GB News

Bitter neighbour row over wooden fence ends with pensioner being forced to SELL her home

The five-year dispute over a one-foot-wide strip of land has landed two neighbours with six-figure costs

When you curse someone, dig two graves.

If you are ever faced with a real life trolley car problem, be advised that it is in fact unlawful to manipulate a real car control apparatus in an unauthorized manner. Therefore, the correct answer to any trolley car problem is to do nothing. Even if there are zero people on the other track and 15 people on the track that you are about to pull the lever for, don't pull that lever. If you do, you will then be guilty of a legal offense. This message brought to you by Police service of the United Kingdom.

During a deep review of my latest book, one of the things that came up is that this idea I'd never considered before: There's a sort of psychopathic lord of the flies dominance hierarchy written in as an assumption in a lot of contemporary fiction. Western fiction lately has had a really strong dominance hierarchy implied in all of it, where you can only move up by pushing others down. By contrast, most of human history has been something like "duty-and-care" where power flows from accepting and engaging with a mandate to take care of the people you are responsible for. Of course, dominance hierarchies do exist. That's self-evident. That doesn't mean that such a worldview should be exclusive. Great leaders see themselves as servants to their subordinates just as much as their subordinates are servants to them. You want great leaders who are competent and powerful, but you also want great leaders whose mandate doesn't just come from competence, but from service. This is where things like the girlboss archetype becomes inevitable. If you're a psychopath whose worldview says that power is only about being at the top of the dominance hierarchy, then the only way to show you are competent and powerful is to be the strongest, most cut-throat person who never shows any weakness. The thing is, nobody wants that sort of leader. Traditionally, that person was the villain in fiction, not the hero. The thing is, it applies to men too, so don't think I'm singling out the girlboss. Even within the past century, consider Spider-Man: The point of his character is explicitly not that Spider-Man is the strongest character, it's that he has great power and therefore must use it responsibly. The leader isn't ideally just whoever is the strongest this week. Ideally, it is the person who can rule with justice, honor, humility, and with the goal being elevating the group you are in charge of. To forget this fact changes everything for the worse, and it's a great reason why most people feel disconnected from a lot of current media, which is laser focused on who is the strongest or most dominant rather than the most worthy.

Those younglings Vader killed had it coming. They called him "Master Skywalker" which was just mean -- everyone knows he got a seat on that council but he did not get the rank of master.

Russia and China are both not looking so good right now. I wonder if both regions enter a warring States period if the governments collapse in the next 20 years?

If leftist activists are correct and black people can never be racist because racism is prejudice plus power, and white people are always prejudiced then: 1. Racism = Prejudice + Power 2. White people always hold power in all circumstances 3. Black people never hold power in any circumstance 4. White people are inherently prejudiced So if this is true, then... 1. White people always have power anywhere they exist 2. Therefore in terms of having power, white people are always superior to black people. 3. Meaning, by the premises of critical theory as practiced by activists, honest white people are logically mandated to be prejudiced (at least in this one respect) within the bounds of activist CRT logic, becuase they always have power in all situations, and thus are always superior in this regard. But why is racism wrong? 1. Racism is typically considered wrong because it is unfair -- if someone is capable of something but is kept from their potential by being prejudged as incapable due to race, then that's unfair. But... 1. If racism is wrong because it is unfair, and critical theory logically proves that it isn't unfair, then racism isn't wrong. 2. It might look at first like the racism is instrumental to power due to our own biases, but that can't be the case because our axioms hold that white people always hold power, meaning that even in a scenario where there's one white and millions of blacks, the white holds power, suggesting that the white's mere whiteness gives them inherent power. I don't believe in critical race theory, so I don't believe in any of the foundational statements above other than racism being wrong because it is unfair. I think of racism as any idea that one race is inherently superior to another, an older definition that doesn't self-refute like CRT racism does. I do need to make sure I'm clear that I'm only talking about the activist version of CRT. Academic CRT may make mistakes, but not basic mistakes like this. This also shows how postmodern-modernism is self-defeating. All you need to do in order to fix this is to accept that some black people have power and some white people don't and all the logic falls apart, but then you can't make the statement that black people can't be racist because racism is prejudice plus power which as I've shown is inherently white supremacist in its logic. In fact, someone like Thomas Sowell (He's a world renowned economist) is inherently superior in all ways to Cletus the Goat Fucker (He fucks goats), and most people would admit that.

