AggressivelyPassive

  • 5 Posts
  • 611 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • I see that problem also in a kind of “contact guilt” in certain topics.

    That is, if there’s any polarized issue, there’s always the liberal/left/progressive position with extremely clear boundaries to what is acceptable to even discuss. And then there’s the vast conservative-fascist spectrum. If any problem arises within that issue, even mentioning it is immediately labeled as outside of the acceptable part, simply out of fear that this could be used as a wedge against the liberal position.

    That in turn alienates people, they see an actual problem and the liberal side either ignores the problem or says it’s fascist. And the actual problem never gets solved or even tackled, simply because nobody wants to touch it.

    This leads to a situation where for a whole bunch of people the fascists seem downright reasonable and then the radicalization pipeline kicks in and suddenly they think Hitler might not be such a bad guy after all.

    So essentially, the left feeds the right gullible people out of fear they might legitimize some of their points.

    Just an example from Germany: when the first wave of Syrian refugees came to Germany in 2015, they were greeted with literally open arms. Great thing. But if you let about a million people into the country, you also need about 500k new apartments for them, the bureaucracy has to be capable of processing everything, language courses have to be expanded drastically, job trainings have to be organized, etc etc. A whole bunch of problems.

    Now, what happened? Nothing. There was great fanfare, the local governments did their best, but nothing substantive happened. Nobody talked about it, because that might fuel the existing resentments. Nobody tackled the problems. And within a few months, we had tens of thousands of young men, who had nothing to do, were not allowed to work, were completely alone and had no money or social safety net. Well, of course a bunch of them turned criminal, which then fueled the resentment even more, because suddenly the fascists actually had what they hoped for: criminal foreigners. Even if the actual problem was tiny, it was the spark that ignited the fascist resurgence.





  • That is absolute nonsense. SUSE mostly serves large enterprise customers.

    And where do you think the people deciding what to buy get their information? Mind share is important.

    I’m pretty sure SUSE is bigger than Canonical.

    That’s actually surprising to me, but I’d argue that Suse offers more products, it seems like Rancher, Longhorn, etc. have no canonical equivalent.



  • And you really think, people who are willing and able to buy enterprise support for their Linux distro get confused by the naming? Sure, there’s that one confused dude, but you also have people asking Facebook where they left their keys.

    OpenSuse is essentially free marketing for SUSE, nobody would know them otherwise. Why would you give that away?

    Suse is not a huge company, it has neither a large enterprise backer nor any killer features, and its market share is relatively small compared to Red Hat or Canonical. Throwing away free marketing while alienating a relatively passionate community is a kind of brainrot only MBA can come up with.





  • Every system will get gamed by bad actors.

    At least in my case, I can’t come up with a system that doesn’t suffer from these problems, but still keeps corruption in check.

    For example, I was in a bidding process for my own software. Our contract has a legal time limit, afterwards it has to be renewed using the same bidding process as the first time. It makes perfect sense for us not to rewrite our software - it’s working just fine after all. But legally, we’re bidding on rebuilding the entire thing, have to compete with laughably low offers from all over Europe, and when we won the contract we decide, almost by accident, to keep using the old software, but on a very tight budget.

    The pragmatic thing would have been, to just extend our contract, but that could mean endless contracts to extremely high prices for software that just happens to be embedded deep enough to be irreplaceable.

    No good solution, really.









  • The Founders were among history’s monsters and you need to stop trying to protect their legacy by painting us with their brush. Chattel slavery was a uniquely horrible institution and its end mattered.

    Dude, I’m German. I know a thing or two about facing the past. So don’t act like I’m defending anyone.

    I didn’t choose to enslave anyone and I have no power to free them.

    As far as I know, only about a third of people in the US back then ever owned slaves. The other two thirds didn’t choose that either. Yet most of them got complacent for a pretty long time.

    Also, you do have a choice. You can buy clothes that are maybe not morally pure, but at least better. You could buy a Fairphone. You could become politically active or at least vote for the better candidates/parties. Sure, that won’t turn the world into utopia over night, but at least you can make it a bit better.

    We all have to face the fact that our actions and inactions cause suffering, and some of that is indeed not in our power to change. But your stance of essentially giving up and pointing at the other crime as ever worse is hypocritical.

    As Adorno said: there’s no right living in the wrong. And we are so wrong currently the slave population in this world is higher than ever in the US: https://www.un.org/en/delegate/50-million-people-modern-slavery-un-report