It’s definitely a taste thing too. Unripe avacados have very little flavor.

Related to Movim; it just received Discord-like spaces a couple days ago! So it’s now a pretty effective decentralized Discord that can do group audio/video calls, screen share, and even has blogging built in.

Highly recommend anyone thinking about ditching Discord to give it a shot. It doesn’t even require an email to use, just a username and password :)

Traditionally, the business class T-series thinkpads were always easy to take apart and replace parts. All of the used lenovo thinkpads I’ve ever owned had marked screw holes on the bottom for the keyboard, which would let me slide it out without having to remove the case or anything.

The consumer Lenovos that weren’t based on the older IBM thinkpad designs were more standard designs like you describe.

There are isolated incidents, but they are usually swiftly punished or killed for doing so, like Serpico.

Humanity can’t be fixed, will always be selfish, greedy, discriminating against other people who differ enough, since a bunch of these things are pretty much hard coded.

According to recent archeological evidence, the style of humanity that gives you that impression is actually quite a recent phenomenon in our species. This is explored quite thoroughly in David Wengrow’s and David Graeber’s book The Dawn of Everything, which gives very strong evidence that for most of human history, human societies were egalitarian as the norm, where as only about 8,000 years ago did we seem to get into the hierarchical exploitative rut that we’re still in today.

However, it appears to be quite possible to reawaken that old egalitarian impulse that has been suppressed in us for so many thousands of years, as demonstrated by the egalitarian mutual-aid focused society formed in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War, of which tens of thousands participated in.

It would probably be at least somewhat determined by what you’re physically close to, and what a person’s capabilities and interests are (one that opted for medical training could be rotated into needed medical roles), plus what they’re personally willing to do.

we’re still in the position of a dystopian “today it’s your turn to work in the salt mines, comrade” decision being made by a higher power, and imposed by law.

There would be no state government in a libertarian anarchist society, and no institution that could force anyone to do anything against their will (if anything like that began to form, it would be in society’s best interest to dismantle it).

Ultimately the 2 to 3 months of work would have to be entirely voluntary, otherwise it would be dystopia.

You may then think that the whole concept comes crashing down in a house of cards, as there’s simply no way anyone would engage in that essential work without some coercive force above them making them do it, and thus everything becomes unmaintained, and everyone tries to free-ride on it until the the whole system collapses on itself. But this issue has been pondered for over 100 years now, and there are compelling counter-arguments that it’s still extremely viable.

As an example, this aspect was discussed at length by Peter Kropotkin in The Conquests of Bread (specifically Chapter 12: Objections).

It also breaks down why the Authoritarian Marxist argument of forcing people to work will only lead to the same conditions we’re trying to escape from:

“But the danger,” they say, “will come from that minority of loafers who will not work, and will not have regular habits in spite of excellent conditions that make work pleasant. To-day the prospect of hunger compels the most refractory to move along with the others. The one who does not arrive in time is dismissed. But a black sheep suffices to contaminate the whole flock, and two or three sluggish or refractory workmen lead the others astray and bring a spirit of disorder and rebellion into the workshop that makes work impossible; so that in the end we shall have to return to a system of compulsion that forces the ringleaders back into the ranks. And is not the system of wages paid in proportion to work performed, the only one that enables compulsion to be employed, without hurting the feelings of the worker? Because all other means would imply the continual intervention of an authority that would be repugnant to free men.” This, we believe, is the objection fairly stated.

It belongs to the category of arguments which try to justify the State, the Penal Law, the Judge, and the Gaoler.

“As there are people, a feeble minority, who will not submit to social customs,” the authoritarians say, “we must maintain magistrates, tribunals and prisons, although these institutions become a source of new evils of all kinds.”

Therefore we can only repeat what we have so often said concerning authority in general: “To avoid a possible evil you have recourse to means which in themselves are a greater evil, and become the source of those same abuses that you wish to remedy. For do not forget that it is wagedom, the impossibility of living otherwise than by selling your labour, which has created the present Capitalist system, whose vices you begin to recognize.” Let us also remark that this authoritarian way of reasoning is but a justification of what is wrong in the present system. Wagedom was not instituted to remove the disadvantages of Communism; its origin, like that of the State and private ownership, is to be found elsewhere. It is born of slavery and serfdom imposed by force, and only wears a more modern garb. Thus the argument in favour of wagedom is as valueless as those by which they seek to apologize for private property and the State.

Fantastic book! For anyone interested, you can read it here.

