It’s exactly what it is, you build a strawman and then argue against it.

The degree of overreach by a US company, in this instance, is shocking.

Yes, but they do many other types of shenanigans that are against the interest of their users. Like snooping, and lock in attempts, stifling competition and charging high prices for services that cost next to nothing to deliver. Those things are completely apart from the fact that you have zero control with the software, or insight into back doors or other security issues.

We could just as easily see Mossad fucking with a poorly implemented Linux iteration

WTF? Talk about a straw man argument! There’s a reason some of the most demanding and sensitive tasks are completely dominated by Linux. Stock exchanges is is one example of that.

You are absolutely right, and I can understand that for a company IT department, but for public institutions, there are so many factors that speak for using open source software.
Public institutions have requirements of for instance transparency private businesses don’t have.
Here universities have been aware of this for all of those 20+ years, and usually the ones that advice governments come from universities.
But somehow monetary interests comes in between, and lobby their expensive proprietary solutions. And that’s the real problem I think, proprietary vendors have loads of money for lobbying, while open source has almost zero.

The old saying goes, “nobody ever got fired for buying Cisco.”

That would be IBM, and that saying is from way before Cisco was even founded.

That’s been one of the cornerstones of Microsoft propaganda against open source. So it’s not strange that the uninformed are exactly that, uninformed.
It’s worse when the professionals fall for it, and fail to recommend good solutions to politicians.

Do people really still need to be explained why proprietary software is bad?
I have zero understanding of why an organization like ICC would use it? Any court needs to be independent, and using proprietary software clearly compromises that. The same goes for public services. And private enterprises should of course avoid it in their own interest.

Open source proponents have tried to explain this simple fact for more than 20 years. But 90% of people simply don’t care even just a little.

The problem is that he only wants to end it in a way that favors Putin.
This ought to be clear to everybody by now.

If food alone adds £9bn to the UK economy, then what was the cost of Brexit really?
Anyways it’s nice to see the 2 sides having some constructive results, now that the insanity of the conservatives is out for a while.

Pigeon Hole Principle

Thanks I never heard of that, but that seems to perfectly describe the principle.

Obligatory: Fuck Israel and their war crimes.

In my experience yes.

My ex was always rambling about how men were always unfaithful, “oops I slipped and my dick ended up inside her” she used to say, to describe how easily men are unfaithful. She made it absolutely clear she wanted a monogamous relationship.
I was never unfaithful to her, but of course it turned out she was herself unfaithful numerous times, and it was crazy how bad she was at hiding it, almost like she wanted me to break up. So I did, and good riddance!!!
Later when I was moving in with a new girlfriend, and I was collecting some of my things at my ex, she was all dressed up, and all over me, kissing me and trying to win me back. She tried to kiss me on my mouth but I turned my head so it was on the cheek.
My girlfriend was waiting in the car outside, and she saw the lipstick on my cheek when I came back, obviously not too happy about it. But I explained it was all my ex and not me.
Lucky for me she didn’t ditch me, and later my new girlfriend agreed to become my wife, and we’ve been together for 20 years now! 🥰

A friend of mine had just bought a very expensive apartment in Copenhagen together with his girlfriend. The papers were signed and the deal was closed. There are a few days where you can get out of the deal, and in that period my friend was told his girlfriend had been unfaithful. He didn’t believe it at first, but the day after the deadline for getting out of the purchase, his girlfriend broke up!

I’m not saying women are worse than men, but the idea that men are more unfaithful than women is bullshit. There are more men than women in the relevant age groups, so obviously on average women have more sex than men do. That’s simply a statistical necessity.

You are absolutely right, there is so much USA could do to improve society.
But the only thing that really counts for half the population, is to ease taxes on the 1%.
IDK why, but that’s apparently a very popular thing for both average and poor people in USA?

I used to have hope for USA, thinking they always turn in the right direction eventually, but since George W Bush was elected for a 2nd term, that hope has been chipped away. Obama did provide a glimmer of hope, but followed by horrible to mediocre to horrible again, so shortly after Bush. That’s a very bad average, and the tendency has been tracking towards worse for a long time now. Hopefully USA is at the bottom right now, but my hopes for that are near zero.

Probably because total amount of CO2 is what matters

Although that’s true it’s still a BULLSHIT argument.
The a target is better measured as a global average per capita, and then the countries can be compared on how close they are to that average.
That would CLEARLY show that Americans are behaving like pigs regarding CO". While both EU and China are way ahead of USA.
The above graph is worthless and a very misleading representation of reality.

Yea tbh. I’m in agreement as someone from the US.

