Why can’t people just be normal. I am being my normal self, but other people seem different. Bastard freaks.

That’s why a universal basic income is a good idea. I’ve also always been very interested in anarchism. I think what it does well is that it gets people to do exactly what they think is right, it creates a society where people are motivated by their inner workings not by external power structures, and it makes sense to think there’s some untapped potential there. But I also tend to think Anarchism might be a bit naive, or far from where we are as a society right now. But UBI seems more realistic and might get us a bit further down this path than we are now. People could still work for a loan, full time or part time or whatever they want, but it becomes more realistic for people to choose to do voluntary work.

Exactly, that’s why we need to convince governments to pay for FOSS.

True, but Mr. Rogers would probably know how to do it properly so that you’d be at ease.

Isn’t it amazing that ‘not lying to children’ somehow seems kinda radical?

School shootings kill some, but smartphones destroy entire generations.

sure, it’s nice to do something about loneliness. Makes me think of human libraries, where you can borrow a human to have a talk with. But please, let’s do these things voluntarily and not for profit. There’s something nasty about “I’m only willing to speak to you if you pay me”.

I wish this was our problem. Of course, there should be no shame in living with your parents. But it should be out of free will, and here in the Netherlands sadly that isn’t the case for many. Our housing market simply doesn’t offer affordable housing options. For many young people the only option is a rental apartment that will cost you so much, that if you can afford it at all, you can forget about ever saving any money. Which means that you’ll effectively be stuck in this situation forever. Which is an option to consider, but meanwhile those who can afford to buy a house, because of rich parents or whatnot, they have a far better deal, often even paying less on a monthly basis, while at the same time their house increases in value. It’s a major dividing factor in our society, separating the rich from the poor. Of course staying home is another realistic option to consider, and more and more people make this choice, but only for lack of a better option. The real tragedy is of course when staying at home is also not a realistic option. A fucked-up housing market makes the vulnerable all the more vulnerable.

LibreOffice is forked long ago from the extremely corporate OpenOffice effort, which in turn originated from the non-open-source Star Office. Not all FOSS comes from enthusiasts.

That’s a fair point. I would also be very much in favor of governments subsidizing certain FOSS projects. There’s a lot of work to be done, and people certainly deserve to be paid for it too.

FOSS software will win eventually. It may take time, but if good FOSS software is being built by enthusiasts then a time will come where proprietary software fucks up. And when it does, FOSS is ready to take it’s place. And as soon as FOSS has become a standard in some field, why would there ever be a need to go back to proprietary?

Here in the Netherlands our house of representatives has 150 seats and they’re filled by 15 parties, the biggest of whom has 37 seats, the second 25. People sometimes suggest that political fragmentation makes things more complicated, because usually at least 3 or 4 parties are needed to form a coalition. I don’t really think it matters because I look at it this way: there are different views on things in society and compromises need to be found one way or another, it’s where this takes place that’s different. In one case it’s on the conference of 1 or 2 big parties, in the other case it happens in parlement/government where the many small parties meet. The benefit of a many-party system is that people actually got a choice, if you’re on the left and don’t like what a particular party is doing, you can pick another leftwing party. You don’t have that option in a 2-party system, you’ll probably stick with your party despite everything you don’t like about it. Here, if a party really fucks up, they’re done for, a party can get 20% one election and 1% the next one. The system is more dynamic. At the same time, the actual governments usually have an overlap, like there will be different coalitions, but our center-right party has been in the coalition for over a decade now. There may be a certain charm to knowing that every other election a completely new set of people forms the government, but that also has many downsides I think. There’ll be little continuity, republicans undo everything democrats have done and in 4 years we’ll see the reverse. Haven’t heard any really convincing arguments against political fragmentations. It’s just the path towards it that may be difficult if you’re in a 2 party system, because as soon as you go third party, you’re hurting your side of the spectrum. What would be helpfull is if it would happen on both sides simultaneously. Can’t you setup a structure where people from both sides would together commit to voting third-party?

Sure, YOU voted dems anyway, but not everyone did. And it’s those others that didn’t that you need to consider if you want to win elections. Is it that they didn’t vote Kamala because she is female and belongs to a minority? Honestly it’s not unlikely that that is the case. Obviously it shouldn’t matter, but it still seems like it does.

A very particular type of prison too

Yes you name important reasons, also there’s migration both legal and illegal. Legal migration also from within Europe, for example there are quite a lot of Polish homeless people here. Often they came here to work, but they lost their job and the housing that was part of the job, and they stick around for a while, thinking to turn things round, but things get worse when they start drinking. Often their best chance is to go back to Poland, because there they have social security rights, which they don’t have here. But they feel shame to go back and face their defeat. It’s heartbreaking sometmes, not very proud of how my country treats foreign workers…

There are some schizophrenic homeless people, but even more people with bad tempers, anti social personality traits, that get themselves into fights all the time. I often need to remind myself and others, that it’s those people that often need help the most. Some people only want to help those that are very sympathetic, and greatfull. But those will make it any way, everyone is willing to help them. It’s the ones with the bad tempers and the short fuses that need your help most, because most people are unwilling to look beyond it.

Money can’t buy you happiness. But stress due to lack of money destroys people. Working as a volunteer at a homeless shelter has taught me that atleast here in the Netherlands quite some of them stay homeless not because there are no options to get of the street, but because with these options comes all the stress of having to pay the bills. That goes to show how rough it must be to live with financial stress, because living on the street itself is terribly rough, and still some prefer it.

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?