What a wonderful murder meme!

It’s called Oligarchy and it predates Tech “Overlords” in America.

Go a little back and look at the prediction made in 1949 for the future, written in a book with the title “1984”.

Sure, it came a little late than forecast, but a lot of it came true.

Today’s society has been pretty predictable for quite a while:

• Political and social environments like now have been pretty common recurrences througout History, with the rise of Fascism in the early XX century being the previous time it happened (incredibly similar to nowadays, not just are most propaganda techniques and discourse used by the rightwing almost exactly same, but we even have a XXI century version of the NAZIs called Zionism doing pretty much the same thing as their predecessors did in 1930s Germany). Society and Economics seem to follow a grand-cycle with a period of around 100 years and we’re back at the point of the cycle of “Highest inequality and the Elites diverting the discontentment of the populus away from them by funding Far-Right politics scapegoating foreigners and using tools of authoritarianism in power” hence why this shit ressonates so much with the 1920 - 30s.
• The extreme desire for surveillance of open authoritarians and those with covert authoritarian leanings (lots of those in Europe plus the previous regime in the US was already the latter, though now it’s the former) and the forms it could take were pretty predictable by observing the secret police of the Fascist regimes in Southern Europe that lasted until the 70s and 80s as well in the Eastern Block, most notably the Stasi in Germany. It’s quite linear to map what Stasi would do with today’s technology and come up with using smartphones as mobile surveillance devices with the complicity of the Tech companies that control them (predictably so if you look at, for example, how IBM helped NAZI Germany), surveillance of citizen’s use of the Internet and modern digital communications (already done by the 7-eyes for ages and explaining things like the repeated attempts at imposing Chat Control on EU citizens) and the increasing automation of mass trawling surveillance made possible by ML to allow far wider civil society surveillance levels than were possible for the Stasi.

Sure, people used to think “Democracy” and thus “This time is different”, but it turns out politicians and elites under Democracy still operate per the very same principles of Power as in the early XX century, they just managed over the years since then to get the populace to stop thinking and talking about Power itself and instead think only in terms of Politics all the while making sure Politics was subservient to older forms of Power, most notably Money.

Personally, ever since I observed how governments in the West reacted to the 2008 Crash, most notably who they chose to save and who they chose to pay for it, that I realized that the power of Democracy (specifically, the control of Citizens over how countries are managed by chosing who manages it using their Vote) has been made almost entirelly subservient to the power of Money, which is why it looks so much like we live in Oligarchies with theatrical Voting that changes only that which Money doesn’t care about (hence the loud Identity Wars in the Moral plane between the dominant parties) rather than real Democracy.

My cash worked fine getting some extra groceries at the store when there was this Iberian Peninsula wide (so Portugal + Spain) daylong blackout the other month.

People without cash were screwed. Some were complaining of having no drinking water (because without power the water from the utilities was soon out as they couldn’t run their pumps) and not being able to buy any because they had no cash to pay for it.

Also worked fine when we got hit by a freak storm that trashed lots of trees and plenty of roofs and took power down for 4 days, and I’m in a small city where utilities quickly got fixed - some people out there in small villages were still without power almost a month later.

Mind you, people paying by phone would be even worse - most phones run out of power in a day or two unless you have an external power bank to charge the phone (which I do, but most people don’t).

None of this event was some giant deadly thing - the first was a loss of control on the Spanish side ofthe power grid that cascaded into a massive blackout as almost all powder generation ended up switched of and had to be brought up slowly block by block whist keeping generation balanced with consumptions and the second was a strong geographically very focused storm effect with high speed wins during the night that brought down power poles, including the high voltage power distribution ones.

There were no floods or more than a handful of deaths, just lots of topple poles and trees and roofs that lost tiles, so there weren’t really any much more pressing issues than having no power and hence no water, with the former leading to unecessary extra problems for people who had no cash to buy groceries with (and because this was a highly focused storm event, there were no problems supplying the place with goods).

And this is far from the only situation were you’re stuck without cash: for example banking systems going down means you can’t pay with debit cards linked to accounts in that bank (a problem I’ve seen happen several times both here and when living abroad) and the banking payment system going down means you can’t pay at all. The mobile network going down is also a problem because most electronic payment point of sale systems use it rather than landline. Beyond that there are all kind of issues linked to relying on a 3rd part entity for payments like the guy at the supermarket the other day whose just received replacement card wasn’t activated so he he got to the till to pay a trolley full of shopping and couldn’t.

In Engineering terms, cashless payments have a lot of external dependencies that cash payments do not, plus there is a natural “buffering” with cash (which you yourself can make deeper by having some cash at home) which doesn’t exist with digital payments, making cash way more robust than digital payments when doing physically-present payments.

“Bullshitting” is probably the strongest capability of LLMs.

You’re assuming I’m using my domain to send spam or am operating the e-mail server myself. That’s a pretty wild assumption.

Further, I don’t live in the US nor do I have assets in the US, so that act means shit for me.

You can pay a company that hosts e-mail to do it for you, and pretty cheap too.

