If you do 2 a day, after a couple months you’ll be good.

https://github.com/yaelwrites/Big-Ass-Data-Broker-Opt-Out-List?tab=readme-ov-file

There are some privacy-forward domain registrars and you can register with a privacy mode enabled that hides your name and info. Also, it’s an honor system, no one comes around to check your ID and phone number, at least in my experience with NameCheap. I registered a domain with a day-old Tuta address. Likely using a credit card with KYC didn’t make them look any farther, but if you get a burner SIM and have an image of an “ID” at the ready, and set a VPN for an EU location, I expect you’d be fine. Just don’t put all your eggs in the basket for a month or so.

When will people learn that any advertising that occurs during extortion like this is the focal point of hate and fear?

This is like anti-advertising.

Same, I used to have some Caliber extension that stripped DRM. Last used it 2-3 years ago and worked for Adobe DRM at least.

I like to go check out the book I want from the library, and when it gives me the Amazon DRM version I just go search for the epub version online and download that. IIRC, completely legal as I have legal access to the book…somehow.

You have 2 neighbors where it’s basically a public good.

I saw a guy in a park in Milan at almost midnight filling up a few 5 liter bottles from the carbonated water station. He clearly lived across the street and just…needed to bathe in fizzy water right then? No idea. But it’s not just you all.

Bonjour, mon aime.

Right, and so I’m saying that forgetting how to make CPUs as a premise seems far-fetched when the actual fact of the matter than we can easily lose the ability to make CPUs with only a few significant supply chain losses. A total societal collapse isn’t necessary. A single catastrophic natural disaster that only directly impacts one part of the world might be enough.

OK, but what if they have to trade their driver’s license for voting rights?

It’s not just the manufacturing of that one thing that is under consideration. There’s an entire supply chain that gets you to that point where you finally have the inputs needed to enter the lab and make the product. There’s likewise a whole bunch of supply chain needed to get an ISO Class 5 clean room, which is what’s needed for general microprocessors. Even if you’re only talking about a clean work box on a bench top.

Who is mining the cobalt and aluminum and making the glass and plastic tools needed to stock the lab where you’re making 1980’s style microprocessors? Who is making a pure silicon ingot you’ll slice to get a wafer? What will you use to slice the ingot for the wafer? How will you polish the wafer to microscopic levels of flatness? Who is making the oscilloscopes that test the processors to see if they work? Who is making the glass for the lenses for high-power microscopy you need to work? Where will you get the bulbs and needed for the photolithography stage? Where will you get the tiny tiny tiny wires that connect the pins to the chip? How will you purify and process refined silicon dioxide? Sure, the stuff is everywhere, but think through how you go from a piece of quartz on the ground to a material you need to layer on a wafer (where you gonna get the wafer??) and what machines and processes are needed for that. And on and on and on. One of those things missing means you can’t move forward.

And depending on the scenario, each of those things needs to be local to you as well.

This is Carl Sagan “If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, first you need to invent the universe” level picking the process apart. Everything is connected, and we don’t always appreciate how much things are inextricably tied to what we use on a daily basis.

My favorite example: This guy figured it out when thinking through a cheeseburger.

There’s also a book from 2016 called “When the Trucks Stop Running” that is fearmongering oil industry hype, all about how important oil is to fueling heavy machinery. (Spoiler, it’s not as important as they make it out to be) But the real lesson of the book is how many rarely seen or talked about corners of the supply chain are fundamental to keeping huge numbers of industries running, and how fragile many advanced technologies are to supply chain interruption.

I was thinking of modern CPUs the whole time and then people are trying to “What-if” their way into whatever they want it to be.

Fine, it’s whatever you want it to be. We’ll be making modern CPUs in a bucket next to the bucket where we recycle paper.

Grandma, we’re watching things on the internet now. It’s consolidation of the media because those formerly powerful outlets are dying and now these things are cheap.

This is a Boomer problem, and I’m fucking tired of Boomers running stuff, because they suck at it.

I propose a Constitutional Amendment that the voting age starts at 18 and ENDS at 70. And that no one over the age of 70 can be elected to anything Federal ever again. That anyone currently in office over the age of 70 be kicked out right the fuck now.

Then let all the Boomers exist in their paranoid racist little bubble getting scammed and buying pillows and catheters from whoever the TV tells them.

Yeah, but look at how much other stuff that is highly-manufactured goes into that process? It’s not about just the end product, it’s about the entire supply chain needed to get the stuff to make the 1 product.

You can make vacuum tubes all day. You can even make transistors and integrated circuits at home.

But the definition of “computer” here is a glorified calculator.

A TI-81, the graphing calculator from the 1980’s, used a chip that had 8500 transistors. So if you’re planning to, say, build a dam and need to know how thick the cement should be to account for the pressure from the volume of water when the lake is full - unless you want to do all that engineering calculus yourself (I promise, it sucks) then you might want some more advanced computational power. Sure, dams were built when this was all done by hand. Dams also collapsed and washed towns away sometimes. Something I haven’t heard of happening in a while.

As nice as it is to think about going back to an analog world, things like knowing what the climate is doing, medical advancements, sharing video and images, etc. save lives and advance medicine. No one is making a COVID vaccine without sequencing the genome of a virus. Pacemakers, hearing aids, prosthetic limbs, cars with increased fuel efficiency, electric vehicles, solar panels - all perfectly good reasons to enjoy modern microprocessors.

…you say as we both use machines that used a planet’s worth of supply chains and resources to talk to each other.

This is aaaaaaaamazing info! Thanks, and I absolutely plan to borrow these ideas as well. I make a veg lasagna at home for a big weekend meal with leftovers for the week, and so making a double batch and popping one in the chest freezer in an aluminum disposable pan is beyond workable. I’m genuinely enjoying the idea of bringing one to a White Elephant exchange to see what happens.

Somewhat related - if you’re already comfortable doing lasagna, this is a rich and delicious variation I tried once. Worth the time, but it needs some side dish to support it, like a salad to break the richness - https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1026104-saag-paneer-lasagna

Forgot? Have you seen what’s needed to make CPUs? Clean Room Manufacturing is a fragile thing.

Developing countries often need a lot of help just getting to ISO Class 7, which is what’s needed to safely make cough syrup.

Injectable drugs are ISO Class 5. CPU manufacturing is ISO Class 1 and 2. In some post-apocalyptic scenario, depending on the scenario, it would be decades or generations of work to get semiconductor manufacturing back. Even if you have an abandoned factory sitting right there. It would potentially be decades to get back to making anything safely injectable. Supply chains involved with specific parts and inputs. shudder

Hey cool - now that I can afford a No Fear shirt and a Discman I have no desire for them.

I was going to bring up the Interpol bust all around Africa of SIM farms that is referenced in this article. Usually all about international calling and for scammers to use.

Reporting on this said that this setup had been involved with nation-state level threats. I wonder if it’s that these spammers were just doing their spam stuff and have all their stuff automated to sell bandwidth. Like you just send them a CSV with numbers and messages, and they don’t care what the content is. So then nation-state just books a few campaigns that are what kick off an FBI/Secret Service investigation because the nation-state isn’t actually affiliated with the spammers.

This setup is worth a ton of money just chugging along, and realistically, this is not built to overwhelm a few key mobile towers. These things are built to spam and scam.

Just looked up a candied jalapeños, and I think I might need to make myself a batch. You know, just for testing purposes.