That link worked for me.

I’m not really sure that is the reason. I’m not saying I would put it past them, just that I really don’t think it’s necessary. Smart phone manufacturers have a million other ways they could spy on you if they wanted to. The U.S. Government already has the ability to know each and every thing you do on your phone, even if you never use Bluetooth. I think it’s greed pure and simple. It probably cost’s them a few pennies to add a physical jack and most people would lose their shit if a phone came out without Bluetooth capabilities, so they save those couple of pennies and put them into their greedy ass pockets.

That being said I have never bought a phone without one and never will as long as I have a choice. I do love my wireless headset though but I am also not too worried about being spied on (yet).

I’m 100% convinced that is why they stopped making batteries user replaceable though. In 2019 Edward Snowden did an interview with Wired magazine where he made the interviewer remove the battery from his phone as a condition of the interview. He explained that the U.S. Government can make it seem as if your device had been ‘powered down’ when in fact they can still listen to your conversations and transmit them back to the CIA or whatever other spooks that want to listen in. Shortly after than almost all manufactures stopped allowing you to remove the battery. Coincidence?

My current phone doesn’t have a removable battery, because I literally couldn’t find one in my price range that allowed you to do so.

The best advice if you don’t want to be spied on is not to use a smartphone altogether or just do whatever you want to be kept secret away from the phone at the very least. Buy a Faraday bag and keep your phone in there if that’s not an option.

I know this is a joke, but I would just like to take this opportunity to relate what I consider to be an interesting historical fact.

Many Americans think that Australia was the only British penal colony, and that America was founded by Puritans, Quakers and the like. In fact Brittan was sending prisoners the North America well before they started using Australia after the revolutionary war. From 1610 to 1766 Brittan sent between 50-120,000 prisoners to America. In 1717 with the passage of the Transportation Act and continuing up until 1776, Brittan sent between 30,000 and 50,000 prisoners and ‘indentured servants’ to America, most of whom were political prisoners. I’m sure that having such a large number of people persecuted for their beliefs by Brittan and shipped off to a foreign land had nothing to do with the colonists declaring independence.

Granted when they did start shipping prisoners to Australia (1787 to 1868), they ended up sending quite a few more there, approx 162,000, but still the U.S. can proudly claim to come from Outlaws, just like the Aussies :)

Sure. The way to counter the rebrand is to question it and call BS on it when you encounter it, expose it for what it actually is. That was the point of my post.

Please take note of MystValkyrie’s response to my post. I have no experience with Murena and I cannot vouch for them. In light of what MystValkyrie shared, it might be wise to proceed with caution and maybe look into it more before ordering.

Democracy is a form of government.

Capitalism and Socialism are economic systems.

You could have a Democratic Socialist system, if the majority of people wanted it.

You could have an Authoritarian Dictatorship that allowed Capitalism.

It’s a little more complex because people are used to living under Capitalism and many people don’t really understand Socialism and would fight against their own interest to revert to the status quo, as a result some socialist philosophers have suggested not giving people a choice but to accept socialism, a so-called “dictatorship of the proletariat”, but even in such a system you could have a constitution that enshrines socialism as the the economic system, while still giving people the ability to vote on everything else.

For example “Private Property” could be abolished. Factories and business could be owned by all of the employees as a whole and the profits shared equitably. After a short time living in such a system it would be unlikely that the majority of people would vote to return power back over to just a few individuals.

This would likely depend on the transition going smoothly. Give people a little hardship and the knee jerk/reactionary response would be to proclaim they were “better off” before.

The main problem with Socialism is that people are so used to having ‘rulers’, that they simply do not know how to act in their absence. This creates a seeming ‘power vacuum’. Unscrupulous individuals can use that fact as a way to assume the roles vacated by the formerly rich and powerful in the name of being a force that maintains the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”, when very often they seem to become dictators themselves.

In my personal opinion, violent revolution will always lead to that outcome. If we ever want to evolve as a society, people must first understand what Socialism actually is and why it’s the best choice for the majority of people. We must freely choose it, because it’s the right thing to do.

That is made extremely difficult because the rich and powerful like being rich and powerful, and will use every bit of their resources to ensure they stay rich and powerful. It’s easier to convince cops to side with them to keep them in power by sharing a tiny bit of their wealth, than it is to convince them to do the right thing, when they aren’t even sure what the right thing is.

There is a reason that Education is a political battleground in the US. If people were actually taught the truth, they probably would choose to do the right thing. The capitalists won’t allow that to happen if they can help it.

Anytime you see someone trying to cut funding for education, or try to have a whitewashed version of history taught. This is the reason.

This is also the source of “Red Scare” propaganda and fear mongering. ‘Keep people scared, ignorant, and confused’ will probably be the subtitle of the last 100 years if they make a movie about it in the future, provided the Fascists and/or Capitalists don’t win.

Edit: JFK once said “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” I think there is a lot of wisdom in that and I wish people in power would take it to heart, though I know they wont.

Well it’s blatant propaganda. Think about it, when people got rid of kings and ‘nobles’, they didn’t take the wealth from them. Those people stayed rich and invested that money into business. The ruling class never changed, they just changed job titles.

There has also never been a system (under capitalism) where peoples wealth is taken from them when they die.

The whole idea that under Capitalism everyone “Starts from 0” is just laughable.

