I want that. I really do. The major problem is that throughout most of history the wealthy have always gotten away with the most incredibly blatant shit and the general attitude of the legal system has been to comfort the comfortable and grieve the aggrieved. The times where the people on the top got their comeuppance and where the wealthy were forced to comply with some level of propriety towards the average person are both rare and brief.

In the US, the New Deal era was by far the most prosperous era in US history, and many of the wealthy people HATED it. The whole modern anti-politics as politics started shortly after WW2 as a response to the whole thing. The video I linked has more information on it… and it is far from the whole story. What I am saying is that it is really fucked just how powerful the propaganda apparatus of capitalism has grown. This isn’t to say that it was somehow unbiased in the past. Prior to WW2 the liberal media basically aided fascists gain power even when fascists were killing many of the same liberal journalists and shutting down their newspapers.

It isn’t impossible. It is just fucked is what I am saying, and things will get a lot worse before things get better… and the sad reality is any recovery will be very brief since that is the way how humans work.

The same thing in Canada. Despite the reputation of Canadians being polite wusses by Americans the Canadian legal system is much harsher than the American system.

This is why libertarians and many modern authoritarian LOVE corporations. Unlike governments which have some accountability (that has seriously been dwindling) corporations can basically do what they want. Laws are effectively written by corporations so that anyone in any position of authority is never thrown in prison or even needs to worry about that (ultra low level workers can be thrown to the dogs to placate the public every once in a while) and meanwhile the right of protestors has been so seriously curtailed that soon even in formerly first world countries they might be able to break out the machine guns like they did in central America in the 1910s and 1950s. In Britain protestors are being sentenced to record prison terms that were formerly reserved for rapists and muggers.

There is little question that corporations are behind them all.

The reason is the same reason why bullies go after vulnerable and/or isolated kids. The type of person who has a car and has the money and means to illegally modify it is also the type of person who would give the police absolute hell if they so much as dared to look at them the wrong way. A person jumping a small toll is someone who is poor and will never attract the sympathies of any judge who will treat them very harshly.

They would never win. The police were just doing their jobs after all. So what if a couple of innocent people get shot? After all, just because they are currently innocent, doesn’t mean they aren’t future criminals. So really, by shooting them they make it less likely that they’ll commit future crimes!

This is an age old American tradition of shooting people who try to stow on train cars. There is an image in American culture of the freighthopping hobo who is trying to find a better place to live and work despite not having a dime to his name. Of course in reality many people have been shot for doing that. Property and a few dollars is worth much, much more than a poor person’s life.

I am aware, but sometimes my autism still demands I write it anyway. In my experience comments read by people can still inform them even if they have no idea who wrote them and the reason why. I just want to leave the world a better place than I found it.

Exactly. I am elder millennial, and I grew up in Dubai. Back in the 80s and 90s in Dubai the only security cameras that existed were in malls and some supermarkets, and public CCTV by police did not exist. Traffic light cameras to catch people speeding and/or running a red light only got started in the early 2000s. This is one thing that I honestly say that really demarcates the early 2000s from previous times is the fact that the possibility of mass surveillance became a reality only back then. Before that surveillance was mostly disjointed and not at all interconnected. If you had security cameras, then they were on VHS tapes and unless you had the budget to get new tapes regularly, most people would just rewind the tapes and tape over and over, meaning they will degrade fairly quickly, and since most places didn’t keep an archive for too long, if something ‘suspicious’ happened a few weeks prior that you weren’t informed about until today, it would be lost since those tapes were likely overwritten, and there is no way to recover that.

The 90s were far from perfect for me. I had a fairly hard time growing up. But I honestly just wish for the dignity of not being on camera 24/7. My apartment building has cameras on all floors and I cannot exit or enter my own apartment without being caught on camera. That is if those cameras are real and not fakes.

Robocop… the movie they love but don’t realize is a complete mockery of THEM. As a kid I thought that Robo was just cool, but as I got older and rewatched it a few times, I realized just how deep the rabbit hole goes.

You know what’s one profound thing I noticed a few years ago that flew over my head? The ED-209 robot does not have a non-lethal apprehension method. It only threatens to kill for non-compliance, and then does so if compliance is not absolute. It has no way of restraining or leading arrested suspects if they comply, and no other method to deal with non-compliant suspects other than to blow them away. No tasers, no net gun, no ropes, no tear gas, no sci-fi ‘set for stun’ laser beam, nothing.

