These systems are based on the flawed assumption that poor people and minorities are less able to manage money that others. It is hugely discriminatory and treated poor people (and specifically the most disadvantaged racial group in the country) like criminals and addicts. It removed personal agency and forced people to use specific retailers, preventing them buying used goods and fresh market produce. The program was expensive and the only people who benefited were the company running it. It is populist divisive nonsense.

Anyway the point is digital payment systems can absolutely be used in democratic states to enforce spending behaviours and you can even see how it starts with people here believing such a system is justifiable. Then it gets extended to other minorities. The elderly, veterans, disabled, unemployed.

Fortunately in a democracy we can educate people as to why overly simplistic solutions that appear to protect vulnerable people are in actuality a really bad idea.

Sadly not entirely true. The incredibly shitty previous government in Australia widely trialed a racist, classist cashless welfare card for indigenous people. Recipients got 80% of their welfare on it and it could not be used for alcohol, gambling or cash incase they spent it on drugs or porn or other “sinful” things.

As we become more dependent on digital systems there are new ways for our privacy and freedoms to be eroded which makes participatory democracy all the more important.

Almost all my transactions are contactless payments and it pisses me off that they all go through VISA when there is a perfectly good local network for debit card payments.

Our family does a reasonable amount of editing in kdenlive every week (youtube, education etc). A decade or so ago practically every video editor on linux felt incredibly unstable. I remember trying to do stuff in Cinelerra. Now shit just works. There are a couple of things in the workflow that still need other tools but kdenlive has been fairly solid. It could do with some minor usability tweaks to make it friendlier to people coming from other editors and for beginners. Also I wish the gpu acceleration (movit) was stable enough to be enabled in MLT in kdenlive builds. Focussing on stability makes sense though.

Using infinite energy to employ infinite monkeys to recreate the work of one Elizabethan playwright is not a business plan.

Stop using windows, office and azure and this company and their bullshit go away.

Waiting for Canonical to up sell proprietary utils features by subscription. Ubuntu’s regular release cycles were brilliant in 2004 when there weren’t a lot of alternatives but why does it still exist?

The tech sector has a massive diversity problem. Lots of young men raised with one hand on their dick watching porn while reading libertarian propaganda. I get why vulture capitalists want naive, manipulable children running their businesses but I wish real adults were in charge.

I have left multiple platforms that don’t offer parental controls, family sharing etc. Fortunately better alternatives exist to all these platforms.

As a older man and father I think these people are pathetic little children and I avoid shitty commercial social media in my house and around my family. Unfortunately they are still having a devastating impact on society.

Canada is basically USA-lite (sorry). We play cricket with NZ, India, West Indies, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, South Africa and the Poms while you are playing seppo sports. You want to be part of the Commonwealth when things are tough but the rest of the time you are up the USA hard. So you are kind of Commonwealth-lite as well. We might be friendly and our countries sort of weird mirror images but pragmatically we don’t have much in the way of common interests or uses to each other. Neither has a navy able to bust a blockade from the US or China so we are useless to each other militarily. Most of your exports go to North America and most of ours go to Asia. Apart from off season skiing there isn’t a lot there.

Meanwhile there is a certain group of people who are anglophile, white supremacist, monarchist, regressives who want the British empire back and we have them in Australia as well. They plotted coups against the government in the 1930s but they are back again today, emboldened by Trumpism and social media. I am suspicious as hell about CANZUK types. Fascists are the problem, not the solution. If people want a union based on those values, Trump is offering it all.

Muslims ruled the Iberian peninsula for about 800 years. Islam had a very productive golden age of great scholarship, science and maths that had a huge influence on European thought and progress.

Canada actually shares a land border with the EU.

Brazil has a stronger claim if that was is all that counted.

Georgia has no such claim but is a great candidate for EU membership.

France’s longest land border is with Brazil. Brazil has not been invited to the EU despite being the past home of the Portuguese throne which in a reverse colonialism move kind of makes Brazil a past European power, majority Catholic and they speak a European language. Brazil would be the fourth largest economy in Europe, ahead of Canada with higher economic growth. They would be past Italy and aiming for the French position in no time.

Pakistan, India, South Africa and Nigeria are Commonwealth countries. How about bringing in the other European ex-colonies? Indonesia has a lot of potential, similar sized economy to their old rulers the Netherlands and growing faster.

The reason Europe likely would be receptive to Canada isn’t cultural. It isn’t language. It is that they have a relatively small population with relatively high incomes and a lot of resources. They don’t threaten the status quo.

Nah, Eurovision is enough. We are happy to be everyones mates and have access to their markets. Our focus is Asian markets and it hurts our interests enough that some in the region view us as a remnant of European colonialism without us leaning into that. We aren’t colonial and we aren’t European. We need to find our own identity. Unlike Canada we aren’t heavily dependent on exports to the US and desperate to find a replacement. Our equivalent would be a trade war with China and we have already proved we can cope with that.

