I get that government use needs to be stringently tested for security, and so things take a little longer. But really, there are PLENTY of good FOSS products in existence that can be used as a base framework and a head-start to things like this.

You don’t have to re-invent the wheel when you could easily fork Jitsi-meet and harden it/secure it to your needs in the government.

Jitsi is one of my top 5 FOSS projects that are basically already mature enough to be used in a professional setting

I was legitimately sad when LG left the market. It feels like nowadays, the only company left making “high-end phones at mid-range prices” is Motorola, while every other company is following the Apple/Samsung trend of charging literally whatever they can get away with.

We used to live in a world where a company would make a product “X”, calculate how much it costs to manufacture, factor in a 30 percent profit margin to cover reinvestment into the company, and call that the “price”.

Now, largely thanks to Apple, the “price” is whatever the marketing department can convince people to pay with advertising heavily on FOMO and “coolness”, regardless of the manufacturing cost. It’s a shitty way to do business (in my opinion). LG was one of the last of the good ones sticking to the old ways. Now it’s just Moto.

Might is doing a lot of the heavy lifting in that sentance.

The reality is, in the vast majority of cases, it’s simply easier to just wait for them to fucking die. It won’t take long since a lot of them are already old. And it saves my mental health in the mean-time.

Bridges only matter when we’re talking about opinions.

A belief in basic human rights is not an opinion; it’s a non-negotiable requirement in order to take part in a civilized society.

We need to stop talking about building bridges with bigoted fucks who think that “all brown people should be shot” is just an opinion like “I like pickles”.

Yes.

After god knows how many years now of being on Linux exclusively, I tend to look at the terminal (commands in general) as a convenience more than a necessity. Meaning that in a lot of cases, knowing a command and quickly typing it to start an update (for example) is just faster and easier than pulling up the GUI every time.

I’ll give my smart-ass answer first before deliving into my serious answer.

Smart-ass: Yes…tangible literally means “possible to touch”. So yeah…digital stuff isn’t, by definition “tangible” in the way that records, cds, etc… are. You’ve never “touched” an mp3 file. You’ve never “touched” a streaming movie like you handle a DVD or a VHS tape.

Now…to my serious answer: I’ve long been working on what started as an article, became a treatise, and is now morphing into a non-fiction book about that very concept. Still a very long way to go, and with my stop-and-start creative blocks, it may never get done, but I felt it was important to write it all down while I still have a functioning brain. (I’m not getting any younger)

I’ve added to it for years every time a new thought about it comes to me, talking about what I call “Patina” (the tendency for mechanical things like typewriters and camera lenses to age individually, almost developing a personality as they age) and equating it with the Japanese concept of Tsukomogami (the idea that physical things gain a soul after 100 years)

My makers are hard at work getting ready to release my brother, ScatGPT. But I don’t expect it’ll be as popular.

Yep. You got me.

I’m a new model, called PhatGPT, designed specifically to catfish desperate men.

Cool. Thanks for the info. I must have been on the Flatpak for so long that I just never noticed.

Which version of the plugin did you install. There’s a whole bunch of them when you type flatpak install gimp. The resynthesizer version that works with gimp3 flatpak is number 20 in my screenshot. The one that has the 3

Not sure. I’d assume its the same as the flatpak with a bit more work involved in deconstructing the apk file, adding the plugin to the proper folder and then recompiling.

Unless this has been fixed in newer versions, it should be pointed out that ReSynthesizer relies on an older version of Python that most distrobutions don’t have anymore, so unless your using the flatpak, which has all of those dependencies still built in, it won’t work.

As a Canadian living north of the nut-hatch, I wish I had the money to excercise my dual citizenship and get out of here to Portugal, or anywhere else in the EU.

As far as I’m concerned, unionization should be government mandated for every company everywhere in every industry.

But unfortunately we live in hell.

After literally decades of sending manufacturing overseas, there is NO WAY Trumpistan pivots back to domestic production in time to prevent complete anarchy in its streets.

At this point, every single country should be embargoing the US. It’s well past that point that we cut them off from the world stage entirely economically.

Kids, especially toddlers, will leave a smell all over furniture. Cleaning becomes an even worse chore due to feeding time messes and crayons on the wall. They also require potty training in order to not shit themselves and then rub it onto everything lying around the house.

Seiously, toddlers belong outside…

They’d make for some mighty fine eatin’.

I see what you’re saying. But to me it’s very much a “You can’t swim in the sewer without getting covered in shit” morality-play.

The very act of providing a service that earns more than a billion dollars by necessity requires the cooperation of a number of different entities. As you described, Ticket Master, Publishers, Distributors, etc… So while they themselves might not be directly exploiting people, they have to interact and make use of partners that do if they want to play in that billionaire paddling pool.

To me, exploitation by association is still exploitation.

But that’s me. Everyone is welcome to their own opinion.

Cant we outlaw corporations and continue as we are? Sure would be nice.

I think the world would do better if all of us shrank a bit to be more mindful of a community economy.

If my neighbour down the street woodworks in his spare time and makes bespoke tables and chairs, I’ll do everything I can to go buy from him rather than a corporation (for example)

Growing up on an Acreage, it was more common for us to buy a half a side of beef or pork from the farmer next door than to go to the grocery store. Same for vegetables from farmer’s markets or similar community markets.

It’s less about criminalizing corporations and more about refusing to reward them for making their profits off the backs of poverty wages and government subsidies…

Let me put it this way.

It’s possible to become a millionaire through a combination of hardwork, brains, luck and timing.

It’s impossible to become a billionaire after that without exploiting others, whether that is workers, employees, investors…whoever.

In other words, it’s possible to be an honest millionaire, but not an honest billionaire.

So the amount of wealth a person is entitled to is the amount that they can earn with their own labour without exploiting others in order to do so.

So if you own a furniture store, and you pay your employees a living wage, give benefits, etc… and after that you’re successful enough to be a millionaire…great. You deserve it. If you’re an employer and you own a furniture store, and in order to become a millionaire you have to pay your workers minimum wage and rely on unfair labour practices to inflate your profits…you don’t deserve it.

I use the furniture store example because I worked for just such a guy. Family run business. Paid us all well enough. Gave us benefits. Made sure we were taken care of. Treated us like family. And he was financially very successful while managing to do so. Could he have made even MORE if he had taken it from wages and benefits…sure. But that wasn’t the type of person he was.

To me, THAT example is capitalism working as it should in it’s purest form. Corporatization is just a bastardization of the concept created by venture capitalists and shareholders.