the purpose of social media is to collect data on your interests in order to produce targeted ads to sell you things....unless you're on a list, in which case it's also to track your movement through the parallel protest movement reality.

so, what i've done over the last few days is learn a few things about the way the laptop works, which has given me a number of ideas for steps to try to truly reset the device to factory default, but i want to put that aside until after my birthday. i want to get the raspberry data in by the end of the night.

something i'm going to miss about the trump administration is the difficult logic problems attached to trying to eke out any sort of position on anything, as so many traditional dichotomies got thrown out the window. i found that, often times, the correct position wasn't anything close to what either of the parties were articulating, which exposed this incredible gulf in the country's left discourse. trump at least forced us to more closely revisit the traditional left in order to make sense of his contradictions. he helped us understand the world a little better, in his own warped way.

biden is unlikely to present the kind of difficult worldview that trump presented, and we'll probably all go back to the same boring dichotomies within a few months, dichotomies chosen to align along obvious logical breakpoints, almost as though they were designed that way, or something. but, hopefully we can take a little bit of this more careful thinking and let it help us move forwards, too.

so, trump is getting shut the fuck down. what do you do, here - do you side with those shutting him down or do you stand up for his rights of expression, as an individual?

i think that standing up for his rights, in context, means a request for the application of due process. this is a scenario where i think a court would actually be in it's jurisdiction to restrict trump access to the tools of communication with his audience, as he's demonstrated legitimate malice in it's use. like, if we apply the logical legal steps, we still find trump guilty - we find him more guilty, as we've demonstrated his guilt through facts and logic. and, while i'd like to see those formal steps articulated, the correct side of the argument is to shut him down. in legalese, the court orders an injunction while the proceedings develop - and i believe it should, given the circumstances.

unfortunately, the legal structure that i'm referencing to adjudicate the harmfulness of speech does not exist in really any country, leaving what are clearly legal decisions to be decided by private companies. in this case, while the steps are heavy-handed, they got the legal decision right, i think; if a court existed, they would order trump shut down via injunction, as the case to determine the harmfulness of his speech continues forwards. and, that's because trump's tweets, right now, legitimately fall into the category of legitimately harmful, actually influential speech. this is the exception,,,,

so, if you want a liberal defense of trump's speech rights. that's what it means - arguing for due process, and realizing he'll still lose when he gets it.

what does that mean moving forward? well, fuck, he's going to be dead in a few years. i dunno; who cares, really. i don't think he'll remain quite so dangerous in a few months time.

this guy seems to answer most of my questions.

so, i think i missed it the first time and want to go back and flip and retry the ubuntu install.

i think this is the board component, but how is it a switch?

so, what did i do?

i took the laptop apart looking for a write protect switch and did not find one, but i'm wondering if i misunderstood and am going to try again. i also plugged the memory card back in to see what would happen, and it read it as external. so, i formatted it and rebooted with only a formatted flash drive, and it was actually able to push it down from the rom. when i rebooted back into the hard drive install, it then told me it was leaving developer mode, suggesting that it was in developer mode? i couldn't get it to repeat that trick on the ssd card, so i'm going to format the hard drive and try it again.

the keys on the keyboard haven't come back yet.

what i want before i open it again is a clear video showing exactly what the switch is and where it is and youtube isn't helping.