Humanius

That is not entirely a fair equivalence though.

A road is built once and after that it exists. Its a matter of maintenance and upkeep to make sure the road doesnt deteriorate over time. But even if you neglect that, the road will still exist… only now with potholes.
There are many places around the world with shit roads like this.

Public transit requires staff pay, fuel costs, upkeep, etc besides the initial investment and maintenance. If that money doesn’t exist the busses don’t disappear, but there will be noone to drive them. Same for trains and other modes of transit.

So when public transit has funding issues they are more immediately noticeable than when the road authority has funding issues.

Converting that to a yearly inflation figure:

1.015¹² =~ 1.196

So about 19.6% yearly, assuming it will stay at 1.5% monthly for the next year.
By Argentinian standards that is honestly not too bad

In that case it wouldn’t be “good enough”. But I don’t think this is such an all-or-nothing situation.

Don’t let perfection stand in the way of good enough
It may not be the holy grail, but moving away from Meta-owned Whatsapp is already a pretty significant improvement

Not all of them.

I have a non-official chat group with some colleagues, and a chat group for the neighbourhood that are not likely moving just because I am refusing to use Whatsapp. It would just result in me missing out on those chat groups.

Currently I just have both installed, and that is also how I try to convince people to install and try out Signal.

But my goal is not to move to Threema, my goal is to move away from Whatsapp.
Signal fits the bill while expending far less social capital convincing people to use it.

Then by all means keep that momentum going.
I’m just looking at this from a Dutch perspective, where Signal is seeing by far the most growth.

Yeah, but Threema has basically no momentum behind it at all at this point.
I’m putting my social capital behind the option that currently stands the most chance of beating out Whatsapp

After Trump was elected and inaugurated, Signal has finally been gaining some steam here in the Netherlands.

It’s still an American company, so it’s not ideal. But it’s still significantly better better than letting a tech giant like Facebook have control over the most commonly used chat app.

WhatsApp needs to go and Signal is the most likely way in which we can achieve that. We can worry about the American elephant in the room later.

Which is entirely optional. You can install nice looking bollards that fit the scene (Noone complains about the bollards in Amsterdam looking ugly) or are integrated into other street furnishings (e.g. flower pots and planters)

So they are just openly arresting political opponents now. America is really spiraling down the drain fast.

Is that an AI image in the article? Could they really not find a stock photo of a street in Paris?

Failed wheat harvest which caused a bread shortage.
Bread was a staple food in 18th century France.

I’m not quite sure if it is similar to the rice shortage in Japan today however. When the French couldn’t eat bread in the 18th century they went hungry, but when the Japanese today can’t buy rice they can just buy a different carb.

Its the difference between barely scraping by on bread, and being inconvenienced by not being able to buy cheap rice.

Somehow I don’t feel easy with Europe buying American gas at this point. Trump could simply shut down the gas supply on a whim just like Putin did in 2022, and then we’d have another energy crisis on our hands.

America is an unreliable trading partner.

Instead we should be doing everything in our power to build down our gas and oil dependencies as fast as possible. And in the meantime we should be very picky about who we buy gas from.

Lobbying is just a group of people representing the interest of that group to their representatives. A gay rights lobby group would also be lobbying the government if they advocate for better rights for LGBT people.

The issue isn’t so much the fact that lobbying is a thing, but rather the methods (read: bribery) that some lobby groups engage in.

I have 24TB on my own server, and another 1TB (split halfway between me and my boyfriend) that comes with a Proton account I pay for.

The 24TB was about € 200 per drive, built out over several years.
3 x 8 TB + 1 x 8 TB for parity makes about € 800 total. The other hardware was leftover computer hardware I had lying around, so in total I think the server cost me about € 1000,-

I pay € 180 / year for Proton for two people, which is € 7,50 per person per month. That includes a mail server, 1 TB cloud storage (500 GB per person), VPN, password manager, etc.

It’s a French initiative, so it makes sense that their share of the vote is outsized compared to the other countries.
The organizers are likely not sitting idle at home.

I’ve been keeping an eye on it off and on over the past year. The sudden speed at which the petition is going has gotten me quite hopeful that we might make the threshold of 1.000.000 signatures.

Yesterday we were averaging about 12.000 signatures per hour.
Currently we seem to be averaging about 20.000 signatures per hour.

It’s getting so much attention that the website appears to be suffering a natural DDOS 🏳️‍🌈

The problem in this case is the Google Play Store, not Android.

Google is blocking Nextcloud from updating their app on the Play Store unless they remove this vital permission. But nothing is stopping Nextcloud from making their app available on third party app stores with the approriate permissions.

If you download the app from F-Droid instead, it should work correctly.

That is not to say that what Google is doing isn’t monopolistic. I’m just pointing out that you can bypass this restriction by not using their app store.

Would be a noble goal to bring obligations closer to something voluntarily taken and not just obedience.

It may be noble, but it is also a bit out of touch with reality.

When you participate in society (even if it is something as simple as buying groceries at the supermarket) then you have to follow the rules of that society that you participate in. We have decided together as a society, democratically, what those rules are.

You can’t then say “I’m not playing by the rules” and expect people to just accept that.

Edit: Fixed a typo