Whenever I hear talk about the state crumbling (and since my wife works for the federal government in Switzerland I hear plenty of that), the first thing many people think is that the fault lies with the balanced budget amendment ("Schuldenbremse"). And indeed, that is the obvious cause for many of the problems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balanced_budget_amendment
Arguing about the balanced budget amendment is doomed, however. Most people don't understand the difference between household economics and state economics. A much simpler solution exists, however. One that everybody understands: INCREASE TAXES FFS!
Now I know why countries like Switzerland don't like to increase taxes: Where would all the oligarchs go? Where would all the great holdings go? And within Switzerland, same thing: as soon as one canton dropped inheritance tax they all feared that the rich would move elsewhere and started dropping their inheritance taxes. And now there is practically none, for descendants. Wealth can stay in the family, like in the good old days of feudalism. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erbschaftssteuer_in_der_Schweiz
Taxes are great for redistribution of wealth. We don't need to argue about Universal Basic Income (I support it!) or new subsidies or anything else like that: We can simply use existing mechanisms to redistribute wealth, reducing that Gini coefficient, increasing happiness, increasing the feeling of living in a fair and just society, increasing the feeling that work can get you to the top.
Taxes are great to fight inflation, too! If the state hands out more money in a time of crisis, that excess money has to be taken back via taxes. This keeps the money flowing (and only money flowing is what counts). Of course you don't want to bring it back via asocial taxation schemes like a fixed per-head tax, or a VAT, but something like progressive income tax or progressive wealth tax.
This makes sense, even in broken system like ours: COVID money for everybody, everybody is squeezed by landlords and industry, then tax them to get the money back. Virtuous cycle!
Next up: Fighting tax evasion, fighting the free movement of capital, fighting for a global tax (do not follow the Swiss model of malevolent compliance!), and more. The fighting just never stops, I know.
Whenever I hear talk about the state crumbling (and since my wife works for the federal government in Switzerland I hear plenty of that), the first thing many people think is that the fault lies with the balanced budget amendment ("Schuldenbremse"). And indeed, that is the obvious cause for many of the problems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balanced_budget_amendment
"As of December 2021, the decision has not been confirmed by the Council of the European Union. The Council has asked the Commission to produce a detailed impact assessment, but the Commission considers that the onus is on the Member States to find a common position in Council. As a result, progress on the issue is effectively blocked."
"As of December 2021, the decision has not been confirmed by the Council of the European Union. The Council has asked the Commission to produce a detailed impact assessment, but the Commission considers that the onus is on the Member States to find a common position in Council. As a result, progress on the issue...
For some people, a war doesn't end with a peace agreement. In this case, another British "high capacity" (HC) blockbuster bomb was discovered in the harbour of Kiel, Germany. It seems to be intact. 3,000 lb of explosives, 3 fuzes, it's all still there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbuster_bomb
For some people, a war doesn't end with a peace agreement. In this case, another British "high capacity" (HC) blockbuster bomb was discovered in the harbour of Kiel, Germany. It seems to be intact. 3,000 lb of explosives, 3 fuzes, it's all still there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbuster_bomb
Apparently, it was found by accident as the mine sweepers were checking the harbour in preparation of some ship manoeuvres. Defusing the mine is supposed to happen tomorrow. ...
Yesterday we saw Leave No Trace (2018). A quiet movie about a man and his daughter living in the forest near Portland. So good. Whoever had recommended it to me on fedi years ago: thank you!
I have ended up on a German spam cannon that always sends four or more emails with the exact same content from a domain, each email local part varying slightly so the simple account blocking on the phone doesn’t work – and since the next mail is sent from a different domain, blocking domains via email admin website is inefficient, too. I don’t know why this makes me more angry than the usual spam. Is it because they’re Germans? Is it the boring ball pens, office chairs or table football they are trying to sell, or the fact that I always get for of them? Or the fact that they send it to a fedi email adress that is visible somewhere on the web frontend? So how to channel this Sith energy of mine? Right now I take the email domain, ask whois for info and send a two line email to the abuse address. I guess what I really want to do, however, is send them Abmahnungsschreiben. This is an evil German strategy whereby people send cease and desist letters including the bill for the lawyer who wrote the letter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abmahnung Is there Abmahnung as a service where I can forward emails to a German lawyer who immediately does the thing? Wouldn’t that be a great business idea?
