They could set up an account on one of the larger well established Canadian instances or even better start up their own.

Both of these options have their pros and cons, and I think it is important to explain these well to the council if you want to have any hope of convincing them.

A line of argument that has had some success in Europe is what has become known as “Digital Sovereignty”, basically a fancy term for saying government should control its own infrastructure. So you might want to sell it as an easy way to have a permanent archive of public communication and a method for it that is under their direct control, rather than as a way to find more engagement.

As others have said self hosting has a maintenance and moderation overhead, but this can be lessened by running an instance together with other cities while still retaining most of the benefits of self hosting.

Seeing from the linked cross-post that this is about Port Alberni, and considering that http://portalberni.ca/ returns an empty reply while https://portalberni.ca/ lets me know I have been geoblocked because I’m outside of Canada and the US, I’d say you have an uphill battle before you though. These people made a website (probably paid for it, too), and then killed much of its use by geoblocking most of the world.

Good luck.

I don’t know if there is any single takeaway here, this story is just fucking ridiculous on every single level.

1. They bullshited themselves into a search warrant based on typical cannabis “investigation methods”.
2. In a state where recreational cannabis use is legal.
3. Persisted in the search even after their main argument for it, high energy usage indicating a grow-op, fell away when it was clear it was indeed a medical facility.
4. Made the motherfucking “Gun flies to MRI” TV trope a certified reality. This is a thing that verifiably happened now.
5. Instead of getting help, used a sealed (!) emergency shutdown button…
6. …which damaged the machine. And released thousands of dollars worth of helium gas.
7. Forgot their loaded magazine on the ground.

This can’t be real. I’m fucking dying over here. Please let there be bodycam footage of the cop speaking in a high pitched voice after. (I know the helium was probably not released into the room, but one can hope I guess)

That image choice though.

AI makes ethical hackers 40% more effective, twice as productive, EC-Council claims

*image of a man facepalming*

I see what you did there Ernestas.

You thought it was AI, but she just has ulnar polydactyly. How do I know this is ulnar instead of radial or central polydactyly? The wedding ring, it’s on the ring finger.

(/s of course, this is obviously AI. But yeah people with extra fingers do in fact exist. They or the parents often cut away the extra finger for cosmetic reasons.)

I’ll have you know that this is famous sci-fi author Charles David George Stross posting an excerpt from his seminal novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus. The warning is right in the title, I’m sure nobody will be dumb enough to ignore it!

[…] a public institution is really not a great example of the general population […]

Which I touched upon in my disclaimer, but in some ways it is a great example. Public institutions are defined by the general population, indirectly through their representatives creating the rules that govern them, and directly through contact with the public at large. Now if all our institutions still use this very outdated technology, and you can have trouble convincing them - during a global pandemic mind you - that using email is just as safe as using fax (so not safe at all basically), then that speaks to a larger mindset in the general population.

Many in the general public are also a lot quicker, some might even say careless, with adopting new technology of course. But as a society we are rather slow, and there are surprisingly many individuals who are hesitant or entirely resistant to adopting new technology. The fediverse usage is a bubble in a bubble here.

The internet infrastructure is another good example for this on the societal level, as there were plans in the 1980ies [!] to lay out a glass fibre network between every publicly used building in the country, which would have gotten us a good part of the way towards adopting this new material at scale. But in the end it was deemed unnecessary and too expensive and the project got canned (mixed in with rumours of “close friendship” between the chancellor and a major copper producer). Instead now we have people running around thirty years later and collecting signatures at the door for last-mile fibre network projects that seldom make quorum and thus almost never materialise public funding.

2. […] But also how are Germans technologically behind regarding common personal life?

I bet you wherever in Germany you are, if you go to the website of your local city government right now they will have a still active fax number in their contact information. I guarantee it. Well if they have a website that is.

Which is a bit silly as an example but highlights the central problem, which is that adoption of new technology happens at a glacial pace, especially in public institutions. There are many reasons for that of course, some good, like the aforementioned inclination towards privacy, some bad like whatever allows fax machines to still be around.

And don’t get me started on internet infrastructure… In an international comparison we certainly aren’t leading the field regarding adoption of new technologies.

