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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Yeah, there was nothing good about it. My great great grandfather was a serf as a kid until it ended at the end of the 1840s. Almost all of the food they produced was taken by their lord. The little bit his family was allowed to keep wasn’t enough to stop them from being sickly from hunger. They lived in a tiny cabin, and slept on what effectively were picnic table benches - two people per bench with their arms and legs hanging down to the floor from each side. There were just a couple differences between that and being slaves. Slaves were legally considered dead, serfs were not. Serfs were bound to the land, slaves were not. That meant a serf could only be bought and sold with the land, and serf families could not be split apart. It also meant they could not legally be murdered or raped. But they were expected to work for and give almost everything they produced to the lord, and they were not paid. They could not leave because they were bound to the land.

    A lot of rich capitalist billionaires really would like to bring that back.




  • To be clear, a VPN provider effectively works the same way as an ISP. If you use a Dutch VPN, it will follow the exact same rules as a Dutch ISP. Given, you should verify that it actually is based out of that location and not just incorporated there with no office and a PO box. In a DMCA situation, the DMCA agents generally are never told the identities of anyone by an ISP or VPN provider. But the ISP or VPN provider forwards the notice to the user with the associated account as they’re legally required to do. If the worst case scenario happens and you get your VPN service cut, you’ve still got your ISP and can just move to a different VPN provider. Having your ISP service cut, on the other hand, may leave you with no service options at all. You don’t get privacy with a VPN, but you do get a stopgap like that.

    Edit: Also signing up for VPNs that don’t record your personal information is probably a good practice as well.


  • 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.



  • Superman was created in Cleveland.

    That explains everything. That’s literally one place on the planet that would have been so boring, finding a bird in the sky would be the highlight of the week. Thankfully, I’ve heard it’s gotten better over the past few decades. But the reputation still lingers.


  • Even if you look at the pure definition, it can be fuzzy. Who should control the means of production is the great debate among leftists. The problem is “social ownership” can take many forms, and how well they represent society widely varies. If a government is corrupt, government ownership certainly will not represent the people. I’ve come to the conclusion that a variety of approaches is probably necessary as each has its own weaknesses. Natural resources need to be protected from exploitation by even local communities. But people are also right to not trust governments to continuously maintain their best interests. Generally speaking, keeping stuff as close to the people as possible is ideal. Workers, and not investors or government officials, should control the means of production in a business. At the same time, there should be a low barrier of entry for people to come together and form competing businesses. Investment may be necessary, but at the very least, investment should be a one time thing with a limited return on that investment. It should exist to lower barriers of entry, not raise them. And people certainly shouldn’t be able to make a living off of loaning money. While the answers aren’t always clear, there are some fundamental things all leftists should be able to agree on, though.