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Braintree

Knob Twiddlers
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Posts posted by Braintree

    stupid first world problems you're dealing with

    in General Banter

    Posted

    My new employer sent me a work phone and a laptop in two different packages that required a signature. I wasn't around when they were delivered so the phone was sent to a nearby store for me to pick up, but the laptop was just automatically returned to them instead. Tomorrow is the onboarding process and I have to use their computer to access it. I hope I don't have to do all this on a phone...

    Coronavirus COVID-19

    in General Banter

    Posted

    5 hours ago, logboy said:

    odd use of the phrase ‘final stretch’. i’d say ‘end of the beginning’, and even then, denial is rife within leaders of some countries, so not even close to wrapping their heads around there being a problem, let alone solving it. variants will generate, vaccines will require revisions, problems will persist. likely for decades.

    More like the beginning of the end. It's probably not really going to be over for another year and half if you really get down to it.

    • Like 1

    Interesting things

    in General Banter

    Posted

    The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months

    https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-of-the-flies-what-happened-when-six-boys-were-shipwrecked-for-15-months

    Quote

    Then, on the eighth day, they spied a miracle on the horizon. A small island, to be precise. Not a tropical paradise with waving palm trees and sandy beaches, but a hulking mass of rock, jutting up more than a thousand feet out of the ocean. These days, ‘Ata is considered uninhabitable. But “by the time we arrived,” Captain Warner wrote in his memoirs, “the boys had set up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old knife blade and much determination.” While the boys in Lord of the Flies come to blows over the fire, those in this real-life version tended their flame so it never went out, for more than a year.

     

    • Like 5

    How does the World view America these days?

    in General Banter

    Posted

    5 minutes ago, ignatius said:

    just heard pete bootedgeedge on NPR talking about how much he supports the infrastructure plan. hopefully the dems don't identity politics themselves to death over something like an infrastructure plan.  the railroad parts of the bill look pretty amazing.revamped east/west rail lines/service.. from NY to LA etc.  i took a train from chicago to portland it was pretty good actually. a nice ride. my dad has taken rail all over east coast and parts of it are old as fuck when you go south. he described it as "real kidney busters" type of ride. 

    regional rail service could be a big deal in every part of the country. 

    I'm more concerned about bridges and highways since they have more people on them and are ripe for disaster, but a refurbished rail system would be nice. California has had plans for a high speed rail for a while now, but keeps getting stalled because of finances. It would be pretty sweet to take a 3 hour train to LA. It's a 6 or 7 hour drive as it is.

    How does the World view America these days?

    in General Banter

    Posted

    3 hours ago, Cryptowen said:

    President Biden really going above & beyond here. Promised to stop building the wall & now he's set to declare the very concept of building stuff racist.

    Ex0mOuJXEAooHar.png

    I mean, in order to repair America's failing infrastructure, we'll need to put in some serious investments. So it's something that needs to get done regardless if he's going to look like FDR or not.

    How does the World view China these days?

    in General Banter

    Posted

    I don't know anything about Max Blumenthal but he's really fighting a losing battle if he thinks it's not real. Just taking a pass through his video, I can see that he's making fallacious and specious arguments. He mentions toward the end that the US was in favor of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians (heavily loaded language), however can't seem to make the connection that the US doesn't get involved in any human rights violations unless it benefits the US. There's no benefit to not supporting Israel, and there's no benefit to opposing China here. It's that there are many more eyes on China now so they have to finally take a stance.

    Revealed: Massive Chinese Police Database

    https://theintercept.com/2021/01/29/china-uyghur-muslim-surveillance-police/

    Quote

    Details of the investigations are contained in a massive police database obtained by The Intercept: the product of a reporting tool developed by private defense company Landasoft and used by the Chinese government to facilitate police surveillance of citizens in Xinjiang.

    The database, centered on Ürümqi, includes policing reports that confirm and provide additional detail about many elements of the persecution and large-scale internment of Muslims in the area. It sheds further light on a campaign of repression that has reportedly seen cameras installed in the homes of private citizens, the creation of mass detention camps, children forcibly separated from their families and placed in preschools with electric fences, the systematic destruction of Uyghur cemeteries, and a systematic campaign to suppress Uyghur births through forced abortion, sterilization, and birth control.

    That last sentence should be alarming since it's basically included in the literal definition of genocide.

    Here's an older article that goes more in-depth about other things done by China before the internment camps were hot news: https://theintercept.com/2018/08/13/china-muslims-uighur-detention/

    Quote

    As with the U.S. presence in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, China’s war on terror in Xinjiang risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. But the Chinese — like the Americans and the Israelis — don’t really give a damn about alleged terrorist threats. This has much less to do with security and much more to with politics. Beijing is asserting control over a restless province that borders eight countries — including Pakistan and Afghanistan. Other economic factors come into play, too: Xinjiang is home to the country’s largest reserves of coal and natural gas.

    Fighting terrorism, though, has become a useful cover for authoritarian governments around the world. Bequelin, who is the East Asia director at Amnesty International and a former visiting scholar at Yale Law School’s China Center, draws a “direct line” from the Bush declaration of a war on terror in 2001 to the repression of the Uyghurs in 2018. “The war on terror rhetoric immensely benefitted the Chinese,” said Bequelin. “It was a 180-degree turn for the discourse of the Chinese state with respect to its ability in Xinjiang: from minimizing and trying to hide it to casting its efforts and suppression of any form of dissent as ‘counterterrorism.’ So there is a direct line here.”

     

    • Like 1

    Social Media Marketing (class project)

    in General Banter

    Posted

    I think @modey would be a good person to ask about this.

    Personally, I haven't really had any luck with FB, but IG has had a good trickle of followers and site visits. Having an aggregate like a record label is really good because it's a sign of legitimacy in addition to reaching more people that never would have heard of you. Inside that, there's a bit of a catch 22 since you kind of need to have some followers to even get on a record label. Doing something novel or running a YT channel that's focused on music production or something like that could help.

    Also, being part of a community like WATMM or r/idm is a strong way to do that. But you have to be active in it for it to be effective.

    At the end of the day, you need to be social in order to get people to hear your music. Being social in person has been like ten times as helpful as trying to do this online. Not everybody is a Heorge Garrison, so don't hedge your bets on being able to grow interest because you're mysterious.

    • Like 1
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