On top of that another thing I realized is that Dick Jones considered that thing to be street ready to take on law enforcement. From everything to ultra-violent encounters to jaywalking and parking tickets. What it tells me about his mentality is that he would be a HIGHLY successful billionaire today…

Not only that, he will probably set all the cameras that he is in control of to switch off on command or if he is in the vicinity (in addition to purging the previous 10 minutes or so) so that he is NEVER caught on any camera, period.

Which is far worse. Governments are, to a large extent (even dictatorial governments) still have some accountability to the people. Corporations NEVER have that. The greatest propaganda trick that corporations did is that somehow they are better than governments and the less restrictions on them, the ‘freer’ and ‘richer’ the average person will be.

While wearing a mask that’ll fool AI on top of a ski mask beneath it.

they put that shit into water bottles… water bottles! Like they have a water bottle that can be synched to your phone and it’s % shown on screen and it changes color at set intervals to remind you to drink. Like for fucks sake dude!

They consider themselves to be gods and so far better than you and me that any behavior on their part is none of your business (even if it directly affected you and your entire family and community) but if you so much have a 10 minute variation in your sleep they want to know and probably film you when sleeping without any justification and they will tell you to go to hell if you tell them to stop.

Nope. It is only for the peons. Dissidents will have ANY behavior be seen as bad and the fascists will be identified specifically to train the AI to ignore them or automatically rule them out as suspects. Blame their victims and not the perps.

BTW, people like Zuckerberg fucking HATE people like you and me. He considered the people who trusted him with their emails (when he was in university and coming up with the idea of Facebook) to be absolute idiots and even more so for trusting him with that information. He lives his life in a way that insures that we know as little about him as possible. He lives in a compound that is impossible to view via satellite imagery AND he has the actual house he lives in surrounded by dummy buildings specifically so that people cannot spy on his with telescopes. He is obsessed with privacy and probably has never been seen on CCTV in years.

I was exposed to both basic and python first. No wonder it was so much harder for me to do code!

I can confirm, too

Pre-1968, civilians could buy full auto machineguns. At one point in the 1930s the Sears catalog would send a full auto Tommy Gun straight to your house via mail order with no background check. And yet in those eras the idea of a grand spectacle suicide/homicide event would have been absolutely unthinkable, even among the most disposessed in society.

OK this is not true. Firstly I seriously, SERIOUSLY doubt that Sears ever did that in the 1930s. I looked up the Sears-Roebuck catelogs from 1897 to 1926 (as much as I could find online) and I learned some surprising things.

Firstly, prior to WW1, the Sears-Roebuck catalog absolutely DID sell firearms, including handguns, to anyone with no questions asked. The handgun section in the 1912 catalog was quite exciting to look at if you are the type of person who likes old school handguns. Ammunition was also sold without any requirements other than money.

And besides handguns, the rifles and shotguns section was also quite good for just about everything that a North American sport shooter/hunter would want.

But after 1912? People started complaining that many criminals were using the catalog to get handguns and it was starting to worry people (in the 1910s and 1920s the crime rate was starting to rise rapidly) and so in 1918 handguns were no longer available for ‘just cash’. They started selling handguns to only people who proved that they were legally permitted to own and carry a handgun, and you needed to provide a signed letter from a local sheriff or mayor or other authority figure that knew you, and by 1922 the handgun section shrunk to a single page and after that Sears no longer sold handguns.

The long gun section, however, remained as is. So yes, if you wanted a rifle or shotgun (even a semi-auto rifle or shotgun, which were around back then and sold by the catalog) you could buy it no questions asked.

The first federal gun law in the US wasn’t the NFA in 1934. It was earlier in 1927 that forbade mail-order handguns.

The National Firearms Act in 1934 very strictly controlled fully-automatic guns. There was no way, NO WAY, any seller could find a ‘mail-order’ loophole to bypass it.

The term privatization was, however, coined to describe what the Nazis were doing during the 1930s.

I am not sure, but I think Milton Friedman once revealed the depths of his ignorance about racial segregation in the US and that the claim that laws demanding all segregation be dismantled were a violation of the free market principle and that a true free market would dissolve segregation.

Chicago, as you mentioned, was used as an example to show just how dumb he was. Chicago had no official segregation policy. From a purely legal standpoint if an Irishman wanted to get an apartment in a black neighborhood and invite Italian friends over that would be a huge taboo and suffer reprecussions over it even if he wasn’t doing anything remotely illegal.

The only way it COULD have dismantled is to make law to strictly forbid that kind of discrimination on any grounds.