assuming you just want good, plain headphones and don’t need wireless: Meze 99 Classics. if you do need wireless, Meze 99 Classics and a FiiO BTR5 (or other wireless DAC, whatever gets you a decent sounding bluetooth audio connection).

yes, I am a dankpods viewer, no, I don’t usually go in for “a youtuber said this is good so I’ll buy it” but I kind of sort of vaguely trust the word of Wade on audio gear. And I’m pleased to agree with his verdict, these kick ass.

they are very repairable (I’ve seen them taken apart and servicing them wouldn’t scare me much, and Meze sells replacement parts at a reasonable price and encourages repair), they sound excellent, are by far the most comfortable pair of headphones I’ve used in my life, and have served me well for several years and survived much use and abuse without needing repaired. The cable that came with them died a year or two ago (most of what suffered the abuse), but it’s got a replaceable cable and it’s just normal 3.5mm, so a replacement was cheap and easy to source. They come with a hard case, too, which is nice.

The company is Romanian, all designed in Romania and I believe some of their higher-end headphones are made in Romania as well (can’t recall if the 99 classics are one of them, or done elsewhere cheaper – I don’t think they’re all made in Romania, iirc some of the cheaper ones aren’t, but I could be wrong).

so we’re fucked, then

It’s worse than that: they know it does, and they don’t care. They see us as impotent.

correct, that’s what they’re building the concentration camps for.

it is the actual, factual bone hurting juice. I’d say your fear is justified.

Hydrofluoric acid is both incredibly dangerous to work with, difficult to safely get in bulk, and rather unsuited for the purposes of body disposal. It can dissolve glass, but that doesn’t mean it dissolves things fast.

Piranha solution, on the other hand, is just hydrogen peroxide and sulfuric acid, and it can turn a chicken drumstick into a black carbon slurry in the span of mere minutes, and if you keep adding peroxide, eventually the black color disappears as it turns into carbon dioxide.

I would unironically sooner become an actual hermit and never socialize again than give these cretins my ID or even trust that they’ll delete an age verification photo. Knowing Discord? yeah, no, absolutely fucking not

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

If anyone is capable of enshittifying literal shit, it’s AI techbros.

Oh I know all about Kent State, I just mean right now, ICE has not (to my knowledge) started firing live ammunition into crowds of protestors yet. If or when they do, I hope they get a lot of return fire.

well they’ve yet to actually fire on an entire crowd with live ammo – though I’m sure that’s coming, too.

well, it was worth asking. Anything to hamper the brownshirts and their support network, you know. Thanks.

what if you had something like that running in a bag or backpack at a protest, with hundreds or even thousands of people around you? How about if you had three or four people with them coordinating, switching them on and off at certain times as they move through the crowd?

Be the change you want to see in the world.

no, it’s much simpler than that: I think that any system, no matter how well-designed, can be broken by anyone with the will and patience to break it. And in an apocalypse, there would be no shortage of people with the will to do it and the time to plan how.

compounds on… the outside of the bunker. As in, not a bunker itself. Additionally, fed with what? I assume if billionaires are to the point of hiding in bunkers and paying “loyal guards” in food, that food outside is relatively scarce, and probably global transportation infrastructure is no more. Meaning they either have food stored onsite in the compound (which just means storming the lower-security compound first, getting a bunch of food, and then gassing the bunker to get even more goodies), or they’re somehow moving food from the bunker to the compound (which sounds like an easy way to get into the bunker).

that would probably work better, but if the infrastructure for communication between bunkers exists in the bunkers, and 95% of the people located in bunker A and bunker B want to escape and kill asshole billionaire A and asshole billionaire B, all they have to do is coordinate a simultaneous attack using that same communication infrastructure. If the order to “get ready to kill xyz prisoner’s family” can be communicated, so can “get ready to kill Bezos”.

If blocking the ventilation doesn’t work, I can think of plenty of chemical and biological agents to introduce to a ventilation system that will produce the desired effect. Filters only catch so much, have a limited lifetime and will deteriorate, and can be hastened to deteriorate faster. I doubt they’re going to fit a HEPA filter factory down there.

And as for the armed guards, if the world is bad enough that the billionaires have hidden away in their bunkers, I doubt it’s a world where fiat currency has meaning anymore. About the only ways I could see armed guards being kept in line long-term would be to have their families all held hostage in the bunker as well, and/or explosive collars – and the latter can be hacked, I’m certain. The former, I’m sure they could try, but then you’re not relaxing in luxury in post-apocalypse bliss, you’re running a massive underground prison where every guard hates the warden and wants to help the inmates escape and murder the warden. That doesn’t sound easy or fun no matter how much money you have to throw at the problem.

Really, I find it unlikely that billionaires will be able to retain much in the way of long-term control if the outside world gets bad enough that they’ve sealed themselves inside a hole in the ground, no matter what kind of connectivity they have down there. They can build whatever they want now, while fiat currency still has meaning; but once it stops making sense to worship the dollar and the planet is on fire, they’re just some moron in a hole in the ground with lots of supplies. They’re a loot cache.

I didn’t say “the next term”, though, I said “when the dust settles and adults are back in charge.”

That might be ten, fifteen, twenty years from now – but there are young men in this administration committing crimes right now whose impacts will still be felt years down the line, it’s not just the ancient orange fuckwit; and those men will likely still be alive if nobody has doled out mob justice to them in the intervening years.

I have no idea who will survive that long, not in this powder keg; and justice delayed is justice denied. But conversely, someday, these morons are not going to be in power, nor their cronies or their controlled opposition, and it might just happen in our lifetimes if we work for it. And me, personally, I really want to see Stephen Miller’s face when he’s sentenced, even if seeing his corpse would be satisfactory.