Sudan woke up without Internet
blog.cloudflare.com
blog.cloudflare.com
Needless to say, when that happened, I simply lived down in Tahrir square since my brother was already there and I had no other way of checking on him.
Now that I'm in San Francisco, I can't tell you the libration I feel every single day by being able to do and say whatever I want. By being able to think, really think.
Sadly though, a lot of Americans and especially people on the far left are not appreciative of the freedom of speech this country has, and continue to squander it.
Can you expand on this? I’d like to understand your view better. How does the far left not appreciate it?
There are so many opinions that are downright foot-guns or taboos in any sort of public arena for example. And we don't even notice how we self-censor those opinions, nor do we notice it until we have those opinions/ideas and try to voice them. I'm relatively civil and polite on HN, but I don't dare repeat most of what I express here under my real identity.
It's one thing for one to share their opinion "I don't like this, this is inappropriate", it's different when one is seeking power to shutdown the person they're disagreeing with.
All of this makes people who have a different perspective, who might want to share their own personal experience that doesn't quite fit the narrative, to withhold and play it safe. Which ties back to freedom of speech. I've experienced this myself in my career in large SV tech companies. And my friends in Academia share similar stories and concerns.
You can maybe kind-of almost justify strong restrictions on what someone is allowed to say in public - but no, these people will try to get you fired if they think that you have the wrong thoughts. This is, quite plainly, inexcusable pure malice.
I think this is unnecessarily presumptive, and doesn't reflect the US's actual (and tarnished) record of free expression.
Something doesn't add up in this sentence.
>are not appreciative of the freedom of speech this country has, and continue to squander it.
On one hand. You should be and somewhat happy for them. Because obviously they have never been through life without it. And it is a horror. A seed of fear forever planted inside you brain.
On the other hand.... you sighed. There is no way for them to understand without going through it. Human are damned to continue to repeat the same mistake over and over again. There are just something you cant learn from textbook.
The sheer hypocrisy of it all is incredible.
Maybe across all time, yes. But parties change. Right now there's a clear enemy of free expression, and it's not the right.
The correct play, of course, is to pressure the party that's currently on the anti-free-expression side to back down - even (especially) if that's your "own" party (not like the two major US political parties are very representative of their ostensible constituents) - and that's what the GP is doing.
(you can do this without condemning the ideals of the party as uniformly bad - which is something that a lot of people don't get - attacking a party is not the same as attacking its ideals!)
Are you sure about that[1][2][3]? People on the left side of the aisle seem to be invested chiefly in social shame; the right side is actively using the power of the state to control public expression and educational content. Equivocation between the two feels like false balance.
[1]: https://apnews.com/article/florida-race-and-ethnicity-govern...
[2]: https://www.aclu.org/legal-document/bert-v-o-connor-complain...
[3]: https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/sta...
Conversely, even without me digging up any references of the progressive politicians also using the power of government to suppress free speech, it seems like you're making a false distinction.
Progressives are using their power to try to get people fired and unemployable (which is somewhat disingenuous to call "social shame"). When you can make someone unemployable in most of an industry, there's little difference between that and using the government directly. Furthermore, progressives use large tech companies (with power comparable to the state in some respects) to censor speech on their de-facto-town-square social media platforms.
(FWIW: conflating "progressive" and "left" belies a fundamental misunderstanding of left-of-center politics. It's a misunderstanding that you're going to want to correct if you want people to entertain your positions.)
Food in the supermarket, water, telephone service...
And imagine that they go away and there's nothing you can do about it. No-one to complain to. What do you even do?
Yes, obviously Internet isn't the worst of the set to lose. But it's a way in to thinking about the feeling that something you've utterly relied on can just ... stop.
Brb, my notepad needs to update.
The internet failing kinda sucks, but thats what a charged kindle is for.
I don't know about you, but for me the vast majority of possible disaster situations would not include fleeing my home and city.
Local disaster (e.g. fire) would flee my home but use city services. Regional disaster (e.g. blizzard, civil unrest) would involve staying at home for the protection / amenities it provides.
Personally, I think fleeing to the wilderness is an anti-pattern and I have not seen a situation for me that would necessitate it besides the end of the world as we know it (e.g. nuclear war), but IMO that moves into "some prepper crap" territory.
If you live in a region with seismic activity, earthquake preparedness might necessitate a bugout bag, but that's hardly 'everyone'.
Civil Unrest/War can also lead to folks fleeing their homes- see the massive numbers of refugees fleeing warzones. Staying in your home in such a situation may not be the wisest course of action.
Earthquakes as you mentioned can be another cause- also, tornados- but tornadoes are usually fairly localized.
I don't know how many of the other ones realistically call for a bugout bag. Big storms have days advance warning - you don't need to be ready to leave at a moments notice, you need to decide days beforehand whether you're evacuating or boarding up your windows. Most civil unrest does not warrant evacuation in the United States, and if it got to that point, it would probably not be a sudden and unexpected departure.
Maybe I should clarify: In my previous post I wasn't so much against the idea that someone should need to possibly evacuate, as that you need to prepare to make a sudden and unexpected evacuation from society as a whole (like a "take the bugout bag and make a run to the woods" situation)
As for big storms- ideally, yeah, but it seems that a lot of folks try to ride it out, it ends up being worse than they expected, they get flooded out, and now have to be evacuated in a hurry.
This strikes me as a rather strange way of looking at it.
The only way there's nothing I can do about it is if I'm dead or seriously injured, and in that case there really is nothing I can do about it, so why worry? :-)
The shift from "there's no Internet/food/water" to "let's start making progress toward resolving this" is easy to make in that moment, and there are plenty of people who have the skills and patience to make it happen. It might take longer than we all might like, but that's fine. As long as we're alive, there's always something to work toward, and always the ability to make some progress.
I used to run the following node on Guifi: https://guifi.net/node/102135
It had direct line-of-sight to a node 3.8 KMs away, latency was excellent all the way to Barcelona via Guifi (think it was under 5ms) and would do again if I move to a place with higher elevation.
- [0] Guifi(https://guifi.net/), Freifunk(https://freifunk.net/), NYC Mesh(https://www.nycmesh.net/) and more
Using ham radio as an internet replacement (even for basic communication) isn't exactly trivial though. I have all the necessary bits lying around, and years of experience with the topic, and it would still take me quite a bit of fiddling to get a functional AX.25 link up and running (and that's just my end of it).
But as the government is now the enemy, why would somebody refrain from operating without a license? And managing from being found, of course. OTOH, hams from other countries may refuse to communicate with unlicensed users, splitting the network...