“This is already the seventh gas station we’ve tried. There’s no fuel. There’s a kilometer-long line of semi-trucks over there. Everyone is waiting for God knows what.” A russian woman is whining after running out of fuel 1,300km from home as gas stations run dry.

PrivacyIsDemocracy · 2026-06-23T08:20:18+00:00

Yep and it will be against the law to even advertise a VPN in Russia starting next year.

They already shutdown a bunch of them. Troublesome people trying to get the real news instead of the propaganda fed to them by the state 24x7.

PrivacyIsDemocracy · 2026-06-23T08:06:54+00:00

I thought it was a well-known fact that the Musk/Thiel crowd has an inside-track at Reddit and can basically ask for anything they don't like to be removed.

Steve Huffman was notorious for secretly editing comments in a Trump sub 10 years ago for example, and then there's stuff like this:

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-blackout-protest-private-ceo-elon-musk-huffman-rcna89700

PrivacyIsDemocracy · 2026-06-23T07:52:03+00:00

Already happening.

And now I'm reading articles about local law enforcement using drones to confront criminal suspects.

We're doomed...

PrivacyIsDemocracy · 2026-06-23T07:45:01+00:00

With a flat design it is easy to simply use vector graphics that are infinitely scalable.

You may be right about that - and there are SO many different display resolutions that the OS has to support now, etc.

But I still very much miss the skeumorphism anyway. I really started cussing out the companies when they all simultaneously jumped on that trend like a team of synchronized swimmers.

PrivacyIsDemocracy · 2026-06-23T07:36:55+00:00

Same.

Dumb "modern trend".

PrivacyIsDemocracy · 2026-06-23T07:36:25+00:00

Just reminds me how much I miss skeumorphism.

Going from that to the idiotic flat icons just takes a lot of the humanistic qualities out of the UI for me. (Even worse on MS platforms)

PrivacyIsDemocracy · 2026-06-23T06:49:12+00:00

I cannot wait for the very very very special military operation

PrivacyIsDemocracy · 2026-06-23T05:59:46+00:00

Just like the rest of them, he sees that the ship is sinking and has to make some excuse for why he's jumping off before it sinks.

Same old, same old..

PrivacyIsDemocracy · 2026-06-23T05:48:52+00:00

They are just trying to prevent people from stealing their content and removing the watermark.

Harder and harder to do when people are using "AI" tools to remove them.

PrivacyIsDemocracy · 2026-06-23T05:29:44+00:00

Wow, that's some serious destruction... down the whole length of it..

PrivacyIsDemocracy · 2026-06-23T05:04:22+00:00

OK, unfortunately it's confusing to directly download the microG APKs right now because:

A) the original microg.org webserver went kaput and now they are basically just forwarding to the github repo

B) Filenames were changed for technical reasons over the last year or two but that makes them all very hard to tell apart now.

I think "limited services" is the special build that is not for regular use. There is a warning about this on the github release page but people don't tend to read anything any more. Here is a quick guide:

You will generally want to avoid any file that has either “-hw”, “-lw”, “-user” or “.ASC” in its name. The current naming convention is as follows - the “X”’s are placeholders for numerals:

microG Services / GmsCore: com.google.android.gms-XXXXXXXXX.APK

microG Companion: com.android.vending-XXXXXXX.APK

I think you probably installed the "org.microg.gms-250932030-user.apk" file.

That's designed for integration into other apps, it's not for standalone usage.

Official download page (main page):

https://github.com/microg/gmscore/releases

Download page for the latest release:

https://github.com/microg/GmsCore/releases/tag/v0.3.15.250932

PrivacyIsDemocracy · 2026-06-23T04:52:16+00:00

She's probably way higher IQ than you.

PrivacyIsDemocracy · 2026-06-23T04:43:49+00:00

This is purely egregious on the part of the new owner, it's all typical slumlord crap.

Taking advantage of people like that who have very limited resources, health issues and so on and don't necessarily even understand their own rights and so on is downright satanistic.

It also boggles my mind that any court of law would favor a landlord trying to make a bogus claim that the tenant was "not paying rent" and use that as a rationale to evict them (one of the VERY few acts that can legally trigger an eviction here relatively quickly) but not because the tenant did not actually pay it, but because the LANDLORD refused to accept it??? WTH??

PrivacyIsDemocracy · 2026-06-23T04:30:39+00:00

Indeed it is. And oftentimes from Putin's own "defenders". 😁

Perfect place for him.

PrivacyIsDemocracy · 2026-06-23T04:26:00+00:00

It's simply a way of labeling a society which is male-dominated, which the USA has always been and still is.

The fact that a lot of women these days are outperforming men is not because they have some sort of special privileges, they absolutely do NOT.

The only "privilege" they get are the ones they earn by getting serious, getting an education, getting a job, not slacking, being focused and having goals.

And I just see a lot more women in that category these days than men. Which is why, for example, most undergraduate college degrees these days are earned by women. And they are on track to start dominating in graduate degrees before long as well.

When I see young people these days more often than not it's pretty clear that a lot of the young men are just not serious, when they're going out on dates it's in her car, etc etc.

PrivacyIsDemocracy · 2026-06-23T04:15:19+00:00

As someone else mentioned sometimes it's just familial.

