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mothballed

2,359 karma · joined August 16, 2025

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mothballed··on Hunter-gatherers introduced fish to a mountain lake 7000 years ago
Sounds like you need alcohol, and also a pistol, with a few full magazines. Just in case. Try not to let the women see it, if you have occasion to remove your clothes.
mothballed··on Hunter-gatherers introduced fish to a mountain lake 7000 years ago
Because you think god is immoral, and you want them to meet his mercy?
mothballed··on Stop Killing the Internet: No Digital ID and No Age Verification
>There was never a threat of lethal violence, hardly a life and death matter.

Do you suppose the state charge you with a violence linked crime if you showed up to Chancellor of Germany's private home with a battering ram and holstered weapons and started "readying your battering ram" to barge in? I realize there is the additional element that it was authorized against a different home and "just a mistake" but that is immaterial to whether the execution of a warrant involves threat of lethal violence (that is for good reason, checked by a judge).

mothballed··on Why a $154B CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights
I mean if all the people that voted last primary voted basically the same you have some sort of control group, the only significant delta in that primary was a huge group of very elderly people that don't vote in the primaries except this time that showed up after they were targeted for a hilariously false campaign with Isreali AIPAC money.

If the control group changed as well I'd agree with you, but the delta here was basically a huge group of demented people that were specifically targeted to show up in a one-off. It's hardly just disingenuously brushed away as some "other people" that just changed their mind after labeling the other guy's opinion as propaganda because they disagreed.

mothballed··on Stop Killing the Internet: No Digital ID and No Age Verification
Unfortunately, reasonable men, perhaps virtually all reasonable men, can and will become more corrupted by expansive power. The fact that they were not corrupted when they had less leverage on the populace doesn't mean they will behave differently than other historical German (/human) apparats when they have a bit more of the intoxicating liquor.

>r warrant was for a different address and they left.

I am sorry but this is not something that I find "reasonable" or "positive impression" unless small children are the instigators or low stakes events are involved. If armed men are barging into sacred spaces they need to be able to triple, quadruple check they are performing what the warrant says and if not then nothing else they are doing shall be trusted either. Invading a home uninvited is a life and death matter and there is no room for policeman who make such glaring mistakes even if the natural untrained or undisciplined random person naturally might.

mothballed··on Stop Killing the Internet: No Digital ID and No Age Verification
> it's only legal to have alcohol delivered by the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board. It is not legal to order directly from producers.

You are full of shit. Opinion safely discarded.

https://www.pa.gov/agencies/lcb/shop-wine-spirits/direct-win...

>The laws do indeed vary by state.

I am not disputing that. I am disputing that "most US states, they require the delivery driver to recheck the ID in person" (the original comment I was replying to). "UPS or fedex has to check" is meaningless since they have no idea what it is and essentially no historical nor practical route to prosecution of a common-carrier deliveryman who has no idea what is in the package and no mens rea for wittingly transmitting alcohol to a minor. The states that require adult signature on common carrier delivery essentially have zero legally binding requirement as the deliveryman in most states can't be successfully prosecuted unless there is mens rea that they had prior knowledge the non-descript package was alcohol and the economics of common carrier delivery practically guarantee they will not check IDs when requested to. Thus the "requirement to check at delivery" for mail order wine is actually just a weakest of suggestions with a wink and a nod with no teeth.

mothballed··on Stop Killing the Internet: No Digital ID and No Age Verification
Did you order it under mail order delivery rules or under alcohol retailer rules? They're quite different. If the person you bought it from offered beer and alcohol as well, you were probably ordering under the retailer paradigm which requires an ID check. If you ordered it straight from a wine producer or exclusive wine seller then it was probably under the mail order framework. The point isn't that all wine purchases aren't ID'd, it's that there is a framework under which you can legally order wine online without an ID check happening -- if you pursue the alcohol retailer delivery rather than wine mail order route you might not be able to do that though.
mothballed··on Stop Killing the Internet: No Digital ID and No Age Verification
Not for wine, not usually. Wine can be mail ordered, the carrier has no idea what it even is. They might require signature on delivey, but anyone who's dealt with UPS and fedex know they will essentially never look at ID. In high school I used to order wine and they had me sign but I was under 18, the box was non-descript and the delivery man had no idea what it was so a kid signing for it made no difference. It's different than beer or liquor sales where it's under the more recent COVID era exceptions that require checking ID and the delivery person actually knows what it is.

The mail order wine stuff is way older and under way different rules than most other alcohol delivery services.

mothballed··on Stop Killing the Internet: No Digital ID and No Age Verification
That's why I think it was a huge mistake to make teachers mandatory reporters. The idea was that they'd report people neglecting or abusing their children, but what happened is the more egregious cases usually learned to just do a half-ass "home schooling" instead so the child never sees a mandatory reporter and then situation is even worse because now the kid has no escape, no access to doctors, etc.
mothballed··on Stop Killing the Internet: No Digital ID and No Age Verification
A few things you can legally do online without ID or age verification in the US

1) buy cigars and pipe tobacco (but not cigarettes!)

