I’m curious how hard it would be for a typical user to chain VPNs together so that my traffic went sequentially through VPNs. In theory it seems like VPN #1 would know that it was connected to my home and VPN #2, so it couldn’t tell where data was originating. VPN #2 could see the site that was being accessed and VPN #1, but not me.

I have no idea if it actually works this way in practice through.

There is no context that makes this a smart thing to say in Texas when you’re running to be a US Senator. It doesn’t matter how rabidly you oppose 2A rights, you keep your mouth shut and don’t say a goddamn thing.

Off the top of my head, the only one that I’ve watched in recent memory was Fallout.

That’s okay, I’ll ramp up my piracy of Amazon-exclusive shows in 2025 too.

O’Rourke is such a fucking moron. What kind of pants-on-head, helmet-wearing, short-bus riding, genetic defect of a village idiot tells people in Texas, “Hell, yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47”? And it’s going to be even worse now, because more and more Democratic-leaning voters own firearms than did in 2019. It’s so goddamn infuriating, because by every possible metric, Cruz is a godawful human and has zero principles.

If Dems dropped gun and magazine restrictions/bans entirely, and never brought it up again, they could peel off significant numbers of single-issue Republicans, just like Republicans could peel off a lot of single-issue Democrats is they entirely dropped abortion/birth control restrictions/bans. (And, in both cases, you’re better off addressing root causes.)

If they’re illegal to sell, then Amazon hasn’t gotten the memo yet.

My experience has been that executives don’t usually have a solid grasp of how things work at ground level. They’re good for vision and overall direction, but can have… peculiar ideas about how to get there. Good management makes sure things go in the direction that executives want, without the executives interfering in actual processes.

This does assume that executives aren’t actually malicious though, and same with management.

Some of them certainly did. My younger brother, for instance. He’s quite literally a psychopath. There’s no cure for him, no rehabilitation that would fix him. The best that can be done is keeping him out of society for as long as possible. He was in and out of juvie starting at about 11.

People think this without a hint of irony, and yet have never worked in a place without management. Good management improves productivity and efficiency, while also shielding workers from executives. Bad/no management almost always leads to chaos.

It’s like the whole idea of not having leaders; it’s a great theory, but it assumes that everyone is capable of working together perfectly towards the same goal, when the reality is that not everyone has the same goal.

Middlemen, etc., are trading in knowledge. They know who can do what, and decrease duplication of effort.

Higher octane fuel shouldn’t give you any more power; it just prevents pre-ignition. If your engine is very high compression and needs high octane fuels, then usually something like an anti-knock sensor is going to be present to cut engine performance–retard timing, I think?–if you have the wrong fuel in your car.

OTOH, a less energy-dense fuel like pure alcohol can increase power because you can increase compression in the engine even more than you could with high grade gasoline. That means that you can get more benefit from turbo- or super-charging.

IIRC, most fuel injected cars can now make some kind of adjustment to the fuel:air mix if you’re at high altitude so that it shouldn’t be an issue (unless you’re at altitudes outside of their range of adjustment). Carbureted engines can not do that.

Longevity is almost always the price you pay for power though. The engine in my VW GTI could put out nearly double the horsepower that it currently gets, but the lifespan would be under half that of normal.

It depends on whether you believe that people should be allowed to use narcotics or not. I tend to believe that people should be able to make that choice for themselves–as it’s their own body–and ordering narcotics online decreases violence in the drug trade since there’s no longer obvious fights over territories, etc.

The same interagency cooperation that makes it easier to track down one groups of people and punish them also makes it easier to track down other groups of people that you might agree with.

Depending on what you’re doing, that probably wouldn’t be a significant hinderance to law enforcement. Child sexual abuse, drug trafficking, etc., all tends to get lots of interagency cooperation, regardless of political issues.

I’ve tried to use it, but have not managed to get it to work. Which is a bummer.

I should probably try again now that I have a new computer. My old computer was so old that a lot of stuff wasn’t working correctly.

