The difference is that there is SOME accountability in the West and we can, to an extent, influence who leads us, especially in Europe.

So if flagrant misuse does appear, there’s a much higher risk of it being discovered and of heads rolling in the west.

Think of the number of exposed scandals in the West and compare that to China.

And I’m not throwing shit China’s way and thinking the West infallible. I’ve been to China plenty and worked with awesome Chinese people plenty. There’s a lot to love in China.

But let’s not get lost in whataboutisms. Where would you rather raise your children?!

You can milk anything with nipples!

Well you’ll soon be able to subscribe to the big accounts on Threads, even from Mastodon, provided your server allows it.

I personally wonder if the time for this kind of microblogging hasn’t come and gone now. A lot of media on Instagram but my teenage kids don’t use Twitter, don’t want to use Twitter and don’t care about what happens to Twitter. Pry TikTok out of their hands, though…

Wholeheartedly agree with TFA. People who claim Firefox should go all in and block everything and return no data to advertisers need to explain how Firefox should continue to fund development.

I pay about £2.50 for 700+ GB storage, with about 2-10 GB of ingress every month. Storage alone is only £1.40. That’s using OVH’s “Cloud Archive” product; they also have a product called Cold Storage which is a smidge cheaper but doesn’t offer updating of existing data, so according to my projections based on the class of data I am archiving it wouldn’t be cheaper in the long term.

I know - it’s unreal how much people confuse Swiss banking privacy with Swiss privacy laws in general. FADP is weaker than GDPR IMHO.

I just have a smaller dataset using the same settings, which I try to recover a couple of times/year.

It’s not perfect as recovery exercises go … but it feels safe enough for me.

I’ve used backblaze for years and regularly run recovery exercises. Never had a problem.

However, to avoid any fears, I store remote backups in two locations (the other one being OVH, a large French cloud provider).

My data retention regime:

• Mirrored disks in local NAS.
• Continually (every night) copy to Backblaze(US) and OVH (DE).
• Once/year, copy all local NAS data to offline disks (ie disks that are plugged into a tray only during the copy) to avoid a file locking/encryption infection that could spread to the online files.

But what if I don’t have an MEP? (Cries in British)

I mean you did claim Sweden was being occupied. Words do matter, you know. It’s how we understand what you believe.

<giggle.gif>

Not really. They’ve got a version of the euro, called kroners, which allows Danes to believe they have their own currency. They are locked into an exchange rate band (extremely tight) which means the Danish central bank has to follow every decision the ECB takes within minutes). And this makes complete sense, in that it’s a compromise that’s edible by voters (maintaining the illusion that Denmark didn’t adopt the euro) and edible by business (allowing businesses in Denmark to participate fully in the common market).

And that’s one of the reasons Denmark has such small national debt and runs a government surplus - they can’t really invent new money because it would break the bond with the euro. So the Danish budget is sort of a “household budget” in that in contrast to, say, Sweden, they cannot create money (meaningfully) and the books have to balance (which they do; lots of oil, Novo Nordisk, Maersk, Vestas and a few other big international plays who still pay a majority of their tax in Denmark obviously helps a lot).

Yes more or less, that is indeed how the central bank creates money most of the time; the government creates a piece of paper that says “IOU 100k and I’ll pay you 5% interest on it for 20 years and then I’ll return your original 100k to you in 20 years” (that’s a bond), which they sell on the open market, at auction (where the variable element is the interest rate someone is willing to accept). When the central bank wishes to increase the money supply they buy government bonds on the open market (ie from other holders, rarely from the government directly) by materialising money out of thin air.

When they wish to shrink the money supply they sell their government bonds and destroys the money that they receive from the sale.

Does your mom have debt that she pays on time? Is her “doing everything right” visible to credit scoring agencies and aligned what statistic says about good borrowing customers?

Credit score doesn’t mean “runs a good personal economy” it means “likely to pay their loans on time, consistently, based on statistics that are observable”.

No, if anything it shows capitalism is working. When you can increase or tighten money supply (ie when you can print and shred money) debt isn’t what you think it is. A state with money issuance powers is not a household.

I can thoroughly recommend “The Deficit Myth” book by Stephanie Kelton, if you wish to understand modern monetary policy better.

Or watch the film Finding the Money: https://youtu.be/3HRgsYSLOYw?si=g_CgqMWtC7oBCkGn

And to answer your specific question, there are countries with very low debt, but that’s usually due to either not being able to “borrow” money (again, borrowing doesn’t always mean what we would think as borrowing when you can issue your own money), being locked to another currency (Denmark is a great example - amazing economy and locked to the euro) or having a large generation of wealth (typically oil). Larger countries can issue debt more easily.

Yes completely agree. The cool thing about opencollective is the transparency - that should mean the core devs should be happy to pay themselves some money for their time. This is how projects sustain themselves IMHO.

Dunno about affordable but you can usually find some decently priced 1L Dell Optiplex micro systems. I’ve got one running under my desk 24/7. Great Linux support.

Are you referring to the US? In the country I live insulin is available for free for those who need it.

How can I take this news and turn it into a class struggle?!

But it’s inheriting classics, breaking through!! What’s not to be excited about?!

<breathy> Bigme </breathy>

I’ve already paid for a lifetime license of Plex. Is it worth considering a switch?