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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 8th, 2023

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  • Fair point, I can only speak directly about my local experience.

    That’s true but we, that includes me, can look around and see what’s happening beyond our State and National borders to see if a theory fits.

    Realistically, the standard of living has been falling for a while.

    IMO that’s the crux of the problem right there. The Standard of Living has been falling everywhere and it’s been falling faster as “Globalization” took hold. The real issue though isn’t trade between countries that have roughly similar economic systems and lifestyles, it’s the one sided importation of goods between countries that do not have roughly similar economic systems and lifestyles.

    The problem with Globalization is that it tears the floor out from underneath the vulnerable. The under-educated and the poor struggle to make a living because their jobs have been shipped away to another country where someone can live for less and thus work for less. It’s a race to the bottom.

    Those vulnerable people, and even the once privileged who’ve watched their livelihoods ripped away, are increasingly desperate to find a way out of their situation and so they’re increasingly turning to the only people who seem to care. To paraphrase a bit “It’s the (real) economy, stupid!”

    This isn’t my idea either as this outcome was widely predicted by Union Bosses and Business Leaders during the Clinton Administrations runup to NAFTA and MFN Trading Status for China.

    If they were correct, and it appears they were, then the only way to stop the madness is to re-onshore the jobs as much as possible with a special focus on geographic areas that have the highest imbalance. The U.S. started doing it under the Trump Administration and the Biden Administration has accelerated the trend. If everyone will just hang tight for another 12-18 months the effects will start to get really noticeable and the Right Wing rise will ebb away.







  • I’m somewhat surprised that there’s no purchasable solution to this problem as all of the technology to make a short range drone interdiction system already exist. To detect one all that’s necessary is an appropriate camera setup and a system hooked to it capable of recognizing them, both of which are already prevalent in the market. Add an inexpensive laser range finder so the system can know if the drone is truly over your property and at an altitude acceptable for interception.

    Once that’s done it becomes a matter of how to interdict the drone. One relatively safe option would be for the system to deploy a high speed short range interdiction drone to overfly the other drone and drop something on top of it meant to snarl its rotors, for instance fishing line with weights.

    None of that is necessarily easy but its certainly doable.











  • it was the 80s/90s, windows didn’t exist

    Wow, that’s a pretty narrow gap. The 80386 started mass production in 1986 and Windows 3.0 (the first actually usable one) came out in 1990.

    I refused to use Windows until Win95 and even then I was experimenting with OS/2. In 1997 I installed Slack 3.4 and have been around every since. I’m currently running Linux Mint but I sorta miss SuSe and may go back to it.