401–410 of 476 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please. You could defend yourself from first or second hazmat wearing person that comes to your house, it would be very much different story defending yourself from SWAT team, then remotely detonating drones, finally if it all fails, try to defend yourself against B52.
[flagged]
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But that did save lives; I was able to know my family had Covid before the symptoms showed up. Happened with a lot of other people too.
Was your short term safety at the expense of long term safety? (assuming rights erosion and government failures ultimately harms safety long-term).
For large-scale infectious disease --- epidemiology and public health --- quarantine and infection/contact tracing are very tried and true containment methods. Yes, these impose costs, particularly on individual liberties. What's key is having a well-governed, principled, high-integrity, trustworthy government which makes clearly-justified decisions as to when to impose such restrictions, and when to lift them. Sadly, this has become more difficult in recent years.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Didn't actually this happen in China? Maybe the videos were fake, but I saw at least a couple of this happening.
That was Australia. In China, they welded the doors to their housing units shut.
> Hayley Hodgson [...] was ordered to go to the facility after a friend of hers tested positive for the virus and she was identified as a “close contact” by the number plate on her scooter.
> spent 14 days at the Howard Springs mandatory Covid-19 quarantine facility
> "Police officers blocked my driveway. ’What’s going on, are you guys testing me for Covid? What’s happening?’ They said, ‘No, you’re getting taken away. And you have no choice. You’re going to Howard Springs. You either come with us now, and we’ll put you in the back of the divvy van. Or you can have a choice to get a Covid cab.’
> they were even threatening me that if I was to do this again, ‘We will extend your time in here.’”
> Ms Hodgson said she told police “I don’t consent to this”, and asked why she couldn’t “just self-isolate at home”. Police responded ‘We’ve just been told from higher up where to take you. And that’s all that there is,’”.
> She was told to pack her bags and that she would be released when she tested negative. During her two-week stay she was tested three times, and each time tested negative.
> The video includes footage filmed by Ms Hodgson during her stay as she argues with a police officer at the facility, who reprimands her for leaving her cabin without a mask and threatens her with a $5000 fine.
> “I’m gonna give you a warning, yeah?” he says to her as she sits on the balcony. “It’s an official warning that you have to stay on your balcony and obey the rules while you’re here.” When she argues with the officer that the rules don’t make sense, he replies that “it doesn’t have to make sense”. [...] “Highly infectious when all of us people are negative?” she asks. “So far. The risk is still very high,” he says.
> She said at one point when she was distressed and asking to be let out of her room to go for a walk or a run, facility staff instead offered her Valium to calm down.
> Ms Hodgson said as a result of her two-week stay she had lost her casual retail job. “They compensated me $1500 for the two weeks, and that was all,” she said. “Now I’m currently unemployed because of this situation”
Full interview with recordings from inside the Australian "internment camp" https://unherd.com/newsroom/inside-australias-covid-internme...
Mirror: https://archive.ph/GQDkN
Earlier quoted context omitted.
i don't get your point. that does not matter. what i mean is that as a user i care about the tech that runs on my phone, not how the connection is made. i don't make phone calls anymore. nowadays everything is done with video chat. neither PSTN nor VOIP offer that, so their use will eventually decline unless they start offering video. phone numbers are also a privacy nightmare. they need to be replaced with something…
What do you use - WhatsApp? That's VOIP.
whatsapp is a private network, not federated and only works with a whatsapp owned client. to qualify i would have to be able to call someone on whatsapp with a generic VOIP client.
this is comparable to googles text messaging system that is built on xmpp. it used to be possible that i could use any xmpp client on any xmpp server to reach people on google. at that point google was xmpp. but when they removed public access it stopped being standard xmpp but became a custom fork of it.
In 2014, the Hong Kong protesters used an app called FireChat.
I had the pleasure of meeting the founder, Micha, a few times. The company was called OpenGarden.
The app was popular - distributed in the App Store. Same idea: Bluetooth and wi-fi networks.
User numbers growing like a hockey stick. 100k+ downloads a day.
Micha was in Hong Kong during the 2014 protests (originally for a layover en route to meetings in China) and gave many interviews to international/Western media outlets while there, including the New York Times, TIME, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, BBC, and Reuters. Mica expressed support for free speech.
Authorities limited or blocked downloads and information about the app.
The term sheet for the funding round disappeared.
Too early?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Didn't actually this happen in China? Maybe the videos were fake, but I saw at least a couple of this happening.
That was Australia. In China, they welded the doors to their housing units shut.
Our governments have failed us worldwide.
I don’t know what we can do with that information. Feels both useless and that we’re helpless to fix it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you use - WhatsApp? That's VOIP.
that depends on how you define VOIP. strictly going by the term any voice sent over the internet is VOIP. but since PSTN can be routed over the internet too, that would be included as well. but i am talking about the system that uses a standardized protocol over a federated network with a VOIP or SIP client with a public address that allows you to reach any other public address on the internet, just like email. whats…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That was Australia. In China, they welded the doors to their housing units shut.
Can we perhaps agree the that the response to COVID, worldwide, was essentially shit. When faced with a true crisis, the People in Charge fucking lost their minds. It’s laid bare for all to see: Our governments have failed us worldwide. I don’t know what we can do with that information. Feels both useless and that we’re helpless to fix it.
I'm probably more on your side than it sounds based on this comment, but I find it frustrating to encounter learned helplessness dressed in profundity.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, why would I? You didn't need to know the staff rota at Dachau to know the government was doing bad things, way back then.
> No, why would I? Because your original comment was: > Weren't some of the German tourists last year sent to an ICE camp in Mexico?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you think that the 1:30 ratio of guns to people in the US is going to stop the government from doing whatever the fuck they want, you are suffering from a potentially terminal case of optimism. I am an ardent believer in “Those who would give up essential Liberty to purchase a little temporary Safety deserve neither Liberty nor Safety”(even though the context was the Penn family bribing the governor to avoid taxat…
You underestimate how little resistance it takes to make a difference. It's not about every free man in the country single-handedly holding off the might of the US military on his doorstep. As soon as a single shot is fired in defence, every thug now has to think twice before busting down a door. The game changes. Tyranny becomes a whole lot less efficient. You send an FBI task force or god forbid the military to int…
What it comes down to is can you scare those within the power structure sufficiently enough that they back off before they escalate violence to the point of mass murder? In the U.S. I don't think that you can. It seems that a lot of other people don't either, which is what is delaying people from using violence. There are still enough incentives to be handed out that those capable of committing the harm will escape being harmed by the power structure. When the rewards run out and those who wield arms in service of power become no different from those being harmed, then it will change. The issue is that so much of the world is connected now that those rewards are at no risk of running out, because they can always be pulled from somewhere else.