cecilkorik

Here’s the quick checklist of reasons the US needs to invade a country:

• Does it have oil?
• Does it have terrorists?

If you answered “Yes” to any of the above questions, your country can be invaded.

The thing I hate most about Ford is that he can be genuinely likable and relatable at times. Sort of like George Bush Jr, he’s got a non-threatening “I’d sit down and have a beer and chat with him” charisma. It makes it really hard to imagine that he’ll ever lose an election or face any resistance to his policies, even though he is one of the most corrupt and directly threatening premiers in living memory. He is quietly dismantling and privatizing everything about Canada’s largest province and mortgaging its future to cash out for his cronies while keeping the masses distracted and on his side by relaxing regulations and alcohol policies and performative trade rhetoric.

And it makes me angry how amazingly well it works. We get so excited about the unimportant stuff he does because it’s simple and fits in a tweet, and we don’t have the time or energy or context to try to understand the important stuff where he’s intentionally breaking things and stealing from us because it’s complex and convoluted.

Just because the visible footer gets removed doesn’t mean there isn’t other unique tracking information hidden deep in the PDF that could still get the lawyers sicced on you. Depending on how valuable this information is to the company, and how litigious they are, you have to judge how far they might’ve gone and might yet go to protect it.

Unfortunately, that’s why this kind of copy protection can an actually be an effective tactic to prevent individuals from sharing their copies. While there might be ways to strip this kind of hidden data on simpler PDFs… even resorting to methods like screenshotting or printing and scanning, still cannot give you absolute confidence that there isn’t some subtle unique identifier invisibly hidden in the layout or through subtle inconspicuous variations, especially if you’re doing this regularly and they start targeting you and your account for identification. And on complex PDFs there are so many more ways they could hide this information digitally if they know where to look for it and you don’t. 99% of the time it’s going to be pretty obvious to strip out, but are you willing to take that risk even if you do find a technical method of removing the visible footers? If it’s a one-off, maybe you can get away with it, but in the long term this strategy is not viable and is a trap for rookies.

The only truly safe way to share digitally watermarked content like this is to buy it with a burner account and full opsec in the first place. Nobody to sic lawyers on if it’s a hacked paypal or a stolen/prepaid credit card or an untraceable email and IP, or in a jurisdiction with no enforcement. Smash and grab, get the data anonymously and get out. Don’t share stuff from your personal account that’s literally got your name and banking information attached to it unless you can confirm it’s bit-for-bit indistinguishable from other innocent copies with something like a checksum.

It’s not the case for your toothbrush.

Isn’t it though? I didn’t make my toothbrush. It came from the toothbrush factory. In fact, it’s an electric toothbrush. Which presumably requires a lot of somewhat high tech inputs and resources to create. Would someone have developed this innovation without some economic pressure to do so? I’m not totally convinced. I think there is some role for capital in that sense. Maybe I’m wrong.

Thank you for taking my somewhat tongue in cheek comment so generously though. My humor is not always placed appropriately and doesn’t always come across well, but it sometimes provokes people to respond, and I’m simply trying to learn and keep an open mind, and I appreciate your time and effort in sharing your knowledge.

They are not logically incompatible, but we will have to make clear and specific decisions about where one ends and the other begins.

Unless you are asking me to live in a society where I must share my toothbrush with others because I am not allowed to keep any private property.

I do believe in private property: with modest, reasonable limits. Which we can and will discuss the details of over time, and I understand that will likely become a heated discussion at times, but I believe it is an inevitable and necessary one. Does that disqualify me from being a leftist? Does it make me a liberal too? Let me know.

I love it when people are surprised that for-profit businesses seek profit above all else. Like they assume there will be always be a set of strict laws to keep them in check and just assume they will strictly follow those laws because they’re laws.

Then they go ahead and vote for people who say that there are too many taxes and regulations. As if those taxes and regulations aren’t exactly the same laws they’re expecting to keep the for-profit businesses in check, which are often not even close to being sufficient in the first place.

The cognitive dissonance is wild. People are fucking brainwashed.

The culture wars and gender wars are intentional distractions. The class war is the one that matters. The billionaires figure they can solve the housing crisis, solve economics, end war, and save the environment by simply making the rest of us extinct. And in the most cruelly utilitarian way possible, there is even some truth to that. They do not value human creativity, human rights, or human life at all. They are extracting every last scrap of value we have, then they will end us. They consider themselves above the rest of humanity, transhumans, superhumans, better than obsolete humans, and they think the world will be an objectively better place with much fewer of us on it. When you start to see everything that’s going on in the world it all starts to make sense when you understand that is actually their goal. Their goal is to not need us any longer, and then to remove us. I am certain it will not be as easy as they think, but expect them to try.