Well. technically he was an ape rather than a monkey.

It really depends on where you bury the body. Once you get out of developed areas, it gets very hard to track things down. Take this example; she was missing for two years, and her body was found in a tent, in a sleeping bag, just two miles off the Appalachian trail, which is one of the busiest hiking trails in the US. If someone was actually buried out there, the odds that they’d ever be found are very, very poor.

Admittedly, carrying a body off trails through fairly dense forests ain’t gonna be easy. If you were going to do it, I’d say start by getting an old car with no GPS, get some paper maps, make sure that you leave all of your electronics at home so that there’s no electronic trail of where you’ve been (especially your cell phone!), and only use cash for gas, etc. while you’re driving to your body dump site. Assuming that the body isn’t recovered for at least a year, you’re likely in the clear.

But what if I don’t want credit in the Play store? What if I want to use the Graphene OS, and side load everything?

I have considered getting a burner phone that I pay for in cash only, having it utterly unconnected from my real life, and turned off and stored in a Faraday wallet when not in use just so I can use the ‘digital coupons’ that food retailers keep pushing. I use a loyalty card because all they get from that is my buying habits–groceries–plus an address. But access to my phone? Absolutely not.

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.

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.

You’re just like yeah I know windows and Adobe will profit off of every button I click

First - Win 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC is not a consumer version. It’s about as locked down as you can get. It doesn’t even have drivers for the ethernet on your mobo out of the box; you better have already downloaded those. (Yes, I’m serious. It’s about Also, it’s pirated, since it’s not available to consumers at all; Microsoft doesn’t want to let consumers have the Enterprise versions of Windows because that’s no longer software-as-service. And the LTSC? That shit’s going to keep getting security updates–but no ‘feature’ updates, at all, ever–for at least 10 years.

Second - I don’t pay for Adobe, but I have to use it in my job. I’ve limited as much of it as I can, and CC doesn’t start up by default, but yeah, if you work in the commercial arts fields, you simply don’t have any serious options that aren’t Adobe, and yeah, they’re going to bleed you dry. But, as i said, i’m not the one paying. My workplace has a license that allows two seats, and I’m literally the only person there that knows how to use any of it–or even has the password to the Adobe account–so I just use the work license to put it on my home PC.

Once I finally got it installed, Win 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC has been fine. The only real hitch was that I had a terrible time getting the graphics card drivers instsalled; kept getting a BSOD. But everything is running quite nicely.

As soon as I remember to get my other hard drives installed, it will be time to put the Adobe Creative Suite and Corel Painter X on it, and see how happy it is with those.

I’d have to check and see if I can access Netflix from my desktop at work, but my suspicion is that the lower quality has more to do with smaller screens in general. That is, you can get away with a lower bitrate when you’re viewing on a screen that’s 19", and that’s probably a fairly safe maximum size for most people watching on a desk- or laptop directly.

I use my PS5, TBH. I still get ads on Amazon Prime, but I’m not seeing Netflix ads. (I also don’t have Hulu, etc.) I pay for a VPN for my desktop–I’m using Win 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC–and with Firefox and uBlockOrigin I see pretty minimal ads online; if you’re able to open your streaming service in a browser rather than needing to download their application, then a VPN an uBlockOrigin might be sufficient.

Good point.

A quick check online says that Samsung–which has about 25% of the global market–sold at least 1M OLED televisions and 8.3M QLED televisions in 2023. So, let’s say that they sell 9.5M televisions annually (I’m not sure if the numbers are global or US-only); that’s $190M in pure profit from advertising alone. For a billion-dollar plus corporation, that might seem small, but it’s certainly enough to get them to take notice.

Don’t give your TV the wifi password, kids. No, you don’t need to ‘finish setting up’ your TV; it works just fine as a dumb display.

The church has tended to tread very, very lightly on what they’re willing to declare to be doctrine, and what they aren’t, because they’re aware of how bad it looks when they have to walk doctrine back. The November policy, for instance, was explicitly called out as being revelation from god (via Russel Nelson, in 2016), but the church had to walk it back in 2019 because they were hemorrhaging members and getting incredibly bad press. (Plus, the whole article of faith thing about, “we believe that men will be punished for their own sins, and not for Adam’s transgression” is kind of undermined by not letting children with gay parents be baptized.)

As long as it’s dogma rather than doctrine, the church has the benefits of members conforming, without the same risk of blowback. That is, if/when it’s necessary to roll something back, it’s much easier to say that it was never doctrine in the first place, and that the mind of god hasn’t changed.

Hey, I clearly remember that there was only caffeine-free Coke at Ricks College (apparently now re-branded as BYU-Idaho), and it was a Big Fucking Deal when they started allowing Coca-Cola in the campus stores and dining hall. So even if it wasn’t “official”, it was a very clear cultural issue, to the point where I don’t think that most people could have drawn a line between what was official doctrine, and what was commonly accepted as doctrine.

There also wasn’t an internet at the time, so members couldn’t readily find some of the information about the nitty gritty.

That is the apologetic version, yeah. But it begs the question: if it’s okay to drink caffeine, why is it that an occasional cup of coffee will keep you out of the temple, but a case of Red Bull every day won’t? If it’s about avoiding addiction, then surely any addiction would make you unworthy to go to the temple. If it’s hot drinks, then why isn’t cold brew coffee okay? Why is yerba mate fine, and ice tea is not? One assumes that a god would be able to formulate a standard that can be applied cleanly, to everything, and communicate that clearly to his prophet.

Honestly, the when you look at the circumstances that existed contemporaneously when JS Jr. was formulating his theology, it’s clear that the Word of Wisdom is essentially a slightly reformulated version of the temperance movement. It’s also interesting to note that it wasn’t a requirement until, IIRC, the 1920s or so; JS Jr. and Brigham Young were both pretty big drinkers of hard liquor, for instance. It’s easy to point to tobacco and say, see?, it’s prophetic! But there was a pretty strong temperance movement against tobacco at the time as well. (Meanwhile, the evidence we have right now seems to indicate that coffee and tea are probably good for you, and evidence regarding alcohol is leaning towards it probably not being healthy even in very moderate drinkers.)