No “average” person is aware because they are too busy trying to just survive. Nobody wants to chance losing what they’ve worked so hard for. The only people who watch the news are seniors and disabled people, and they’re being misled if they just watch TV news.

People who call themselves Republicans are happy with what’s going on. People who call themselves Democrat are not happy but think they need to work within the system to solve the issues and wait until the next election. Libertarians have sided with the Republicans. Socialism is still a taboo way of thinking for the most part here.

Then you have disabled people (like me) who are watching what is happening in horror and have sky high anxiety wondering if they’re next to be disappeared or homeless. I can stand for maybe 30 minutes at most, holding a sign maybe 15 minutes at most. So I’m doing what I can and that is trying to live as if things are “normal” to continue on my mental health recovery and sobriety journey at the same time being horrified and terrified of what’s to come. It’s a weird duality that I don’t like. I told my therapist the other day that I have hope for the future for my recovery but I have lost all hope in what is going on politically and in the news.

A lot of this I also blame on false American beliefs fed to us in school that we were safe from all of this nonsense because of our constitution. The American Dream and all that B.S. They sugar-coat our history as a country in schools – at least they did when I went to school in the 80’s/90’s, I don’t know about now. It’s as if America only has a rosy history, even the Civil War is glorified in false narratives.

It’s easy to see how we got to this point as a country. The question is, how do we get ourselves out of it?

I’m apparently blind as a bat 🤦🏻‍♂️

I was about to make a comment about how blatantly stupid this chart is leaving out many bands (Nirvana, Tool, Pantera, etc) and getting alignments completely fucked up (NIN, No Doubt, L7…). Then I looked at the community it was posted in.

Well played @[email protected]. Well played. 👏🏻

If there is a country that will take me I’d go in a heartbeat. But I am unable to work and don’t have the financial means to just up and move. The ones that do have the ability to do that are either doing that already or are in the process of destroying the US.

No clue what my parents’ house could be worth, they’re still living in it too. I do know they paid something like $30,000 for it in the 70’s and it might be worth 5-10x more than that now – if not more due to inflation. Cars were also $5000 or so then, and now the average price of a car is $30k-$50k on the low end.

Due to…several traumatic issues and for my own mental health…living with them isn’t an option and now that I’m on SSDI I can’t really take any of their money or it messes with my SSDI and I went through too much for too long to do anything to risk it within my control (government shenanigans these days might leave me without income and a home but that’s out of my control now). I have one sibling who has a family of their own much like how it was when we were kids but they are struggling to make ends meet in this economy too.

LOL I was born into a middle class family with at least one generation on each side born in the US. Dad worked at the local factory, mom was stay-at-home, had a dog, nice house, and two cars – living the American Dream.

Then all the factory jobs went away, I couldn’t handle college, and I job hopped for a while and got lucky landing a decent paying gig that lasted for 13 years until I went on disability. Up until then I was barely making ends meet living in a studio apartment with a used hand-me-down car that I got when my grandfather passed away.

Now I’m on SSDI and live in a subsidized studio apartment and rely on the city bus for transportation to appointments. Living the dream.

I’m on SSDI (and Medicaid and HUD housing) and have been having insane anxiety the last month and a half to the point that I’m wondering if I’ll even get paid in April. I regularly check my SSA account online to make sure my direct deposit is still freaking scheduled. Missing a payment could mess up all of my other benefits as well.

I know the fuck up is coming, but I don’t know if I can handle another few months hoping they don’t fuck up the migration if they don’t fuck up just paying people first with all that’s been going on.

I’m pretty sure Im not the only one in this situation who can’t handle the stress of this bullshit.

Back when I was working, I had a job that paid close to 3x what McDonald’s was paying at the time. I could barely afford a studio apartment. And that was 5-10 years ago, it’s even worse now here in the US.

Meanwhile Gen X:

Ok, so this solidifies my desire to never buy a Windows PC/laptop and why my switch to Mac was a good choice a few years ago. However Mac gaming is nowhere near where it should be right now and I was thinking about getting a cheap Windows laptop for games that aren’t available on Mac.

I remember a push a few years ago to get some linux distros pre-installed on some OEM hardware but I didn’t hear much of anything past the hype. Anyone have any good OEM brands that have linux installed instead of Windows and are relatively affordable?

I’ve set up a community specifically for release updates from the Rayhunter Github at [email protected] if anyone is interested

I knew about Apple’s tactics and still went all in.

For me at the time it was a choice between sticking with Android (my first smartphone was the OG Moto Droid), trying to de-Google the Android phone I had at the time, or switching to Apple.

Android hardware may be better now than it ever has been, but that wasn’t always the case. Samsung especially pissed me off when they had an Android phone out that after an update to Android the phone would randomly go into Airplane mode without indicating it. They refused to release a fix. That was the last straw for me after trying to use a ton of different ROMS on the phone to get around the issue. Also, back then if you didn’t have Google Play installed that meant you missed out on a lot of apps or had to use Amazon’s App Store.

I got fed up with having to constantly fix things after ROM updates and didn’t have the time due to working so many hours at my job. I didn’t want to stick with Google because I saw where it was headed. I switched to Apple and never looked back. Part of that switch was also influenced because I wanted to get out of the Microsoft Windows ecosystem and gaming on Linux wasn’t great back then so I had to dual boot. Gaming on Mac’s weren’t that great either, but at least I had the “feeling” that things were more private with Apple than Google and MS.

I’m so tied into the Apple ecosystem right now that I’m just not sure I want to go back to hacking Android phones and al that even if things are 100% better than they were a decade ago. I “trust” that Apple handles my privacy concerns better than an ad-supported Google and Windows. I’m going to recommend Apple to non tech-savvy friends and family 100% of the time. Until there’s a phone OS competitor that is both easy to use and on decent hardware out of the box, it’s just a hassle.

That said, I’m thinking about looking at picking up a cheap pre-paid Android phone and checking out the ROM scene again because of the happenings in the US the last few months. I don’t know if I can trust Apple to not cave to the government and destroy the only good thing it had going for the ecosystem for me.

Does this detect only Verizon bands or does it work for AT&T/T-Mobile towers too? I’m tempted to get this just out of curiosity but if it’s only Verizon bands it’s not really useful to me unless the fake towers attach to any device regardless of carrier.

Edit: Was able to find a brand new one on Ebay for a whopping $12 after taxes with free shipping. At the very least it’ll be a nice paperweight if it proves useless to me. 😆

Herbalife

I just got an HDHomeRun that I use with an antenna and love it. I use Mac and they are one of the only boxes that works on Mac.

They don’t have a native Linux client, but you can use VLC supposedly: https://info.hdhomerun.com/info/linux

Anyone saying “they’ll never do it because they don’t want to piss off voters” is missing the real issue and makes the same mistake congressional Dems are. They are assuming we will have fair and free elections in the future.

At the speed with which the chainsaw is moving through federal government institutions, they know they don’t have to worry about elections or voters anymore because we won’t have a republic when they’re done.

Maybe I’m biased because of my reliance on the social safety net completely due to being disabled and have been called a parasite by the richest man on Earth wielding the chainsaw. I’m staring at more carnage occurring at SSA, Medicaid, and HUD all at the same time and wondering how I’ll survive even if one of those gets pulled away from me —let alone all 3.