I’ve been arguing this point for more than 20 years now, but the world is apparently still not serious enough to draw the necessary consequences.

Fuck that graph! Make it per capita, why compare 300 million Americans directly to 1.3 BILLION Chinese?
Same with EU, EU is also way more people than USA, yet we pollute less.
We need CO2 Tariffs on USA NOW!!!

Americans claiming it doesn’t help for them to reduce CO2 because of China are disgusting!
USA abandoning the Paris agreement is disgusting!
The richest country in the world refusing to do their part is disgusting!

Victory for Putin, the whole point was to make Trump step down on the threats of sanctions against Russia, and it worked.
Maybe it’s time we (EU) tell Trump that if he isn’t with us he is against us, just like Bush did to us regarding Iraq, despite what he wanted was for us to support USA based on false intelligence!!

Yes yes, but in their defense Israel is a democracy, and Gaza is inhabited mostly by Muslims. So it’s all good.
/s

Magnetism is always blamed as the factor causing these negative health effects

Better get rid of all loudspeakers then.
Even a stupid lightbulb has a magnetic field that influence you more than a solar flare.

Most of the papers I read on this mention “Schumann resonances”, and sometimes “pineal gland” crystals.

Probably to dupe the gullible and uninformed with technical terms.
These people are probably either con-men or mentally ill.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schumann_resonances

Schumann resonances are the principal background in the part of the electromagnetic spectrum[2] from 3 Hz through 60 Hz

These frequenceies are very close to many other everyday phenomena, occurring in music (loudspeakers) and light-bulbs as previously mentioned.

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/body/23334-pineal-gland

secretes the hormone melatonin. Your pineal gland’s main job is to help control the circadian cycle of sleep and wakefulness by secreting melatonin.

So why is the main function of the gland unaffected? Also there is very little reason to believe these alleged “crystals” would be magnetic.

It consists of small crystals that are less than 20 µm in length

20 µm is very small, and from the above link about Schumann resonance:

These correspond to wavelengths of 38000, 21000, 14000, 11000 and 9000 km.

So the affected parts in the body are in µm but the magnetic waves are in kilometers!. There is NO WAY these 2 can resonate together, simply NADA possibility. There is a factor of 1 billion distance between them being able to resonate!

Clearly you have thought more bout this than I have, which makes sense since you lived there for a decade.
But to the defense of UK, I think very many considered non western countries primitive and uncivilized, so they needed to be treated as such.
Which is of course sick and immoral as hell, but it wasn’t something exclusive to UK. Also UK did give voting rights to women pretty early, only shortly after the Scandinavian countries, and way earlier than USA, which was founded on being a democracy!
But I was thinking mostly about the time after WW2, where as you say they made many improvements. There’s a HUGE difference in the culture of our societies in the west from before and after WW2.

Cambridge Analytica

What a shitshow! But it was British, so the bigger scandal here is probably that they helped Trump win against Hillary. But clearly an example of underhanded upper class controlling the masses.

You make a lot of good points, and I’m reminded that I learned in school that they consider there are 4 classes. UK Royalty, UK upper class and UK lower class and last is all foreigners. This was always a very strange concept to me, and I admit I didn’t really believe it. I thought it was some sort of tongue in cheek saying. This seems to be a lot like American exceptionalism.

If the trend continues the next UK Government will be led by Farage

What? Really? That guy is so stupid and disgusting I can’t fathom how he has even a single follower.

it now seems the post-War period of worker rights and a more egalitarian society was the exception, not the rule

Shit, I hope you are wrong, because that’s one of the things I was counting on to prevent UK from falling too deep.

Wow, you really paint a bleak picture, and I can’t even point to something and say you are wrong! 🙁
Actually I recognize all your points, except I was not aware the antisemitism thing was so bad? Remember it’s not all smear campaigns that actually work.
The first past the post system is really damaging to democracy, and you are right we are seeing that in UK just as much as in USA.
Still UK has a tradition of a more humane society and not as cutthroat brutal as USA, so I think the level of sociopathy in society is lower in UK than in USA.
But unfortunately this has clearly gotten worse in every way over the past decade or two. With increased surveillance, cutting social programs and NHS hard, and increased xenophobia.

The part about antisemitism, was that Jeremy Corbyn? IMO he was very much to blame for Brexit too, and he was himself a brexiteer AFAIK. He was a very poor candidate for Labour IMO.

Anyways I think there is hope for UK, they are traditionally a more social society, but Russian propaganda has really done a lot of harm, and COVID amplified it.
Hopefully the Russian interference will end, and that will make it easier.