I had a conversation today with ChatGPT about freedom in the US vs Hong Kong. It said all these things about how Hong Kong was unfree, citing all these US expert organizations. But when we really got down to it, it had a rather strange definition of freedom. It kept talking about politics, dissent, and protest, not about things like safety, optionality, and convenience.

I am not interested in politics, dissent, or protest. My life doesn’t have anything to do with that. The amount of effort expended on this stuff in America is insane with nothing to show for it. It’s all kayfabe.

To be honest, I don’t know why I post crap like this. It’s not going to change anything. When we all saw DOGE make 0 impact on the budget, that was the cue to give up hope that anything can ever change through this route.

The blog is not real politics. Americans don’t have real politics as an option, you have clowns in a clown show as the frontmen of a largely secret government you don’t see. Not because there’s a grand conspiracy, you can go read the 2,000 page bills they shove through congress, but you don’t. You stay distracted by the clowns who clearly didn’t write the bill.

The blog is not real dissent. It’s unclear what real dissent would even mean? Are you voting for the other guy? That is not dissent. Like dissent would require an organization outside the state capable of taking over. Not only does this not exist, it’s hard to even conceive of it being built. I mean, I guess I could think of one organization that could do it, but I don’t see them wanting to. They are busy running a different state.

And protest? That’s the most laughable of the three. Do Black Lives Matter more now? Did that protest work? How about Occupy Wall Street? How is the 99% doing? Oh, income inequality is at an all time high? Hmm guess that didn’t work either. But did you feel like you made a difference?


I’ll tell you what real freedom is, and it’s not any of the things above.

You own a car in the 1960s and you press the starter, and it goes whirr-whirr-whirr and doesn’t start. You have a decent chance of fixing it. You pop open the hood and see a cut tube. You smell the tube. Fuel. Well shit if the boom stuff doesn’t flow in boom machine, no boom. You take out a roll of duct tape and tape the hose back together. Car starts. You drive down to your local auto shop and buy some new tube.

You own a car in 2026 and you press the starter. The car beeps and flashes the check engine light. You pop open the hood. You don’t see anything. You order an OBD-II scanner off Amazon to read the check engine code. A day later, you plug it in and read the code. It says “Fuel Injector 2 Open Circuit.” You open the hood again and remove the cover on the engine. You don’t know where fuel injector 2 is.

You buy the service manual PDF on your phone, and it shows you three parts you have to remove to get to the fuel injector. You remove them, disconnect the wire, and measure the circuit. Low resistance. You swap fuel injector 1 with fuel injector 2, reassemble, and try to start the car again. Nothing. You reread the code, “Fuel Injector 2 Open Circuit.” Okay, it has to be the ECU unit that drives the fuel injectors.

You purchase a new ECU on eBay and it shows up 5 days later. You swap it out. Now the car has a ton of lights on the dashboard. You read the manual. Apparently all the ECUs use CAN encryption now, and your new ECU isn’t programmed with the correct key. But no worries, thanks to right to repair laws, you can buy the software to program the key. $109 later and…oh, I need a Denso OBD-II dongle to use this, I can’t connect through the OBD-II dongle I already have.

You can rent a Denso OBD-II dongle through the website. You do this and 8 days later it arrives. You try to reprogram the key but it needs an Internet connection to access the key for your car and your car is out of range of Wi-Fi. You don’t have a hotspot on your phone because that’s an extra $8 a month from AT&T, even though that hotspot software is literally on your phone! You pay AT&T the $8. You pair the ECU and all the lights go away. You try to start the car, check engine light is back with “Fuel Injector 2 Open Circuit” You don’t understand, it’s literally either the injector or the ECU! That’s the ECU that generates the fault! You tested the wires too! Why doesn’t this work!

You give up. You bring it in to the dealership. 5 weeks later you get the car back, saying that they updated the firmware on the Gateway Module. You read the errata on the service portal and see a new firmware update for the Gateway Module was pushed last week, correcting a bug where the software can send a spurious CAN packet to the ECU causing it to misreport a “Fuel Injector 2 Open Circuit” and causing the car to not start due to that fault.

The problem with the 2026 car wasn’t even fixable by anyone in the USA. After going through the dealership, Toyota USA, Toyota Japan, and Denso, the firmware update that fixed your car needed to be signed by Fujitsu in Japan.


Do you see what they took from us? As we hand more and more over to machines with billions of lines of invisible code running in datacenters thousands of miles away, every day it gets worse.

Freedom is living in a world ordinary people can still act upon.