If you have a good unit then most of the military experience is hanging out with your friends all the time.

Except for the 5am PT every morning, and at 7am when you’ve got to get your truck ready at the motor pool, or 8am when you’ve got special duty to set up the range, or 9am when there’s a 2 hour briefing about keeping your hands to yourself and having a designated driver.

Lunch at 11am is usually alright, except the base you’re at has the worst DFAC you’ve ever seen.

That range you helped set up? It’s at 12am, and it’s fun to blast away at targets thinking about how much weapon cleaning you’re going to do tonight.

There’s a lot of leftover ammo, but you only had to shoot 2 magazines, so your rifle isn’t going to be that hard to clean. (Any vets know what’s coming next?)

First Sergeant says we can’t waste ammo, if we don’t use the 10,000 rounds they give us, they will only give us 5 rounds next time.

So the next several hours is spent in the sun, loading more rounds to mindless blast in the general direction of targets on the range.

7pm rolls around, it’s quitting time. Just kidding, night land nav, time to stumble around around in the dark with shitty NVGs and try to find all the points scattered throughout 2 miles, using nothing but a compass and a map.

Except nobody ever gets all the points, so everyone gets together at the end to share the points they found.

10pm, now it’s quitting time, except wait, some moron has lost their night vision goggles, so instead of going back to the barracks, everyone is going to spend the night on the land nav course until it’s found. In the morning it’s found right next to one of the vehicle tires.

Those are the general events of a somewhat easy day in a combat unit. A day without overnight watch, hours of formations and drill ceremony, 30km ruck marches, endless briefings, flipping landscaping rocks because first sergeant doesn’t like the side you flipped everything to last month, etc etc etc.

Personally I know several people who have been to prison, and many of them absolutely needed some institutionalized treatment.

Well, really they needed a strong community with support, mentors, and motivations to succeed, but in our broken society where community is all but dead, they needed prison.

Prison is a broken hellhole system, but with total reform, it could be a positive tool for society.

Maybe in a utopian society we could do away with prison, but there are a ton of changes we need to make before then.

They’re just voting for the only party who pretends to care about them.

Democrats have spent almost no energy on making rural voters feel included.

If you saw everything you’ve ever known decay into the shambles of globalization, then some orange guy comes and starts yelling about how he’s going to fight for your way of life, while the other guy is talking to the people who have been shaming you for decades, who do you think you’d vote for?

If we want a better future, we’re going to have to get over all this hatred towards our neighbors. Waving your hands around a map and saying “fuck allll these (rural) people” isn’t going to work anymore, because China/Russia know exactly how to exploit that hate.

Exactly what I was thinking.

That guy isn’t making any big decisions behind the scenes. He’s just being puppeteered until he dies.

The Georgia GOP is going to get itself caught up in federal RICO charges at this rate.

I wonder how that would work.

That’s how it’s supposed to work, but in many counties the bondsman doesn’t actually front any cash to the court, and they don’t get charged if the suspect runs. They operate as a sort of slush fund for the owners, the officials, and the cops.

So these companies are often just another way to siphon money from people accused of a crime.

Super shady stuff.

I mean, illegal online transactions are like the one place where crypto really shines.

Eh, I would support blocks on that. [Porn]

Okay, so lets build all the infrastructure and technology to block porn in the most effective way possible.

And I pinky winky promise to never use that technology to silence my political opponents.

Just think of the children.

And the thing is, there are open source internet browsers that can be written to avoid any browser checks that a law might require.

However, if Google’s browser DRM gets widely implemented, a browser-side content blocker would be effective, because all those open source browsers would be unable to access the wider web.

I think if Big Brother Browser with Google DRM is our future, we’re going to see people using 2 browsers as standard. They’ll have one “corporate” internet browser, for Instagram, Amazon, whatever. And one “free” browser for all the grey area stuff.

Just pick a mid-sized instance and there’s a 99% chance it’s more stable than Lemmy.world right now.

Look at users who don’t sound insane and see where they’re posting from.

Soldiers were sharing nuclear secrets in flash card apps.

Just because someone has a secret clearance, doesn’t mean they’ve ever been told that the entire Internet is siphoning their data in any way possible.

But Google takes their security super seriously, and the only person they’re sharing our data with is the government.

That’s not a good thing, but if you need a chat app that pretty much everyone already has installed, for non-sensitive conversations, you could do much worse than Google Meet.

If you believe your partisan opponents are the only enemies of freedom, then you’re already in chains.

I converted one of these Chromebooks to Linux as a test project and the results were, not good.

To start, they have a bootloader lock screw under the motherboard, so you have to take the entire laptop apart to load anything but unsupported ChromeOS.

Then you have to use a Google tool, can’t remember the specific one, to swap the bootloader. That might be possible to automate but I didn’t look into it because…

… The hardware sucks. We’re talking like 4GB of storage on a lot of these Chromebooks. The driver support is all over the place, and there are issues everywhere even on “supported” distros.

With the vast amount of junk Chromebooks out there, I’m sure community hospice support will get better, but it’s never going to be an easy bulk conversion because of how common the bootloader locks are.

Can someone point me to an overview of why the submersible would be useless in a cave environment?

It’s definitely been in their back pocket since the early days at Google.

Your markdown is showing.

That’s why change needs to come from the corporate level through regulation.

People generally just want food, shelter, health, and comfort. And most people in the world are struggling to maintain food and shelter.

Their evironmental footprint doesn’t even register as an afterthought.

For example…

Go look at your local Walmart and it’s bazillion products. They expect to sell almost everything in that store multiple times within a month. All that generates enormous waste on a scale that’s literally impossible for the earth to sustain for another 100 years without total ecological collapse.

We’re living in the single most polluting decade in human history, every decade, since all of us were born. Even if the entire Lemmy user base become subsistence farming monks, the factories would just keep churning out poison unphased.

I’m not saying it’s bad for people to try and consume more responsibly. I’m just saying it doesn’t make a difference over any meaningful time period until there’s a radical change in how our global economy functions.

Environmental catastrophe will continue until we literally cannot ignore it, only then will we do anything substantial about it. Unfortunately that’s just how our society works.