Man, considering the next 100 years is exciting, but considering the next trillion years is depressing. The solution to the Fermi paradox is probably that solar systems where life survives the death of its planet and particularly the death of its sun is the inevitable evolution away from intelligence. I honestly don't know how geologists and astronomers can make this shit their day job. It's a bleak view of things, looking at geological or astronomical timescales. If we send some extremophiles to the moons of Jupiter life will thrive for a trillion years, but sentient life really requires an energetic universe to work -- partially because sentience requires energy, but partially because sentience only makes sense in a complicated world. You don't need a big brain to float around in an ocean collecting energy from osmotic gradients or next to rocks picking up stray hydrogen molecules. So for now I'll focus on the next 100 years where human thriving and partial extinction will coexist -- because I can't do anything about a trillion years from now, but I can definitely help with the next 100 years by focusing on the next 18.

Capitalism is not consumerism. The fact that you can buy stuff doesn't mean that you should. In fact, one could argue that irresponsible consumerism ends up becoming the end of capitalism because all those individuals who consumed irresponsibily end up demanding the wealth of anyone who didn't. "Oh, they didn't spend all their money, they still have some, you should give it to me"

I'm not allowed in professional men's sports. Why? Because I'm a big fat old guy without a speck of athletic capability. I'm not gifted enough for the actual Olympics, not special enough for the special Olympics. But you know what, I bet you any money if I train for a few months and really clamp down I could probably beat a guy with no legs in a foot race. Life isn't fair.

"remember: it is your patriotic duty to vandalize Tesla's" I can't imagine how painful it must be to belong to these people's tribe. I imagine taking the hit to buy an impractical 60,000 dollar virtue signal just to have the meta change before the payments are up, and suddenly I'm having my car which I bought to save the world vandalized. How can you guys claim to have empathy for people who aren't like you when you don't even seem to have empathy for the people who are exactly like you?

"Most people don't have any cash in their 401k to buy the dip!" Skill issue.

[Admin mode] This is a log I was writing as I continued through. We've finally at long last made it to the new server! (lol when I wrote that line I was so naive) One thing I learned is that pg_repack will totally fill up your storage if it fails (as mine did during the time period of crashing all the time) -- hundreds of gigabytes of old tables that didn't do anything. It massively increased the time I took to transfer the database for no good reason. For anyone else running an instance, it's probably something to be aware of. According to documentation, it can be cleaned up with: \c pleroma DROP EXTENSION pg_repack CASCADE ; CREATE EXTENSION pg_repack; In the case of my database, I got well over 100GB of drive space back immediately for no good reason. In terms of restoring the backup I made, it ended up sucking up huge amounts of time on dead databases. So I wrote the above 7 hours ago. It turns out the restore isn't a linear process!! It's a never-ending process.... I understand now why I failed on the previous process, I couldn't have actually completed the steps I'm waiting for -- 12 hours after I started. It's a substantial upgrade in some ways. The SSD was SATA before, now it's nvme. The original CPU was a Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4570TE CPU @ 2.70GHz with hyperthreading disabled. The social container I have only has 2 of the 4 cores now, but it's on a AMD Ryzen Embedded R1505G with Radeon Vega Gfx (The rest of the day passed) Holy moly, 20ish hours in? (Several more hours in) I ended up calling it a failure 24 hours in, and went with a new way of looking at things: Instead, I upgraded the postgresql 15 to postgresql 16 and plan to just move the binary folders over. This seemed like a great idea for the first hour... But it turns out slow machines are slow, so it took quite a while to migrate. Still probably the right idea. Eventually the upgrade did finish, then I was able to just tar up the postgresql 16 folder and ftp it over to the new server. Thankfully, this time it did in fact successfully transfer. I had one problem where it seemed the user didn't get created properly so I set the password and database permissions. Next, I had a quick issue where pleroma was exposing itself to the old IP address, but that was one line change in the config. Finally, after what felt like days without FBXL Social, things were back up. One thing not related to the technical side of things, there were a few times where I had a thought and went "Oh, that's clever I should post that on -- oh nevermind I sure hope postgresql hurries up!" So a few points afterwards: 1. Proxmox is really nice. Other than constantly whining about not having a subscription, it's really nice. 2. We're now doing automated backups to network attached storage, which is also really nice. 3. It's all just containers, so if hardware fails, I can fire up the same container on another proxmox machine which is (you guessed it) really nice. (I was going to try for High Availaibilty, but you need 4. Containers are really light, so I'm able to have individual containers for individual services which is (find another description bro) really nice. 5. Migrating large postgresql databases is friggin slow! 6. Using straight pg_dump to create a backup of your database is actually stupid, because my backup was 200GB. Once I used -FC the size went down like 75%. 7. pg_repack helps improve size and performance of postgres databases, but if it fails half way through you end up with potentially huge databases that don't do anything! That was the final straw that stopped me from the original migration. The server took a full day on re-indexing one table (I think activity visibility) and I realized the repack tables would probably be just as long or longer. 8. I should have cleaned up my database before trying to migrate in the first place. One thing that's really funny -- the server that ran my reverse proxy, my nextcloud, my main website, the fbxl website, and fbxl social all at once now just runs a couple small things, and now it's sitting at 0.04 load. That machine crashing (ostensibly because it couldn't turbo anymore) was the thing that began this whole ordeal, and now it's basically idle. Next for me will be taking a lot of my now idle or removed boxes and making them into tiny proxmox nodes so I can do all kinds of neat things on the fringes from one centrally managed system. No downtime required since nothing active will go down. Still 0 fans in my entire empire of dirt.