Capitalism was never a punishment for nobles who didn’t work, it was a way for them to continue to stay in power, and still not have to work.

The vast majority of wealthy people were born wealthy. The vast majority of people who start from 0 will die with basically 0.

Adam Smith himself was born wealthy.

Very occasionally, someone like a Bill Gates or a Steve Jobs will come along and be successful, but they are the exceptions to the rule. And most of their wealth came from exploiting people.

A few professions could be a path for poor people to succeed, like for example Lawyers, but you have to have the money for Law School in the first place, so most of them came from well off parents.

Capitalism wouldn’t exist if it were a fair system.

The ideals of capitalism were to punish the rich land owners/nobles who were wealthy without ever working and empower the workers who were poor despite working for their whole lives

Where are you getting this from?

the only way to make more money than someone else is to work more hours regardless of profession

Workers aren’t capitalists. The whole point of Capitalism is to ensure the ruling class never has to do the actual work. Capitalists make their money by exploiting workers, not working themselves.

Capitalists are people who own the means of production. Working in a capitalist system you will never earn enough to buy the factory. Inheritance is one of the main ways to become a capitalist. Sure some people get lucky but with few exceptions if you are rich the way you got rich was by exploiting other people .

Copyright was a halfway decent idea when it first came out. Give a chance for an artist or inventor to profit from their work for a few years and then it becomes public property. Thanks to corporations like Disney, that has all been twisted, and now it’s used as a cudgel to keep others from competing and it takes almost 100 years for something to go out of copyright now (thanks congress).

A system where you do the work and get paid for your value is closer to Socialism than capitalism.

You can get them in the U.S. with /e/OS through Murena, but they are $900 :(

hAvE tHe DaY yOu VoTeD fOr!

Does this make sense?

It’s still a little confusing but I get what you are saying. I’ll look into it. Thanks for explaining :)

yOu ReAlLy FiNd AcCoUnTaBiLiTy HaRd, HuH?

hAvE tHe DaY yOu VoTeD fOr!

Out of interest what games are you running that don’t need GPU performance? Basically any modern 3D game needs a GPU to run well.

I think you misunderstood me. I said “Every game I have attempted to run has just worked and they seem to run just as good as they did in Windows, so I guess I’m lucky I don’t need to really worry about dual booting or VM’s”

The games I play do need GPU performance. Cyberpunk 2077, Red Dead Redemption 2, No Mans Sky, The Outer Worlds etc. I’m not running them in a VM, I’m running them through Steam or Heroic Games Launcher.

I don’t understand why you think that would be less complicated than a high tech solution like virtualization.

Because once you have everything set up properly, all you would need to do to play a game that you couldn’t play in Linux is fire up the VM and play it. In a dual boot situation you would have to reboot your computer into a whole different OS and then play the game. It wouldn’t be a massive difference, but it would be more convenient. Plus it would be contained so there would be no way for it to mess with your bootloader or whatever. Clearly it’s more complicated that I had originally thought.

KVM is special because it’s a hypervisor running in the same CPU ring and privilege level as the full Linux kernel. It’s like if a Type-1 hypervisor ran at the same time as a normal OS in the same space. This means it behaves somewhat like a Type-1 and somewhat like a Type-2. It’s bare metal just like a Type-1 would be, but has to share resources with Linux processes and other parts of the Linux kernel.

Ok, now you got me curious. What is the distinction between that and how I originally described it?

“From what I understood, it runs on ‘Bare Metal’ which means that it theoretically should preform just as well as if you booted into it, with the only overhead being the (Linux OS) which is minimal.”

From my admittedly laymen understanding, it kinda seems like what you said and how I described it are pretty much the same thing.

If I had brain damage I would think voting for trump is a good alternative to democrats.

If that’s directed at me you are an even bigger moron that I thought, and that is quite the accomplishment. Well done 👏

Or I would blame others for the consequences of my own actions.

Instead, you are blaming 10’s of millions of people for other peoples actions, which is even fucking stupider. You are blaming the people who did the thing you wanted them to do, for the actions of the people who did what you didn’t want them to do. That’s worse than shifting the blame, which you are very much doing, that’s worse than denying reality, which you are also doing. It’s dumber than even moronic MAGAt level of reasoning, because as flawed and ignorant as it is at least there is some level of reasoning going on there.

You are just responding to objectively true facts by ignoring them and repeating your stupid fucking catch phrase as if you’ve actually made a point. It’s intellectual equivalent of putting your fingers in your ears and shouting “La, La, La, I can’t heeear you!” That’s some kindergartner level shit right there. Even then I know some kindergartners who are more mature and more capable of abstract thought than you are.

To call it stupid, is an insult to the stupid. It’s worse than even being willfully ignorant, because you are fully aware that what you are saying is bullshit, yet miraculously you somehow you still believe that you have scored a point. I can see you now, drooling into your cum stained panties and clapping for yourself at the ‘zinger’ you just typed out, while grinning like an idiot.

hAvE tHe DaY yOu VoTeD fOr! 🤣

You deliberately gave yourself brain damage?

My cousin was fired from his job. The manager told him that AI had determined that he was to be fired, and that it was out of his hands. Either that was a true statement or it was a convenient excuse. Kind of scary either way.

I’m sorry about the accident.

raid a library and take a book without signing it out

Hey! That ain’t cool.