Thats not a very fun fact 😿

Well, we live in a society where some camgirls give a portion of their paycheck to fund their viewers at three letter agencies.

I was on a hacking team in college, and one of our best defensive people wears cat ears while working.

My car is probably smaller than the cabin and engine of that truck and I don’t even have a compact car

It does make me a little uncomfortable to see intimate displays of affection in public. It doesn’t matter if it’s straight or gay or whatever.

I have gotten comfortable with the discomfort… it’s not their problem to deal with, it’s mine.

100%

As my views matured, I’ve grown to realize that forcing people to comply with the comfort of people is inherently oppressive, and that when I’m in public, I’m not entitled to complete comfort.

I’m not a big fan of straight people holding hands or kissing in public. Like, i support people doing things like that in the privacy of their home, but they don’t need to force themselves upon is and shove their straightness down our throats. Essentially, I don’t think straight people should be able to openly exist in public, since their existence is forcing it down our throats, so they should just go back into the closet.

:::/s:::

Dominos is outrageously expensive if you don’t shop the deals.

When I was in college, I’d get dominos with my roommates when they had the 20$ special, which would be about 30$ after tip and delivery. The special had 2 medium pizzas, garlic knots, cinnamon twists, and soda.

After I moved back home, I learned my local dominos doesn’t always have that deal. I’d get something similar to what you got and I’d be upset that I got less food for a bit more…

Now what really pisses me off is the high end neopolitan place near me is cheaper on their dinner special days, where you can get 2 personal pizzas that taste so good I’d accept it as proof that god is real for about 25$ including tips and gas money.

I thought about it and realized that you missed the point of what I’m saying.

I’m arguing that the only way you can view them (both biden and FDR) as someone who did more good than harm is if you abstract the harms and goods from the perspective of someone who is not being harmed while being a person who is benefited.

FDR sentenced a single ethnicity to prison for the crime of being japanese. This destroyed generational wealth, and ruined the upward mobility of a generation. It’s easier to say “he did more good than harm” if you are both the one being harmed.

Biden is not just allowing genocide, but funding it, and attacking those who prevent it from continuing. If you are isolated from the suffering he is causing, it’s super easy to say he is doing more good than harm.

Sure, there are parallels that can be drawn, but that’s not what I’m arguing against. To say I’m proving this point would be true, but completely dishonest since it blatantly ignores the argument I made against that point you madr in the edit.

It’s been a rough week at work, and being in an environment where we are all on call and numerous people are subbing for others who are having life get in the way, a lot of people are working late and taking weekend shifts that they would have otherwise had off.

One of my college friends works with me, and I know his responses to these questions pretty well, and boy howdy have I seen him go through all of these responses in order as things got worse and worse while the director pops in and out of call to check on us and get updates on the situation.

Considering we would have had the weekend off and both of us stayed very late, things are going pretty OK, all things considered. Can’t complain too much if I’m still truckin’

That comes from an incredible point of privilege.

If you were one of the people who were thrown in an internment camp, you probably wouldn’t remember all the good. You would only remember years of your life, wasted, having been thrown in prison camps due to the circumstances of your birth. Fuck, if you were the child or grandchild of a survivor of it, you would remember the stories of your grandparents thrown in a camp, discarded from society by a xenophobic government who clearly sees them as a second class citizen. You might remember hearing about them selling their homes for a fraction of their worth in order to get anything from them at all. When they were finally free, they were homeless too.

If you were a Palestinian American, you probably are stressed out of your mind, waiting on the uncommon phone call from your family, hoping for a confirmation that they are alive, and hoping you don’t hear that your cousin was gunned down by a gun drone when looking for food, or your aunts, uncles, and their children were blown up at a refugee camp, or executed in a hospital.

You might not have heard anything for six months, and you feel like absolute shit, having gone to protests, and even direct actions to try and put a stop to it only to be ignored, called antisemites, or otherwise degraded by a government and press lying through their teeth to justify a “war” wholeheartedly supported by the president. You might be looking at your paystub, seeing almost a hundred bucks, maybe more, being taken by the government to fund the extermination of your family.

