We need cars because our society has decided for us that they should be incentivized. Public transport is a mess (and not very affordable) and many railways in western Europe have been decommissioned. We could have modern society without cars, or at least without everyone needing to have one.

Most emissions is not due to a person’s activity but to industry. The scale of waste is unprecedented: just consider for a second the environmental impact of surveillance capitalism: of all these Google/Facebook/NSA servers running exactly ZERO useful services for users/society, of all the CCTV cameras and other control mechanisms deployed in the streets. Add to this mix:

• that most companies/jobs are utterly useless or destructive
• that planned obsolescence across industries means even when we produce too much we’ll keep on wasting

And you start to have a basic explanation of what’s fucked up about capitalism destroying our planet.

Yes which is precisely why Lenin and Trotsky as soon as they ceased power made sure to disempower the soviets and nationalize (under control of the central State run by them) all production. This is for example what happened in Kronstadt, as recalled by Emma Goldman: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-trotsky-protests-too-much

From a legal perspective as a tenant, you can do any non-destructive modifications as long as you can revert them later on. Your landlord might be pretty mad about it though so if there’s a proper venue to request a decent sink, maybe try that first? (using registered letters, never use normal letters or phone for important interactions with your landlord is my personal advice)

You could setup your own ventilation for cheap if you have a window. But from a legal perspective the owner is supposed to do it: to my knowledge in the norms no shower is allowed unless you have ventilation. Depending on your existing relationships with the owners and how conflictual you’d like it to be, it may be as simple as asking politely… or you may take information from a tenant’s union and threaten with lawsuits.

EDIT: Yes humidity is a big problem for mold, and breathing problems!

Merry struggles to you too! :)

Thanks for sharing! Can’t wait for an ActivityPub app to share metadata of your favorite songs/movies.

Sure, that’s why we have distro packages to ensure we don’t end up with malware, and why modern build systems like guix/nix ensure bit-for-bit reproducibility. This goes to great lengths to prevent 99.99% of malware from reaching end-users.

Just don’t execute random programs from the Internet (yes, that includes JS programs in your browser) if you want security. Although to be fair i don’t think it should be an individual responsibility of the user, but rather a collective responsibility to make other venues more practical.

Collecting data effectively means having to make deals with each server operator on case by case basis, and governments can only coerce servers that happen to be in their jurisdiction.

Federated public content in fact makes it easier to gather this data. It enables for many more entrypoints to the data stream. Of course federated content doesn’t have to be public (eg. XMPP) but so far that’s the direction most ActivityPub apps have taken.

My personal advice if you can afford the space would be to setup a proper kitchen sink. If you’re not familiar with plumbing, maybe some comrades and neighbors can help you out. Otherwise, setting up a sink is rather trivial and you can find plenty of videos to help you out: “flexible” (french name sorry don’t know the english name) for water input and PVC for water output requires little tooling. A sink and a tap are rather common to find for free on the streets, or can be bought second hand for 5-10€ a piece. Overall if you need to buy everything new you can do it for ~100€ (which is quite a budget but for such accommodation is not a luxury), but some stuff can fit under your coat at your construction shop and when i need to setup a sink for some less-skilled neighbors it usually costs me under 10€.

PS: If you know some people with plumbing skills, it can be the occasion for them to teach you a few things. If they can spare two hours to help you out understand what you’re doing, don’t hesitate to be the person holding the tools throughout the entire process.

I see kernel panics are still a rampant issue! :)

I’m glad people are working on haiku. Having a low-resource graphical desktop with instant interaction is really something from another world. I remember when i had almost similar experiences with GNU/Linux desktop over a decade ago…

Depending on your “brand” of communism, it may more be whether resources (not power) is in the hands of the few or the many. I mean, dictatorship of the proletariat is the opposite of power in the hands of the many. (But if you ask me, dictatorship of any kind - proletariat or not - has nothing to do with communism)

Left means collective property over resources (communism) which means everyone gets access according to their needs. Right means private property (capitalism) in which access to resources is defined by your wealth.

Conservative usually means authoritarian (another axis) in which some people can decide how others can live. Whether it’s via majority voting or dictated by a minority is irrelevant: anarchism (on the other side of that axis) accounts for protecting minorities as the key principle is that the lowest decision level (eg. the commune) is the one that counts.

“Liberal” can mean several things depending on the cultural/political context. Historically, it referred to a political school of freedom as opposed to centralized authority (an ancestor to anarchism). Nowadays, it can refer to the less-conservative positions (in the anglosaxon world, as opposed to conservative) or to capitalism (eg. in the latin world). From an anarchist perspective, “liberal” or “social-democrat” refers to very limited/narrow policy goals (reforms that do not attack the status quo of Nation States and private property) as opposed to revolutionary perspectives.

The political compass posted elsewhere in this thread is very informative, although more axis should be considered if you want a profound reviews of political positions. It’s interesting to note that in many cases, people whose ideas would fit in the lower-left quadrant (anarcho-communism) end up voting for politicians who overwhelmingly represent the top-right and bottom-right quadrants.

Thanks for sharing! I both love and hate the direction GNOME/GTK is going. On the one hand it becomes harder to customize and i don’t agree with some technical decisions, on the other hand it makes for a very practical integrated platform. I only wish we could have the best of both worlds :)

Quality of life there declined significantly after USSR fell.

I’m not saying otherwise. Just like in the Global North quality of life also significantly declined at the same period due to applying the same kind of neoliberal policies (though arguably in a less severe manner than was done in ex-USSR countries).

But you should probably realize that propaganda about philantropic foreign investment is a recurring trope of colonization. France famously prides itself on developing public school and roads/railways in all its former colonies as part of its “civilizing mission”. I’m not saying China has such a bad record as France in Africa (dozens of millions of deaths and countless suffering), but they don’t exactly have a good track record in other regions and i don’t see any convincing argument emerging that Chinese neo-colonialism (eg. privatization of key infrastructure and resources by foreign companies) is any better than Western neo-colonialism.

Yes but why would you want to avoid bots? Most websites don’t need registration at all. If you really do, maybe consider an invite system along a way to manually request an account? Personally, i’m more interested in how to federate small hosts (eg. tilde servers) rather than create/deploy hundreds of services each with their own registration process.

Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t. We’ll probably never know and i’m ok with that. I’m personally more interested in the political response to Covid (the shock doctrine) rather than the cause.

I think something important to point out is that the old web was declarative: we standardized HTML elements (like <form>) so that different browsers and spiders could interoperate. The powers this provided are being eroded by the move to the web as an app distribution platform (whether it’s JS or wasm).

We need protocol-first design so that more solutions can interoperate. ActivityPub, Webmention/Microformats or Matrix, although i have some technical criticism of these protocols, are really a breathe of fresh air in this direction.

At the moment, I am struggling with nearly every aspect of my “computer life”. (…) have not yet decided to let the robots have their way with my website.

Why? What’s wrong with robots? Also, how do you block “robots” without blocking legit users?

For context, Thales is part of the French military industrial complex.

I’m sorry your wife has poor taste, but in the end she fucks who the fuck she wants to. If you’re not happy with that, find another partner.