2) Buy "CBD" by the pound

3) Buy ammunition, a barrel and the rest of gun parts for a glock, except a frame/receiver that can be 3d printed in a few hours to complete it.

4) Order and have delivered wine

But there are people arguing to skip all that and go to straight to ID for social media. It isn't about the children. It's about keeping tabs on who says what.

mothballed··on Why a $154B CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights
It's also not uncommon for extravagantly rich people to form family-run charity organizations to distract their nagging wife or family members with a pursuit where they can lord over employees / recipients / organizations without having any profit metrics by which they could be embarrassed by their inferior business chops. This is doubly applicable if you need to distract a nagging hag while you're off banging Russian bridge players.
mothballed··on Why a $154B CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights
If it includes ability to vote via campaign donations that cause votes, then yes absolutely. Note for instance in the Massie primary, rich donors literally turned money into new votes by prodding a bunch of demented elderly people who never vote in primaries to believe Massie was banging AOC and Ilhan Omar and secretly a democrat (the vote from regular primary voters remained almost unchanged, the delta was almost entirely new voters brought out by a fraudulent propaganda campaign). That's essentially indistinguishable from those rich people having cast the vote themselves.
mothballed··on Why a $154B CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights
I wouldn't want a lot of the landscape 100 years ago, but I'd happily be disenfranchised if I could get the size of government 100+ years ago (federal government <~2% of GDP in non-wartime)
mothballed··on Why a $154B CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights
The Cabrini Green of yesteryear comes to mind. Some of the 60s-90s era public housing were straight up high-rise sniper dens.
mothballed··on A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months
Anyone with means will generally try to put their business, their wealth, and their residence all in separate countries/jurisdictions to ensure their exposure to any particular flood is minimized. Ironically actual career criminals are often the most hedged because they always have dirt on someone higher up so they can horse-trade away charges right at the source before they interact with judge and prosecutor. This is why low level drug users or ignorant drug mules often get hemmed up far worse than their suppliers when caught.
mothballed··on A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months
There are a gazillion federal prosecutions in the US that go something like

1) Pile of evidence that someone is guilty.

2) Federal "expert witness" allowed and funded to testify it points to X person

3) Defense is broke

4) If defense not broke, judge finds reason why defense expert witness can't present their full argument

5) Prosecution offers plea deal or a gazillion years in jail

6) Person folds when they realize none of their defense is allowed or will be funded, or goes to trial and gets a gazillion years for daring to go to trial.

If you already have a pile of evidence for a crime and an expert witnesses you can keep piling on it's not much of a stretch to dump it on some random person, as we saw here, quite easy actually.

mothballed··on A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months
It effectively does for the average person person. You think you have a tiny ability to change or influence it, when in fact you do not, at least not while exercising the range of options and risk you find acceptable*. It is not of much different design today than during the Salem Witch Trials, 300 years ago, and sits in the one branch of government with next to zero democratic levers of control. The justice system is effectively a natural disaster or act of god to the typical person.

Most people harm themselves more by considering it anything more than a fixed system to be calculated against, bashing their head into a wall for no gain.

* To the typical HN user

mothballed··on A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months
The job of the prosecutor is to convict, I don't think it matters whether the person is innocent or not. They have no moral responsibility, if it is most efficient to their career to damn an innocent person the system is designed for the purpose of doing so.
mothballed··on US DOT deleting bike lane references
I think there's a good faith possibility here that the taxpayers just don't see themselves biking to "the hood" rather than some sinister plan against black people. I mean I wouldn't vote for a bike route to the white trash trailer park, not because I hate them but because there is no reason for me to bike there whereas I might bike to a nice gentrified district for some drinks.

I would reframe most things more in terms of "what will I gain" to see how voters to vote, and new opportunities or bridges to bike to the hood gains them basically nothing.

mothballed··on US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search
You'll hear the same "more to the story" if it happens to you, as well. Hope you never have to experience it, but if you do, you'll find the same as me. No one believes it until it happens to them, always "more to the story" or "a lie" or some such right up until they find out reality. Then they find out that "gulf" they thought they saw was a mirage.
mothballed··on US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search
Yeah done that many times. They always just send the "spreadsheet" entry as their proofs. Sometimes they stop despite their "proofs" and just sell it to the next debt collector and everything resets. Other times they just keep doing it and then I get the CFPB involved and after a few months the regulators stop them, then they sell the debt and the new guy pursues it again.

Just something I deal with every year or two, doing the process over again every time they resell it.

mothballed··on US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search
They have verbatim told me they would deny me entry into the country merely for not answering things like random questions about what work I do in the country or whether I own guns (I am a US citizen). They involved HSI and tried to get my passport revoked, they tossed me in a jail cell and vans with my hands and feet bound. They wrote lies in a search warrant, tied the source of the lies to anonymous individuals and animals that can never be held to account, and then got a judge to sign a search warrant that turned up nothing. They got doctors to write in my medical record that they think "I am a drug packer" despite never finding anything or any evidence to support it.

