Actually, that is probably exactly what he was going for. Mussolini was a huge proponent of the Italian Futurist movement, and he had a lot of weird ideas about what was futuristic. Stuff like, "In the future, people will make their clothes out of milk." Anyway, aviation and representing aviation was a huge part of that, and he frequently used it in his propaganda.

That includes almost all remaining old growth forests. Almost all of the areas he chose are old growth forests. Here's a map of all remaining old growth forests in the US for comparison.

Moving to another state is more than just affordability anyway. People shouldn't have to give up their homes and everything they've known. So many states with far right legislatures have a gerrymandered to hell population that's 45% very liberal. Half of the population is just being completely disregarded and considered subhuman.

QuickTime 3.14. it's a really old media player from 1998. Unfortunately, I don't think version 3.14 specifically ever actually came out. We'll never really know what it would have been able to do because 4.0 came out instead. So I can see the appeal for him. Trying to use a 27 year old outdated media player that doesn't actually exist is a lot like repeatedly shooting yourself in the leg.

You realize we've been having large protests, right? For example, the city I live in is not even one of the top 10 largest cities in the US, but it has had multiple anti-Trump protests within the last year with a turnout of over 50k people. There were also other cities within 130 km of mine that had crowds with over 10k people.

The turnout in Tirana is similar in scale, but when you account for how small of a country Albania is and the fact that the entire country can easily travel to the capital to protest, the Albanian turnout is actually far less. The farthest anyone has to travel in Albania to reach the capital is 300 km. You don't even need a car. You can take an 8 hour bus ride.

In comparison, if I wanted to go to the US capital to protest, it is over 2500km away. That's like traveling from Tirana to Estonia, but without the option of easy public transportation. Not only that, but US politicians live in highly secure areas far away from where the public can reach. They never have to face us if they don't want to. No politicians even go to the building of my state capital except for a single 5 month period every two years. So the last several protests in my state capital have been people protesting at an empty building. Look dude, just because the media doesn't report stuff doesn't mean people aren't protesting. But a protest is going to be a lot more effective when you live in a tiny country with an easy way to travel.

Can the average person in your country afford to potentially lose their job while simultaneously being disqualified from unemployment benefits? My current job has 0 days PTO, and yes, I would be fired and disqualified from unemployment benefits. Can the average person in your country spend over $620 per person to fly to Washington DC? Yes, it costs that much for me. And going by bus would be even more expensive and take me over a week in travel time round trip. Can the average person in your country afford to spend over $500 in hotel costs even when splitting a room? If not, please kindly shut the fuck up. Me and many other people have been protesting regularly. But it's not possible for most of us, me included, to protest where the politicians are. Not to mention, the politicians don't care in the least. They mock us regularly. It's difficult to coordinate anything across a country that is as massive as the US, but we're at least trying.

This. People were already protesting ICE long before Renée Good got killed. The racists, white supremacists, and nazis are still not protesting today. They don't care if a murdered protestor is white. A Nazi is going to view any white protesters as race traitors. What's happening right now is a dramatic shift in the scope of what ICE is doing. Rather than simply targeting immigrants, it's being deployed against protestors and in crowd control efforts. The extent of people they're targeting and how they're targeting them is dramatically expanding as well.

In 2025, at least 32 people died in custody after being detained by ICE. This has caused massive protests nationwide.

But in 2025, there were only 2 people known to have been shot and killed by ICE:

Silverio Villegas González - September 12 - undocumented immigrant shot and killed by ICE in his car after dropping his kids off at school in Chicago. Video circulated online of his window getting broken out and him getting dragged out of the car after being shot.

Keith Porter - December 31 - African American father shot and killed in Los Angeles while allegedly setting off fireworks. There are no videos of what happened.

The first people shot and killed by ICE in 2026 include:

Renée Good - January 7 - woman shot and killed in her vehicle in Minneapolis. Videos of the incident circulated online. She was not actively protesting.

