That is extremely cool, thank you.

Thanks. It’s good to hear.

Truth. And AOC is the best of them. But that doesn’t let Trump’s little MAGA culture warrior off the hook. This is the Laken Riley Act guy.

If I were in Georgia’s 10th and had a mind to run, I’d wipe the floor with commercials showing AOC representing the 10ths need for clean water and physically holding up that jar of muddy water in Congress on their behalf, interspersed with shots of Collins’ own social media and deepfaked AI ads against Jon Ossoff illustrating what he’s really been busy with, and asking why he’s nowhere around when they simply need clean water.

That actually had me wondering. This is about Georgia. AOC is a gem, but why is it a NY rep bringing this to the EPA and not that town’s own congressional rep?

So I looked it up in the article, which never names the town nor its congressional representative but refers to Morgan County, Georgia multiple times. (The author goes out of their way to talk around various glaring facts; this is one of them.) So I looked up Morgan County, Georgia, which is in Georgia’s 10th congressional district, and is currently represented by Republican Mike Collins.

And there it is. Mike Collins is himself the answer as to why it’s AOC, a congresswoman from New York, holding up a jar of muddy water in Congress on behalf of the citizens of rural Georgia that he was elected to represent.

Oh, they’re being nice when they use the phrase “crashing out” to describe what this dude actually wrote. I was curious so I followed the link in 404media out to the local paper, and was not disappointed.

From the local newspaper, this is the actual text of the manifesto statement the aforementioned crashed-out Texas town councilmember released after getting his contract with Flock shot down by “a standing-room-only crowd of residents voicing concerns about privacy, transparency and government overreach tied to the planned camera system.” The bold is his own:

The Bandera Declaration of Digital Independence

To the Citizens of Bandera:

For months, I have listened to the outcry regarding License Plate Recognition (LPR) technology. I have seen the eyerolls, and I’ve even been met with “Nazi rhetoric”, the dangerous claim that believing in accountability and community safety is somehow equivalent to totalitarianism. Comparing a neighbor’s desire for a safe street to a dark chapter of history is a classic case of comparing apples to oranges; it is a distraction used to avoid the reality of the threats our town faces today.

I’ve also read the social media comments suggesting that if I want a camera, I should “put one on my own house.”

Funny thing is, I did. And that camera caught a gang of criminals from San Antonio who drove into our town in a stolen car to break into mine. My private camera caught them after the crime was done. But if we had LPR readers at our city limits, that stolen car would have been flagged the moment it entered Bandera, likely before those criminals ever reached my driveway, or yours.

I now understand your concerns and I secede. Your outcry is just too logical to ignore. Since the Council has decided we are the “Free State of Bandera”, a place where the ‘rights’ of a car thief or human trafficker to remain anonymous apparently outweigh the right of a resident to protect their property and the safety of their family, then we must go all the way.

To ensure our historic County Seat becomes the most “traditional” sanctuary in Texas, I have requested the following for the next City Council agenda:

• A Modest Proposal for Digital Device Prohibition: A total ban on all cellular and GPS-capable devices for all operations within city limits. If we are to be truly “private,” we must leave our smartphones at the city line.

• A Modest Proposal for Total Surveillance Abolition (Residential & Commercial): A total ban on all outward-facing cameras, including residential doorbells and all commercial CCTV or security camera technology. If municipal safety cameras are “invasive,” then no business or homeowner should be allowed to “monitor” the public. We will remove every lens in town.

• A Modest Proposal for Total Municipal and Commercial Decommissioning: A total termination of all internet services and electronic record-keeping. We are going back to 1880, paper ledgers and cash only.

The Fiscal Reality of “Freedom”: This decision didn’t just cost us our safety; it cost us our wallets. By canceling this project, the Council didn’t just throw away a state grant (free money); they spent $15,000 of your local tax dollars out of pocket to back out of the deal. Bragging about fiscal responsibility while paying $15,000 for nothing is a very bad deal for Bandera.

A History Lesson: In the 1880s, privacy in this County Seat was non-existent. When a stranger rode into Bandera, the Marshal gave them an interview, not “space.” The livery stable registered their horse’s brand, and the merchants watched their every move. Anonymity was for outlaws; accountability was for citizens.

I even reached out to the Trump camp regarding our “Free State” logic and the way we’re treating our Marshal’s office and the safety of our community. The response was classic:

“Our police are being treated very, very unfairly. It’s a total disaster. We give them the tools, we get them the grants—and I love grants, we have the best grants, nobody gets grants like we do—and then these ‘eye-rollers’ say no? It’s unbelievable. They want the criminals to have the best technology, the newest technology, but they want our great police to have nothing. They want a ‘Free State’ for the bad guys. It’s very sad.”

Let’s take Bandera back to 1880 properly. No double standards, no hypocrisy. If LPRs are “unconstitutional” and invade our right to “public” privacy, we need to be courageous enough to go all the way. I look forward to the “Privacy First” crowd showing up to support these bans….just remember to leave your phones at home.

Jeff Flowers
Bandera, TX

Besides threatening all and sundry with a good time banning all communication technology, he also throws in gems like, “I now understand your concerns and I secede” (paragraph 4). Oh, if only. He “even reached out to the Trump camp” for logic (para 11) while making a claim to “Free State” in the same breath, lol.

I don’t guess anyone has the heart to tell Jeff that people pissed off enough to crowd town council meetings to standing room only are also the ones pissed off enough to start recalls and to vote, that a single vote in a local election goes many miles farther than a single vote anywhere else, and that no matter how many florid letters of support Jeff gets from a staffer trying hard to sound like the lunatic-in-chief, “the Trump camp” is not gonna spend a dime on saving a town council seat that is currently occupied by a manifesto-writing lunatic that is busily earning his town’s contempt.

