Replying to
@lina The obvious choice would be Weird Al's 'Amish Paradise'.
Remote
Maho
@maho@social.lol
mastodon 4.7.3+glitchIT guy. Builds things. AI is a tool, not a religion.
Space nerd. Into Mysticism (capital M), Jung, and what’s beneath the surface. Looking for something real. No patience for cheap answers.
Escaping the treadmill. Small business, craftsmanship, ownership. Scale where it works - and nowhere else.
More taxes don’t create value. People pay them eventually. Always.
European, not “EUian.”
No tribes. No sides.
Friend of people. All of them.
9 Followers
56 Following
13 Posts
Joined August 04, 2025
Sexuality / Gender identity:
yes. yours: yes. doesn’t define you. doesn’t define me.
@petebrown@social.lol Your use-case is not everyone's use-case.
- Not everyone is at home all of the time.
- Not everyone wants to open the door for just about anyone (HOA Karen? Nah, she can go away).
- Some people want videos of porch pirates.
- Doorbells are not seen as a social device, but as a risk interface
Now, all of these can be achieved with non-cloud variants, sure. But those take time and effort to install and maintain. People do not set up 'global surveillance apparatuses', they opt for convenience.
Replying to
@Rhube
Also ... log the hours you actually work. Meticulously. Just in case someone gets creative when it comes to the '16 hours' rule, and, should your disability persist, ask them to assess you once per year so you get a paper trail of 'yes, we believe @Rhube is working less than 16h/week' and to get better averages."
So so ... #wirverlassenx ... ist es mal wieder so weit?
Diesmal aber wirklich? 🤭
After today, the #NobelCommittee must, if it wants any shred of dignity back, decide: Politicians with active career or ambitions are not eligible to receive the #nobelpeaceprize
Also: If you are nominated by #MarcoRubio, that should be an IMMEDIATE no.
@petebrown@social.lol I'm not saying it is impossible ... but a reliable security-conscious, user-friendly doorbell/CCTV solution is about one to two orders of magnitude more complex than a few text-based tools. For starters, you need to provide hardware (Grandma Smith ain't soldering her own raspi-based cam together)...
@zkat@toot.cat The major problem with 'noncommercial licenses' ist that it is easy to tthrow the baby out with the bathwater.
To construct an example: Imagine there is a mail client with such a non-commercial 'Community Software' license.
Can I receive an email with it conceerning my (commercial) sticker business?
Can I write a newsletter for said business with it?
Can I change the code to make Newsletter usage easier?
Can I write a plugin for said software, and ask for donations for a licensee for that plugin?
What if the donation is quasi-mandatory?
What if I change the software itself, for a very particular use-case, for one very particular user, and get paid for that, either as a consultant, or an employee?
What if I slap a new logo on it and sell it as 'my own'?
Clearly there is a line in there somewhere. If a 'Community license' should ever take of, that line needs to be defined, otherwise there is absolute chaos.
The beauty of OSS is: There is a very clear, very simple line: Distribute your own source code with the compiled program. That's unambiguous.
Replying to
@cy @BrianJopek@mastodon.world @oldguycrusty@mastodon.world
That's just democracy at work. If your populance is so impressionable that you can sway their opinion with a few million dollars worth of campaign budget, you have bigger problems than billionaires that start with education.
Switzerland manages to do just fine, with billionaires present.
But then, of course, Switzerland has a culture that encourages meaningful higher education and social cohesion over Jersey Shore and hyperindividualism.
Turns out if voters understands itself as citizens, instead of spectators in an interactive movie, they think before they vote. It's no coincidence the US voted not one, but two actors to become president, every single (elected) president since Kennedy was voted in based on better playacting on the campaign trail, and politicians all around the western world spend more on clothes and style consultants than on increasing their knowledge of a topic (again: exception being Switzerland).
Replying to
@cy
You are making a classical determinism mistake. Cultures are not soap bubbles that suddenly bursts when someone thinks 'money can be made'. Switzerland *is* an attractive target since at least 1875, and somehow, it did not become a chattel slave breeding ground.
Instead, they are the only actual state-level democracy in the world and their federalism remained. Why? Because all that was poured into institutions.
Switzerland does banking, but these days because they are stable and reliable, not because of the reasons you imply. In fact, 2025s Switzerland has probably more transparent banking than any other European country.
"Why would they disrupt?" Who are "they"? The Capital™ ? The US? A secret cabale of slavehunters?
How many slaves have they collected in the US?
Also, I'm not Swiss. But I'd like to be. They do a lot of things right
Replying to
@cy
I don’t deny power abuse, propaganda, or crimes by elites.
What I reject is the claim that everything is already lost, everyone is enslaved, and analysis is pointless.
The moment you say outcomes are predetermined, everything is rigged and dissent is just “proof of manipulation”, you’ve left politics and entered eschantologic theology.
I’m interested in systems that can still be influenced, not myths that excuse total resignation.
If you see no agency left anywhere, then this conversation can’t continue in good faith.
Replying to
@cy
When I said there was an education problem, that was not the standard 'educate yourself' moralism; I was stating a structural prerequisite of democracy: voters must know things.
If you let fools and ignoramuses decide on national policy, do not be surprised when the results are a circus.
If you want a more stable society, you need to give education a higher value than the US does right now. It's not victim blaming, it's pointing towards the exit of a bad situation.
I disagree with your dichotomy of billionaires and victims - billionaires can be the result of certain systems - but we see just as many billionaires who rose in environments that were not as permissive as the US.
In fact, in billionaires per capita, the US does not even rank under the top 10 (they are place 11... behind capitalist hellholes like ... Sweden and Switzerland).
What you describe as “billionaire behaviour” therefore appears less like an inevitable consequence of wealth itself and far more like a pathology of specific US institutional, political, and cultural conditions.
By switching from systems over to billionaires, you make a structural problem a person problem, we've done that before, and much suffering was caused by that. Every revolution eventually comes to eat its children, when billionaire blood runs dry, and the guillotine thirsts for blood, new enemies will be found, and usually it's the useful idiots who cheered on the revolution's infancy.
Your last sentence concerns me most.
Decoupling individual behaviour from moral responsibility is incompatible with liberal democracy.
That logic is not emancipatory. It is classist - and depending on ideological framing, historically indistinguishable from racist or revolutionary marking systems that have reliably culminated in either societal collapse (as in the French Revolution), autocracy (as in the Third Reich or Soviet Russia), or both (as in the Khmer Rouge).
Replying to
I didn't let people be uneducated.
So, what did you, personally, do to raise education levels? Remember: it takes a village to raise a child.
And what makes you think Swedish and Swiss billionaires aren't using the US as their playground, to keep their home town clueless of their actions?
That's an extraordinary claim, and it deserves extraordinary evidence. You making the claim and then, in the very next sentence, admitting that you made it up does not inspire confidence.
Liberalism is compatible with fascism
Oh boy. Well, have a nice day.