Alex Pretti - January 24 - protestor murdered execution style in Minneapolis for attempting to help a woman get safely to a sidewalk.

That's it. This image includes completely incorrect information. Jaime Alanís Garcia died from breaking his neck after allegedly falling 30 feet from a building while a cannabis farm was being raided by ICE in Ventura County, California. ICE and CBP claims they were not targeting him. There's no video of the incident.

Stuff is dramatically escalating, and it's presumably about to get much much worse.

To be fair, eating Doritos and leaving crumbs on a bed is an act of terrorism, though. So who knows, maybe they're in a Doritos death cult and just happen to be trans.

I worked for a VPN company a decade ago that advertised no logging. It was all BS. They absolutely logged. Maybe they only kept the logs for something like 48 hours, but I'm pretty sure all VPNs have some kind of logging going on. Anyway, a VPN by itself does not give you any privacy. Websites have a billion ways to fingerprint you, and they don't even need cookies to do it.

Most likely, the logs consist of what IPs are leased to what users, when the connections start and end, and what IPs those users are connecting from. A VPN company may keep the logs for something like 2 days.

Let's say you torrent something while connected to a VPN and one of the peers in the torrent pool is actually a DMCA agent associated with IP-Echelon. The DMCA agent will record the IP address you have at the time and generate a DMCA notice. It will then look up who owns the IP address to determine where to send the DMCA notice. When the VPN company receives the DMCA notice, it will use the logs to determine who was leasing the IP address at the time in question. If the logs no longer exist, the notice effectively gets tossed because the VPN company has no way of knowing what account was downloading the torrent. But if the notice was sent quickly enough for the logs to still exist, the VPN company will forward the DMCA notice to the user that was using the IP at the time. In that case, it will work the same way as a normal ISP. You'll probably get a warning with something like a 3 strike policy. In such a case, the VPN will cut your VPN service on the third strike.

Presumably, it could work the same way for anything. I used to work for a VPN company a decade ago, and this was pretty much the industry standard. It, like all VPN companies, advertised itself as having no logging.

A widespread general strike will likely never happen because most people would be fired on the spot if they told their boss they were going on a strike. If you get fired, you don't qualify for unemployment, and most people are only a single paycheck away from being homeless. I guess people from a lot of countries do not understand this concept because they had the privilege of actual workers rights.

We've been protesting. The frustration you have from thinking we're doing nothing is the same frustration we have with the so called Representatives sitting with their thumbs up their asses. They don't care what we think. They straight up make fun of us for trying. With the exception of Greenland and Canada, the rest of the world does not understand the pure rage, frustration, and fear we're dealing with every single day. If you're somewhere like mainland Europe, you're in a far safer place than we are right now. You don't have to worry about if and when your friends and family will get randomly kidnapped by ICE. You don't have to worry about when you too will get put in a concentration camp simply for having leftist political views. If the US actually goes through with invading Greenland, what do you think that is going to mean for those inside of the US? The country would immediately tear apart. All US bonds would immediately get dumped, and there would be a worldwide economic collapse. The only silver lining would be that the American war machine would also hopefully collapse. It may be large, but it's expensive to run. The entire US would turn into something that looks like the Bosnian War. Due to the US facing an internal collapse, Canada would likely be able to resist occupation, and Greenland would be won back from any kind of conquest. While awful things would happen in mainland Europe, they would pale in comparison to whatever happened in the US. We're dealing with fascists, and there would probably be hundreds of Tiananmen Square type events. This last few months has involved coming to terms that we probably will never have a chance to live a full life because we'll be dead long before old age ever comes.

