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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • The litmus test for whether something is a lawful order is to ask what will happen if you refuse. If the penalty for refusal is your arrest, say that you would prefer not to but will comply under threat of arrest. If it actually wasn’t a lawful order but you complied to avoid arrest, you’ll learn from a lawyer and get to sue over that.

    As somebody else noted, driving is a privilege, not a right; if you’re pulled over for a traffic offense, you’re obligated to hand over your license and other related documents as requested depending on the state, probably registration and proof of insurance. If you don’t, then in many states it’s assumed that you were driving without being licensed to do so, and you’re probably going to jail.

    On the flip side, if the cop asks to search your vehicle, you can tell him no. Don’t stop him from doing it anyway, just reiterate that you don’t consent to it and fight in court. There are some situations (like you’re under arrest and your car is being inventoried and impounded) in which they don’t need your consent to get in your car. Probable cause also gets them access to your car without your consent.

    If you’re asked to do a field sobriety test, just refuse. Same for a breathalyzer. They’ll probably take you in and have you use a lab machine at the station, but that’s preferable to their bullshit games if you know you’re not doing anything wrong. Make quantitative science be the only evidence. Don’t drink and drive in the first place and you’ll be fine on that front.


  • I’m 99% sure that you’re kidding, but a shitload of people actually think like that. Decades of copaganda in TV and movies weren’t for nothing, and now social media is full of it. The 80s was saturated with loose cannon cops who get results and it convinced people that sometimes it’s okay to violate rights. Now it’s cops doing tiktok dances or flipping water bottles to convince people that hey, they’re regular people just like me, and well, golly gee, I’m not a fascist so how can I possibly believe that they’re fascists?

    Have one involuntary interaction with a cop and your view will change. The cops primarily target brown and/or poor people, so it’s no wonder that the vast majority of thin blue line dipshits are financially comfortable honkies who’ve never had the cops target them.

    Sidenote: I’ve always chuckled at the people who have both a thin blue line bumper sticker and Gadsden flag bumper stick/license plate. Basically a billboard that says “tread on those ones, officers” but they’re always the same people claiming “I don’t have a racist bone in my body!” Okay, but only because bones can’t be racist; it’s your brain that’s racist.



  • This. You have rights, but the police will lie, cheat, and steal their way into getting whatever they want, especially when what they want is for you to waive your rights.

    When stopped by the police (in America), you say “I invoke my fifth amendment right to not answer questions and I don’t consent to any searches and seizures. Am I being detained or am I free to go?” That question starts a clock for what is a reasonable amount of time to detain you for their investigation because you’ve made it clear that you’d like to leave as soon as you’re legally allowed to.

    As for any kind of force, just stay silent and unthreatening. They’re gonna do what they’re gonna do, and anything you do can be used as rationalization for escalation, which they really seem to fucking love. Be polite when you do choose to speak. Obey lawful commands and let them arrest you if that’s what they’re gonna do. You don’t fight armed thugs in the street, you fight them in court. File complaints and sue when they violate your rights and cause undue harm. Swinging at them or shouting in their face is how you get shot. Let their ego win the moment and then administratively destroy their career and life later on.

    I’m also not a lawyer, but this is what any half decent lawyer would tell you to do. Just shut the fuck up (but invoke your right to shut the fuck up or your silence can actually be used against you) and be as passive as possible so your lawyer has a slam dunk case getting your charges dropped and/or suing the everloving fuck out of them, hopefully nullifying their qualified immunity in the process. Nothing you do or say to the police can help you, but it sure as shit will be used against you. Even things you think are innocuous can corroborate that you’re who they’re looking for, so just shut the fuck up.


  • If things would stop getting shittier, then yes. I’m not entirely sure that it applies here so I understand your annoyance, but you’re seeing “enshittification” everywhere because we’re seeing the practice of enshittification everywhere. I applaud it being called out. We shouldn’t be seeing higher prices for worse experiences, but that’s the current trend. If you’re tired of seeing the word, then it’d probably be a good idea to take a break from c/technology because I don’t think it’s stopping any time soon.





  • he has a highschool masturbation related injury that causes one of his arms to constantly ache

    Source? I’ve never heard of this (never cared much about him or Twitter) and tried to look it up, but I’m not seeing it anywhere.

    I don’t understand how anybody can do something for a while, make millions or even billions off of doing that thing, and then they try to do other things to make more money and stay in the public eye. Just buy an island and fuck off for your remaining decades of retired decadence. What more could you want?