ISPs definitely keep records. At least some VPNs claim that they don’t, and that their networks are set up in such a way that they can’t. Some organizations claim to validate the claims of the VPNs, but it’s unclear if they’re trustworthy.

So your choice is to use something that definitely keeps logs, or to use a company that at least says that they don’t/can’t.

And this is covered by freedom of the press.

Their freedom of the press isn’t what’s in question. Their ownership is. They are welcome to continue operating as long as they are not owned by a Chinese company based in China and subject to Chinese national security laws.

But, even if it’s really, truly, a 1A issue, no rights are absolute. You can not, for instance, publish classified information, and then claim that it’s a free speech issue. National security interests can, and do, outweigh individual and especially corporate rights to free speech.

especially when the justification seems to be about the speech on that app

But that’s not the justification. The justification is first, access to data, and second, manipulation of that data. The gov’t is arguing that TT is hoovering up massive amounts of data on users, and then is manipulating the content that is shown to them in order to unjustly influence international policy, and all done with no transparency at all. It’s on-par with Russian election interference, although perhaps a little longer lasting and more subtly done.

After all its not hard to make a corporation in the US

…A US corporation is subject to US laws.

ByteDance is subject to Chinese laws.

If TikTok wants to do everything that it’s currently doing, but under US law and under US scrutiny, they’re more than welcome to do so. But they’re currently evading any serious scrutiny. Hence the reason to shut them down if they refuse gov’t oversight.

National security interests are the interests of the people though.

The fundamental issue is that, assuming I’m not leaking national security information, I can say nearly anything I want on Facebook, Twitter, etc. (as long as I’m not in violation of their terms of service). The US largely does not censor people using the power of the gov’t. If I am an authoritarian communist, I’m more than welcome to spread these views on any American social network that I choose without gov’t interference. I can spread anti-vax and Q nonsense if I wish, and the worst-case scenario is that my neighbors will stop talking to me. I can attack the very foundation of the country if I want, as long as I’m not spreading military secrets.

This is not the case in China. Spreading pro-capitalism and pro-democracy messages can quickly get you arrested. Trying to share accurate information about what really happened in Tianamen Square in 1989 can result in you disappearing. Words and phrases are actively censored by the gov’t on social media. The Chinese gov’t takes a direct role in shaping social media by what it promotes, and what it forbids. Anything that’s perceived as an attack on the political system of the country, the party, or any of the leaders (remember the internationally famous tennis player that abruptly disappeared when she accused a local party leader of sexual assault?) will put you at risk.

This isn’t a case of, “oh, both sides are the same”.

The Constitution doesn’t only protect American citizens, it protects everyone

Uh, no. It doesn’t protect everyone, not by a long shot. The US constitution doesn’t guarantee Chinese citizens, living in China, the right to freedom of the press.

…And this isn’t about which speech they’re allowing. This is about who controls the platform, and how they respond to gov’t inquiries. If TikTok is divested from ByteDance, so that they’re no longer based in China and subject to China’s laws and interference, then there’s no problem. There are two fundamental issues; first, TikTok appears to be a tool of the Chinese gov’t (this is the best guess, considering that large parts of the intelligence about it are highly classified), and may be currently being used to amplify Chinese-state propaganda as well as increase political division, and second, what ByteDance is doing with the enormous amounts of data it’s collection, esp. from people that may be in sensitive or classified locations.

As I stated, if TikTok is sold off so that they’re no longer connected to China, then they’re more than welcome to continue to operate. ByteDance is refusing to do that.

Calculators also say that dividing by 0 is an error, but logic says that the answer is infinite. (If i recall, it’s more correctly ‘undefined’, but I’m years out of math classes now.)

That is, as you divide a number by a smaller and smaller number, the product increases. 1/.1=10, 1/.01=100, 1/.001=1000, etc. As the denominator approaches 0, the product approaches infinity. But you can’t quantify infinity per se, which results in an undefined error.

If someone that’s a mathematician wants to explain this correctly, I’m all ears.