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.

Not for you. And certainly not for the staff working in the shop.

Currently, you’re bartering with copious amounts of copium.

… And if the systems you actually interact with go down, you can get fucked as well.

If you want to buy food with Monero and the payment processor for the local shop doesn’t work, even if it’s a local machine sitting in the back office, you still can’t buy anything.

Bitcoin lightning is absolutely hilarious. Your solution to Bitcoins problems is - not using Bitcoin. Wow, galaxy brain move.

The energy cost to maintain the base chain is <1% of global energy use, mostly from renewables

Yeah, that’s bullshit. First of all, 1% of energy use for a network that serves a few million transactions per day is really bad. A single 1kW node in Visa’s datacenter churns through that in an hour.

Second, it’s not renewables. It’s everything they can get for cheap. And that’s often enough coal, gas, oil. Also, they’re driving up power demand as a whole, which means fossil energy is actually needed longer.

No, that’s my point. Providing the builder factory as an abstract way to construct an entity, it is an abstraction. It removes you from the actual detail, that’s an abstraction. But it also introduces extra complexity, which in turn negates the value of the abstraction.

In reality, the intention is an abstraction, the result is often enough a bad abstraction that introduces more complexity and adds indirection.

To 1), that’s unfortunately not entirely true. The real abstraction criticized is more like introducing a StorableEntity layer that’s provided by a StorableEntityBuilderFactory. So instead of providing a compartment with a stable interface, they introduce a mess of generalizations.

Abstractions should be bulkheads, but in practice they’re often more like one of those beads-on-strings door decorations.

Unfortunately, the current finance minister is really that stupid.

Absolute braindead wannabe neoliberal.

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.

I get the sentiment, though.

Some places define “toxicity” as anything a millimeter away from the party line or any debate at all. And it’s just annoying that someone can abuse their power to silence everything they don’t like.

Communities like this turn into Pleasentville.

Reboots after three days and then disappears in the cloud.

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.

Fake news! We should ask Ukraine for peace talks! Otherwise we might provoke Putin!!

Is there even someone left?

I only tried it around 2008 or so and it was extremely slow paced back then while looking like the interface from a sci-fi movie.

I already do vote and try to convince people around me, but here in Germany, the reality is that most people are old and stubborn (average German is 44, average voter even older) and the propaganda of the last decades worked.

Some still believe in trickle down and neoliberalism, some started believing Russian propaganda and are convinced that only right extremists can rescue us.

But that’s exactly the situation I’ve described above. You see the ship steaming onto the rocks, but ⅓ of the crew thinks, that’s fine since it worked so far, ⅓ denies the rocks even exist and the last ⅓ is convinced that rocks are actually an opportunity for growth.

It’s the lack of perspective. There’s nothing to work or live towards.

I’m in my early thirties and grew up in the last years of the “it’s getting better” time, but nowadays it’s all gone.

The political system in all of the West is ossified and unable to solve any of the real problems. Society is dominated by a gerontocracy. The economy is fucked for almost all participants, except the very few at the very top.

My generation will not have better lives than our parents. And there’s absolutely no hope for it to become better . In fact, it’s likely getting way way worse for most of us.

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.

Maybe because the original post seems awfully arrogant, if you don’t know the context - and the post didn’t provide any context.

I’ve seen a ton of responses like yours. You’re implying that everyone gets the context, if they don’t, you assume everything is “hostile” if it’s not the exact line of thought you happen to support.

Accept that other people live different lives from yours and have different experiences and knowledge.

As a software engineer, this applies to my entire industry as well.

I’m forced to write subpar software, sometimes with atrocious security simply because some idiot set an unrealistic budget.

The worst part is, my current projects are all government funded. The German government implemented processes to prevent corruption, which force unhealthy competition and backhand corruption onto the bidders, which then churn out bad software, which causes gigantic costs down the line, because nothing works. Great job.

Half an Apple a day keeps the IDF away!

You can go and buy sodium batteries already. They’re not competitive with Lithium ion batteries in many mobile applications, but very much competitive for everything where price is more important than size or weight.

Lithium has decades of research and industrial scaling behind it, it’s hard to break into that. But especially sodium is on a pretty good path to replace it in large scale storage applications.