It’s not legally binding though. You could absolutely shout from the rooftops how you got Elon’s money and now you’re voting Dem, and encourage people to do the same. If enough people brag openly about doing it, it would be terribly humiliating for Elon.

Yeah, I know there was a story in that Spectator magazine. I’m still not sold. Dittman said way too many stupid things that point to him being Elon.

I think they’re saying they also feel threatened by this administration, despite not ticking any of the boxes that would make them “undesirable” to the regime. And they have good reason to feel this way. Nobody’s really safe in fascism except for the people doing the fascism.

You think Israel would help the West fight Russia? I kinda doubt it. They don’t seem the type to fight real wars, only massacre innocents they fanatically hate.

Ah, no worries. I’m just sharing for folks who might need Windows for one reason or another. It’s a one time thing to upgrade either way, not a hassle at all. They might own weird niche unrepairable devices like my SP4 which may not handle Linux well or who knows. For clean installs there’s that nifty place with serial keys and builds whose name I forget right now.

As for Linux, I’m kinda torn. I had my time tinkering with config files in the early 2000s in the days of Fedora Core 3 and KDE 3.x before all this Plasma stuff. The whole “year of the Linux desktop” that never came left me disillusioned, although I did enjoy the Compiz/Beryl days. It’s probably better now but I’m too comfortable nowadays. We’ll see if things get dire enough that I need to jump ship again, I hope not.

Obligatory Sartre quote:

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

For people who still need Windows:

I have a 10-year-old Surface Pro 4 and I was able to freely upgrade to Windows 11 and it works fine. It wasn’t technically supported but I enabled preview builds or something like that (I think I had to enable the Insider program) and it showed up as a Windows Update. I don’t know if this is applicable to all PCs that don’t support Win 11, but surely it’s applicable to some of them that Windows says don’t support Win 11.

I suppose it wouldn’t matter at that point? I’m not sure what you mean exactly. There’s a lot of instability in America right now as it tries to become fully fascist, and I think the world (to any Americans reading this — this includes you too!) has to decide whether they’re fine with it or not, which will in turn affect its success in becoming fully fascist. Anything done to make it harder for the transformation to complete could turn the tide, since they’re more vulnerable while things are in motion. Once it’s done and that becomes the norm, it’s going to become much more difficult.

I get where you’re coming from. I’m no fan of China and they’re definitely fascist in my book, but if I had to choose between China and this America, then definitely China. The reason being that a successful fascist America will add even more suffering to the world than there already is. Still, I would prefer an option from a democratic country succeeds — although if we’re talking strictly local use of Chinese (or even US) tech, I don’t really see how that helps the country itself. To the high seas, as they say.

The more subscriptions Mistral get, the more they’re able to compete with the US offerings.

That’s true. I’m still on free. How much for the Pro?

Oh yeah, local is a different story. I’d probably look into something like what you mentioned if I had the hardware, but atm I’m more interested in finding 1-1 alternatives to these tech behemoths, ones that anyone can use with the same level of convenience.

Le Chat by Mistral is a France-based (and EU abiding) alternative to ChatGPT. Works fine for me so far.

Yup, and always will be, because the antiwoke worldview is so delusional that it calls empirical reality “woke”. Thus, an AI that responds truthfully will always be woke.

Only the good actions. It’s how they justify keeping all the profits. The bad actions are never their fault though.

Truuuuue

They’re still in denial and complaining about crazy lefties who are after Elon, poor guy!

I’d also add the fact that his donors might have not liked the idea of a government shutdown causing further turbulence to the stock market.

Truuuue

Hey now, don’t you know that the biggest sin is agreeing with liberals? There’s practically no difference between liberals and fascists because I read somewhere that “if you scratch a liberal, a fascist bleeds” and my takeaway from that was that liberals and fascists are literally identical and both sides are the same. I am very smart. (/s)

Yep. It’s my go-to video explainer for “freedom cities” aka network states.