LOL
Most guys don't actually want a Ferrari. But we'd like to be in a position where getting one to show off is an option we can afford.
This also applies to women.
I had a client pay me once.
He sent the payment from his British Virgin Islands corporate bank account.
My bank took one look at that shifty tax haven and sent the money straight back on suspicion of money laundering. Then notified me, in a very high-handed manner.
Second try, he sent the money to his Royal Bank of Ulster account, paid a trivial fee, then from RBU to me. No problem, an honour to be of service etc etc.
That's how the big boys do it.
My old mentor was there, in the ground fight. Officially, that war didn't happen, and if it did, officially Australia wasn't part of it.
He's not proud of it now, but he says the villages there were mostly under NVA or Khmer Rouge control already. And those two Communist factions were already bushwhacking each other.
Cambodia's King Sihanouk had been taking money and weapons from both East and West for his own plans for years, and both East and West were double-crossing him too.
Very complex and ugly war, no "good guy" side at all.
Centralised government is bad and dangerous, which virtually assures that those who seek to engage in it are too.
Democracy is not the disease, democracy is a treatment that the pathogens evolved resistance to.
Thanks Crow!
Direct to the load, but I do have a number of battery packs I can charge off this system.
Solar-mppt-battery-load was my earlier setup. It gained a couple of percent in efficiency, at the cost of greater complexity and multiple single points of failure.
I learned that the first thing I needed to do when designing an intermittent power system is to kill the Little Tin God (efficiency) and bury him in the foundations.
Solar panels are very cheap, single points of failure are very expensive.
XT60s I shall investigate, thanks for the tip :-)
Few people with a decent job and perspectives are willing to go and die in human wave attacks in an offensive war.
We see this pattern in #Russia all the time — for decades everyone was wondering "why don't they build normal roads, houses and sewage" in these derelict towns in Siberia.
The answer is obvious today — it was not exclusively neglect and corruption, but a policy to prevent building up a middle class. Because independent income offers people a choice, and as a dictator you need a resource of people from whom the choice has been taken away,m when you want to go go war.
Right now in Russia vast majority of people signing up for a contract do it exclusively for money, and it's almost exclusively people from small towns and rural areas, who had been living on miserable state benefits and cash loans for years. War in #Ukraine for them is a life chance: they are likely to die, but even if they do their family receives money they were unlikely to ever see in their life. That's the new social contract in Russia.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/20...
I'm just reading about #Palestine thriving IT sector, with #Gaza hosting a number of IT outsourcing hubs, pumped with money by US and #Israel companies. All that been scrapped on the morning of 7 October, and it's also logical because #Hamas doesn't need educated youth with decent income in Gaza — they won't have any reason to go and blow themselves up on bus stops. For that you need people from whom everything has been taken away...
Your description of rural poverty and decay is exactly how the Australian Defence Forces recruit. I am told the US of A does the same in both small rural towns and urban ghettos.
Its nice that before the war Palestinians in Gaza were building a world-class tech sector - but government using monopoly and decay to recruit for war is a global story. Hopefully #bitcoin and #peace can put cracks in the bars and give opportunities everywhere that don't require killing for a government...
#BREAKING| Journalist and writer Lama Khater, who has been released from an Israeli jail today testified that:
⭕️ Israeli jailers threatened her with rape and of locking her children and burning them alive.
⭕️ An Israeli Shin Bet officer told her that nothing would make him feel better until they kill 50,000 children in Gaza.
⭕️ Israeli forces kidnapped at least 10 mothers from northern Gaza while they were evacuating to the south. They were tortured and isolated from other female detainees.
I have one of his books - "Diplomacy". The theory is pretty good, if rather conventional. And the examples are only moderately self-serving.
Breaking News - Hell Has Recalled Its Ambassador "For Consultations."
“Pinochet’s torture chambers were the maternity ward of neoliberalism, a baby delivered bloody and screaming by Henry Kissinger.” https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/henry-kissinger-war-criminal-dead-1234804748/
"Here richly, and with ridiculous display,
The Politician's corpse was laid away.
While all of his acquaintance sneered and slanged
I wept: for I had longed to see him hanged."
- Belloc Hillaire
True. But.
Superyachts harm the American people less than many government programs!
(The ones that the Shefirs' money was supposed to go to, for example)
Here richly, with ridiculous display,
The Politician's corpse was laid away.
While all of his acquaintance sneered and slanged
I wept:
For I had longed to see him hanged.
- Belloc Hillaire
Luna. Inscribe with a Robot Killdozer.
Then, for millenia after we nuke each other back to flint spears, humans can look up at night and see the final message of the demigods of the Golden Age:
"Maybe she's born with it. Maybe it's Maybelline"
'Mr. Jager likened the new Michigan law to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which was created to protect national security but ultimately was abused by government officials to spy on members of the Trump campaign.
“The victims of the FISA Court abuses were American citizens who did nothing wrong," he said.
“If you think our own government wouldn’t misuse the Red Flag law to target you, just look at what they are doing to President Trump.”'
Well said, that man!
Works well for me.
Orbot runs as a separate Tor service to your Tor Browser client.
It works.
Corporate email providers will shut your account down hard if you set your mail client to access via Orbit/Tor.
And Amethyst images load a bit slowly.
Everything else works beautifully, even banking apps
All this, plus I'll do a shoutout to archive.org.
If a website rejects your browser for being too hard to track, go to the address bar and add https://web.archive.org/web/ before the URL of the website you wanted.
As in, https://web.archive.org/web/https://www.aljazeera.com
This will fetch the content from the latest Internet Archive snapshot. Gets you the content you wanted despite website's insincere concern-trolling and even paywalls (sometimes, anyway).
The Australian government has apologised for allowing Thalidomide to be widely used by pregnant women, causing horrendous problems for children.
My dad also remembers going to the local pool as a kid and getting sprayed with DDT.
To think they are still not allowing this to happen, using us as guinea pigs and making money with the companies that make these 'totally safe' products is impossible. In their minds we are still their serfs, toiling away for them.
#serfsup #grownostr #plebchain #nostriches #irishjail
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-11-29/prime-minister-apologises-for-thalidomide-poisoning/103163990
"I was only following Regulations". Valid defence in all but the most egregious circumstances.
The reason Big Government creates agencies like the TGA and EPA isn't to protect us consumers from crooks.
Its to protect (well connected) crooks against being sued by consumers in (possibly sympathetic) courts. Consumers using old-style Common Law Torts - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_tort_law
Almost anything bad can be actioned as a Tort, and was, before the Administrative State started to encroach, protecting the guilty while showboating and concern-trolling.
I had a Midjourney account when it was free. My own GPU was rubbish for anything high res.
I've upgraded since, I should experiment again when I have a moment. Won't be using your prompt :-p, need to keep it Safe For Wife!
Are you running Stable Diffusion on your own hardware, or using some online service?
If its your own hardware, there are lots of different Stable Diffusion models you can try, designed for different use cases.
With Torrents over Nostr, we now have the opportunity to Zap for Seeding. This allows for the value for value model to flow into a brand new market. nostr:npub1v0lxxxxutpvrelsksy8cdhgfux9l6a42hsj2qzquu2zk7vc9qnkszrqj49 could we get Zaps and Zap Splits amongst seeders added to DTAN?
The concern I have with Torrenting is that it doesn't work over Tor or I2P. So strong anonymity is not really possible.
IPFS - https://www.ipfs.io/ - has the same use cases as Bittorrent, but DOES work with strong anonymity - I've been running a node as a hidden service for a year now.