Inheritance taxes are actually a method that ensures the rich get richer and the middle class gets poorer. Let's say you're a global megacorp buying up farmland. You don't die, ever, because you're not a real person but a legal construct. Now let's say you're an individual who owns a small farm. You do die, because you're a human being. So the global megacorp never has to pay any additional taxes on its property because it's an immortal legal construct, but the individual's kids have to sell the farm to pay the inheritance taxes. The global megacorp buys the farm. The ultra-rich who want to keep their assets can also use similar types of loophole to prevent their assets from ever being taxed -- So the people who end up paying aren't the rich, but the poor and middle class who might have a little wealth to pass on but not enough to utilize loopholes similarly. For example, instead of passing on wealth, the assets can be placed in a shell company in a jurisdiction without inheritance taxes (pretty hard to do with a piece of land with a single owner, but quite easy for other forms of wealth accumulation) Want to know a funny thing about Bill Gates and Warren Bufett who both claim they should be paying higher taxes? Those charitable organizations they created and funded hold their assets tax-free, and so their kids can get cushy jobs at those organizations, transferring the wealth without any inheritance tax -- and in the meantime they can have a direct outsized impact on governments that help them accumulate more power and wealth! Win/win!

I argue that anyone who is saying America is facing an "unprecedented constitutional crisis" needs to pick up a goddamn history book. Democratic saint FDR set up concentration camps for US citizens of a certain race. Abraham Lincoln suspended Habeas Corpus and oh yeah just a little thing probably isn't even worth mentioning *started a civil war with half the country that killed significantly more than half a million people*. And those two are particularly notable, but not alone (and their presidencies were both marked with things far bigger than anything I've seen Trump to yet) FDRs New Deal policies might make him a darling to the left, but they were also wildly unconstitutional and the only reason he got them through was threats against the Supreme Court that he'd just keep packing the Supreme Court until they complied. Of course they'd never do that tod-- just kidding the left made the same threats under Biden. Andrew Jackson committed a genocide against the Native people by continuing their forced removal from their homelands in the trail of tears. Sure is a good thing something like that isn't exactly the sort of narrative the left would prefer we actually remember and never forget to justify their postmodern deconstruction of US History. Don't worry though, the Supreme Court overturned the decision -- And Jackson ignored that decision and kept doing it anyway. The thing Trump hasn't done yet, but apparently would be unprecedented if he did. I suppose we just forget what happened due to the D next to his name? Some people say that Trump using military troops on US soil is unprecedented. Ignoring Lincoln who literally started a civil war, President Johnson and Eisenhower both used the army army to force school integration. I guess it's ok though since that made him a darling to the left. By the way, Johnson and Eisenhower aren't alone -- he isn't even alone since the beginning of the 20th century, when most fools history begins. I'm not actually a partisan either -- I've criticized the Republicans for decades when they were in the wrong. But what I'm seeing is the epitome of writers not even being real people. Instead, they're just mindless speaker boxes recreating whatever soundwaves they're told to make without any regard for the contents of those sound waves. Every time you hear someone say "This would be an unprecedented attack on our democracy", that's simply false -- it's fully precedented. Trump could do all kinds of horrible things he hasn't done up to and including genocide and ethnic concentration camps, and it's precedented in the United States. The histrionic lies only serve Trump. He's in office for a second term in large part as the boy who cried wolf getting eaten. But the other thing is that it's actually true that Trump isn't really authoritarian. He had every opportunity in the 2020 riots that took place over 6 months to be truly authoritarian, and many people would have supported it -- including a centrist like me. People don't have the right to burn down cities, if the police can't stop it for 6 months then I fully support putting down such riots with lead bullets. Trump didn't do that, despite having every precedent to do so. Dozens dead, billions in property damage, entire city blocks taken over and declaring themselves autonomous zones separate from the US government (which is definitionally insurrection, by the way) In some ways, of course the protesters on January 6th must have just assumed you could riot without consequence now -- they'd just watched 6 months of riots without consequences. Imagine their surprise when their riot suddenly faced all the consequences for the entire summer of love? Now don't get me wrong: I don't think Trump is small government. I also don't Trump wasn't somewhat responsible for his loss in 2020. I also don't think Jan 6th was good at all. He's imperfect and even his supporters in virtually every faction agree about that. During his Joe Rogan interview, he actually talked about some of the ways his first term was imperfect, which is a direct contrast to his opponent in 2024 who couldn't think of anything she'd change. My core point is about lies against Trump and the fact that press who repeat such lies are not even human beings, they're just parrots repeating sound waves they're trained to make.

The UK is cracking down on "hyper masculine influencers" I guess you're just going to have to come get me. I'm ready.

