• 4 Posts
  • 74 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I don’t disagree that it could work, but I’m also not sure it’s that simple either.

    There’s a big difference in trying to get people to protest for the threat that is over the horizon than the one in power for 40 years. People just aren’t good at conceptualizing the weight of that future pain against what they currently stand to lose.

    And they could lose a lot - their job first, which also means their house and their health insurance. Not to mention plenty of laws criminalizing most protest already, where you are bound to be caught on camera or via other digital surveillance, and a single arrest on your permanent record means no future employment, and missed payments on your credit history means no future economic prospects.

    And believe me I know the risk of that is worth it, and the risks you’d have in the future are even worse, but most people in the country still aren’t ready to make that trade - hell, most still deny the direction things are headed.


  • Yeah, people abroad are wondering why Americans won’t just stand up, but the reality is that the country is massive and you need an incredible organizing effort to offer any real, organized resistance.

    And sure, some groups have tried, but you really need your opposition party, or some kind of major celebrity, or someone else with major reach to organize something that reaches every American and pulls them together to action.

    And that just hasn’t happened. Some people have spoken out, but nobody has been willing to lead that next step and really lead a movement. Words aren’t gonna be enough to counter this.









  • Maybe I am not thinking of the access control capability of VLANs correctly (I am thinking in terms of port based iptables: port X has only incoming+established and no outgoing for example).

    I think of it like this: grouping several physical switch ports together into a private network, effectively like each group of ports is it's own isolated switch. I assume there are routers which allows you to assign vlans to different Wi-Fi access points as well, so it doesn't need to be literally physical.

    Obviously the benefits of vlans over something actually physical is that you can have as many as you like, and there are ways to trunk the data if one client needs access to multiple vlans at once.

    In your setup, you may or may not benefit, organizationally. Obviously other commenters have pointed out some of the security benefits. If you were using vlans I think you'd have at a minimum a private and public vlan, separating out the items that don't need Internet access from the Internet at all. Your server would probably need access to both vlans in that scenario. But certainly as you say, you can probably accomplish a lot of this without vlans, if you can aggressively setup your firewall rules. The benefit of vlans is you would only really need to setup firewall rules on whatever vlan(s) have Internet access.










  • Look, I’d love for that to be true, but it just isn’t. Biden will win by being a boring centrist, because that’s who he is and that’s who will win a general election (generally speaking).

    With the GOP going completely off the rails the easiest path to victory is to simply go middle of the road and pick up all those independents/centrists and conservatives with brains. Progressives will vote Biden regardless because Trump (or any Trump wannabe) is too terrifying of a reality.

    This country has never shown it has some giant progressive silent majority - Bernie would know, he bet and lost on that materializing in his own presidential runs.

    I don’t see Democrats running hard on progressive policies until either the GOP starts running moderates again (forcing Democrats to pickup votes elsewhere) or young people prove they can be a force at the ballot box.

    All this is not to shit on what Biden has achieved, because he has done things for progressives, but I don’t see him suddenly switching to anything resembling a “strong progressive agenda” because it will just give his GOP opponent ammo to claim “see he’s radical too”. Biden will be the most boring, normal politician he can, while highlighting how bad things will get if his extreme opponent gets into office, and that’s probably the smartest thing to do.