We're not a country of soldiers. We're just regular people. Despite whatever you might think, most people do not own guns or know how to use them. Do you expect people to leave their children homeless and without food over a 1 day strike? Do you understand that if a war happens, most of us will probably end up dead simply from being inside of the US? And even if there isn't a war, we may 2 years or less until we get put in a concentration camp simply for being against Trump. I fucking worry every day that my friends could get disappeared at any moment. You see stuff in the news about Minneapolis, but ICE is in every city. Over 1000 miles away, they've been going door to door near some of my closest friends. To suggest we are content is batshit. We are not okay with anything. I'm not going to apologize for the threats of an orange megalomaniac that I continually try to resist.

If you're outside of the US, you absolutely can do stuff. Stop buying things that feed the monster. Build defenses and deterrents against US aggression. And get the money out of your own politics too. Stay vigilant. You don't want to go down this road, and it's closer than you'd think. If the US goes to war, it won't win. We might all be dead, but maybe the world will reset and fascism will fall.

That place would never survive in Central Texas. 😂 Here, a place with brisket that's actually not sad looking would charge about $7 for a plate like that.

Unfortunately, it's far too tempting to order 10 times more food than that.

To say he was a generally great guy really overlooks how awful he was to women. He was no doubt brilliant, but he had some very serious character flaws. And unfortunately, he had an echo chamber of peers and a rockstar celebrity status that only worked to reinforce his shitty behavior and backwards views. It's not super uncommon for brilliant people to be absolutely nightmares on a personal level. Imagine being an absolutely brilliant scientist that gets married only to be completely forbidden from science and the things you love, and then reduced to being a maid for a madman with tons of insanely particular demands.

It's easy for you to talk on the Internet from your armchair of job protections and privilege, where you've probably never had to resist anything in your life. Most people are 1-2 months from homelessness without an income. This isn't a hypothetical situation. It's a cold fact. And if you are homeless, your kids get taken away. Do you think people are able to protest more effectively in that kind of situation? Which single protest is going to make the immediate difference to bring about change.

And our labor protections were already eroded several generations before I was born. Almost nobody has union representation. It is illegal for a union to require members to pay membership fees. It is illegal for a union to require a company to hire only union members. It is illegal for a union to require its members to participate in collective bargaining. And it is illegal for unions to take action on anything not directly involving the company its members specifically work for, including general, solidarity, and political strikes. Furthermore, the executive branch can obtain injunctions to declare any strike illegal if it is ruled to be a threat to national health or safety. While there have been attempts as recent as this year, there hasn't been a single successful general strike in the United States since the Taft–Hartley Act of 1947 passed.

And WE ARE protesting. There are people are protesting EVERY SINGLE DAY all over the country. But you will never see that on the news. Many other people and I have attended numerous protests when we are able to. Have you ever stood in 40+°C heat all day weakly holding a sign while trying not to black out from heat exhaustion at a protest? I have. What have you done? You might not live here, but you are affected by some US actions too. You have politicians too, which could be doing more for your people. Your rights could be slowly getting eroded away right now. And if there are any billionaires that exist in your country at all, I guarantee they are. It's easy to talk shit, but the impactful thing is to stand in solidarity and do what you can from your side of the pond. There are a lot of things you need to be pushing for. Like what the people in Albania are doing right now. You are in a good place to be making a difference. You don't have to live in fear of the stuff we're dealing with. You don't have to continually worry every single day about whether any of your friends are going to get murdered by ICE or a cop.

And please, almost nobody has used Twitter since it went to shit (I've never even had an account), only boomers have used Facebook for the past decade, and everyone is pissed about the AI stuff. You love to make generalizations. I get that you're frustrated. What do you think the frustration is like here?

Texan here. I've had some damn good hamburgers in my life, and I've been to numerous states. But the one of the best burgers I've ever had was in Luleå, Sweden at a place called Bastard Burgers. Specifically, you have to ask for them to add 3 pieces of Västerbottensoft crispy bites to the burger. It brought tears to my eyes just knowing I can't get anything like that in Texas.

