Can’t read German so I’ll ask here: Does this look like something that can be or will be self-hostable with Nextcloud, or do they just want you to trade your US corporate serfdom for European corporate serfdom instead? Otherwise I’m just going to stick to Libreoffice, as per usual.
We were so close with Trudeau. He was elected entirely on the back of that promise and everyone knew it. All we had to do was hold his feet to the fire when he tried to weasel out of it after getting the majority that left him no reasonable excuse for not following through. But we all know what happened. He later even said his biggest regret was not following through on electoral reform. Well, yeah. I’m not sure I believe him, but if he’s telling the truth I hope it fucking haunts him. It should. I’ll certainly never forgive him.
Almost all Canadian Universities (and the ones we are really talking about here) are all non-profit. They reinvest any profits back into the institution to improve their capacity for research. This is why Canada has some of the world’s leading research universities. They are not profiting to make individual people richer, they are profiting to make society and our future richer.
This is starting to change though. There are unfortunately a growing number of for-profit “universities” in the country but most of them are transparently low quality diploma-mills (which is a whole different problem that needs dealing with) and aside from misleading naive domestic and mostly international students and separating them from their money, they remain of very marginal educational or research significance. That may not continue though unless we do something to support our large majority of non-profit universities.
Actions have consequences, who knew! You can only push people so far. Techbros think they know how stay exactly on the edge of that line as they indulge their addiction to pushing society’s boundaries and maximizing profit at the expense of all else. But what they don’t seem to care about is that the line can move in ways they can’t predict. And when it snaps back, I think they’re going to find themselves far on the wrong side of it and it’s going to get real scary for them real quick. They want us to think we should be scared of them, when they’re the ones who should be scared of us.
I appreciate your attempt to be serious, but I’m going to continue to recommend trial by ordeal and since you brought up the possibility of having it be conducted on Planet Neutral then I’ll support that too, I admit I don’t know where it is but I’m assuming it’s going to be a really, really, really long trip, especially at sublight speeds.
It’s not even a bailout, it’s a financial potemkin village we’ve built to obscure how bad the recession actually is, and how much of a long-term depression it is likely to be.
A very reasonable and sensible perspective, but what if that’s still not going to be a fair trial either? We all have pretty strong opinions about torture, so I think we may need to go the extra mile in this case. If no unbiased jury can be found anywhere on planet Earth, then we’ll have to send them to Mars for a fair trial instead. It doesn’t even have to be elaborate, we can use the rules of the good old fashioned “trial by ordeal”. If you can survive on Mars, that demonstrates you were innocent all along and you can come right back home. Otherwise this is going to get dragged out for years and years while they dig up even more evidence and who knows what else may get discovered. This is really the best option for everyone. All aboard to Mars.
StatsCan is a national treasure and more important than most people give it credit for. Informed decisionmaking requires trustworthy information.
I agree with you. I like the things he’s saying, the problem is I don’t believe them. Even if I were to believe him as an individual and his own intentions I still don’t believe in the others in his big tent, the party, the organization, the apparatus, the system, the environment. I don’t think his intentions will translate into real change. Trust has been shattered. Only real and significant actions will start rebuilding bridges and trust, and there is no obvious framework available that would allow those real and significant actions to start to occur. I don’t see any realistic path forward.
I don’t know how to reconcile this with the fact that I desperately want a peaceful, non-violent path forward. I want a white knight in shining armor to ride to the rescue and fix everything. But I don’t actually believe they’re going to come, and if they did I am starting to understand that they would simply be cut down immediately and wouldn’t actually win the battle single-handedly the way my naive imagination thinks they would.
Why would you conclude that a subscription based model makes them immune from corrupt financial incentives? Quite the opposite. That’s my whole point.
Up-selling and cross-selling. It’s just business. Who’s ever going to pay $25/month if the $5/month plan does everything anyone ever possibly needs? Their lowest level pricing model relies on making you anxious about running out of searches eventually, not finding everything you need within that window each month, and not having effective enough tools to find what you need at the basic level. You may personally reject that you need anything more than the basic plan, but the company’s financial incentive is to convince you of the opposite, and don’t think for a second that they’re not eventually going to try to convince you that you need to upgrade. It may seem like $5/month and $25/month are not that far apart, but multiply that across some arbitrary number of users, say, 100,000, and you’re talking about $2 million dollars PER MONTH of potential revenue on the table. And there’s no guarantee they’re not going to eventually start pushing even more expensive products and plans.
They have partnerships with other businesses too, and while those seem like nice enough businesses on the surface, they’re still businesses and they are going to have motivation to find ways to drive traffic and prime you to get subscriptions to them too. The problem is not that these partnerships exist or that there’s anything wrong with them, it’s that they’re another corrupting influence when money is involved and changing hands.
To be clear, I’m not saying anyone involved is evil, that they’re actively doing this now, that they are even necessarily moving in this direction, or that they’re even slightly corrupt at all… yet, but they’re swimming in the corrupting waters of subscription-based dark patterns and they can’t help but be influenced by them. The lust for profits will inevitably drive them mad. It always does. Enshittification does not make exceptions for good intentions.
No, it’s just trading one centralized search product that is free and profits by using your data and manipulating you, for another that you have to pay for and profits from you more directly but still has financial incentive to keeping you engaged and searching instead of finding. Run your own decentralized SearXNG instead and take it into your own hands. Search isn’t something that should be controlled by anyone who’s in it for a profit.
I will maintain creative control of my life by boycotting EA forever. It’s one of the key plot points in my story.
What if we compromise on fractional thousandths of a kilodog?
The OG cyberpunk Johnny of course is included in that. while he is technically found among “any of the Johns”, I actually meant for it to be both implied and explicitly included, but my words kind of got ahead of my muddled brain.
So… throwing trillions at it is bad, but I’m not following the part where you implied I’m potentially ignorant. Do you, or don’t you, want to fall behind one of the main countries that is throwing trillions at it, which you admit is bad? Is letting ourselves fall behind and proceeding very cautiously not reasonable? Did we not weather the 2008 financial crisis with much the same attitude?
Instructions unclear, got afraid of falling behind and accidentally tied my much smaller economy with a very sturdy rope to a country that is soon to be falling off a cliff.
Wanting to fall behind the rest of the world is a good thing when the rest of the world is charging mindlessly towards a cliff.
I’d absolutely buy and play more cyberpunk games with Johnny Silverhand/Keanu in them. I’d also play games where I can be Johnny Silverhand/Keanu. Could certainly see another attempt to make some cyberpunk-style matrix-like story or open world that would go over well with me. I’m pretty open to any sort of Johnny Silverhand/Keanu related themes. I’d also readily accept a John Wick or John Constantine or Johnny Utah game too, basically any of the Johns. Honestly, I’d even play a game where I have to drive a bus that can’t slow down or it explodes (which really isn’t any different from most arcade racers when you think about it). Basically, shut up, take my money, do whatever you want with it as long as there’s eventually more Keanu- or Keanu-adjacent-content in the video gaming space once you’re done, this is a good thing. Or just inject some Keanu right into my veins, whatever, I don’t know.
Appears to have a github repo if you’d rather run it locally: https://github.com/tlannigan/dig-yourself-out
We’re living in a horrible comedy