sure, it's nice to do something about loneliness. Makes me think of human libraries, where you can borrow a human to have a talk with. But please, let's do these things voluntarily and not for profit. There's something nasty about "I'm only willing to speak to you if you pay me".
I wish this was our problem. Of course, there should be no shame in living with your parents. But it should be out of free will, and here in the Netherlands sadly that isn't the case for many. Our housing market simply doesn't offer affordable housing options. For many young people the only option is a rental apartment that will cost you so much, that if you can afford it at all, you can forget about ever saving any money. Which means that you'll effectively be stuck in this situation forever. Which is an option to consider, but meanwhile those who can afford to buy a house, because of rich parents or whatnot, they have a far better deal, often even paying less on a monthly basis, while at the same time their house increases in value. It's a major dividing factor in our society, separating the rich from the poor. Of course staying home is another realistic option to consider, and more and more people make this choice, but only for lack of a better option. The real tragedy is of course when staying at home is also not a realistic option. A fucked-up housing market makes the vulnerable all the more vulnerable.
LibreOffice is forked long ago from the extremely corporate OpenOffice effort, which in turn originated from the non-open-source Star Office. Not all FOSS comes from enthusiasts.
That's a fair point. I would also be very much in favor of governments subsidizing certain FOSS projects. There's a lot of work to be done, and people certainly deserve to be paid for it too.
FOSS software will win eventually. It may take time, but if good FOSS software is being built by enthusiasts then a time will come where proprietary software fucks up. And when it does, FOSS is ready to take it's place. And as soon as FOSS has become a standard in some field, why would there ever be a need to go back to proprietary?
I have no doubt in my mind that they do.
The question is, is it the fault of "evil Iran". Or is it multiple parties fighting eachother, and they all share blame. Obviously Iran sides with the Shia minority in Yemen. What do you suggest they do, leave the entire Middle East to the US/Israel/Saudis? If the response here is "evil Iran", then we're missing the bigger picture. The Saudis, the US, Israel, Iran, everyone backs all sorts of groups wether it's in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan or Yemen. The frame of Iran as an evil agrssor country and for instance Israel as an innocent victim is in fact, rather bizarre. And why do we NEVER talk about the Saudis? Perhaps because it happens to be our ally and we like their oil? Oh no but Iran is evil, so they are and always have to remain our enemy. They all share blame for the mess that's been created in the Middle East. As long as the frame is "the enemy is evil" we'll never find common ground, move beyond all these proxy wars. Of course Iran is also to blame, but Iran is also protecting legitimate Shia interests.
Exactly, also Houthi attacks on ships flared up when Israel started the Palestinian-genocide. Of course no party is innocent, but people always blaming Iran is rather bizarre.
I have not made a point of cars not serving a purpose in rural areas. If you say there are many rural areas in the US, then it is implied that I am not speaking of those areas. Cars are overused in densely populated areas where possibilities for public transit are immense, and cars are an extremely inefficient method of transport. Surely you're not suggesting that there aren't any densely populated areas in the US... And yes, of course there is some public transport already. But it's far less than it could be and it needs proper investing. We're not doing good on that front here in Europe, not good at all, but the US is hardly doing better. Efficient/collective solutions often seem to lose from individualistic options, despite the massive costs of the latter, and I find that a shame.
I'm not saying cars don't serve a purpose in sparesely populated areas, like West Virginia. They do. But cars are overused in places where public transit would be a thousand times more efficient, like big cities. Also, trains are perfectly suitable to cover large distances. I happen to go on holiday to Italy next week and I do it solely by train. And Europe doesn't even have good high speed raillines. Perhaps less so than the US, but Europe also neglects public transit in favor of the car lobby.
Sure in some rural places possibilities for public transit are limited. But in the US most people live in cities and they could very well have decent public transit, it's a political choice to not invest in trains. .
Yup, Netherlands and public transport is pretty good here. As well as towns, including mine, are walkable/cyclable.
If it's trying to get Tesla to go bankrupt, I highly doubt that will happen. And I also don't really see what it achieves except for annoying Musk.
I hate Musk, Tesla, and cars in general. (I like trains). But I also dislike people who are wasteful, destroys things like everything is replaceable without any harm done. I also dislike people who are dishonest for their own benefit. This is not helping built a better future. It's dishonest and destructive. Lose lose.
Here in the Netherlands our house of representatives has 150 seats and they're filled by 15 parties, the biggest of whom has 37 seats, the second 25. People sometimes suggest that political fragmentation makes things more complicated, because usually at least 3 or 4 parties are needed to form a coalition. I don't really think it matters because I look at it this way: there are different views on things in society and compromises need to be found one way or another, it's where this takes place that's different. In one case it's on the conference of 1 or 2 big parties, in the other case it happens in parlement/government where the many small parties meet. The benefit of a many-party system is that people actually got a choice, if you're on the left and don't like what a particular party is doing, you can pick another leftwing party. You don't have that option in a 2-party system, you'll probably stick with your party despite everything you don't like about it. Here, if a party really fucks up, they're done for, a party can get 20% one election and 1% the next one. The system is more dynamic. At the same time, the actual governments usually have an overlap, like there will be different coalitions, but our center-right party has been in the coalition for over a decade now. There may be a certain charm to knowing that every other election a completely new set of people forms the government, but that also has many downsides I think. There'll be little continuity, republicans undo everything democrats have done and in 4 years we'll see the reverse. Haven't heard any really convincing arguments against political fragmentations. It's just the path towards it that may be difficult if you're in a 2 party system, because as soon as you go third party, you're hurting your side of the spectrum. What would be helpfull is if it would happen on both sides simultaneously. Can't you setup a structure where people from both sides would together commit to voting third-party?