I have ended up on a German spam cannon that always sends four or more emails with the exact same content from a domain, each email local part varying slightly so the simple account blocking on the phone doesn’t work – and since the next mail is sent from a different domain, blocking domains via email admin website is inefficient, too. I don’t know why this makes me more angry than the usual spam. Is it because they’re Germans? Is it the boring ball pens, office chairs or table football they are...
Please provide as much information as possible when submitting an abuse report, including:
1. The nature of the alleged abuse or illegal activity. 2. The relevant law or regulation allegedly violated and the applicable jurisdiction where such law or regulation is in effect. 3. If the abuse report requests a party’s compliance with a particular law or regulation, it should set forth the basis for believing that party is subject to that law or regulation. 4. If a website is alleged to be the source of the abuse or illegal activity, the specific url(s) should be identified. 5. If a court, regulatory authority, or law enforcement agency has made a formal determination that abuse or illegal activity is taking place, that formal determination should be submitted if available.
Ugh.
The response from Alibaba cloud:
Please provide as much information as possible when submitting an abuse report, including:
1. The nature of the alleged abuse or illegal activity. 2. The relevant law or regulation allegedly violated and the applicable jurisdiction where such law or regulation is in effect. 3. If the abuse report requests a party’s compliance with a particular law or regulation, it should set forth the basis for believing that party is subject to that law or regulation. 4. If a website...
Just saw a toot claiming that capitalism was the natural state of being since the world just wasn’t altruistic, that is just the way things are.
I… I don’t know where to start. The entire idea that production is part of a natural state is bonkers. Nobody else purchases things. What about other non-altruistic systems like dictatorships, slavery, feudalism, we have so much choice in terrible solutions… and what a strange reaction in face of one’s lack of imagination to just lie down and give up instead of insisting on human ingenuity and demanding that we do better.
If you ever see anybody say anything about the natural state, the first thing is to ask: are they a philosopher? A biologist? Or are they an economist? Or a haver of opinions?
These are not alike. And philosophy and biology are great topics, that is just the way things are. 😁
Just saw a toot claiming that capitalism was the natural state of being since the world just wasn’t altruistic, that is just the way things are.
I… I don’t know where to start. The entire idea that production is part of a natural state is bonkers. Nobody else purchases things. What about other non-altruistic systems like dictatorships, slavery, feudalism, we have so much choice in terrible solutions… and what a strange reaction in face of one’s lack of imagination to just lie down and give up instead...
I would like to take a Raspberry Pi to a place and plug it into an amp connected to some speakers. It runs Debian with mpd and allows us to play all the music on it. Now: at home, it is connected to the router with /etc/network/interfaces.d/wlan0 providing wpa-ssid and wpa-psk. This works. But now, at the other place, there is no router. The Raspberry Pi still has a network card. How can I turn it into a "server" so that it provides a wireless network which I can pick on my phone? It probably also needs some sort of DNS? Is there an URL explaining how to do this somewhere?
I would like to take a Raspberry Pi to a place and plug it into an amp connected to some speakers. It runs Debian with mpd and allows us to play all the music on it. Now: at home, it is connected to the router with /etc/network/interfaces.d/wlan0 providing wpa-ssid and wpa-psk. This works. But now, at the other place, there is no router. The Raspberry Pi still has a network card. How can I turn it into a "server" so that it provides a wireless network which I can pick on my phone? It probably also...
Well, the most convenient solution ended up being the installation of an app on a tablet, and uploading music for tomorrow… I've already got over 600 tracks, which is way too much music for about 10h and it's still catching up with the uploads.
