• 2 Posts
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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 8th, 2023

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  • The town I grew up in is in the middle of a cancer cluster. The largest factory (where most people work) got caught illegally dumping chemicals in the ground. They were just made to pay a relatively small fine. The corporation was threatening to move the plant somewhere else if it became too expensive to operate there, and all lawsuits were dismissed.

    That factory, and most other factories in the area primarily just hire “temp” workers that they keep as temps for years, never actually hire them full time, and pay them near minimum wage with no benefits. Many young people who do end up staying in that area become drug addicts and die in their 20s or 30s.

    There’s a lot of corruption in the local government and police as well. The police harass anybody they don’t like, and they know pretty much who everybody is and what they drive. A few people in government got caught embezzling money. A sheriff tried to frame somebody for murder. Also, I think the people in the courts have some kind of deal with the juvenile detention center, because they give kids very long sentences for minor things (6 months for being 10 minutes late to school while on probation in my case).

    Small towns, in my experience, are shitholes with corrupt and authoritarian local governments, and are exploited by corporations in ways similar to third-world countries.


  • Where I live, I would still need to pay for a VPN to use torrents. I’ve been banned from an ISP before for torrenting (thankfully, I had multiple ISPs available for me).

    At the moment, I just “pay” legally because I get a few “free” streaming plans from my mobile provider and ISP. Occasionally, I just use a free streaming site if I really want to watch something that’s not available to me. Every once in a while, I try anonymous p2p such as Tribler or torrenting over I2P, but it’s still extremely slow, unfortunately. I’ve never used Usenet, but I think it’s about the same price as a VPN or seedbox would be?







  • Trump is currently favored in polls and in betting markets. Few people care about the convictions. People who would vote for him definitely don’t care about impeachments. The far-right has a very effective and expansive propaganda machine (old media, alternative media, and social media) that can counter any negative (“fake”) news. Biden is a very weak candidate because of his physical and mental health, and the Democrats are ineffective at “controlling the narrative” compared to the Republicans. I think it’ll probably be a close election, and if I was forced to bet, I’d bet on Trump winning.