Very good idea. Done.

Sweet! That is exactly it, thank you.

For a while, I used to sometimes pack up wealthy people’s stuff as part of my job. At one point I was packing up wineglasses that were, no joke, about a foot and a half (0.5m) tall made of thin crystal. When the job was done, the guy gave the workers checks for $500, as a tip.

There’s a certain type of wealthy-person stuff that proves its value by being incredibly impractical or fragile. “Not only did I spend way too much for this, I already know that it’ll probably fall apart soon, and I’ll have to buy another.” Being able to bring up again how expensive it was and how pissed off you are that it fell apart is just another good opportunity to let everyone in the vicinity know that you buy absurd rich-girl stuff. That’s actually better than still having the stupid spiky shoes.

You missed the punchline, one instant later.

She claimed her uncle was deported as part of Trump’s mass deportation plan.

Way to bury the fucking lede. When did this happen? Why the fuck did neither Mediaite nor Cardi B think that part was important, except to clarify one aspect of how she thought shoe justice could be achieved?

he’s at least an American

He’s not really. He fell in line, eventually, behind Trump’s attempted coup the first time around. He’s been undermining the American system for decades. And, in traditional fashion, now that all the walls and pillars he’s been systematically knocking out are starting to affect his living room, it’s all of a sudden a problem.

I will agree with you that the people who are still voting for Trump’s stuff are more stupid. They’re still knocking stuff out, and it’ll come back around on them pretty quickly. But McConnell certainly doesn’t get a pass for any of it. He’s not American, he just doesn’t want him to be the one getting hauled out in the street by the mob or Trotskyed, and he’s still sharp enough to see that on the horizon now.

“On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably every day, with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined.”

“Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.”

“I think that all the explanations leave some mystery. When I think of it at all, I still say, with unbelief, ‘Germany—no, not Germany.’”

All from Milton Meyer.

Architects of the internet, they said.

If they said the people currently in charge of the internet are an uneasy alliance of shadowy goons and idiots, afraid to openly break anything too irrevocably but occasionally trying to yank on the wires to see if there isn’t some way a little more money inside them somewhere, I would generally agree.

It’s useful to check how people are using your site, if they’re getting stuck or there are spots that are hard to navigate, things like that. That’s true irrespective of whether you’re selling ads. I think it’s just that the people who are making money off the thing are a lot more likely to be bothered to invest energy into making sure their users are having a productive experience.

I mean, it is kind of getting that way. The proliferation of some domains that are more expensive than others could potentially be a sign of the whole thing slowly collapsing into costing $10/month or maybe orders of magnitude more, if you are a big company with fat pockets that can be rummaged through, like everything else is nowadays. My point is that the price is $12 per year specifically because those forces have been kept at bay, at least partially, which means the system is an ever-more-incongruous-with-every-passing-year vestige of the decent way that the internet used to be. And also, yes, there’s an increasing cacophony of services which are trying to charge you more than it should cost, hoping that you’ll think $50/year is reasonable and just pay it not knowing any better.

If you think it is sustainable to be able to submit registrations completely for free, though, you are welcome to provide that service to the world under some subdomain, and do a vital service to remove the evil of which you speak. Just register dns.free or whatever, and set up a thing where people can register mysite.dns.free or whatever subdomain they want, and then they can all have it for free. You can be the change. I suspect that if you undertook this mission, it would quickly become apparent to you why the system as a whole still needs to charge a tiny nominal fee in exchange for doing it.

Running the central DNS servers is so cheap that it makes no sense to try to charge for it. Doing the administrative work of keeping track of hundreds of millions of people who all want to register some appellation for themselves, and keeping track of all the changes thereto, is significant, which is why that side of the operation wants to charge you a few bucks a year for it.

Absolutely. That’s a good start. Mouseflow or one of its competitors honestly was always more useful to me than Google Analytics. Honestly, as far as I know, a huge share of their income still comes from search ads and YouTube. I think if you just avoid those things, you’re already doing more or less as much as you can.

Oh, also, publicize duckduckgo and friends over Google. Google search has become far less useful than it used to be, anyway.

Good. Get punished. Don’t go along with it. If you start bowing and scraping so you won’t get ejected from the oval office, then that will enable that much more the gradual evolution that will lead you along with many other people to get “punished” in ways that are far more severe. Like, barges floating off of Gitmo or working in the fields on a prison labor system severe. It is insane to me that people are taking all of this so lightly and going along with it.

You don’t have to pay anything to have your own identity.

