DigitalDilemma

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

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  • Individual consequences, maybe, but not for some time. Consequences require law. The USA has made one person untouchable by law who can override any action without consequence, and they have misused that literally hundreds or thousands of times in freeing others convicted by court and jury. To quote Martin Luther King, “True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice.” and “It is not possible to be in favor of justice for some people and not be in favor of justice for all people.” The USA does not have a working justice system. (And given how many apparently guilty people have walked free because they are rich in the past, possibly never has)

    As a nation: The US has already weakened itself significantly in just a year, both nationally and internationally. Every historical ally the US had has been repeatedly abused and ridiculed by the person they chose to represent them. The damage from this will take decades to heal, if ever.

    What it’s really exposed is how weak America’s much celebrated democracy is. That it can be subverted by a small minority who have systematically removed all effective opposition is surprising, and has made other democracies thoughtfully consider their own systems. The internet and social media has played a big part in this - we’ve seen tools of tribalism and hate used many times before, but never at such scale and speed as is possible now, and it’s caught the entire world unprepared.


  • Cheap and good: Cloudflare (they sell domains at cost, you won’t find anywhere cheaper unless they’re loss-leading) Currently the best choice, imo. API is useful for DNS01 Letsencrypt certs, with plugins for lots of software. Only downside is you can’t use a third party nameserver without paying extra, but I’ve never found that necessary.

    Ok and good: I’ve been pleased with Gandi and Joker in the past. Both are also not-US based, if that’s important to you.

    Privacy: Not sure what’s exposed with a domain registrar. You have to give an owner’s detail for any domain, but that’s hidden from public whois now.

    If you mean untraceable - well, I dunno. You don’t need to prove that identity for anything other that .gov type domains, afaik, so I guess disposable email (but not that disposable, as lose that and you lose the domain) and pay by crypto.

    Shitlist: GoDaddy for all the well published reasons. Had some problems with Fastnet in the past too. In both cases I was able to transfer domains away successfully.

    (Experience: Personal. I’ve been registering, transferring and working with domains for over 20 years. Not full time, nor at huge scale.)








  • 20 years old, self employed manual worker who broke his leg whilst on a night out drinking. The only night’s drinking I’d ever been on before or since.

    How quickly I ended up without any money and unable to pay rent was a real eye opener. The bank I’d used all my life denied me a very small loan, I had no friends I felt I could ask for money. Fortunately I live in a country where health care is free, and my sole client kept a place open for me to limp back into when the plaster came off. I managed to stay out of serious debt and kept a roof over my head, but skipped a lot of meals and went without heating for a few months. I’ve never forgotten the feeling of helplessness and that has been a driver for a lot of my life’s spending and saving habits. We take a lot of things for granted, but they can often be taken away so quickly.


  • Our shower drains into the grey water tank a

    I’ve done the maths!

    Shower water /is/ normally collected in grey water systems, but piss would be so diluted as to be a negligable contaminant. A shower uses roughly 70 litres of water. An average human bladder voiding is 400ml, so that works out at 0.57% piss in the grey water collected in a single shower. Negligable - but for fruit trees, a fertiliser.



  • DigitalDilemma@lemmy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlDo you pee in the shower?
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    9 days ago

    In any country, I would think.

    Even where grey water systems are deployed for water re-use, shower water /is/ normally collected, but piss would be so diluted as to be a negligable contaminant. A shower uses roughly 70 litres of water. An average human bladder voiding is 400ml, so that works out at 0.57% piss in the grey water collected in a single shower. Negligable.

    Piss away.

    Source -Dr. I P Freely.




  • DigitalDilemma@lemmy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlWorkers Rights in China
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    14 days ago

    The world’s most successfuly motorbike vlogger, Itchy boots, is currently finishing a tour through China. It’s been enlightening to watch - but do accept that I’m parrotting what I’ve seen there (and she makes a point of focusing on positive things) and some other vloggers on other platforms, I have no direct experience, so apologise for the lengthy reply.

    IB has to travel with a guide, and can only stay in cities because hotels need a licence to take foreigners, but even in Western China and the Urghur areas, which I understand are the most restrictive, I’ve been hugely impressed by the quality of life there. It’s certainly not what I expected.