To say “FDR did some bad things, just like Biden. But we still remember all the good that came from him, of which there was arguably more” is not a pragmatic calculation. It is valuing the good done to you, as a person who wasn’t systemically attacked by the government during that time, over the suffering of a marginalized group who felt the force of a white supremacist government coming down on them. Being a social democrat doesn’t excuse anything bad FDR did, and it certainly doesn’t make up for any of the bad things either.

Everyone loves to say ACAB, but people often forget about the cop in their head

I can’t say I’ve experienced pride a decade ago, since I’ve been closeted for years and only recently had the epiphany that I can just show up as an undercover ally now that it’s more socially acceptable to have solidarity with the queers.

I can see where you are coming from. Before I realized I was queer, I was an ally and I thought about it a similar way, happy to see people support a group one of my friends belonged to that has suffered historically.

I think our difference of opinion is summed up by your last paragraph:

no, those rainbow ads don’t mean anything more than the green and red ones in December, or the red hearts in February. But the fact that corporations are openly showing support without fear of death threats, or “more importantly” losing money, means something to me.

I genuinely don’t care about symbolic actions. I worry that corporations will heel turn the moment it is no longer safe or profitable to pander to the queers. Having rainbows in june does feel nice, but I’ve come to notice that it merely distracts me from the pain of the closet.

I think it’s more important that pride comes from a stronger base than the whim of a corporation chasing profit. As long as we are profitable, we get support. The moment things change, we lose it all.

I also have a problem with the corporatization of pride. When I went to my local pride parade, I wouldn’t be allowed to march, since I wasn’t a member of an organization/corporation, since pride was no longer for the people, it was for the corporation.

Queer protestors interrupted the parade to try and stand in solidarity with Palestinians, and they were beaten by the cops. Pride used to be a protest, but now protest was no longer possible in pride.

When unaffiliated queers tried to march through the street, cops blocked them and were preparing to arrest people before that crowd took a different route. Had that group of people been an employee of the local military contractor, they would have been able to stroll down the road with them unopposed.

My expression of pride was reduced to standing on the sidelines and watching corporations parade down the street with rainbow banners, interrupted by real people in organizations. There was a sterility of the corporate floats compared to a random organization marching down the road.

For example, there was a group of furries marching down the streets in their fursuits and the pride flags that represent them. There were multiple groups of drag queens strutting down the street with a car following them blasting music. These displays had a completely different feel than seeing some airline company march down the street with their little carts throwing pride themed merch at us.

To me, the big thing I want is solidarity, and corporations are incapable of giving that. And solidarity is what is going to matter if things come crashing down around us.

The soulless structure of the government is not much different than the soulless structure of a corporation.

Also, there is no indication that this isn’t a private consulting firm, for example.

No matter how much I hate corporate pride, I cannot find a fiber of my being that hates this

It’s not just the phone manufacturer, but the mobile carrier, and apps with access to your location (like weather apps, or map apps)

That’s making more sense to me, but my view of reverse engineering is 100% tainted by my work in SRE and hacking.

I work in the same way, but I’ve kinda forgot about using a calculator since the last few math classes I took forbid using calculators

As a kid who had a habit of reverse engineering shit, (malware analysis and ethical hacking my beloved) I genuinely don’t know you can reverse engineer an equation with a question and 4 answers, 3 of them which are wrong. Even with two questions, its still a crapshoot, and the amount of wrong to right answers seems a bit time consuming to use to try and figure out the real solution, much less the equation, in a reasonable amount of time needed to complete an exam.

If you have no desire to do rudimentary googling for a group project in college, that sounds like you aren’t a very helpful teammate. Last time I generated certs I used the first stack overflow result and was done in minutes, there’s no excuse.

It was a project requirement, PHI was processed by it, so yes, it needed a secure connection. I now realize I should have used mutual auth, but hey, I only learned about that after that project

We never sent actual data to it (the actually sensitive data used for training never left a secure VM), but the point of the course was to act like we were. Plus, setting up an nginx reverse proxy is simple, setting it up and getting certs from some ssl commands is a 10 minute task that appeases the project manager/professor with minimal effort.

I was doing a group project in college where we had a Linux server running some of our custom software. I asked a group mate who worked in IT to self-sign some certs so we could get https up and running for our next sprint demo.

He installed a fucking snap package to do it via certbot. On fucking RHEL. And that server was not hosting an internet-accessible service. And he didn’t know why I lost my mind.