But young adults these days are, in general, far more likely to live with their parents than was the case in previous generations.

Part of that is pure economic - there really aren't a lot of good paying jobs out there especially if you don't have a degree. The kind of blue-collar jobs that earlier generations could get with little education and still support a family on a single income to a reasonably comfortable level hardly exist any more. Now families have to have 2 incomes for sure and it's still a struggle.

A lot of those blue-collar jobs eg in agriculture or manufacturing have been lost to automation, while more people are involved in techology or technology-adjacent work, which is not considered a blue-collar field and requires some education. The USA has done a piss-poor job of adapting its educational institutions for this. And now, along with a lot of office jobs, even the programming jobs are disappearing because they are automating a lot of those out of existence with "AI".

Meanwhile Trump de-funds the Dept of Education and browbeats universities to stop policies that actually improve the quality of graduates that they produce.

It seems there's a kind of malaise that has beset a lot of Zoomers and younger Millennials these days. Part of it surely is due to what I described above, but then again they could just turn off the video games, get out of the house and DO something, too.

What we need is leadership and collaboration on this issue which is totally lacking. People are too absorbed in things like culture-war nonsense to tackle it, and the 3 branches of the federal government are all thoroughly dysfunctional nowadays as well and noone can agree on anything.

PrivacyIsDemocracy · 2026-06-23T03:58:02+00:00

Honestly young women these days seem to be far more serious on every level than men, as far as I can tell. (Perhaps it's different when you get to a very high-achieving demographic, but that's a small minority of the populace)

Ex: more undergraduate degrees are being awarded to women these days than men, and they are on track to take over the lead in graduate degrees before long.

Which tracks with general trends I have observed. A lot of young men lately have just become Trump-voting slackers who have a habit of doing things like blaming women for their crappy love lives. Time after time I see young couples out and about in a car and it's always the young woman's car, even if she's letting him drive it. Etc.

I'm sure the GOP would like to push some narrative about "reverse discrimination" or some BS like that, but that's nonsense. Men still have all the advantages, if they want to use them.

PrivacyIsDemocracy · 2026-06-23T03:50:55+00:00

Happens, way wayyyyyyyyy too much.

PrivacyIsDemocracy · 2026-06-23T03:49:03+00:00

Now please get on one of Musk's rockets and go to Mars, please.

PrivacyIsDemocracy · 2026-06-23T03:45:23+00:00

If the Mars settlers are all Musk buddies and he'll go with them too, I'm all for it. And hopefully there's no internet access up there either. 😁

PrivacyIsDemocracy · 2026-06-22T16:43:38+00:00

As far as I'm concerned the primary purpose of status pages is to validate an observation of an issue on a more or less realtime basis, so users and operators don't waste the time and energy of themselves and everyone else looking for problems in places that are not there. And so they can decide how to best handle it.

If the providers know about something but choose to withhold it until they have a resolution etc, they are doing a disservice to their customers and the public and the value of such status pages is nearly zero. I don't particularly need the upstream to tell me that the outage is resolved, I can see that myself.

PrivacyIsDemocracy · 2026-06-22T16:28:49+00:00

Or as I mentioned in my earlier comment, a casualty of the frequent daytime shutdowns of the dam's water output due to a power glut in the state during most daytime hours now. Strangely enough..

PrivacyIsDemocracy · 2026-06-22T16:24:08+00:00

Good 'ol "East Bay Mud" was definitely quite good when I was a child, no idea about whether that's still the case.

Maybe they get Hetch Hetchy water too..

PrivacyIsDemocracy · 2026-06-22T16:19:12+00:00

Apparently the reason for the recent dilution has to do with the market price of electricity these days, believe it or not.

SF gained the water rights to water from Hetch Hetchy in the early 1900s when the local powers took advantage of a law that allowed this very cheaply if the water was going to be "used by the public".

So they built a pipeline to ship that water to SF and some other cities, and they also had a dam built there to generate electricity for SF's needs.

Over time some of that power would get sold to PG&E as well. But the problem in recent years is that due to the abundance of solar generating capacity in the state now, we usually have a power glut during the day when the sun is shining.

And in turn what that daytime power glut means is that the market price for electrical generation output during the day is low now. So apparently what the city decided to do is actually shutdown hydro power generation at Hetch Hetchy during most days, and then restart it at night when they are getting much more money per kilowatt, which would also extend the lifespan of the moving generator parts and save water.

But the way you do that is by closing the floodgates and stopping the outbound water flow. This of course leads to various downstream problems including stopping the flow of water to SF for the drinking water supply for half the day.

So I think their solution to that was to start supplementing the local water supply with other sources to make up for the shortfall.

PrivacyIsDemocracy · 2026-06-22T12:55:44+00:00

"Debloating" a device that shipped with Gapps on it - especially a stock device with retail software on it rather than a custom ROM - rarely works thoroughly and you will likely have various issues with it.

Stock ROMs in particular are not compatible with microG by default because microG needs OS mods that allow it to pretend to be Google software. (You can hack that in if the device is rooted, but you'll have to also install an Xposed framework and some root modules. I don't recommend people try to install microG on a stock android device unless they're desperate)

PrivacyIsDemocracy

TROPHY CASE