system is literally saying, “the system doesn’t work, we need to throw it out, take matters into our own hands, and start from scratch”, i.e. a civil war.

For now we continue to try to take steps within the system, but it is now abundantly clear to most Americans that the Republicans in Congress have been colluding to allow the president to do whatever objectionable thing he wants. SCOTUS seems to be doing something similar. Unfortunately, that is their prerogative in the system we have.

If a group of states said, “that’s it, we’re done, the system doesn’t work, we don’t acknowledge you as the president, and we’re going to try to stop you” then within the system, it is the job of the US military to put a stop to that. Their job within the system is to ensure the system keeps working as the law dictates. And the US military is the most funded military in the world, so the rebellion would lose almost instantly.

This fall will be the real decider because of midterms. Trump is polling very poorly. A record number of Republican congress-people have announced they will not seek reelection. Democrats are winning in red states for the first time in close to a century. Trump is desperately trying to rig elections, and there’s a possibility he’ll attempt to cancel elections entirely. The result will be one of two things:

1. Democrats regain control of Congress, and all of the crimes that Republicans wouldn’t hold anyone accountable for suddenly get held accountable.
2. Trump tries to say “the system isn’t working, we need to establish a dictatorship and cancel elections”.

Ideally it’s option 1, but there’s a very real chance it’s option 2, in which case the US military is obligated to stop him. If they don’t, then we will cross the bridge you’re describing, and it won’t be pretty.