Also, there isn't even a way to tell if this is real. Sure, it could be, but chances are high someone took a picture of a couple that look kind of "white trash" from who knows where, and just used it to create outrage/superiority-circlejerk-bait.
“I don’t want to have to worry that everyone is constantly changing my financial reality,” said Alison Carey, 64, of Oregon, a freelancer in the theater industry. “Let the economy do its machinations, but don’t put me in the gears.”
Sorry you had to learn it this way, Alison, but "the economy" has always been grinding people up in its gears. The main difference is, that it is now reaching you, personally.
Sounds like an easy way to do unproportional damage to projects with a bit of location spoofing.
Even though this is most likely fake, it's still worth a reminder, that learning how to fly drones is a hobby that could have some extra utility if the situation develops further in a way, where things may be needed that would be illegal to mention on reddit.
And even if that doesn't happen - still a very cool hobby.
The only problem I have is with the whole "foreign backed" language. It's technically not wrong, but please, as a reminder: It was not simply manipulation from Russia and others, putting Trump into power and creating MAGA. It is a homegrown problem, fascism has been smouldering in the US for a long time, and just as another reminder, it is also glimmering in the EU as well.
The country is "occupied" by its ruling class, and in this case, a specific clique of them benefitting themselves even against other capitalists, but overall, this is much more about class-, than it is about nation-dynamics.
It's only half-topical, but let me say one thing: farmers are romanticised waaay too much in my opinion. Yes, they usually have a more precarious business, and agriculture as such is, of course, very much the foundation of our societies and very lives.
But don't be blinded by the image of homesteading and such - most farmers are basically just business owners, with their class interests often removing them from a large part of the population. Many of the seasonal workers for example have shit pay on top of shit conditions, and they are notoriously overrepresented with some kind of "rurally wholesome" image, when they can be just as much business assholes, that mainly own a piece of land and the machinery necessary to use it for agriculture.
This will only get worse, because bankruptcy like this has one main effect: consolidation, even more farmland operated by big business, even though I personally think small business like this one is clearly already not as good as people tend to make it out as.
Thank you for sparing us from the clickbait title
You know, personally, I don't think the rumours of Trump being an active foreign agent instead of "just" a narcissist grifter are useful, because they can be used to argue that things weren't already pretty borked before in the status quo.... (and I think they are wrong, personally)
But I do have to admit - if I was a foreign agent wanting to destroy the US and its influence in the world, I would basically do exactly what he is doing.
The fact that spooking the market could wipe out such an absurd amount of money, larger than many GDPs - and the economy hasn't even crashed completely at all yet - should provide a good reference for how much of billionaire wealth is actually just abstract numbers representing nothing tangible but raw power over people and processes.
One of the big - but to be expected - problems had always been, that basically every group or individual could don the "Anonymous" label. But yeah, this is in the spirit of the anti-authoritarian hacker identity, that it started out with.
The problem isn’t that the fediverse isn’t viable. The problem isn’t that it’s “too complicated.” The problem is that the giants of Silicon Valley have spent 20 years convincing us that anything outside their control isn’t worth our time.
And that’s just not bloody true.
Couldn't have said it better myself
Like many things, it's an irrational decision to start at some point, and then addiction keeps you doing it. I have tried out a few drugs in my teenage/young adult years, including some "hard" ones, which ended up genuinely being one-off curiosity things for me. But the one that I simply wasn't able to kick until last year was nicotine. It really is scarily addictive for something so widespread and legal. (Alcohol was also hard, but easier for me).
That, and the part about "no high" is just not really true, even after you develop a dependency/addiction (with rapidly diminishing returns, of course). But especially when first starting to vape/smoke, there are very much effects beyond placebo. It hooks into a lot of your neurochemistry, and like most things that do, you feel that. To the point that, e.g., many people that consume weed with tobacco, will think the initial wooziness they feel is already due to the weed, when really, it is a tobacco hit. The weed effects generally come afterwards.
Of course, the effect is not at all as intense as alcohol or other drugs, but there are effects. There are also, to my knowledge, some indications, that a lot of people with ADHD use it to self-medicate, since it seems to affect them differently, like other drugs do, too.