This isn’t the named senators telling people to not use VPNs, this is the senators saying they are worried US citizens are being surveiled as if they are foreign threats due to VPN use.

They are then asking the person in charge of the people doing that surveiling to change their guidance to reflect that reality, as they currently reccomend VPN use.

There won’t be a response, and then I would assume the named legislators will propose legislation to patch this problem which will not be read or passed by any other politicians to the right of these fairly progressive legislators.

At worst its political theater, at best an attempt to protect VPN use, realistically something closer to the former, and none of the outcomes are these senators trying to take muh vpns

We can’t have any of those things, because humans are shitty, and are as a whole just in it for themselves.

I disagree, I don’t think humans are, as a whole, shitty. Most people are willing to do good when faced with a moral decision, even one they stand to gain from. Its just the ones that make it into seats of wealth and power aren’t part of that majority, so we see and hear about these awful people far more than the millions of good people all around us.

In a community as wide reaching as the internet there are going to be people looking for personal gain over others and they make everyone else withdraw. I don’t think you could ever have a gathering of millions, with some actually representing corporate profit motives, and freely share without risk. But not because everyone in there wants to stab you and take your money, but because a few do and you have no idea who some of them are and one of them is Jeff Bezos and he pays you.

Hershey’s is the only widely produced American chocolate with the acid “flavor”, probably the only one at all because its widely disliked. Hershey’s also makes many of the other supermarket chocolate sold here that isn’t bile flavored but they are still pretty gross.

Any other slightly smaller manufacturer of chocolate in america is doing something dramatically different, and if all you’ve had is junk food candy, it’s no surprise you’d think that’s all there is.

Its the same in Europe, without the vomit of course. Most of my experience with EU and UK chocolate has been slimy milky mush, which I think is pretty awful. I know that’s not all European chocolate, but the mass market stuff is pretty rough no matter where you go.

I’m not sure if I’m adding anything new here, but the wall wart appears to be a ballast which traditionally drives fluorescent tubes. There are led tubes you can just plug into a light fixture or lamp with a ballast, there are also ones that want you to rewire the lamp and remove the ballast. I won’t be able to help on rewiring as I’m in the US on our special voltage and I’m not qualified to be giving advice on that here much less anyplace else. There is another type of tube that can operate both with and without ballast (after a rewire).

The first step would be to ensure the tubes you’ve got are ones that need the ballast to work, it should say on the product page. In the US they refer to these as type A, the ones that work without ballast as type B, and ones that work with both as type AB. I’m unsure if that is the same elsewhere, but I do notice the “AB” in your picture, so that may be the case, but you would need to confirm.

If it works with ballast you could replace the old ballast with a new one, which is easier and safer than the alternative, though you may struggle to find one that fits where you want it to and they are less energy efficient. I have no experience replacing ballast, so I can’t help you there, but it may be as simple as getting another ballast and wiring it in. You can probably get a brand new one as they do wear out over time and need to be replaced.

If if works without ballast, since you’ve already removed it, it may make sense to rewire the lamps for the LEDs to run directly off of main voltage if the tubes are made for that and if you can find the resources to teach you how and you have the ability to do so safely. The lamps can be wired differently and the led tubes can require specific wiring. Its not the most dangerous thing you could do with electricity, but its got a lot of room for personal harm and fire if something is done wrong. I’ve done it without incident, but I’ve also rewired my home, adding light fixtures, a new circuit breaker box, and a heat pump, and had it inspected/approved by the local authorities, so I was pretty confident in my abilities. I don’t think its that hard to do safely in comparison to those other things, its just important to be very sure of what you are doing with electricity. Sometimes things can work but are incredibly dangerous still, other times they might blow up in your face. It takes years of training to be an electrician for a reason, you don’t get to make many mistakes more than once.

Also please don’t open up the transformers or ballast, they aren’t safe without the shielding they come with.

Good luck and stay safe.

I know it’s just a little sarcastic comment, but that’s only true if everyone goes along with it. Show them pain in their bottom line and it won’t seem so necessary to their shareholders and lobbyists anymore, and you’ll have a lot louder voices arguing against that law.

Also I’m totally cool being a ‘hermit’ if by hermit we mean chatting with friends on IRC and hanging out in real life, I’m always up for a LAN party.

Not having a right to privacy doesn’t mean we should record everyone’s every move if they aren’t locked in their windowless basement. Which they would have to be since its legally OK to have cameras pointing at your neighbors bedroom window or backyard, or to fly a recording drone over their house.

Additionally I think we should have a right to privacy in public. Why does your right to have your own surveillance fiefdom in your building extend to the street where I’m just trying to go for a jog? It interferes with my peace of mind, and it makes neighbors appear more like police than people I should be able to rely on.

I’m also exceptionally skeptical cameras have any impact on crime. I know police rarely investigate or solve property crime, and unless they prevent the crime from happening outright (doubt), or the camera owner has a full time live human monitoring to respond to an immediate action (businesses), it serves no purpose but to give the owner a false sense of security and to peep on your neighbors.

Getting broken into can be a very traumatic and violating experience, and in a better world we would try to help both the person who is driven to robbery and the person who’s space was violated. In the one we live in, people slap cameras and floodlights everywhere, mental health care is nonexistent, and we punish such that the cycle of poverty and crime continues. Thus nothing is solved and the world gets worse.

Police cameras and municipal cameras are even worse in these ways, now it isn’t the guy next door, its the state and all the money and power it holds doing a peep into your bedroom and a follow down the street. They don’t trust you, they don’t want you here, and you had better watch yourself. That message isn’t for everyone of course, but if you’re already marginalized in a community, it sure reads like the message is for you.

If we do install cameras, like red light cameras or speed cameras which have proven to do something, we need to be extraordinarily careful about where we place them and how we use them. And they should only be there until the underlying problem is solved, not placed as a solution themselves.

I’m not sure that’s how that shakes out, you can’t exactly extinguish open source projects, they may go dormant but they are still there, and there would be the last open source proton build to start from too.

It would also annoy the very people who are most likely to make their own compatibility tools and inconvenience themselves to spite bad business practice. Maybe in some future world where everyone is on Linux/proton, the people who just blindly use windows today because they always have would just keep using the now proprietary proton, but that’s far from the way it is today.

Honestly I just use what is easiest to get working, used to do every game manually, then used Lutris, now I use Steam, probably will use something else that’s easier in the future, especially if/when my library disappears. Til then I’ll support the company that made it much easier to leave Microsoft behind. Nice bonus: valve is one of the least bad large companies in the US at time of writing, so it feels less awful to give them money.