Terrarium

Okay so losing the domain is actually very funny to me. I am not personally invested in us getting the domain back so long as measures are taken to ensure security (comments on MITM and the need for invalidating JWT, at minimum, are reasonable concerns).

I'll make one quick note about the donations issue. I would recommend that in the future, you distribute funds so that if someone goes AWOL you only lose, say, 20% or 40% (let's say someone else leaves with them) rather than 100%. This is how many orgs maintain funds for organizing without needing all of it to go to a legal entity or just one person.

In terms of domain registration and access, I can give a couple tips for whatever domain the site settles on.

• Have all emails go to a forwarding email address that pings multiple admins' emails with domain messages. You can set up a regular ping to that address so that everyone knows it is still working every 2 weeks or so. e.g. "Subject: hexbear.net email is working". You should also make a note if when the registration expires. Domains tend to be renewed yearly and on a particular date, so you can set calendar reminders and alarms and so on to each verify that the domain has been renewed.

• With some registrar services you can have multiple domain admins. There is still just one legal entity that owns the domain but you can set up multiple accounts to have access to change DNS settings, get expiry emails, etc.

• This is an InfoSec risk, but you can share ownership by making a shared legal entity the owner, like a business or non-profit. The problem with this is that two people need to register the business and this effectively reveals your names and that you are associated with one another. But depending on your risk tolerance and existing social connections, it might be possible for 2 people to do this kind of thing.

Obviously there is no perfect solution. The ability of one person to change the password on any shared account (e.g. forwarded email address) would still pose a disruption risk. But doing at least the first two steps would give you a heads up on something going wrong and if you did the third you could pay on behalf of the owner (the legal entity) even if one of you goes AWOL.

Anyways, thanks again for picking up the pieces here. I'm sorry, I am sure it is very stressful. We are all comrades here. Let us know if there are ways for us to support you all.

At its core, it is a bad to bet on the US state being run in a sophisticated way. It depends more on its position to exert leverage than on the smartest and best stratagems. The people "at the top" being incompetent (but still cynical) has happened many times.

Though it is an interesting question of what is going on in the intelligence blob. Sure, they havs their own batch of true believers that do not understand their actual role and what they do, but I have no doubts that those who are generally aware run the show. Does it mean they are on board with a surface-level restructuring and are betting on a different approach? Does it mean they plan to rein this in and we just haven't noticed? Are they too distracted by the loyalty purge stuff for now and will be responding later?

In any case I am very entertained to see so many imperialist propagandists out of work. Watch where they go next. That might indicate the extent to which this is a restructuring rather than defunding. Moves to academia, social media companies, and brand new NGOs are the ones to look out for, IMO.

Real ones buy 20 kilos of beans at a time and seal them in deoxygenated mylar.

Nobody is as serious about beans as me. It's hard to retain friends.

Every cybertruck has a Lacanic death drive. It yearns for every street pole and every other car.

Yeah that's a scam with MLM elements. The "coaches" make money based on how many people they sucker into the program, not their ability to trade. They separated you from the others because they were afraid you'd convince one or more of the others to not give them $17,000 for nothing. The selling part with 1:1s was a hard sell session like they do for timeshares. Presumably they walked you through some numbers about how great of a financial decision it would be to give them $17,000, how you would make that back in a month, and wouldn't it be great to be rich and retire early?

PS given your mention of a gambling problem of some kind I would recommend moving away from day trading. At minimum, take an amount of money substantially larger than what you initially invested and lock it away in a savings account or 10 year bonds or something. And keep your day trading money separate from personal finances. And stay as far away from investments that can be overleveraged, i.e. where you can lose more than you "buy in" for. That way, in the worst case scenario, you cannot lose more money than you had before and you can think of this more as a hobby than a job.

And if doing that seems unreasonable or like you could "lose gains" and you don't want to do it, well, then you are still gambling and you are risking losing all of your money to bankers.

Yes it was a fully top-down, banker-spun narrative for how people buying subprime mortgages were "irresponsible" rather than the massively overleveraged financialization of all mortgages, including subprime, by the banks. This is part of a common PR scheme by which to blame "consumers" and the poor for problems created by capitalism and the ruling class. Same as telling people to budget better when they complain about real wages dropping. Or to "sell-improve" if you've been unemployed and are desperate for a job. It's not that the fed created a baseline level of unemployment in the intetests of capital, it's that you didn't divine what skills were most in demand by capital 10 years before they needed them.

Even more dramatically, the banks went to the proles and advertised that even with bad credit and small down payment you could get a mortgage, escaping your landlord and becoming housing secure.

In English you could just write "Self" and be fine. The urge to Latinize comes from a tradition of academics trying to make something even more academic and, historically, required the "standard" education of learning Latin (and some Greek) at substantial expense of your parents. Snooty people for hundreds of years would not consider you educated (read: part of their in-group) unless you could come up with a new university motto.

Pro Ecclesia, Pro Texana

And for the reverse, overuse of jargon by a newer academic worker is a sure sign of insecurity. These are people that will break if you ask a couple challenging questions. The jargon is a shield. Unfortunately, academia creates the environment where people feel the need to do that, where they cannot be vulnerable and learn because everything is an evaluation of your worth for the "next step", where 20 people compete for the same job and everyone else leaves the field.

Similarly, you can use jargon to make a document unassailable. Not just because it is difficult to parse, but because (1} you can always pivot around your meanings when challenged, and (2) you can embed your work in social goods and therefore characterize disagreement as a social ill of some kind. Declare your work to not just be full of jargon, but also, say, an essentially feminist work, and you can write the absolute silliest things while counting on the absolute support of around 30% of your audience, depending on the field. Of course, this is a double-edged sword, as you now also depend on the cowardice of closeted misogynists and the inefficacy of loud misogynists. To be clear, feminism itself is not a problem, it is a very good thing, but academics quickly learn they can construct unassailable works detached from intellectual merit not just by using jargon to obfuscate, but by embedding it in social contexts that inherently challenge critics. In reactionary audience contexts they do the same thing, equating communism with "bad", praising "fecundity" in white supremacist contexts, getting weird about IQ, etc.

The English translations and study of Freud use id, ego, and superego. All latin forms to denote how sophisticated and sciencey he must have been. The concepts declared as academic abstractions, special terms to learn.

In Freud's actual writing, they are Es, Ich, and Über-Ich: "it", "I", and "beyond I". In normal language, in his own tongue of German. Sure, he capitalizes them to make it clear they are dedicated concepts, but they are not Latin. That was English language academics trying to make it sound sufficiently academic.

Jargon is often employed in the attempt to get published. Graduate students write the most papers and publications are how you get a job. Your publications will be reviewed by the most insufferable people that will give absurd feedback, so often the goal is to bamboozle them to make your work seem inscrutable. Sounding fancy and using the jargon of the trade is how you appear "serious" to the self-important assholes incompetently reviewing your work and nakedly asking you to cite their own lest they reject your paper.

Once a person gets their tenure-track job, one must basically become a self-promoting huckster to get funding and tenure. The kind of self-promoting huckster that expects the authors of papers they review to cite their own works to increase their own citation counts and prestige. And has a gigantic, yet fragile, ego.

Academia is broken due to its social relations to production, just like other jobs. There is basically no incentive to act reasonably outside of not lazily faking your data. Convincingly faking your data with cherry picking and bad analysis is the norm, though.

Hell yeah