Which I do.

Like the registar, one can change that provider too, and if do that I get to take the e-mail address with me as well as all my e-mails (all data is fully exportable), unlike with Google were the e-mail address is theirs, not yours.

Try again.

Literally the worst that can happen to me if I’m really really unlucky is end up tied down to a single provider, same as you.

There were already 100s of registars back then (and as of 2024 there were over 2000) along with a standardized process for moving a domain to another registar, all regulated by an international regulator, ICANN.

Given that ease of migration is guaranteed by ICANN, making the market highly competitive, the only real risk that this entire system end up “consolidated” is if ICANN is totally subverted, a pretty tall order considering it’s in the interest of every single country in the World and millions of businesses (who also have domain names) that it is not, so that’s highly unlikely.

Meanwhile Google is just one and has always been just one. From the very start there was NEVER any perspective of there being more than one provider of gmail addresses so there was NEVER any perspective of being able to move away from Google and still keep your e-mail address if Google screwed you in some way. As for all your e-mails, those were always freely accessible to Google and they could always do whatever they want with that data.

In simple terms, you chose to be Google’s bitch and hope that they don’t screw you over too badly, whilst I, maybe, if I’m really really unlucky and an entire international system for domain name regulation is subverted against the interests of all countries in the World and most businesses, might one day at worst end up in the same situation as you.

I’m afraid your face-saving risk “analysis” on this is hilariously bad.

Not the previous poster.

A simple ESP8266 module from AliExpress is less than $4 (an ESP12F module - which is the FCC certified one with most I/O ports available - is $2), can be programmed with Arduino, has WiFi and that is more than enough for wireless home automation peripherals that are not supposed to do lots of processing (it will still easilly fit a REST interface for automated control and even a web interface for user control alongside it).

That said, in order to power it unless you can somehow draw 3.3v from the device it’s attached to, you actually need more parts and that’ll add up to more than $4 unless you’re doing it with batteries (and design and assemble your own voltage regulator circuit which is not that hard and is cheap, or maybe get a slightly more expensive ESP module that comes with voltage regulation) - this works fine if your device sleeps most of the time and just wakes up once in a while to check some data from a server holding instructions for it. For an always one device, best IMHO to use a 3.3V wall power adaptor, which will cost at least $6 from AliExpress.

The power considerations apply exactly the same for ESP32s.

Exactly.

My first personal e-mail way back in the 90s was with my ISP. Then I changed ISPs and saw the problem with that. So I moved to Yahoo.

Some years later, in the 00s I just decided to get my own, paid for, Internet domain and have my e-mail there, even though I could’ve carried on using Yahoo or get Google Mail (very popular amongst techies back then) for free. The main reason was that I realized I must made sure the e-mail address was MINE, not actually owned by somebody else with me allowed to use it under their conditions.

Twenty years later and guess it was pretty wise to not have my e-mail in the claws of “Definitelly Do Evil” Google.

Experience using and living with Tech, mainly once your understanding of it reaches the level of understanding systemic elements, naturally informs ones choices in Tech, and that often means chosing something else than the mass marketed “popular” stuff that’s designed to lock you in, sell you stuff or sell your attention to others and eavesdrop on you and sell your data.

I’m making the bet that if the government changes, I will have time to adapt. (Yes, I could be wrong.)

The thing with data is that once it’s out, it’s out.

If tomorrow whatever you do today starts getting deemed a perversion or even a crime, the data related to you doing sent out today will at the very least put you at the front of the list of people to be investigated for it.

Best to have as little as possible about me and my activities (no matter how innocent) out there in an easy to access form, IMHO. If I have to trade a bit of convenience for it, so be it.

I’m an European (specifically from an EU country). I was born still in a Dictatorship, before the Revolution which brought Democracy, and I grew up hearing the stories of Censorship and the Political Police arresting people for criticizing the local Dictator.

I don’t know who your “we” is, but it sure as hell ain’t me or most of my countrymen.

A mandatory Government app on your phone is the kind of thing that rings alarm bells in people’s minds around here because it stinks of Dictatorship and is a wet dream come true for a Political Police.

I lived elsewhere in Europe, so I can understand that people in countries which have long been stable and Democratic (say, The Netherlands and all of Scandinavia), have no memory of Authoritarianism and think that the Authorities only ever act for the greater good (which is why, for example, Swedes have zero concerns about every single payment they do ending up in a database), but pretty much everbody from Southern and Eastern Europe have either direct memories or heard the stories of just how bad the Authorities can be and just how bad it is to let them know what you’re doing.

Clearly, if you’re really from Europe (and not just a paid propagandist or troll), you’re not from one of those countries which freed themselves from some dictatorship or other recently enough for most people in that country having themselves or their parents been alive during the dictatorship days.

One thing is some kind of passive ID, be it in a card or in digital format, another very different thing is software running on your devices which is capable of automatically reporting to the authorities everything you do.

As the US is showing right now, it doesn’t take much to go from absolutelly legit activity - say having an abortion - and innocent apps with some kind of “phone home” ability - say something to help women track their periods - doing no harm to anybody, to extreme prison sentences (for murder, even) and said apps being used to catch and prosecute women for it.