Depends on the kind of colour blindness you have I guess. I think I have the congenital red-green blindness common among men, and saturate Just Works™ for me. Plus I don’t have to fiddle with setting a rotation degree there.

PSA for my fellow colour blind people, you can use inspect element option of your browser to add a filter: saturate(100); rule to the element for this kind of image:

I don’t think capitalism is necessarily at fault, nor must the working/middle classes be struggling for fascism to emerge. If anything, quite the opposite. It is the better off countries that end up turning fascist. All fascist countries are/were first world countries, in various states of advanced development.

That’s not right, at least not for the fascist regimes in Europe that emerged prior to WW2. The countries where it happened (specifically Germany/Italy/Spain) had all seen civil unrest or even civil war in the recent past, they were hit hard by the global financial crisis in the twenties and had high unemployment and widespread poverty. This was the very thing the fascists used to ingratiate themselves to the public at large, by creating jobs through massive public building and rearmament projects.

By the way “first world countries” is post-WW2 terminology and didn’t originally have a connotation of superior economic status, but was referring strictly to ideological alignment. Whether a country belonged to the capitalist/communist/unaligned block in international politics during the cold war.

I got 800 hours of fun

I have no skin in the game

Well during that time you will have lost quite a lot of skin cells, so in a manner of speaking you literally have some skin in this game. Around 328 grams going by an average loss of 3.6kg/year I took from some random website.

That it was offered is nigh impossible to prove if the offer is only made verbally though. And conversely, if they make the offer an “official act” they are immune again.

Yeah but like I said, if you promise some other form of compensation on the level or above what they lose in benefits, you will still find people willing to follow these illegal orders. Hell you could find people willing to follow illegal orders even before this ruling, but now that the presidents right to give illegal orders is explicitly enshrined in constitutional jurisprudence this pre-existing problem is much worse. I doubt those people will care about a dishonourable discharge, on the contrary it will make them martyrs to “the cause” and they will be worshipped for it. And it remains to be seen how all this would play out in court, I guess it’s quite possible for the defence to argue that if the president has immunity for giving orders, their subordinates have immunity for following those orders.

The number of littered bottles, with or without a cap, is greater than the number of loose caps,

That smells like survivorship bias. Your dataset is skewed by loose caps being way harder to find due to being smaller. It stands to reason that all those bottles without a cap you find will have also had their cap littered in the vast majority of cases.

All good points if true. However I will say that to my limited understanding a crime under a specific law having been pardoned, that same law can then not be used to prosecute this crime anymore. Meaning states would have to find a different (preferably state) law under which the same offence is punishable.

And that is all disregarding other issues like packed courts, republican controlled states, the vagueness of double-jeopardy in this regard, and the general chilling effect a presidential pardon would have on prosecutors to even press charges in the first place.

The loss of benefits is easily circumvented by promising a golden parachute along with the pardon, so I could still see a lot of fanatics doing the crime “for country and freedom” or whatever they tell themselves.

Overall this seems like a potentially dangerous erosion of checks and balances that is easily abused when put in the wrong hands. As the dissenting opinions in the ruling openly state.

Ok yeah fair enough, that sounds reasonable. But to my knowledge the UMCJ is a federal law, not a state law, so how does that line of argument factor in there? You cited that as an example of checks and balances that would prevent people from following illegal orders, but it being a federal law still means the president could circumvent it with the official order plus pardon combo, at least if my understanding of this new supreme court ruling is correct.

IANAL, but there is the presidential power to pardon. So the president could in theory give an illegal order (as long as it is an official act they have immunity) and promise a presidential pardon once the order is fulfilled (therefore extending immunity to the perpetrator). Meaning the president can entirely circumvent the UCMJ.

For the unfamiliar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJYOkZz6Dck

(CW: gore, subtitles)

So, I think it’s pretty stupid to argue whether “convicted felon” should be in his opening lede line for Wikipedia.

True though that may be, I don’t think it’s surprising that this would happen, and since making the post I have been falling down a rabbit hole of finding out how Wikipedia is handling situations like this, partly through taking more than a glancing look at the talk pages for the first time ever, and it’s fascinating.

Currently my deepest point of descent is this sub-thread on the Admin board about the “consensus” boxes on top of talk pages being an undocumented and unapproved feature.

Not yet, but you probably will be able to in the future.