I am more concerned about the US alliance. If they can shit on Ukraine and by extension Europe all our strategic planning and defence investments are worthless overnight as we can’t rely on parts, or support let alone US forces showing up.

The Chinese writing system probably isn’t so bad with predictive text entry (perhaps even better than English) but I think a tonal language with limited sounds has some challenges taking on the dominance of English in global culture. I like songs in other languages but being able to listen to artists from South America, Mexico, Germany, Italy, Norway, Finland singing in English is a privilege I don’t take for granted. When you go down the rabbit hole and discover a country like Japan has a lot of talented musicians it is sometimes hard to understand why they don’t have more global recognition until you understand that countries struggles with English language proficiency.

Also English vocab borrows from all around the world. That gives a lot more flexibility for word choice than a language like Esperanto.

Yes. It is an important distinction. I should have been more clear.

France has always been a bit different. They left NATO for a bit to push back against the US/UK dominance and they developed an independent nuclear deterrent and delivery systems. They are a shit country in many ways, probably more like the US than they realise. They held onto colonialism for too long, have a stupid political system and their police and security services have done some shitty things. But hard not to admire their independence even if some of their motivations for independence (eg maintaining colonial possessions) might have been suspect.

Many countries caved to the US and became client states, heavily reliant on US defence industry and an extension of the US military, not because we were free loaders as Trump claims but because the US pushed their interests so hard and for so long. We cancelled our own weapons programs and shuttered our factories to support US jobs ahead of our own. Most of us are so dependent on the US it has been hard to conceive of a world without them. Being against the US alliance was basically equivalent to being against national security and being a fool or a supporter of potential enemies.

Trump is breaking people’s world view. The French leadership were decades ahead of the rest of us.

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It’s a bad combo in my opinion. The HDMI forum hates Linux so we mostly use display port. If you need HDMI 2.1 or higher for 8k I don’t know if it will work. It might end up with a really low frame rate. It is a crazy low end graphics card for 8k. That’s a low end 1080p card as far as games go. DRM is a problem with crappy companies like Netflix, so you will probably be watching upscaled standard def pictures. They must want us to pirate.

It was an ambush. The only thing he did wrong was walk into it. Have to give him credit for being willing to take risks to save his country.

Spam, spam, spam

It isn’t relevant to the Linux kernel at all. Even though Torvalds wrote git to support Linux development they operate on a different development model (email, patch sets etc). It is very relevant to the wider ecosystem (Linux distro vs Linux kernel). Most open source software development is hosted on one of these platforms and even non-developers sometimes need to interact with them. Anyone starting a project or looking to share it finds themselves asking the same questions.

I prefer this sort of engagement farming question to the ones asking which laptop to buy or which distro or desktop environment is best. Though it is arguably healthier and more productive for me to be doing almost anything else with my life. I increasingly feel like I am filling out a captcha every time I answer such a question. It feels like something any reasonably competent human could discover trivially hitting a small number of websites and reading. Even the people who cut and pasted low effort LLM responses pretty much nailed most of the facts - arguably more than good enough. What is the point of participating here really?

In my opinion Github in its current incarnation mainly exists to steal the IP of programmers and lock it up in proprietary AI services controlled by Microsoft. It dominates for the same reason Facebook or Youtube dominate. It is the only platform normies know and it benefits from massive network effects. It is US owned and operated which is becoming an issue for lots of people. Github is a proprietary closed source platform. I believe it was originally mostly written in Ruby but they have likely replaced all the performance bottlenecks using other languages. In my opinion their site is a usability nightmare.

Forejo is a fork of Gitea by Codeberg, a community run non-profit from Germany (still a liberal democracy under the rule of law) and hosted in Europe. They provide free hosting for open source projects or it is easy to self host. Gitea is a fork of Gogs and remains active. All those forks are written in the Go language and it requires a single exe, a config file and an sql database to run making it very easy to self host even without containers.

Gitlab is a service like Github or Codeberg that can also be self hosted but it is written in Ruby, a slow and inefficient interpreted language, which like Javascript or Python has lots of crazy fragile run time dependencies. The open source project was originally a work of Dutch and Ukrainian programmers and it was a Dutch company but they took VC money and IPOed and I don’t know that I would assume it is European controlled. Some open source projects like Gnome moved there as it was the main alternative to Github. Can’t recommend vs Gitea/Foejo for self hosting.

For single developers, small groups, arguably all you really need is git and email if you don’t need or want all the extra fluff. That can work even for large projects like the Linux kernel. Sites like github tend to serve as single points of contact for lots of projects. It is their front page, issue tracker, everything which is one hell of a dependency on another company. It has Facebook-ized the code ecosystem. I think it also sort of serves as a linkedn for some people.