many people have been saying since the beginning he is going to come after citizens. First he came for undocumented, then for green card holders, and now for actual citizens. This doesn’t end with just that.
This is also happening in the context of an extremely close Senate election in Texas where a Democrat, Beto O’Rourke, is in a statistical tie with wildly unpopular Republican incumbent Ted Cruz. There’s a lot of energy on the Democratic side of this election, especially in this state, and you know what happens if your citizenship is in question, if your birth certificate is no longer proof of where you were born?
Do you ever think about how Jeff Bezos could feed literally more than a million food insecure people while losing an hour’s wage but you have to tell yourself no when you want to buy a coffee but can’t because that’s all your rent money?
I do too
These gonna be the first 9 motherfucker we line up against the fucking wall!
That’s Louis Rossman, a repair technician and YouTuber, who went viral recently for railing against Apple. Apple purposely charges a lot for repairs and you either have to pay up or buy a new device. That’s because Apple withholds necessary tools and information from outside repair shops. And to think, we were just so close to change.
My mom has an iPhone 6 Plus and hasn’t even had it for a year when one day it suddenly died and would not charge. So she took it to an authorized Apple repair place and they charged her $50 for a diagnostic only to tell her that she would have to buy a brand new phone.
So she decided to go to the AT&T store to talk to our usual guy that upgrades our phones and handles any problems for us. She tells him what’s wrong and he takes her phone to the back only to come out two minutes later, puts her phone on charge and it comes back to life.
She asks him what was wrong with it that he managed to somehow fix when the people at the “authorized apple repair place” couldn’t. And you know what he told her?
“There was just a bit of fuzz in the charging port.”
I FUCKING KNEW IT. Listen, I have a MacBook from college. The charger has died twice, and I had to get a new one. This happened for two years in a row around the same time each year. I’m fucking convinced that their hardware is rigged to “expire” in order to force people to keep buying their shit.
Wait, people are just now learning that Apple has some of the shadiest business practices?
You know this isn’t really just apple, company’s do this all the time, everything is rigged to expire and all they want is your money.
Ohhh no no no, this IS JUST Apple.
All companies want you to buy their new products. None have gone to the lengths that Apple Inc. has gone to make end user repairs as impossible as is legally viable. I have been repairing electronics and computer systems privately, commercially and active duty in the US military for about 30 years.
Apple puts extra effort into special hardware requiring proprietary tools that are only legally produced by their licensed manufacturer and can only be purchased through licensed repair shops if at all.
Companies like iFixit can only exist as profit making companies because they are able to make workaround tools and kits that are still profitable but less of a blatant ripoff than Apple.
Apple has been doing this forever. The way Apple treats consumers is abysmal, and people still eat their products up.
This is called “planned obsolescence” - many companies do it, but Apple has made it into an art. Basically, companies - tech companies in particular - have realized that if their products are manufactured too well, they won’t be able to sell you a new one in three years. So, in order to keep consumers coming back for more, they design your gadgets to “expire” in all manner of ways; Apple is infamous for pushing software updates that render older model phones and computers useless right before releasing a new product so that consumers will be forced to purchase the newest version of a gadget they already have.
The best way to fight back against this kind of wasteful, predatory, capitalistic schlock is to learn more about how your gadgets work so that you can repair them instead of replacing them. This man is doing the Lord’s work.
“Get a rat and put it in a cage and give it two water bottles. One is just water, and one is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always kill itself very quickly, right, within a couple of weeks. So there you go. It’s our theory of addiction. Bruce comes along in the ‘70s and said, “Well, hang on a minute. We’re putting the rat in an empty cage. It’s got nothing to do. Let’s try this a little bit differently.” So Bruce built Rat Park, and Rat Park is like heaven for rats. Everything your rat about town could want, it’s got in Rat Park. It’s got lovely food. It’s got sex. It’s got loads of other rats to be friends with. It’s got loads of colored balls. Everything your rat could want. And they’ve got both the water bottles. They’ve got the drugged water and the normal water. But here’s the fascinating thing. In Rat Park, they don’t like the drugged water. They hardly use any of it. None of them ever overdose. None of them ever use in a way that looks like compulsion or addiction. There’s a really interesting human example I’ll tell you about in a minute, but what Bruce says is that shows that both the right-wing and left-wing theories of addiction are wrong. So the right-wing theory is it’s a moral failing, you’re a hedonist, you party too hard. The left-wing theory is it takes you over, your brain is hijacked. Bruce says it’s not your morality, it’s not your brain; it’s your cage. Addiction is largely an adaptation to your environment. […] We’ve created a society where significant numbers of our fellow citizens cannot bear to be present in their lives without being drugged, right? We’ve created a hyperconsumerist, hyperindividualist, isolated world that is, for a lot of people, much more like that first cage than it is like the bonded, connected cages that we need. The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection. And our whole society, the engine of our society, is geared towards making us connect with things. If you are not a good consumer capitalist citizen, if you’re spending your time bonding with the people around you and not buying stuff—in fact, we are trained from a very young age to focus our hopes and our dreams and our ambitions on things we can buy and consume. And drug addiction is really a subset of that.”
This seems like something everyone should know if they’re in the sciences and/or interested in reading scientific papers.
Interesting :)
Also worth noting https://sci-hub.tw/ is a free online catalogue of thousands of papers many of which are usually behind a paywall and the person who runs it is risking jail time for making them and the knowledge contained within free to anyone who wants to access it! Many researchers are in support of their papers being shared and disseminated via this website and it seems only the for profit journals are upset about it. Share and donate if you can.
As to methods. Anarchism is not, as some may suppose, a theory of the future to be realized through divine inspiration. It is a living force in the affairs of our life, constantly creating new conditions. The methods of Anarchism therefore do not comprise an iron-clad program to be carried out under all circumstances. Methods must grow out of the economic needs of each place and clime, and of the intellectual and temperamental requirements of the individual.
cishet: this is literally why people hate gays. this is why homophobia happens. this is why gays go through systematic and institutionalized oppression. you wanna know why your kind gets murdered?? look at the tumblr post you made on june 4th, 2018-
