Absolutely.

Bad, rushed software that wires together 200 different giant libraries just to use a fraction of them and then run it in a sandboxed container with three daemons it needs for some reason doesn’t mean “8 Gb isn’t enough”, it means write tighter, better software.

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I felt the same way. I was VERY happy with that outcome. I won’t say PayPal earned my LOYALTY with that, because loyalty to ANY company is stupidity, but at the very least they earned my respect for the time being. Of course, I reserve the right to revoke it at any time.

In my experience, their consumer protection is great.

PayPal has been absolutely instrumental for me in issuing refunds with obstinate vendors. Once or twice they’ve issued me a refund after being refused a return/refund when an Aliexpress vendor either sent the wrong item or nothing at all.

I even got them to secure me a refund against the Australian government after they refused to issue a refund after directing me to apply for a tourist visa with the wrong visa process.

This is less of a brag and more a question for the philosoraptor.

Edit: Apologies… didn’t even notice that [email protected] beat me to this observation.

I hope for everyone’s sake you’re right, but if that does come to pass it will come as a surprise to me.

I agree with your conclusion, but I don’t agree that it’s feasible. Any tax solutions will involve legislation by a government owned by those same interests. And even if you managed it in major economies, you’d just force the climate issues into places with fewer qualms about their fuel usage. I’d love to see this problem solved, but my faith in our ability to resolve it is far less than yours.

Okay, I can see how you got that from my post. I was a bit hyperbolic in my original post, and I apologize.

I’m not REALLY making a moral equivalence argument or saying anything about comparing the horrors of slavery to work… I’m saying getting rid of slavery was easier to enact because there was an alternative system that happened to be ultimately profitable for the rich at the same time. Yes, wars have been fought to stop abolition, but at the end of the day, after slavery was abolished, the rich found a way to stay rich almost everywhere - abolition came at very little real change to the wealth structure of society. They had a supply of labor to exploit for profit during slavery, and they had one after. The fact is that the moral and financial interests both aligned on making abolition happen - it wasn’t caused by pure strength of willpower. And yes, the system we have now is MUCH MUCH better than true slavery, but it’s still a stretch to use the current system as a beacon of hope.

On climate change the moral and financial interests are NOT aligned in a clear way. There are always still going to be financial incentives to screw the climate for extra money. By comparison, if slavery were somehow legal again TODAY, it’s not clear it would be profitable for anybody to actually do it. That difference will make climate goals harder to enact.

Not to be defeatist, but…

We didn’t abolish slavery… we just replaced it with wage slavery. Sure, the workers are free to leave - and try to survive with no other job opportunities and no money. In fact, for the employers, this is actually preferable to real slavery, because there are lower upfront costs for your slaves, they don’t try to run away or rebel, you don’t have to pay for their healthcare or long term care, and in many places government tax dollars will subsidize their living expenses. Employers have it WAY better with wage slaves than real slaves.

Child labour is still alive and well in many countries, and even there the ball is rolling on rolling THAT back in the US at least.

I admire your positivity, but I’ll believe it when I see it.

Untrue. I grew up on the Super Mario Brothers Super Show.

Possibly. But it’s also pretty common in many instances of technology adoption that as more users come, the quality gets worse, and while open source doesn’t have to worry about a shareholder-driven profit motive driving it, it’s still easy to wind up with a muddled focus. I wouldn’t expect that Linux and all of the associated software projects that make the functional desktop are going to be an exception overall. If you’re an open source developer working on a project now, basically any user is some form of power user, and it’s easier to find consensus of what to prioritize on a project not only because Linux users tend to be better about understanding how their software works and are actually helpful in further development, they’re also likely to direct development towards features that make software more open, compatible, and useful.

Now fast forward to a future where Linux is the majority desktop OS, those power users are maybe 5% of the software’s user base, and every major project’s forum is inundated with thousands of users screaming about how hard the software is to use and, when bug reports and feature requests are actually coherent, they mostly boil down to demands for simpler, easier to understand UIs. I can easily imagine the noise alone could lead to an exodus of frustrated developers.

Some things are better for NOT trying to be the answer for everyone.

I can see the point in theory, but when this would’ve been really helpful, my experience is 80% of the time the video maker’s hand is obscuring the important stuff, and the video is often out of focus or frame anyway, and a red circle on a photo as an alternative will usually do just fine. The nice thing about still photos is, the photographer REALLY has to think about each shot, and if it is showing the important thing they want to reveal in that shot. If it isn’t, they’re forced to either retake it or take extra photos to get the point across.

With a video, the videographer is distracted by talking and doing a thing at the same time, and they just think “Yeah, it’s video. I got it.” and they often don’t even rewatch the footage.

Absolutely. You usually don’t need a whole step-by-step 40 minute walkthrough anyway. You need help with a SPECIFIC step and it’s MUCH easier to scroll through a page or CTRL+F the part you need than try to scroll around a freaking youtube video that you can’t search unless you run it through a text transcriber. Not to mention the bandwidth and storage waste, the annoying, unclear voices, the sponsor ads…

I swear people learning most things from youtube videos either have COMPLETELY different brain wiring, or are just straight up insane.

Well, I guess that’s not fair… they might ALSO be lying about learning. That’s the hustle culture, I guess. Learning things is less important than the APPEARANCE of learning things.

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It’s easy to say that when you’re an outside party who doesn’t understand or care about the underlying issues. Not to minimize the issue with the metaphor, but have you ever fought with a sibling or someone else at school and your disinterested parent our authority figure told you to both to stop without addressing any of either of your underlying problems? How well did it work?

Pretending that “just stop it” deals with the realities of a complex history of real grievances and legitimate causes for anger and retribution on both sides is the most magical of magical thinking, and it doesn’t help that third party negotiators usually start their peace proceedings by learning NOTHING about the history of distrust and anger building up over decades, picking a side to ride or die with, and then declaring the issue fixed as soon as someone signs an agreement.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhbvnIEMxSA

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