Look at this weird link blog fed by an IRC channel. I like it! More IRC channels should have one. I will write something for my "home" IRC channel. https://linkbudz.m455.casa/
I think there are people with more interesting ideas than what Tim Berners-Lee has to say, given what I just read. His post is on Medium so I had to read in eww, the browser built into Emacs. 😂 The most interesting fragment was "collectivise their solutions, and to overturn the online world being dictated by profit to one that is dictated by the needs of humanity". It's pretty much out of context because it follows something like "there is a need, an urgent need, for others to do the same, to back the morally courageous leadership that is rising" and that's a bit weird. I started thinking. Where is that morally courageous leadership that is rising? Are they morally courageous but not in other ways? Is their morality courageous because their morals aren't recognized as morals or their morals might seem amoral to others? Or is amorality considered moral in the mainstream? Or isn't it rather that the mainstream knows full well what is moral but can't help the systemic pressures of having to earn money? Why isn't he advocating for system change? Is that what collectivisation is about? What exactly are we collectivising? The solutions? The products? The capital? Or is he just saying that the morally ambiguous but courageous leaders have ideas that we, collectively, ought to support? And the "fundamental change" he has in mind are "Contract for the Web" and "Solid Protocol"? I… I don't know… We must "champion the efforts of those visionary individuals who are actively working to build a new, improved system"? It just feels so weird. How about this alternative:
1. We need a web that is built for the people, by the people. 2. We need free ourselves from the shackles and fetters of corporations. 3. Remove corporations and their representatives from all governing bodies and committees. 4. All positions to be paid positions. 5. One human, one vote. No strings attached.
It took me two minutes to write something that seemed a bit more visionary than what Tim Berners-Lee had in mind and if you like it, please don't champion me but talk to some friends and do a little thing, no matter how small, to support a few more people on the web. Run a forum, a wiki, provide email services, run a fediverse instance, run a HTML course at the library, collect money for a mutual aid fund, something, anything. The only conditions are that 1. it's concrete and 2. it benefits more people than are involved in doing it. It's OK to cap it. But it's important to start it. Just make it a point to enable somebody else. And just like that, we're taking back the web.
I think there are people with more interesting ideas than what Tim Berners-Lee has to say, given what I just read. His post is on Medium so I had to read in eww, the browser built into Emacs. 😂 The most interesting fragment was "collectivise their solutions, and to overturn the online world being dictated by profit to one that is dictated by the needs of humanity". It's pretty much out of context because it follows something like "there is a need, an urgent need, for others to do the same, to back...
The reason the Swiss aren’t good at English, I think, is that when I was young, in the German speaking part of Switzerland, you learned French in 6th grade and in 8th grade, if you had qualified for a better school, you could pick between Italian and English. Later, when I was in my mid-twenties, there was a big move towards „early English“ which many felt was problematic for national cohesion reasons: if everybody learns English instead of a second national language, that just means more imported culture and values. As a non-Swiss I didn’t mind so much but I liked the ideal of a multilingual country where people speak three of the four languages. Now I know that not all languages are treated with the same respect and don’t understand why the old national languages need special support and I guess it‘s just complicated. Which is fine. The world is complicated and if we have ten popular languages picking English as the second language is fine – at least it’s not one group lording it over the other.
The reason the Swiss aren’t good at English, I think, is that when I was young, in the German speaking part of Switzerland, you learned French in 6th grade and in 8th grade, if you had qualified for a better school, you could pick between Italian and English. Later, when I was in my mid-twenties, there was a big move towards „early English“ which many felt was problematic for national cohesion reasons: if everybody learns English instead of a second national language, that just means more imported...
The office is running a phishing sensibilisation campaign with a partner where you get fake phishing emails that you have to report; reporting then gets you extra little tips about phishing. The idea is interesting. The gamification is cringe-worthy. Collecting stars! There's an upcoming treasure crate! And here I am, participating like a child even though I am 50. It does feel a bit demeaning. And today it explained something about emails that promised more privileges or permissions, ending with: "The fewer unnecessary permissions you have, the safer you and your employer will be." Giving me 1984 vibes. "Weakness is Safety. Power is Vulnerability."
The office is running a phishing sensibilisation campaign with a partner where you get fake phishing emails that you have to report; reporting then gets you extra little tips about phishing. The idea is interesting. The gamification is cringe-worthy. Collecting stars! There's an upcoming treasure crate! And here I am, participating like a child even though I am 50. It does feel a bit demeaning. And today it explained something about emails that promised more privileges or permissions, ending with:...
How you read the situation depends on what you think is important: safety or freedom, employers or employees. The most boring reading is the once we are faced with every single day. That is not the one worth posting about.
Gregory's Server