It definitely got very intertwined with fascism, though. There were a lot of ideas like, "In the future, there will be no books. Books focus too much on the past, and we need to keep looking forward." The never look back mentality especially led to a lot of bad things, and it ended up directly inspiring fascism. It's pretty easy to see the close association, especially considering the Futurist Political Party got absorbed into Mussolini's party basically as soon as he created it.

Apparently this just applies to unions and federal workers, though. At least as it was written in the Taft–Hartley Act of 1947. But yeah, the fact that it's illegal for unions to call for general strikes is indeed fucked up beyond belief. Unions are an essential part of organizing strikes.

I do think there's a lot of eyes opening now.

There's definitely a rise of the far right happening all over that's very alarming. One of the things that makes it scary is how low key all of it can be. It's easy for people not to notice until all of the cards are in place, and then everyone is completely caught off guard. Like consider France - despite how frequent, powerful, and progressive all of the protests have always been in France, Le Pen got scary close to getting into actual power. All of the oligarchs have their tentacles spread throughout the planet. Albania is protesting stuff involving Jared Kushner. It's really got me thinking that there's some very specific things that need to happen in countries all over the world while there's still time, otherwise they'll inevitably turn into authoritarian hellholes. But right now, the cards aren't in place for a lot of countries. What just happened in Hungary inspires hope.

But billionaires need to get taxed out of existence, large companies need to be broken up or nationalized, money needs to be kept out of politics in every way possible, and the world needs to move completely off of US based technology as well as fossil fuels. I know a lot of people are trying in Europe, and I hope that even if my country turns into a hellish nightmare, that it opens enough people's eyes that they can at least save their own. Climate change is coming, and it's going to cause civil unrest like we cannot even comprehend. Nobody anywhere is going to escape it unscarred. Hopefully some of us can at least make it. But that will require societies working as societies and leaving nobody behind, and everywhere is very far from that point.

In Asia, there's what's called Chinese, Vietnamese, and Thai okra, but those are actually in a completely different plant family than actual okra and closely related to squash. If picked while immature, they're said to taste similar to actual okra. You can find them in Asian markets. They're in the luffa genius and if fully grown, they're used like sponges for scrubbing.

No. You'd be surprised. Old growth specifically means forests where the trees are older than 200 years on average. If you include mature forests, which are defined as 80-200 years old on average, the amount of forest becomes much larger. But also consider how much there used to be, and how much disappeared. The US was the first place in the world to really add forest protections. Theodore Roosevelt alone set aside over 150 million acres as national forests at the turn of the 20th century. We're insanely lucky that happened. I've been lucky enough to have traveled to and seen national forests in almost every US state. It makes me die inside knowing they might get cut down now.

The differences are a lot more than the current state of affairs. My great great grandparents were serfs, so I've heard quite a bit of stories about what it was like. As bad as stuff is right now, we are still worlds better off. Thanks to relatives that are still there today, I've been to where they lived during the serfdom, and saw the work they had to do. They slept on what looked like picnic table benches. Two people per bench face down with their arms and legs hanging over the sides. One tiny house, for a family with 7 children. They were constantly sick and weak from lack of food, despite growing it. Almost everything was taken from them from the insane taxes. Moving was not an option because they were bound to the land. Every day, they had to walk up and down a mountain to tend sheep. The one advantage over slavery is that they could only be bought and sold with the land they were bound to. So families couldn't be split apart. It was also illegal for owners to murder their serfs. Slaves, on the other hand, would have been legally considered dead in the court of law.

That said, the oligarchs absolutely want to bring back both serfdom and slavery. Prison labor will be the means of slavery. Freedom cities will be the path to serfdom. The fact that there is a long way to fall to get to that point should absolutely terrify us because YES, it gets MUCH worse, and yes, we are taking an express train straight to that dystopian reality. There is no bottom for billionaires. There is no road too low. The most horrible things imaginable are part of their plan. The road doesn't stop at late stage capitalism. Late stage capitalism leads to oligarchy, authoritarianism, and corporate feudalism. And the horrors of that we cannot yet comprehend.