    Some intesting things:

    Bikes are not that common - everyone in cities uses public transport or private cars. No bikes allowed more than 12 years old, and entering a petrol station requires being stopped by a police checkpoint and the rules are different for each one. Sometimes she has to fuel to one side, filling a can from the pump and carrying it to the bike, others she has to push the bike onto the forecourt, and others she can ride right up. But maybe that’s a fuel thing generally - petrol stations are not busy places there, and most cars on the roads seem to be brand new and electric.

    A stronger police presence than I’m used to in the UK, but less than many African and other Asian countries she’s ridden through (including Afghanistan - yeah, solo female riding a bike through active taliban was an eye raiser!)

    Zero rubbish. I mean, NOTHING. I spotted only one piece of graffiti. (Hugely common in Europe, USA, Middle East, other Asian countries). Very high state of cleanliness. Huge road building and other infrastructure programs of truly incredibly scale. Crime rates are extremely low. (Probably at the cost of personal freedoms and restrictions we don’t consider here) Cities are often beautiful, with wide streets, separation for motorbikes, loads of parking, lots of trees, open spaces and planting.

    The people she meets are much like people anywhere - friendly when approached well, inviting, helpful. The food is superb and offered to guests.

    So yeah, what I’ve seen it not third world by any scale. It’s a higher standard of living in the cities than we have here in the UK by some margin for many metrics. Much of this change has been very recent and has come at many huge costs. (I’ve read a lot about Mao’s time and that sounds awful at many levels, including the actions of many of the Chinese people themselves)

    Workers rights: They do work longer hours, typically, than we do in the west. 12 hour days, six days a week are common, especially in the megacities. Cost of living there is also very high, and many younger employees send money home to families in rural areas. This is not seen as unusual as the Chinese have a very strong culture of working hard and working together for the common good, not that dissimilar to Japanese working culture. I would not like these hours myself, but my own culture is very different.


  • I’ll look into OpenSUSE as a potential alternative

    You could do worse!

    I’ve worked with OpenSuse for a few years and I really like the people involved. They’re stand-out in that they’re European based (no bad thing in today’s uncertain world if you’re not American yourself.) They’re a german organisation but the employees are spread through Europe and further afield and they’re a really, really small concern, but IME, they genuinely care about doing the right thing, even if that comes before financial growth. One example of that is their tutoring programs and, unlike many organisations even in the FOSS world, I get the feeling they genuinely uphold their guiding principles

    I use Debian myself at home and at work and it’s my go-to for everything, but if it didn’t exist, OpenSuse would probably be the next on my list and although I’m not working with them at present, I would happily do so again.



  • Fedora is a community project but ultimately owned by Redhat. They own the trademarks and the domain. They could stop support for it at any time they, or their owners, IBM, decide it’s not in their interests to continue supporting, or even allowing, it. People will say “Sure, but you could fork it” and I don’t doubt that it would be forked, and there’s enough userbase to make that fork successful and arguably better, but then it wouldn’t be Fedora.

    That does seem unlikely since Fedora is a fundamental part of Redhat’s upstream for their main Linux project, RHEL and would require a bit shift in their model, but they have made some odd decisions over the past few years that have upset the community. (Ending Centos Linux 8 with very little warning, and then trying to block source distribution for the rebuilders that stepped in to replace Centos Linux. Centos was a community owned project back along, by the way, founded by Greg Kertzer who was forced to give it up, which indirectly led to Redhat taking control over it and ultimately ending Centos linux entirely. This was its own huge controversy and did not paint Redhat in any kind of warm and fuzzy light)

    So I don’t trust Redhat as much as I did half a decade ago because of these reasons, and more generally because of their corporate sellout. No matter what their supporters and community say, Redhat are a for-profit company that made decisions which upset the community even before it was bought out by a huge multinational with a long history of choosing profit over ethics.

    So stick with Debian if you want to stay clear of corporate linux ownership. I’m afraid that does include the entire EL group - Fedora, RHEL, Centos Stream and even the rebuilders, Alma and Rocky. (Two projects that I really love but are vulnerable to further changes by Redhat)