If you want someone else’s servers to replicate a piece of information for you, and you want them to take responsibility for administrative issues like figuring out whether you still want it next year or what to do if you’re doing something illegal, you may have to pay anywhere from $5 a year to $30 a year for the privilege depending on a couple of factors. Given how massively inflated the price of registering a domain could be, if the type of ghouls who like to get their hands on things like this were able to get their hands on it, I’m inclined to call that success. About 99% of internet users will never need to know or care about DNS, and they can still have their identity without having to pay $30 a year.

I’m pretty sure the price of domains has actually been going down over time, and they’ve introduced a bunch of new TLDs and new types of entries in the records in response to pretty much the only significant problems that the 40-year-old system has ever had during its history. Like I said, I’d call that success.

UnitedHealth came to my house and kicked the fuck out of my dog, and then they took a dump on my TV. I really hate UnitedHealth. I hope the whole piece of land their headquarters sits on slides into the ocean, and personally, I’m so reckless that I wouldn’t even care if a bunch of other buildings nearby got caught up along with it.

I like how a whole community of academics and researchers worked out how to run a system which, even into the modern day which is kind of amazing, is largely disconnected from being abused by government and industry, and just runs according to what the people who need to use the system need it to do. You can get extorted for a fancy domain name if you really want to, but you can also go to Hostinger and get one for $5/year or something, because a lot of the core of the system is still pretty well-protected from being a cash-grab, through application of good governance and cooperation.

And then, somehow Hexbear managed to find their way around that system and fucked things up for themselves, and now it’s all DNS’s fault that they stepped in a pile of doo doo.

Never forget the architects of the internet were some of the vilest US MIC and Silicon Valley ghouls who ever lived and they are still in control fundamentally no matter how much ICANN and IANA claim to be non-partison, neutral, non-political, accountable, democratic, international, stewardshipismists

Yes, John Postel and David Mills were some of the vilest ghouls and so on. There was nothing about them that could provide a good model for how to do effective cooperation and succeed outside the systems of ownership that defined computing and telecommunications at the time, no particular reason they succeeded so dramatically and gave you, ultimately, this space to post pig balls today, and nothing about their work and traditions that needs to be defended against any silicon valley ghouls in the modern day. You fucking dingbat. I started out sticking up for you guys because no one deserves to get victimized by DNS scammers, but I take it back, go fuck yourselves.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPtjyqgZAUk

The difference being, the Bamboo Lounge didn’t really have a choice. CBS does, they’re just too craven to take it.

Oh, you’re right. CBS was the one that provided transcripts to the FCC when they didn’t need to.

I still maintain that they are idiots. Fight back, man. That’s the way.

You fucking idiots.

The instant you bought into it, you signed up for this. He’s going to keep fucking with you. The day after you pay, he’s going to be fucking with you again. The FCC’s going to pull your license. He’s going to sue you again for something you allegedly did in 2014. It’ll never stop, until you actually stand up for yourself.

And now you’re out $15 million, for nothing. You got nothing at all for it.

This is what I don’t get.

There is a mechanism for doing this that’s fairly well grounded in the legal system. Go to a federal judge, explain that he’s continuing to break the law even though he’s not supposed to be, and ask for an order authorizing you to go and stop him, by force, with some officially designated force providers.

It’s what you do if someone owes you money and won’t pay. It’s what the cops do when they want to violate someone’s privacy. It’s not the judge’s job to wander off the bench and into the real world and make it happen for you. But there are plenty of people who it is their job.

Get a court order authorizing you to stop the illegality, get some law enforcement or military people to back you up, with the full force of the law behind them, and get to work. This cheat code of “IDC what the judge says” isn’t some new thing Trump discovered. People do it with their child support payments or bench warrants all the time.

We nominated people in government to be our representatives in this democracy, and keep it safe. It is, to a certain extent, their job to make that happen. I don’t get what is all the waiting for “someone” to do something about it.

Who, the guy that posted on Reddit? Yeah, he’s going to be in a lot of trouble, I agree.

I kid. I actually think that the one saving grace in all of this is that Trump is generally considered the boss, and famously thin-skinned and jealous, and Musk is like a hot poker to both of those attributes over the long term. I think it’s halfway likely that Trump will turn on Musk, especially after they cause some kind of absolutely unmistakable visible national fuck-up, at which point his plot armor will go away and he’ll suddenly be liable for all of his crimes.

It might be wishful thinking. But I think it’s at least 50% likely.