No, you’re quite right. To be fair, from slavery to robber barons, I don’t think we have ever been free of corruption. But now we’re speedrunning into the level of corruption of having to bring extra cash for the bribes when renewing a drivers license.

Well, you have the actual, physical cost of the datacenter – the land, the design, the engineers, the permits, the environmental studies, the lawyers, the construction, etc – and then you have the cost of removing roadblocks along the way. Especially in Louisiana, if you’re not familiar with Huey Long: he’s been gone for many decades, but his way of doing business down there hasn’t changed a bit.

It’s exactly like the East Wing ballroom: there’s a private fund that Trump opened specifically for businessmen to contribute that will fund the ballroom construction, which has been open and taking donations since he tore the East Wing down, and there’s also the bill before Congress, right now, that will have the ballroom paid for by tax dollars, all of it.

“But,” you may ask, and rightly so, “why are private contributions needed to fund a ballroom that will be funded entirely by taxes?” and the answer to that is, “Yes.”

One of the sure signs you’re in a banana republic is that every palm must be greased on the way to getting legal consent for anything, no matter how small. The US is now no different.

I already assume that everything that goes into a cloud somewhere WILL be used for other purposes, at the very least as AI training material, and this will be no different. And the plan is for at least some (possibly all?) video to automatically be extracted to some kind of cloud storage, no matter how temporarily. From the article:

The AirPods will have a “small” LED light to indicate when “visual data is being fed into the cloud.”

That’s a hell of a non-answer to all the privacy concerns Apple already knows the public has. Since this entire article is itself just a manufacturer-friendly puff piece for pre-release promotion, the only conclusion I can draw is that Apple is willfully holding back the specifics on all of that.

And again with the fucking notification light, like that’s the solution to all privacy concerns. On AirPods a light can’t possibly be more than a pinhole itself, just because of the size of the device, so that’ll be even worse than Meta’s joke of a notification light.

The first unmistakeable clue was that it was a man doing this to a woman. The BBC article that [email protected] posted in this thread removes all doubt as to the purpose (emphasis mine):

Alice was walking into a London shopping centre when she was approached by a man wearing smart glasses. She says she had no idea she was being filmed.

“In the moment I just thought ‘OK this guy is just trying to talk to me, to chat me up’,” she said.

“I was hoping that he would leave me alone eventually but he did actually follow me.”

The video was posted on social media and viewed about 40,000 times, though Alice only found out about it after a friend sent it to her.

“My initial reaction was complete shock,” she said. “He had no phone, he did not have a camera directly in my face.”

The videos are often posted on social media under the guise of giving dating advice to other men online.

That last line . . . think about what’s going on in that area of the internet, use your imagination, fill in the missing blanks.

That said, I appreciate that your character is such to have not instantly jumped to this conclusion. But in the world we now occupy, there’s generally not a whole lot of innocence in a dude filming a woman without her knowledge or consent.

deleted by creator

Yeah, I was wondering about that myself, but for USD. Right now (May 2026) the exchange rate is roughly $1.08 USD for every Swedish Krona.

So 300sek, a doctor’s visit, is roughly $32.50. 1450sek, the line above which everything is paid for by the Swedish government, is about $157.25. The 500sek or so Stoy paid per night, including meals and meds, is $157.25.

This, as an American, is literally unimaginable to me. It sounds like the numbers from 30, even 40 years ago.

I remember Bezos at the inauguration. He’s spent millions on the administration, including the inaugural party and financing not only the first lady’s documentary, but its positive reviews. All of them. And that’s just the highlights; Bezos has given so much to promote this administration at every turn.

Glad to see this kind of multiplicative return on his investment. He is very literally getting the presidential experience he paid for.

Yep, found it. I’d forgotten about the projection, “You think you stumbled onto something big,” etc. No, I thought I’d just stumbled across an asshole, which of course I had, but then he decided to tell me more about himself:

Just so you know, it was more than that. Just speaking from my own participation, you already saw the whereIsTamara alts debacle from February 11 involving fourteen accounts; here’s another lemmy.org special from February 19 that wasn’t about alts but trying to create a brigade by providing false info with an emotional plea to a fairly passionate group of people. Add what happened to your own comments the other day, and that’s twenty-five proven bad accounts right there.

Add all the other dishonest/manipulative/bad actor bullshit I have no idea about, and I suspect even our own experience with lemmy.org is just a drop in the bucket.

I also expect that the value of lemmy.org will drop significantly to its admin now that it’s been defederated from lemmy.world (the largest instance with the most comms and accounts) and that he will spin up a new instance without such obvious tells.

One of the things whereIsTamara said to me before their accounts got modded (I have it screenshotted somewhere) was thanking me for telling them how to improve their game, like letting them know they needed to space out their votes, etc. In the bot attack that hit you, the bad actor did just that. Ergo, whatever’s involved in this on the backend and whatever benefit it serves them to do this, it’s worth enough to them to invest in it with time and effort and learning how to circumnavigate efforts to restrict their activities.

They’ll be back.

Thrilled to see it. Thank you.

Standard contracts in the US include a severability clause anymore; I don’t remember the last time I saw a contract without one (as a non-lawyer who reads everything I sign).

Good luck with that.

Even in the 70s, if you went to Catholic school in a very Catholic city, or had a number of friends that did, whether male or female, you knew. The only ones keeping quiet about it were the press and the church itself.

No, I did not know that. It sounds relaxing, which is what I watch powerwashing for. Thanks for the recommendation, I’ll check it out.

I love pressure washing myself, but don’t have the situation right now where it’s necessary or even feasible, so I go watch others who do it. I’m a big fan of Sid Partridge’s YT channel, and he started with a small Karcher just like that. It’s a younger man’s game in a lot of ways, but god it is satisfying. Well done you!