  • The answer is actually pretty simple. Musk is a man child who doesn’t like criticism. He lives in a bubble. He fires people who disagree with him and listens to anybody who fawns over him. He appeals to the loudest ones he allows himself to hear. That’s why he made that dumbass truck. There’s not actually many people who want that hideous, broken monstrosity, but his worshippers shouted that they wanted a truck.

    He’s also scrambling to get money coming in. Twitter is falling apart. People are starting to wake up and realize that he’s nothing more than a lucky nepo dipshit. To soften his losses, he’s doing a shitload of layoffs and cutting corners wherever he can. Quality is dropping on his products that already had quality issues. Brand recognition and reputation will start to be a net negative factor as a result.

    If he wants to turn Tesla around, musk needs to pivot to producing tech for other car companies and stop making cars themselves.



  • I mostly agree, except that I’m here because I left reddit. I can’t speak for anybody else, but you can see my history here and compare it to my history there. It’s been almost a year now and I’m not going back.

    I’d like to think that enough people will get pissed off enough to make real change happen, but people think they have too much to lose and don’t see how much they have to gain. In general, I mean. Windows doesn’t really fucking matter lol. Netflix doesn’t really fucking matter. The realistic course of action is to just vote with our wallets and hope that discourages overly shitty practices from these companies.


  • I don’t disagree with your point, but I think that the most important variable is how receptive the average person is to change. It takes a lot of discomfort for most people to want to make a significant change. Most people probably won’t even recognize that Windows sucks because it’s what they’re familiar with and they probably attribute general tech improvements and new software with the OS because they don’t know any better. So they see it as better in a lot of ways and only worse in a couple of ways. They probably also generally think that the only alternative is an overpriced Apple product. It wasn’t until YouTube started cracking down on ad blockers that most people were even aware of the existence of ad blockers lmao. So I’m sure your average Windows user thinks that Linux means programming gobbledygook in cmd.exe and they would rather scroll Facebook. People are dumb and uninterested in the discomfort of learning things. Even if what they’re learning is that there’s not much discomfort because there’s not much new to learn. You have to trick them by sneaking vegetables into their food. “You have a Samsung phone. That runs Android. Android is Linux. See, you’re already using it.” It’s a fucking shock to me that Windows phones never took off.

    But maybe the most important factor to Microsoft is the business world. It’s obviously not unanimous, but a shitload of companies rely on the Office suite. Switching to something different overnight might be easy for some workers, but I’d assume a massive disruption in productivity until everybody got acclimated. There would probably need to be some kind of canned training thing to help workers with the transition, which would cost more money. In general, companies would run a cost-benefit analysis and ultimately decide that it really doesn’t make much business sense to make that change when things are fine as is. Because in reality, Windows is fine. It’s not bad enough for a business to burden a rocky quarter just because of some ads and a little jank.

    The bad news for Microsoft however is that privacy and security could be getting called into question. Some businesses here and there might get worried about that, but it’s the big Department of Defense fish that will drop them overnight because it’s a matter of national security. In the same way that government devices banned tiktok years before considering a nationwide ban, government devices would not hesitate to dump Microsoft. Their greed could be their downfall. They’re okay so long as the government and their big contractors keep running Windows.


  • This was my general takeaway. My laptop is showing it’s 9ish year old age considerably. I picked up a used Steam Deck and I actually love everything about it except that it’s really not powerful enough to replace my laptop. I’m interested in building a desktop, and SteamOS taught me that modern Linux is not super complicated, and now I know that it’s not a huge pain in the ass to troubleshoot because the community isn’t nearly as toxic as I was expecting. So unless I learn of an even better distro for general use, gaming, streaming, audio recording, and video editing, all for somebody who is experienced with Windows and not much else, I’m leaning towards Nobara.

    The only real hurdle I have is that it’s hard to justify dumping like $1200-1500 on a computer when I already have a PS5, Steam Deck, and gaming laptop. I really don’t need it.


  • You’re definitely right. Facebook got super shitty and most people didn’t leave. Netflix got super shitty and most people didn’t leave. YouTube got super shitty and most people didn’t leave. Amazon’s shitty video service got even more shitty, but Fallout was about to come out, so most people didn’t leave and I bet they actually got more subscribers (but idc enough to look it up). It seems like most people have accepted that things just get shitty over time. Or maybe they’re just not noticing the shitty changes? Idk. It’s hard to look at our projected trajectory as a species and be left with much hope. There’s good in this world, but it seems like none of it is coming from companies.