You will find "temporary" can be long enough to make your life extremely unpleasant, that they can do unpleasant things to your body (another lady at my point of entry was raped, sued, and lost, -- the raping was done to "probe for drugs" and held to be justified), that they can run up debt in your name (what they did to me is just travel around to different ER and tell them an emergency, then bill it to my name, and to multiple hospitals to rack up the debt), that they can put you on a list so that you have no hope of making any airport connections for many years. I don't even bother scheduling same-day international connections anymore, and I have to plan on family members and animals being taken care of for at least 72 hours in advance before I cross the US border.

You later contact a lawyer, several lawyers in fact, only to find out they've handled many of these cases, always lost, and reluctant to bother trying again.

Respectfully, you don't realize how horribly naïve you are. You are not dealing with people that follow the law, rather genuinely evil people that will do whatever they can get away with because they can get away with it and find supreme satisfaction in sadism.

mothballed··on US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search
I refused to sign anything, they billed it to DHS, DHS refused it and put that I was the responsible party, then the hospital sold it to debt collectors under my name.
mothballed··on US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search
You "can't get in real trouble" but teh last time I crossed with basically nothing, they wrote a search warrant by literally fabricating almost everything in it. They wrote that an anonymous dog told an unnamed officer I had drugs, then a completely separate HSI officer signed it and a judge signed it based on complete inter-species hearsay two links removed from any named entity to face to question it.

So yeah you can be imprisoned, brought to ERs while they run up private medical bills (they told doctors I had drugs up my ass), have a search warrant executed, and then at the end of the day be chased by debt collectors for the search that turned up nothing.

mothballed··on US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search
I've been thrown in immigration jail as US citizen. They will not provide or allow you access to a lawyer and you won't see a judge to determine if they have PC to hold you. You just sit there until they decide to eject you. Nothing else to be done and no one to contact, plus most of the other prisoners cannot speak English.

CBP via a bunch of crazy court cases, basically operates outside constitutional constraints. This is also why DHS has been used as private army by POTUS (snatching up people in unmarked vans in Portland for instance) because they can be ordered essentially directly by POTUS and not have to worry about the constitution.

mothballed··on US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search
I've done that and they held me for about a day, strip and cavity searched me, imprisoned me, "diesel therapy" me across the state while taking me to multiple private ER claiming there were drugs up my ass to run up hospital bills in my name. They've also threatened to revoke my passport or deny me entry to the country (both failed).

They also would not allow me access to a lawyer during questioning or imprisonment.

Another woman was at the same port of entry, was raped to "check for drugs", sued, and lost. Apparently raping is a legal way to search for drugs (that were not there).

mothballed··on Government orders GitHub to remove Bluetooth-based chat app Bitchat: Jack Dorsey
Your rebuttal rests upon a logical fallacy of false mutual exclusion that one cannot exercise resistance as a means of survival. You believe resistance comes from rich white people with lawyers; I believe it largely comes from the hungry and those with no other choice. The truth is it comes from a bit of both.
mothballed··on Government orders GitHub to remove Bluetooth-based chat app Bitchat: Jack Dorsey
>Ah, ok. So not “a healthy culture of resistance” but more “desperation because the country made sure that’s driving them”.

This is logical fallacy, but you've tried hard to pull a gotcha out of it.

Resisting because you are desperate is perfectly valid and doesn't create a contradiction.

It's not something reserved to "those who can afford a good lawyer." Desperation is one of the hardest drivers of resistance, not something reserved to rich people with lawyers and something to lose. And even if we suppose there's not resistance in USA, I said in USA or someplace with a healthier culture of resistance, which means even if you don't consider USA a place of resistance it still meets the logical test of falling within my statement.

>[now deleted] If you hear this for the first time, hello white male with plenty of money for a lawyer.

Lol you couldn't resist adding that in. Your little racially charged bits about why we're not allowed to call it resistance when a poor black person does such acts. While ignoring your very example of Rosa Parks who was a black woman, child of a teacher and itinerant worker and before activism working largely in domestic work for white families. The contradiction is yours.

mothballed··on Government orders GitHub to remove Bluetooth-based chat app Bitchat: Jack Dorsey
I can see how that worked in Berlin. In USA or someplace with a healthier culture of resistance that would fail laughably. Americans will drive with no license, registration, in cars they've stolen back from the repo man because they refuse to pay anything to anyone. When my car was totalled by an illegal alien, the police didn't even show up, wisely because they were surely driving without license, identity documents, insurance, registration, or any sort of recoverable assets or any way to punish them but to throw them in an overflowing jail. You could try fining them but it would be like trying to draw blood from a stone. I suppose could try to jail them, but you'd find our jails are already full, and we already let violent criminals out on bail.

In much of the world including USA poor people will slang crack for $5 under threat of life in jail and fines higher than they could ever hope to pay. Suffice to say there's an endless line of people willing to uber for roughly crack slinging wages without the risk of life imprisonment even if the fines are as bad -- because their alternatives are worse.

mothballed··on Government orders GitHub to remove Bluetooth-based chat app Bitchat: Jack Dorsey
Those "protections" are in place for the protection of the government, not the citizens. That's also why the US tried to classify encryption as arms and why they passed the gun control act (people nowadays might think modern gun control was passed to help school kids, no lmao, it was passed in response to the killing of JFK).
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