A drone is a good idea, actually, but I wouldn't use a laser. An actuated squirt gun filled with epoxy or some other nearly impossible to remove liquid would be easier and work just as well. You could even use regular paint if you wanted to hedge and avoid "destruction of property" charges, instead just be a nuisance, forcing them to waste money and manpower to clean the camera lenses.

The biggest risk of being caught is probably a correlative search, using other nearby recording devices to try and figure out the common suspect who was near all of the destroyed cameras. This is one of the big chilling effects of any surveillance state - even if you aren't caught red-handed in the act of something, it becomes trivial to collect enough circumstantial evidence to build a case against you.

And eventually they'll create drone no-fly zones around every single Flock camera. The drone dead-zone map for the country will look like Swiss cheese, with 50-foot circles scattered over every single city and road.

Exactly. I have a pi-hole and it's great for helping block ads in Android apps, but it misses a lot, especially in web pages.

Reminds me of the old APK HOSTS FILE ENGINE spam we all used to love seeing on Slashdot. Everyone (rightfully) gave him shit for it, but Pi-hole is exactly the same thing. Blocking based solely on domain names hasn't been sufficient for 15+ years and as great as pi-hole is, that hasn't changed.

FWIW I use Firefox (Beta) on Android exclusively and can count the number of crashes I've seen in the last year on one hand. I use a half-dozen addons, including uBO, but I do keep a modest open tab count (usually fewer than 12) and rely more on bookmarks.

The only real issue I see with mobile Firefox is possibly battery and memory use but it's improved drastically in the last 5-6 years, so if you're looking at comparisons online make sure to check the dates (AI summaries love to use ancient data). Some of these resources no doubt go to support uBO, and that's a worthwhile tradeoff.

Incredibly well-said.

I would just add that, you do need to sweat the small stuff.

I've seen a number of people claim that a problem with "the left" is that they get upset about every single "little" thing Trump does and that they should just ignore the "small stuff" and only worry about the big problems. Demolish the White House for a ballroom? Insignificant. Put his name on everything? Small potatoes. Pardon thousands of convicted criminals, including some millionaire and billionaire donors? Doesn't matter. Accept a $500M bribe in the form of a luxury airplane? Who cares.

The problem is that grift, corruption, autocrats, and authoritarians always start small. They push the limits of norms and convention, then the edges of the law, then "small laws" that don't meet the criteria for "high crimes". A broken constitution and subverted free society is built on the bones of the "small stuff". If you wait to fight back until the big critically dangerous stuff is happening, you've waited too late and have already lost the farm.

Slippery slope may be a logical fallacy but it's modus operandi of people like Putin, Trump, and yes, Hitler.

Trying, but all I can picture is a brown man wearing a tan suit, and some people getting really upset by this for some inexplicable reason.

Even if US oil companies could extract and refine sufficient domestic oil for everything (something open to debate due to the mismatch in the type of oil and refining capabilities) why would they? If Exxon or Chevron can sell a barrel of oil for $150 to someone in Europe or sell it in the US for $80, which one do you think they'll choose? Hint: They aren't going to cut their profits by 50% in an act of selfless patriotism.

Making your energy production and distribution infrastructure privately run has pros and cons. One of the cons is they will chase profits over everything else.

But this has almost nothing to do with supporting NATO and almost everything to do with almost 20 years of bailouts, inflationary spending, and repeatedly cutting taxes. Saying "we have too much debt so we're killing NATO" is like saying "Fast food costs too much so I'm going to stop taking my medication".

If debt is really the problem, we need to address the cause of that debt. Doing anything else either reveals that either (1) the regime's goal is something else, or (2) the regime is too stupid or corrupt to fix it, or (3) both.

Disagree on this. That's like saying only shows that trek through the stars should be called Star Trek - and yet the best Star Trek series ever made was Deep Space Nine.

The Stargate is just part of the premise of the followup shows, not a required defining characteristic of them. Even for the original series, by about season 6-7 it was sharing the field with ships and other methods of travel.

As for Universe, it did stumble out of the gate (haha), for sure, but almost every show does. I think it had found its footing by the middle of the second season and season 3 was set up for some great potential. It absolutely deserved a third season.

What kills me is how Repubs constantly use "BUT CHINA!!1!" as their go-to boogeyman for everything from technology and AI to the economy and trade, and yet they conveniently ignore their massive buildup of renewables and nuclear. One of the few instances where the divergence between the US and China actually matters and they pretend it doesn't exist.

Imagine if the party in power actually cared about the energy future of the US. We could be setting ourselves up for the next 50 years of growth by electrifying everything and upgrading the national grid to support it. Instead we're DIRLL BBY DIRLLing, building new pipelines, and putting up as many methane power plants as possible. Stupid old fucks.

The real friends are the terrorists we made along the way.

Hey, I saw this movie!

Didn't end well for the guy with the plutonium.

Oh, I don't know. An EV version of the Reliant Robin might be just what the world needs right now.

Bullshit weasel words. "Cleaner" does not mean "clean".

A shit sandwich, now with 50% less shit! is still a shit sandwich.

The US has never been a completely anarchistic hellhole - we've always had laws (aka regulations). Gambling, for example, was very tightly regulated for hundreds of years and only recently has been opened wide (with all the expected problems).

If you're desperate for capital-F Freedom, I hear Somalia is pretty lawless. You can go set up a compound and fiefdom there.

Hah, good to know. I almost wrote "F350" because they're the most egregious "luxury commercial trucks", but 150s are so much more common I went with that instead. Luckily they have plenty of carrying capacity for all that regret.