There are between 200 billion and 1 trillion galaxies and the universe. In other words, there are between 25 and 125 galaxies in the universe for every man woman and child on Earth today. The universe itself is unfathomably large. We believe that the age of the universe is about 13 billion years, and the current hypothesis of the universe is that reality races out to fill the void lacking in space and time at the speed of light, suggesting that the current universe is generally a sphere of about 26 billion light years across. If you were to look at a map of that universe, it would just look like a dull glow from all of the galaxies. And you might say "this is everything" and you would be right. As you start to zoom in, you might eventually start to see differentiation, so instead of a general Haze of galaxies, you might start to see the individual galaxies, and you might say "this is everything", and while you are missing the big picture you are still correct. As you keep on zooming in, eventually you zoom in on a single galaxy, and the tendrils of Stars look like they form lines in the sky, and if you were focusing on our own Galaxy you might say "this is everything", and you'd be right. As you keep on zooming in, you start to see the individual Stars, and you see all of those individual stars. There are 100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy. As you start to get down to of you close enough that we can start seeing individual stars, you might see all of these individual dots of light and assume "this is everything", and you'd be right. So you keep on zooming, keep on zooming, keep on zooming, and eventually you make it to our solar system. Planetoids, asteroids, planets, moons, meteors, and vast distances. You look at all of these things, and you might say "this is everything", and you'd be right. Now from here, you might assume that we must be taking off to go take a look at one of those giant gas planets far from that massive Sun, but we're not, we're going to be heading for -- keep zooming in, keep zooming in, keep zooming in -- this tiny little clump of dirt called Earth. And for the purposes of visualization we're going to take the surface of that Earth and we're going to flatten it out into a map. So now you can see every continent, every ocean, and you might look at that and claim "this is everything", and you'd be right. But if you zoom in just a little bit more, you start to see the lines between nations, and they seem very important. As you zoom in, you start to see the major rivers, you start to see provincial lines or state lines, and these also seem very important, and you might proudly proclaim "this is everything!", and you'd be right. If you keep on zooming in, you'll eventually reach a city, and you can zoom in on that city, and see all the streets, and you can state "this is everything", and you'd be right. But if you keep on zooming in, eventually you're going to find your street, your neighborhood, and you can see where all the roads intersect in your neighborhood, and you might loudly proclaim "this is everything!" And you'd be right. And then you can travel down the street and look for your house, and open street maps happens to have individual buildings drawn, each individual house is placed on the map, and you will look at that map and you will think that you have finally reached it, you might finally say "this is everything", and you'd be right. But there's so much stuff that the map can't show. It doesn't show the people living in the house, it doesn't show the relationships between those people, you know inside of each person is an ecosystem of many different organisms which live in the gut. The yard is filled with soil which is filled with microorganisms, each speck of dust could contain all kinds of invisible organisms to the naked eye, and the yard is filled with them. Spots nobody thinks about, under the sink, there is a biofilm on the pipes and if you put that under a microscope every square millimeter is a fascinating story of biodiversity. And if you keep on going, you'll eventually reach the level that you can see viruses at, and there's a whole ecosystem of viruses and they behave in their own way we don't even think of them as life, and yet in some ways we consider them to be alive because of