I, too, used to believe that somehow cooking with gas was superior even though it seems pretty obvious that it’s not pure methane burning into pure CO₂ and water. And of course the pipes have leaks. All this time, however, I did not realize that I was following a plot laid down by the industry with ads and lobbying to avoid regulation.
From the transcript of a recent episode of 99% Invisible:
“You see a lot of parallels here between the gas industry and tobacco industry and how it delayed and disputed decades of scientific concerns around the risks of smoking. And the gas industry did something pretty similar to dispute the effects from these emissions–from gas cooking and just burning gas at large. And you see a lot of focus from them on the uncertainty and that there are questions that need to be answered. But even when we get those studies and we learn more of those answers, the industry has really pounced on that as the lack of regulation is proof that this is a product that’s safe.”
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/cooking-with-gas/transcript

I just listened to that podcast episode where @sarahtaber talks with @pluralistic about the commonalities of agriculture history and computing history, seizing the means of production and computation, system change, and the fact that neither doing it all yourself nor voting with your wallet are meaningful options. The system needs to change.

Farm to Taber episode:
https://shows.acast.com/farm-to-taber/episodes/diy-isnt-enough-systematic-change-with-cory-doctorow

I sometimes feel like there is some sort of insight right around the corner of my mind about decision making in societal bodies made of living individuals. It ought to go something like this: Since life is finite and therefore infinitely valuable to the individual, in the end anything will be endured to stay alive and stay well. In consequence, this means that usually unpopular decisions are only made when individuals are dying. Which is why it seems that as a collective, we can never act before it's too late. It's always too late because nobody is willing to take a step back. Instead, everybody stands their ground until people start dying.

Apply at will to revolutions, emancipation, civil rights, climate change… ? I started working again after a four month break and it isn't helping.

"The relationship between digital multinational corporations and the population is akin to that of feudal lords and serfs, and their productive behavior is more akin to feudal predation than capitalist competition."
– Cédric Durand, Technoféodalisme. Critique de l’économie numérique

As cited by Jordi Inglada in "Use ChatGPT and feed the technofeudal beast"
https://www.jordiinglada.net/sblog/llm.html#org29fad54

As linked to by Garjola Dindi in "AI assistants in Emacs. Don't use ChatGPT. Help Open Science."

As boosted by @vedathallac from Planet Emacslife, a blog aggregator for Emacs people.

The original is in French and not available for free so I did not verify it. There's a French review by Yannick Fondeur that points towards potential ways out, like mandated interoperability.

"Au-delà du capitalisme numérique, Cédric Durand n’évoque aucune dynamique alternative, comme si le numérique impliquait nécessairement une économie de prédation. On regrettera aussi que certaines dimensions des phénomènes de plateformisation n’aient pas davantage été explorées, en particulier la question de l’interopérabilité."
https://journals.openedition.org/sdt/41620

Anyway. It was an interesting read. My main takeaway is me pondering the role of paywalls in the development of humanity. 💰💩

I read an article in Le Monde Diplomatique which talked about the incompatibility of regionalism, federalism, and socialism. From a Swiss perspective, I can only agree. Yes, sometimes it does make sense: perhaps the cost of living in a region is lower and it makes sense to pay less wages or less pensions; but it is not the case that this can be extrapolated to mean that no financial compensations need to flow between regions. An air port, a sea port, a university, an opera, a hospital, lakes, water supply, power plants – many things might not actually exist in a region and need to accessed elsewhere. An unregulated market would make essential services as expensive as possible and so a central body needs to keep things under control and redistribute and enforce where necessary. Here’s a cautionary tale: when family life was very regional, inheritance tax was in the hands of cantons and it didn’t matter much. These days, however, you can access all the services in one canton and live in another who promises less inheritance tax. In order to attract the rich, the race to the bottom begins and now inheritance is 0% in all Swiss cantons. Fuck this shit. It enables money aristocracy. Some cantons are now “for the rich” because taxes go down and rent goes up, the public service degrades and the rich go to private insurances, private hospitals and clinics, send their kids to private schools. And then they drive their damned cars into the neighboring cantons to visit the opera.

Does anybody know what influences the font size of Firefox UI elements on Debian/Gnome? I have layout.css.devPixelsPerPx set to 1.5 and I wonder whether the new Firefox 115 I have is now applying the setting to its UI, too. Assuming that both web pages and UI are now controlled by the same setting (which I can't change because I want to read the web pages), I guess I need some CSS help for userChrome.css so that I can set the font-size for just the UI. This seems to fix the problem (the font-size: 10pt part, specifically):

@-moz-document url(chrome://browser/content/browser.xul),
               url(chrome://browser/content/browser.xhtml) {
    * { font-size: 10pt }

    /*** Tighten up drop-down/context/popup menu spacing (8 Sep 2021) ***/

    menupopup:not(.in-menulist) > menuitem, 
    menupopup:not(.in-menulist) > menu {
      padding-block: 4px !important; /* reduce to 3px, 2px, 1px or 0px as needed */ 
      min-height: unset !important; /* v92.0 - for padding below 4px */
    }
    :root {
      --arrowpanel-menuitem-padding: 4px 8px !important;
    }
}

#Firefox