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Welcome to the Netherlands. If there’s anything that fills me with pride it’s our cycling culture. Most people have a car too, but I don’t, and I do everything by bike and public transport.

What about the online food ordering market. I reckon that might be an easier first step than consumer products. Here in the Netherlands JustEatTakeaway has a market share of around 90% and requires restaurants to give them a 14% provision. Restaurants don’t have much of a choice, if they’re not on there they miss out on a huge part of the market, it’s like they don’t exist. Why don’t restaurants unite and develop a FOSS protocol that let’s them federate, so the consumer has a central place to browse the food delivery market, but simultaneously makes the providers independant because they can run their own instance if they please. Have these types of ideas been pitched to branche organizations? Restaurants have a clear interest to develop this to free themselves from the platforms with a monopolistic venture-capital-driven strategy.

People with a burn out

That’s an unfair representation.

Money isn’t simply given to Elon every day…

Other people work hard for his money!

TIL: Abdullah Gül

Though I find the predecesor before Gül even more interesting: Ahmet Necdet Sezer. Apparently he was the last secular president of Turkey. “During receptions at the presidential palace, Sezer refused to allow women wearing the headscarf to attend citing the laws on the separation of religion and state at the time; this resulted in the wives of Abdullah Gül and Erdoğan, Hayrünnisa Gül and Emine Erdoğan respectively, being barred from attendance. Erdoğan later said in public that he had ‘suffered a lot’ from Sezer.[3]” So he refused the wives of who would be his successors.

“During the 2014 presidential election, won by Erdoğan, Sezer openly refused to vote, citing the lack of a secularist candidate as his reason” Turkey has a strong secularist tradition and I really hope it returns sometime. Atatürk is still being celebrated, but do people still believe in his secular ideals?

Yes, even when people copy eachother they don’t have the same output. And some individuals are mighty excentric, for instance Picasso. But most people stick almost entirely to what they see and only differentiate by means of the mistakes they make, not by intended originality. From the moment people are born they start copying everything they see. With a head full of mirror neurons we tend to live our lifes exactly the same, and the differences only stand out because they’re relative. From a distance we would all look, behave, be more or less the same. Copyright should be abolished. I’m all in favor of supporting artists and creators, support whoever you will out of free will, but don’t limit others freedom to copy you. If we can’t copy what others have done before us, then our culture is not free. It should be an honor to be copied, that means others like your idea and want to use it too. That’s how humans have always lived, that’s how we progress. it’s what has brought us this far. Let’s continue without bizarre copying limitations. If we can copy freely that means culture is free, it means we can learn from eachother, take eachothers ideas and creations, put them to use and expand upon them, sometimes inadvertently while trying to make an exact copy. This freedom will be to the benefit of us all, and the opposite is true aswel, intelectual property is to the detriment of us all.

If you don’t want your work to be used by others, keep it private. Don’t show it to anyone. Keep your invention in your cellar and let nobody enter. If you want to share your ideas and creations, please do so. But you can’t have your cake and eat it too. You can’t show what you’ve made and expect others to not use it as input and put it to use.

unpopular opinion: humans are a deeply mimetic species, copying is our very essence and every limitation to it is entirely unnatural and limiting human potential.

When Bush jr. was president, we were a funny joke.

I strongly object to this sentiment. The world has far from recovered from the damage that this man and his regime have done to it, and if the west had any crediblity left in the world then it was certainly gone after his ‘‘war on terrorism’’. My point is: war-criminals aren’t funny.

This is being presented as a sort of cover-up, but the fact of the matter is that most protests never get much attention unless they are extraordinary in scale or in regards to any violence, or anything else. There will always be some protests, so that begs the question, is this always newsworthy? Trump is inaugurated and quite some people don’t like this… well aint that surprising? No. I don’t think it’s a cover up, I think it’s deemed rather irrelevant, obvious, nothing out of the ordinary. Had the protests been more massive in scale perhaps that would be different though. Or had people stormed the capitol,. ouch…

What about the least essential?

1. Tax consultants - helping companies avoid contributing to society
2. Marketeers - manipulating people into buying worse products for higher prices
3. Middle management - causing a lot of fuzz while doing nothing of significance.

Just to name a few. An artists contribution may be abstract but it’s certainly there. There are others that actively sabotage society and very often they make a lot of money.

he means ‘is showing virtue’. And he’s right.

Some info, that’s interesting and helps balance this blatant advertisement. Tony’s was started by Dutch television maker Teun van der Keuken. He worked on a program that exposes products for their production methods and false marketing and so on. They stumbled onto the slavery that’s part of the cacao industry. He asked to be arrested for eating chocolate, and in doing so enabling slave labor, but he wasn’t. He started out Tony’s Chocolonely to attempt to change the chocolate industry. He’s not part of the company anymore. He has concluded the mission has failed, and is very critical of his former company, saying they’ve lost sight of the aim: slave-free chocolate.