Yep. Exactly this. I'm white and my wife is black. We live in one of the states where our relationship was a crime just 55 years ago.

Her grandfather has stories about what happened to people who crossed the race barrier (of course the law only punished minorities for it, not the white partner). We're not far removed from those horrors and lunatics are already trying to drag us back.

Self hosted email is its own can of worms. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone outside of experienced IT people. You'll end up blacklisted before you send your first email if you do anything wrong (and there's a lot that can go wrong), and it doesn't solve any security problems email has.

Anything sent over email just isn't private. That goes for Proton customers when they send or receive anything from a non-Proton address too. The one thing privacy email providers can actually do is keep your inbox from being scanned by LLMs and advertisers. That doesn't prevent the inboxes and outboxes of your contacts from being scanned, though.

If you use email, the best thing you can do is be mindful of what kinds of information you send through it. Use aliases via services like simple login or anonaddy when possible. Having a leaked email is a security vulnerability. Once bad actors have your email, they now have half of what they need to breach multiple accounts.

I'm also sick of hearing about Swiss privacy laws. Their intelligence service got busted covering for a US and German spy front operation in Switzerland. If it happened once, I promise it has happened before and since.

Edit for those who can't click: a front company in Switzerland sold fake encrypted communications services around the world for years, possibly decades, with the assistance of Swiss intelligence agencies.

They aren't burning fossil fuels. They're burning CHOOH2, which is the product of a genetically engineered plant.

Everything else has already been addressed by others. It's a dystopia. Public transit exists in universe, but it's very dangerous (as is the rest of the city). The corporate solution is to upsell you cars.

This one hit close to home. I literally just talked about this here, where I was worried about libs 'letting red states secede' to own the right.

And I did the same thing for boomers. Seems like I need to introspect more. I've been making progress, considering I grew up in a fundamentalist, far right household, but I clearly have a ways to go.

Anyway, thanks for this. Of all the criticism I saw, yours resonated with me the most.

I agree. I guess I'm feeling schadenfreude because boomers are finally getting the short end of policies they supported their whole working lives. But nobody should be homeless.

I think maybe the description is a bit harsh, but for real, they eagerly helped prevent or overturn just about any social policy that didn't benefit them. And now we're stuck with the consequences.

I know a boomer couple that is extremely conservative. Lived in a nice house that got foreclosed on when the guy took out a loan and couldn't pay it back. They berated their kids for being "failures" their whole lives.

Their kids are too poor to help them and the social services they opposed or helped gut won't either. At least they have some bootstraps to pull themselves up by.

The most mask off one they had was the short they made celebrating Robert E. Lee. Unironically did the "slavery wasn't that bad" bit in it. And there was a whole "Lee heroically killed John Brown and ended that evil abolitionist revolt".

Naturally this has made them DeSantis' preferred curriculum.

That tracks. And to be frank, I don't know if they're wrong. Globally, it looks like neoliberalism is crumbling, including in America. The rise of modern fascist movements and the end of democratic pretense in conservative parties is a testament to that fact.

And as bad as liberalism has been, it's kind of a "devil you know" going up against one that will be even worse. It's a race to the bottom for us.

I think you captured their sentiment perfectly. Red states bother them, and their solution is increasingly to let the red states have their way. And I fear, when people like us start bothering them to, you know, defend our rights, we'll get ignored.

I mean, fuck, union activists and BLM protestors already got that very same treatment. They'd rather live oblivious to this country's problems than address them

Thanks man, and thanks for hosting this instance.

When I was a little kid, maybe 5 years old, my family lived in this old house that used to be a Civil War hospital during a few battles.

All kinds of weird shit happened there, but one event stands out.

I was sleeping between my parents in their bed on the second floor. I woke up. It was late and very dark.

I looked to my right and saw the curtains blowing in. The windows were painted shut. I watched as the curtains start to slide off the wall. It looked like someone was holding them up. I shit you not. Like I could see feet just underneath the bottom.

The curtains moved to the foot of the bed, and fell.

I don't remember seeing this, but my parents swear I told them that when the curtains fell, a woman with a yellow dress and no eyes had been holding them up, and that she stood at the foot of the bed for a while.

The curtains, according to my parents, we're in fact on the floor at the foot of the bed. I can't vouch for that though because I was a kid and frankly, don't remember.

My best non-supernatural explanation is that I had sleep paralysis that night and hallucinated much of what I saw. I've had it chronically since, so it's possible.

I don't know though. It's one of those things I think about late at night when I have too much free time. What the fuck did I see?