shirro

They fought a very bloody civil war to avoid that outcome and the US is a much, much stronger country if they bury their differences and work for a common good. In many ways a split would be a much worse outcome than even what we are seeing at the moment.

Has there ever been a more timid, passive, weak, complacent, idiotic population than the current USA?

From afar I watched them passively accept people dying or losing their homes because they couldn't afford health care. I saw them go off to fight stupid unjustifiable wars overseas with little protest. But it is when I saw them accept their kids dying in mass slaughters in schools with barely any outrage for decades that I realized they had lost their humanity. If you can accept such outrageous things without acting you can and will accept anything.

A large number of them actively cheer their own downfall as a nation, their own impoverishment, their slavery and their stupidity. I wouldn't underestimate the tasking of rebuilding a civilized society there. They might kick the Trumpists out with some effort but the rot goes very, very deep.

I had moved from Slackware to Debian but by 2004 the long release cycles of Debian were making it very hard to use any Debian with current hardware or desktop environments. I was using Sid and dealing with the breakages. Ubuntu promised a reskinned Debian with 6 month release cycles synced to Gnome. Then they over delivered with a live cd and easy installation and it was a deserved phenomenon. I very enthusiastically installed Warty Warthog. Even bought some merch.

When Ubuntu launched it was promoted as a community distro, "humanity towards others" etc despite being privately funded. Naked people holding hands. Lots of very good community outreach etc.

The problem for Ubuntu was it wasn't really a community distro at all. It was Canonical building on the hard work of Debian volunteers. Unlike Redhat, Canonical had a bad case of not invented here projects that never got adopted elsewhere like upstart, unity, mir, snaps and leaving their users with half-arsed experiments that then got dropped. Also Mint exists so you can have the Ubuntu usability enhancements of Debian run by a community like Debian. I guess there is a perception now that Ubuntu is a mid corpo-linux stuck between two great community deb-based systems so from the perspective of others in the Linux community a lot of us don't get why people would use it.

Arch would be just another community distro but for a lot of people they got the formula right. Great documentation, reasonably painless rolling release, and very little deviation from upstream. Debian maintainers have a very nasty habit of adding lots of patches even to gold standard security projects from openbsd . They broke ssh key generation. Then they linked ssh with systemd libs making vulnerable to a state actor via the xz backdoor. Arch maintainers don't do this bullshit.

Everything else is stereotypes. Always feeling like you have to justify using arch, which is a very nice stable, pure linux experience, just because it doesn't have a super friendly installer. Or having to justify Ubuntu which just works for a lot of people despite it not really being all that popular with the rest of the linux community.

Non-murican - strongly feel preference should be given to genuine refugees fleeing war, famine etc where they have absolutely no ability to influence their fate other than escape. The US is a failed democracy but the people there have barely begun to challenge their government compared to what we have seen elsewhere in the world. And there is still refuge available in blue states. US citizens need to stand up and fight. Then if they fail, only then do they get to go in the queue with the genuine humanitarian refugees. I don't like queue jumpers. Sorry but impingement on your civil liberties doesn't compare with families in war torn parts of the world living in fear fear of having their limbs blown off every night.

Ofcourse business around the world would like to cherry pick talent for in demand jobs. They prefer not to invest in developing local people when they can import experienced talent for less. So people with in demand skills will get in that way, not as refugees.

Ranked choice is bare minimum for a democracy these days. Whatever ancient shit the US has doesn't count anymore. Also get rid of the elected tyrant bullshit and upgrade to parliamentary democracy. Then go for mixed-member proportional for extra credit. Also get rid of voting machines and do it all on paper.

I would say the US has an executive with aspirations to implement aspects of a fascist state. As long as millions of people are protesting in the streets, the courts are ruling against the executive on points of law and people are standing their ground it is still a long road for the executive to get where they want to go. If the country really was full fascist you would be totally fucked and being shipped with your family to a concentration camp for disloyalty to great leader right now.

Unlike some other countries where law enforcement and prisons might be state run on principle, the US has a history of privatizing such functions. They had the union busting Pinkerton thugs, for profit prisons and bounty hunters. A society that didn't cry out when the Pinkertons were busting the heads of working people or kids were being railroaded into for profit prison slavery shouldn't be surprised when thugs are clearing the streets of immigrants. That is just America sadly. That nastiness has always been there.

As we dont have the gaps in my country my guess is it a US interpretation of Jeremy Bentham's panopticon as applied to the shitter.

I expect in the USA people, particularly the out groups, are believed to be inherently criminal/immoral and need to be observed to make sure they aren't doing anything undesirable.

As the US public toilet is primarily a place for moral judgement and not elimation of waste you then get the crazies questioning if people's gender and equipment meets moral standards for use of the facilities based on casual assessment of their appearance.

It's just another money/power grab. Tech bros want to spy on your kids to train their mythical AGI God, make shit loads of money and be in a position of influence.

Take away people's economic independence. Take their intellectual capital. Take their capacity to learn and think independently and ultimately their capacity to play and imagine.

The sheep are being led towards a very fucking grim world.

Lets be clear it isn't the tech that is bad. Self hosting a model for a task that suits it like speech recognition for a disabled person is righteous and liberating.

I hate to agree with the Marxists of Lemmy but the problem is very much capitalism as it is with global warming, pollution and a social inequality. Where I will split with them historically is I still believe in liberal democracies capacity to regulate capitalism for a common good. But when everyone has outsourced their thinking to a corporate AI from birth to death democracy is fucked isn't it.

We need to be aware of how we are being fucked over, sceptical of people pushing this shit and engaged politically to make sure it is regulated appropriately otherwise these cashed up AI fuckers are going to write legislation for our politicians to rubber stamp.

Can you imagine tabling this evidence in a civil case against police brutality. It would be a slam dunk if the US police were accountable like in civilised countries. The fact that they can say it out loud is indicative that the US is beyind fucked.

The US has gone from my let's organize an intervention for that fuck up friend list to their fucking poison and will drag the rest of us down with them if we don't keep our distance.

Paying to get access to data and eyeballs. Social media is about mass surveillance and influence. The customers pay the service for access to the stupid people. Always have.

Niri is very promising on a ultrawide. Not so good on a 3:2 laptop. I maintain a config to experiment with it but it's a big commitment to change not just your desktop environment but your whole workflow and then to have different environments on devices with different screen aspect ratios.

Australia is in a very different position to Canada geographically and strategically. Our politics can be almost as different as our climate.

Australia's major party primary vote has been declining for ages. In the most recent Canadian election the opposite happened and the major parties gained votes at the expense of the smaller parties. In Canada both the Libs and Conservatives increased their vote share. Lets repeat that, the Conservatives in Canada, despite existential threats from Trump to annex and bankrupt their country increased their votes while the mainstream conservative party in Australia declined in vote share despite Trump policies having less direct impact here than practically anywhere else. Carney limped home with minority government while Albo thumped the conservatives with a huge majority. We are not the same. Not even close.

In Australia Labor had a relatively modest increase while the Liberals lost a few percent. The Green vote barely changed but independents and smaller populist parties did ok including One Nation which had a modest increase in votes. Nothing like Canada.

I think the consensus from most domestic commentators is that the Liberals in Australia ran a poor campaign, their policies failed to impress swing voters in marginals struggling with cost of living and looking for an alternative and Labor campaigned better than expected.