Sure, YOU voted dems anyway, but not everyone did. And it's those others that didn't that you need to consider if you want to win elections. Is it that they didn't vote Kamala because she is female and belongs to a minority? Honestly it's not unlikely that that is the case. Obviously it shouldn't matter, but it still seems like it does.
Bookwyrm, BookBrainz, OpenLibrary, etc.
Just here to shed some light on BookWyrm, the Fediverse equivalent of Goodreads. I've been doing some more reading lately, and I like to keep track of what I read and also I like reading other's review, suggestions, etc. Now I boycot amazon and others big tech as much as possible, so for me Bookwyrm is the place to be. It's steadily growing I think, but I thought it deserved some more attention, therefor this post. Same goes for BookBrainz and to a lesser extend IA's Openlibrary. OpenLibrary is, among other things, a place where people catalogue book-metadata, and if a book is not on Bookwyrm yet, it can often be imported from OpenLibrary. Problem with OpenLibrary is that the data is often messy and there are a lot of duplicates. That's where BookBrainz comes in, the book-equivalent of MusicBrainz. They're not that big yet, but what they do very well is that they have got very cl
Late response, but there is BookBrainz, the book-equivalent of MusicBrainz. It's catalogue isn't as big as OpenLibrary but they're doing way better on the front of keeping their data clean and without duplicates. I hope someday it will find more users and be the base for other apps to built upon.
Yes you name important reasons, also there's migration both legal and illegal. Legal migration also from within Europe, for example there are quite a lot of Polish homeless people here. Often they came here to work, but they lost their job and the housing that was part of the job, and they stick around for a while, thinking to turn things round, but things get worse when they start drinking. Often their best chance is to go back to Poland, because there they have social security rights, which they don't have here. But they feel shame to go back and face their defeat. It's heartbreaking sometmes, not very proud of how my country treats foreign workers..
There are some schizophrenic homeless people, but even more people with bad tempers, anti social personality traits, that get themselves into fights all the time. I often need to remind myself and others, that it's those people that often need help the most. Some people only want to help those that are very sympathetic, and greatfull. But those will make it any way, everyone is willing to help them. It's the ones with the bad tempers and the short fuses that need your help most, because most people are unwilling to look beyond it.
Money can't buy you happiness. But stress due to lack of money destroys people. Working as a volunteer at a homeless shelter has taught me that atleast here in the Netherlands quite some of them stay homeless not because there are no options to get of the street, but because with these options comes all the stress of having to pay the bills. That goes to show how rough it must be to live with financial stress, because living on the street itself is terribly rough, and still some prefer it.
Elon’s middle name Reeve is derived from his maternal great-grandmother Edith Reeve Angel, who is in turn a granddaughter of Elizabeth Reeve, of Totnes, Devon, England. A reeve was a form of medieval bailiff, who managed feudal lands, and as such was not usually a popular individual. source: https://forebears.io/news/meaning-of-elon-musks-name
All fun and games untill obesity sets in, probably before puberty. McDonalds tries it's very best to instill the habit of regular fast-food consumption in to children across the world. I'm all in favor for fun and games for kids, but I get uncomfortable when you target your fast-food chain at children. Let's just make a public playground for kids, and let's not allow the obesity-salesmen to target them.
ListenBrainz passes the 1 billion listens mark!
Allow me to spread the word about ListenBrainz, the occasion being that ListenBrainz now stores over 1 billion entries of listening data from it's users. ListenBrainz is a FOSS project that aims to crowdsource listening data and release it under an open license. Basically it’s Last.fm but better.
Whatever you use to listen to music, you can probably link it up with ListenBrainz. For instance you can connect Spotify, Apple Music, Soundcloud, Last.fm. You can link it up with loads of music players. If you’ve kept track of your what music you’ve listened to up to this point, don’t worry, there are several ways to import them into ListenBrainz.
All ListenBrainz listening data is available for all to use. This means that we don't need to rely on big companies like Spotify for recommendation algorithms. We can use what
ListenBrainz passes 25k users!
Allow me to spread the word about ListenBrainz. ListenBrainz is a FOSS project that aims to crowdsource listening data from digital music and release it under an open license. Basically it's Last.fm but better. Whatever you use to listen to music, you can probably link it up with ListenBrainz. All ListenBrainz listening data is available for all to use, commercially or not. Why should we give our listening data only to proprietary companies like Spotify and depend on them, when we can share it. If you've kept track of your what music you've listened to up to this point, don't worry, there are several ways to import them into ListenBrainz so you can keep an overview of all your music listening.
I am not working for ListenBrainz in any way, I just really like this project, and I had not seen much on Lemmy about them, so I'm happy to spread the word.