I’d appreciate it if everyone could just stop burning fossil fuels, please. Thank you for your cooperation.

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Joined 3 年前
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Cake day: 2023年11月3日

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  • In the old days we had large numbers of people believing that being online meant using AOL, Compuserve, or whatever walled-garden type of “portal” they were lured into using. But we could mostly rely on tech-aware people like computer programmers to know better. Not any more. Today it’s a more diverse group that knows better, but a less cohesive and politically influential one, and it makes up a much smaller fraction of net users.







  • They’re directly lobbying the government on a massive scale. They’re looking for every opportunity to force their software on people buying any computer, like they always have. They’re looking for every technical trick to screw the competition, and to extract more from their customers. Where it’s possible (i.e. not LibreOffice) they’re buying up any company that does threaten to successfully compete with them. They bought half the video game industry for example. They’re buying their way into all the schools so kids grow up knowing nothing but the Microsoft life.

    I mean what else would they do? It’s Microsoft.


  • In principle, it’s a bad idea to route so many of everyone’s web requests through one central provider. It gives them too much power to track everything. It’s not how the web was meant to work.

    In practice, the techniques they use to try and keep out the bots also keep out people like me who like to make our web browsers slightly more secure by disabling parts of the vast and overly-complicated set of features implemented in javascript, such as those that are normally only used for browser fingerprinting. Over time it’s become increasingly difficult to figure out all the things I’d need to do to have my usual browser pass all their tests, and in this era of plentiful browser 0-days I’m more reluctant than ever to spend any time trying.


  • Tax the rich. Start rebuilding the public wealth that has been sold off over the past 40 years. Reinvent capitalism along more sustainable lines where it’s possible, build alternatives to it where it isn’t. Or maybe just let things roll along the path of least resistance for a few more years and then watch it all crash and burn.

    By saying that even a relatively modest goal such as an NDP government “will never happen” you’re casting a vote for the latter.



  • Rabble dot ca got cloudflared so I can’t see the article, but who needs democracy when you’ve got a strong leader, tough on crime, who can really get things done, forcefully confront our problems, thrust forward with nation-building projects like helping the world burn even more fossil fuels, and boldly invest in the future by buying expensive military hardware from all over the world. Listening to parliament — let alone listening to civil liberties nuts and environmentalist weirdos who don’t have the financial clout it takes to make a difference in the new Canada — would only slow them down.