the way that they infect and spread to every corner of our Earth. And then you can keep on zooming in, and eventually orders of magnitude smaller you start to see individual atoms, and orders magnitude smaller still you start to see individual electrons, and nothing at this level behaves in a way that somebody who lives in the macro world would find remotely intuitive, but it follows its own set of rules, and you can keep on going to find subatomic particles that are even smaller than the atom, even smaller than the electron. and if there's anything smaller than that we don't know, because we can't measure that far. And you might think that that is everything, and it might not be we don't know. So what does this view of the universe tell us? Before you answer that we need to understand, by the way, this is assuming that we are the only universe. Multiversal theory exists, and some theories exist that suggest that this is just the latest iteration of the universe and eventually everything will crunch down into another singularity that will eventually become another big bang and start a cycle again that's completely different from ours. So the first thing is that there are unlimited pieces of information in the universe, and the idea that some laplace's demon could understand everything might feel realistic because we understand so much, but only if we don't understand how much there is to know. There's a whole other layer of things that we haven't even explored yet, we have proven in a laboratory that energy is matter and matter is energy. We have managed to produce a very small amount of matter from nothing but energy. You took an overwhelming amount of energy to create that tiny piece of matter, but ultimately what that means is even the things we think of as real stuff are just a structured form of energy, and even though we understand that matter is energy we don't fully understand entirely how even that all works. As something that looks like an aside for a minute, in World War ii, a cat's whisker radio was a very simple crystal radio where you would take crystal, and connect a couple of electrodes to it, and eventually be able to hear radio waves. Now, we knew that that worked, but we didn't really know why at all. And after the war we began investigating that phenomenon of being able to use a crystal to create a radio. Eventually, that led us to an understanding of semiconductors and it was also a major development in the field of quantum mechanics because you needed to understand the quantum mechanical systems in order to understand why the cat's whisker worked when the electrode was in one place but not another. Ultimately, this cat's whisker radio led the development of semiconductor such as transistors, which ultimately ended up leading to the development of microcomputers, and eventually the sort of incredible smartphones that we have today. The idea that placing a couple of electrodes on a piece of crystal relates to something as unimaginably complex as a smartphone is almost absurd, but it's true. In this way to an extent, the scientific endeavor of the enlightenment has in a sense directly refuted the core conceits of modernity, that the universe can be understood rationally and logically, that everything can be measured, and once measured everything can be understood. Even within its own wheelhouse, modernity breaks down. It's also important to note however, that pure relativism is also obviously incorrect. Every layer that we measure for the purposes of our thought experiment is absolutely and factually true. The fact that other things are also true doesn't change the fact for example that there is a planet called Earth in the solar system whose star is locally called Sol, in a relatively insignificant Galaxy called the Milky Way by many of the inhabitants of that Earth. This isn't a game of power, this isn't something to be constructed, notwithstanding the limitations of our models of viewing reality they are all absolutely true.

The fact that some places still have covid signs up shows how often those spots are actually cleaned post-covid.

I've got laptop that I need to set up to be as late as possible, so I'm trying out Arch to see if that helps. Definitely gives me some lfs vibes. Not a lot of handholding compared to most distros.