Use AI, learn the methods, tools, uses. Then keep working through the process yourself like you do now with AI as a partner who sometimes flakes out.

Remind yourself of the tenents of critical thinking regularly. Never just accept what AI tells you. seek proof behind the answers. Think through those answers to ensure you understand the logic behind them.

Fight complacency.

We can’t ignore this. We need to know how it is done if we want to earn salaries. Reality rarely makes a dent in the corporate herd until years later.

By then, careers are obliterated.

There are ways to protect your mind in the meantime.

I noticed something in the last 15 years of these polls. For right wing reactionary actions, the approval rating never goes below 30%.

What we are seeing is the cult faithful. Used to be the Tea Party, is now rebranded MAGA.

You will not see the numbers decrease until they die off from age, diet, disease, or “hold my beer”. The danger is the indoctrination of youth.

And for many years, that bacteria was unknown, and undetected. Victims were told they were imagining it.

It’s a combination. I saw a video last week about how MAGA tout their larger amyglya (spelling err) as proof they are smarter. The video pointed out that part of the brain regulates fear.

Fear makes one vulnerable to influence by would be protectors. Stoke enough fear and critical thinking is very difficult.

Smarter people learn how to manage the fear and rise above it.

For example, I watch bushcraft and survivalist videos for fun and education, and the prepped survivalists almost universally are preparing to defend their homesteads from literally everyone.

I prefer the ones that cite the Amish and similar communities works. They understand survival comes from both skills and community.

… And this was one of the goals starting with the Reagan revolution, mid 1970’s.

You mean the megacorp farm that actually got $ from the government… Plus tax cuts, and sweetheart trade deals with favored foreign countries? One of those?

They are in the process of lining up the layoffs as soon as those new androids roll off the assembly line.

I really hope most of us liberal leaning people did not laugh. Murder is horrific no matter who the victim.

It is counter to the principles we (should ) live. Sure, no need to go pretend to be particularly impacted, or to suddenly try to find the goodness in him.

Besides, most liberal leaning people are also reasonably smart and know such an act only makes things worse for us, even if our side didn’t do it.

My first thought was it probably was a MAGA follower who did it, and it turned out to be the case.

If you really need to laugh, laugh at MAGA for killing their own.

Yes, just like Lyme disease and chronic fatigue syndrome. Also brain fog from various illnesses. All took undeniable evidence to be acknowledged.

Don’t worry, Trump is on it. It’ll be fixed soon. /sl

Well, gotta pay for the help with oil, right? /s

The Paris Accords. So, yes.

Yes, I am nuanced enough to understand the security issues and respect that - on their equipment.

As for monitoring, there is a very large and prosperous market for products to do exactly that, and we are frequently told we have no right to privacy on company equipment.

The watched pot never boils. The watched employee is constantly distracted, stressed, and wondering when he will be admonished or fired for something he doesn’t even know is a problem.

This is the first time I heard of it, so I’m going to read up. I set up openvpn on my NAS, ensured only the one port is open, and connect to the vpn when I need to access my local network.

Inside, I configured a DAVX volume and use DAVx5 on the phone for file transfer. The vpn uses a certificate and pwd for auth.

I have KDE Connect as well.

… and for Gnome based distros, Valent is a good adaptation of KDE Connect. For a long time, the SFTP file sharing feature wasn’t working, but someone finally updated the security protocols and you can access your phone as if it were connected via USB with MTP, but over the network.

There are still lots of flaws, like limited features on notification handling, messaging (I can’t do anything like respond or initiate messages for Google Voice).

I had to read up on that to know what it was about. While I’m all in on unions and collective bargaining, I’m not keen on Communism as a political approach. the original idea was a plausible answer to the woes of the struggle between groups of people, but it does not acknowledge that the problem is human behavior. Specifically, a portion of the population that will always seek dominance, regardless of the means or declared ideology. This is what happened with Communism. The assassination of the white revolution in order to insert the red revolution is class 101 in that fact. The United States’ founders understood this, which is why I’m still behind the checks and balances approach to power.

Yes, it eventually is subverted and must be re-established (sometimes forcefully) but it is as Churchill said, Democracy is the worst form of government… except for all the rest.

Bingo. It’s not about making life better, it’s about fostering dependence, then extracting value ($) from the dependents. It’s the textbook definition of enshitification.

Yes, I do tend to over explain and it does annoy people, especially my son. I have a near pathological need to make sure others understand the why. I’m working on it.

Been looking into Stoicism lately, and not explaining yourself (to people who don’t care or can’t comprehend) is one of the tenents - not wasting precious energy.

Aha, okay. It would have been redundant to put that in there since we had just gone through that process together. I’d also mentioned my reservations in earlier emails.

Thanks for explaining it, it didn’t occur to me. You are right though about alternatives. He’d actually offered to seek another way, but I was emotionally unable to accept that at the time due to all the effort already sunk. For me it was cutting my losses, and I might have done myself a disservice there.