You still have spending wars. Politicians are bought and sold every day, and any large company probably donates to politicians of multiple parties.

I don’t see the problem originating from Congress necessarily being polarized. I think the problem is that corporate and big money interests are too strong, and they fund politicians that will try to divide the people on social issues so that they can distract the people from badness happening on the economic front. In other words, I think we’re seeing a problem with corruption that’s expressing itself as polarization.

Even the term “polarization” can also be used as a trap, because it tends to be used in a way that frames politics as a linear spectrum, and your views are somewhere between these two end points. In reality everything is far more complicated. People have highly nuanced views on many different subjects with good reason, and there’s no way you can easily capture it on one single sliding scale.

What are you talking about.

Nothing. Discovered mine long before.

I know. And many of the comments are coming from the US, so I’m trying to help American readers see what US law would dictate in a similar situation, because they might have instincts that are inconsistent with US law.

In the US, the 4th Amendment says that’s unconstitutional. Fortunately. Too many dirty pigs out there.

In the US, the cops need RAS to handcuff you. The standard was never and is not “until they know what’s going on”. And RAS depends on the current cop knowledge. Even if they had legal grounds to break into your place, what they see in the next ten seconds is still relevant. For example, if someone said you attacked them with a knife, when the cops see no victim, knife, or blood, their legal authority ceases.

Of course it’s all highly dependent on specific details.

(On traffic stops, often they already have RAS. That’s why they pulled you over. So don’t be fooled by other comments about that topic.)

In the US, property records are public records. Easy to find someone’s address online if you know their full name and the county they own property in.

Go try it!

The legal standard in the U.S. is if there’s exigent circumstances. Detailed 911 calls are typically sufficient to meet that standard. Not always.

Right now, we cannot tell if the officers did anything unlawful. Need the call recording or call logs, plus the body cameras.

(I think the exigent circumstances standard is BS, easily abused, but that is the current law of the land.)

It’s not a question of what’s the better option. In reality we have a lot of software that already exists and works, and you can’t replace it all in bulk at the same time. So the question is whether the implementation of Rust makes logistical sense, given the difficulties of maintaining currently existing software while replacing some parts of it.

No seeds no stems no stress my guy. The Internet is a great place for complaining. Readers can downvote and move on, everyone gets what they want.

It would not embarrass the government. They’re lying and they know it. People who let the Nazis into Canada have long since retired or died. But their children and grandchildren are still around, as are the new generation of racists. It’s these latter groups that dislike any kind of transparency and justice. Embarrassment has nothing to do with it.

You’re even more cute, my friend.

My company will let me purchase software, but it won’t let me donate to FOSS. Budgeting says it’s “unnecessary”. So screwed up. (A tiny amount money on my end, but still, it would be nice to help out a little.)

This one is very obvious. It’s not specific to the tech world. Companies know that changing jobs is stressful, that there’s value in remaining where you are, and quite obviously many people are willing to accept smaller raises so that they don’t have to go out and apply. For most jobs in the world, you can’t work remotely, and renting a different place or selling and buying property is time consuming, stressful, and expensive. In other words, this is common sense economic reasoning.

One side point is that if you can work mostly or entirely from home, that gets rid of some of the pressure to stay where you are, which in turn should create more mobility, which in turn should create more pay raises for employees who stay. But work from home is relatively the recent phenomenon, so old company pay scales are unlikely to properly account for it.

Another point, that the author completely overlooks, is that some people don’t contribute as much as the author thinks they contribute. If they know that, of course they don’t want to move to a place that does contribution-based pay. They could get hired on somewhere during a probational period of some kind, and their new bosses might think they’re not good enough, and now they are out two jobs. Of course the turnover on their second job makes their resume look weaker, so they’ll have more trouble finding a decent third job.

None of what I wrote is new information. It seems like the author of the article did that standard thing in tech circles. They decided to reinvent the wheel and write about it, and try to make it exciting when it’s not. Good for them for examining the problem, but they should be slightly embarrassed for publishing before doing basic research to see if someone had already addressed the question at hand.

It’s curious that you claim privacy and anonymity are clearly differentiable but didn’t bother to define either of them. Is your claim accurate? We have no idea, because we don’t know what you’re talking about.

George Orwell, Philip K. Dick, and Corey Doctorow already covered the basics, and two of those authors did so decades ago. Why are you asking this question now? What is it that you want to hear that they didn’t already say? Or are you asking us whether we’ve read those authors?

You’re the one who brought in a personal political view, and basic history realize your claim, which is why you didn’t actually cite any.

I mean, what’s a good example of cancer culture? If some white guy says something horribly racist, and then he loses an election, he complains about cancel culture. But that’s a good thing, because we don’t want racist bastards in office. Of course he doesn’t see it that way. So he looks for some new term to describe the phenomenon, some way to make himself a victim.

The term itself was created by right wing people who decided to deploy it against those they didn’t favor, as an excuse to justify their own bigotry, but the idea of public shaming and goes back centuries if not millennia. Quite naturally, the establishment has a strong interest in public shaming if it will keep them around longer.

It’s not “all of a sudden”. And it’s not “the world”. And it’s not even “America”. Rather, you’re now consuming media that’s exposing you to thoughts that have always been around, often on the fringes.

Remember, bigots have always existed, and polite bigots toe the line as much as they’re forced to. They aren’t going to disappear, ever. (That being said, we can make them less relevant and powerful.)

If you really are so hopeless with computers that you can’t figure out a modern popular Linux distribution, then you should not build your own computer, because that’s much more complicated.

Who is “we”, my friend? This all depends on your research and expectations. IMO Linux works great, but you should consider it before you buy a machine. Make sure your graphics card and other hardware is going to work. When in doubt, buy from a reliable shop that preinstalls Linux for you.

I find that the default settings and programs of Debian (or whatever major distro) do 95% of what I expect and want, and maybe 5% involve some customization. In other words, it’s much simpler than getting Windows or Apple and then purchasing or downloading all the extra programs. But this depends on what you wanna do.