Anybody who has even just heard the stories from their parents and grandparents about whatever the version of the Stasi in their country used to do in the Dictatorship days would be profoundly against any “report to the authorities” software even if it’s sold by politicians as “think of the children”.

If this is not the most crooked EU Comission ever, it’s a pretty close second.

deleted by creator

FYI, the actual circuit properly designed is stupidly simple:

• The 5V and Ground power lines come in from USB on dedicated pins
• Since that’s a USB-C connector you need 2x resistors for it CC lines (they let the USB Host on the other side know that something is connected to it and wants power of a certain maximum current, and to figure out the orientation of the cable since it can be plugged in two orientations)
• To light the LED you need the actual LED and a resistor that limits the current that goes to the LED (since LEDs themselves don’t limit it and without external current limitation they’ll just light up very brightly and then release some “magic smoke” and stop working)

That’s it.

Now, assuming R3 and R4 are properly connect CC line resistors (though WHY THE FUCK are the two lines of R3 routed on the other side of the board!!?), the only two other things needed are R1 and D1, nothing else.

Instead, there are way too many extra components, most notably this thing on the middle, supposedly a microchip (judging by the “U” code, can’t see the actual writting in the device), maybe a voltage regulator but what would be the point!?

Worse, all 3 legs of that U1 device are wired together. If we’re really really lucky, they go nowhere. Otherwise at least one ends up connected to a Ground line (ultimatelly coming from USB) and the other to a power (most likely the 5V from USB) - in other words, it’s a short circuit of the power from USB. Not, just not good, but actually a seriously bad “I’ve never touched electronics in my life” mistake: there is literally no topology where the 3 pins of a 3-pin component are wired together like that, since electrically that’s the same as not having it there at all (so even if connected to something else than 5V + GND, at best that component would never do anything). This is like something you figure out in the first hour of learning Electronics.

This shit is not just a little bad, it’s incredibly bad and probably a danger to connect to anything over USB.

I’m a Generalist (mainly because I’m challenge-driven) - even in my own professional area (Software Engineering) I’ve worked in all sorts of domains over the years, and I’ve also really went down deep in other very different directions (Embedded Systems in Electronics, Acting, 3D modelling, plus countless “just playing around” areas into which I did not spend years of my life).

In my experience, the “problem” of starting to do something that you don’t really know well is that it takes at least a year of constantly doing that kind of thing, more often two to even start doing it properly.

Oh, yeah, in the meanwhile after the initial “zero to hero” stage you’re quickly in the phase were you ride the peak of the Dunning-Krugger curve on that subject, thinking you’re really DOING IT. If you do persists doing that kind of thing you eventually figure out that you actually know very little of it - this cartoon is exactly somebody at that later stage: done it long enough that they have figured out how amateurish they still are and can now genuinelly judge their playing around for what really is and how much it really costs (the level of awareness of that cartoon character is of somebody entering or in the domain expert stage).

Even knowing how it goes and being very aware of the different speed of growth of the “confidence in one’s knowledge” and “actual knowledge” curves (which together yield the Dunning-Krugger curve), this still happens to me EVERY TIME I go down a new knowledge domain.

So why do it?

Well, if you like challenge and learning, the first couple of years of doing something are a lot of fun: lots of challenges, smaller and simpler projects quickly yielding the rewards of achieving something, a strong felling of progression because you’re learning a ton of things (which later will seem small, but when you do learn them, they feel like big improvements) all the while you feel you’re achiving a lot (the upside of the Dunning-Krugger effect is that results which are basic and amateurish for domain experts, feel like great things to somebody ridding that overconfidence part of the curve).

All this to say that, IMHO, you don’t really derive any monetary value earlier on (it might feel like it’s returning something but if you do the Maths versus other options, you’re lucky to break even on it even if you count your own time as being worth nothing) and you’re not actually learning all that much early on (you’re going to be wasting lots of time and resources doing the wrong things and going back to redo what you did and at best your work yields something slightly flawed and you kinda just accept it and live with the problems) but it certainly FEELs like you are learning a lot.

Personally I recomend it for the fun of it if you have the kind of personality that enjoys learning and the challenge of doing new things, not so much for saving money when doing it yourself vs paying others for it.

It’s the same principle that anchors the idea that you can fix any plumbing problems at home yourself.

This all started with:

A nomadic life can be cheaper than a sedentary one.

To which the previous poster added an example.

I’m pointing out that there are many other common contexts were things don’t at all work like that.

By that “logic” of yours whenever a Western newspaper publishes a story about something that happened elsewhere in the World, it’s “goalpost moving”.

I think you’re confusing your own “I don’t give a shit about people not like me” mindset with the mindset of the entire audience here.

Well, the reason why I also included “typical access to Education” is that for those from countries whose main language isn’t the most often spoken second language in the World, the most common way to learn it is at school.

Try doing that with a passport and the typical access to Education from, say Burkina Faso.