Oh, right. Sorry, easy to confuse the meaning in this particular case 😅

I still think that it is important to standarize a canonical Linux core

If you’re not aware, Ubuntu Touch is no longer operated or developed by Canonical, they abandoned the project in 2017. UT was then picked up by UBPorts, a community effort to keep alive what Canonical left behind.

Personally, I don’t have a very high opinion of Canonical due to their use of CLAs, which also appear to be present in some fashion with UT and UBPorts as well:

I agree that some standardization would likely be beneficial in some areas (such as focusing on a single Phone UI and polishing it up). PostmarketOS is making the most progress on getting real Linux on mobile, so if I had to pick one project to support monetarily, and one that could become mainstream, or partner with a manufacturer like GrapheneOS did with Motorola, I think that would be the project to back, IMHO.

It is certainly not usable for the average person in it’s current state, hence why I suggest donating to it to help with developing it.

With proper funding and full-time devs, it would be able to focus on adding proper support to more phones, or potentially partner with a manufacturer like GrapheneOS just did with Motorola to get first-class support on a smaller handful of devices.

Postmarket is our only long-term mobile option that will remain FLOSS and in the users best interest, we just have to support it and help build it up into something we can all use :)

Theoretically, yes. Since everyone would share in both the unpleasant and pleasant work equally (the different jobs would likely be rotated out, to prevent one person permanently doing the really unpleasant work while another person always gets the easy work), it wouldn’t really necessitate that they are paid more than someone else on an easier work rotation.

In exchange for that base essential work being performed, every individual would receive free access to healthcare, education, basic housing, food, electricity, internet, and transportation. The tokens could then be used almost exclusively for luxuries created by other people in their now abundant spare time, or for an usually scarce resource.

This setup would entirely eliminate poverty, homelessness, hunger, debt, wage slavery, and economic classes.

However, that’s only if we want to retain a market system. An alternative is a gift economy, where there are no tokens at all (which is what The Dispossessed explores, and what was used in some parts of Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War).

In either case, those unable to perform certain jobs or any work due to disabilities would not suffer any reduction in benefits, and would still receive all of the same benefits/tokens as those who can do more types of work.

The issue with Ubuntu Touch is that unfortunately it’s not a genuine alternative to Android, as it actually relies on Android quite a lot to function as well as it does.

It generally uses an outdated Android kernel (which is also usually not receiving security updates) and a Halium abstraction layer to access the closed source binary blob Android drivers for the phone’s hardware. It also requires that it be installed on top of an existing Android install, so in all it’s more of Linuxified layer on top of Android, which means it’s not truly escaping the control of the Android/Google ecosystem.

PostmarketOS and Mobian are genuinely Mobile focused Linux distros that run the mainline up-to-date Linux kernel, right on the bare metal, meaning they are not subject to any influence from Google.

Both projects often collaborate and benefit from each other, they just use a different base distro (Alpine for PostmarketOS, Debian for Mobian), but that doesn’t result in any wasted effort, as ultimately any new developments, drivers, or new phone support are mainlined into the kernel itself, so both projects benefit.

They’re not as usable as Ubuntu Touch is right now, but they are ultimately the better solutions long-term to ensure that all the code is under community control so we aren’t reliant on outdated unsecure Android components.

Hm, the article I linked to about the foodbank system wasn’t ideal, here’s a better one (replaced the old one in my previous comment with it too).

The difference between pur current system and the foodbank system is every foodbank bidding for the limited resources are all given an equal amount of fake money before every bidding session without having to do anything for that fake money.

You could entirely eliminate wage labour if this system was adopted country wide. If profit motive was removed, all the bullshit jobs would no longer be done, leaving us with just the essential work to keep society running, like food production, housing creation/maintenance, medicine, utilities, etc.

If we then collectively spread the load of those essential things, especially combined with automating as much as we can, each person would only need to work roughly 2 to 3 months out of the year, with the rest being totally free time they could do anything with.

To see an extremely fleshed out version of how a moneyless society could look like in practice, I highly recommend reading Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed.

For anyone reading this, please consider donating to PostmarketOS or Mobian if you have the means, as it will help us escape the Android ecosystem which is getting more and more anti-user due to google controlling it.

I’m not a believer myself, but theoretically, what if this was simply the best God could do? Not an all powerful being, but a flawed one that couldn’t foresee the consequences their actions, or of the systems they created?

You could replace markets with a Cybersyn-like system combined perhaps with how food banks bid with fake money to determine how resources are distributed amongst them.

If you’d like to see a moneyless world explored extremely well, I highly recommend reading The Dispossessed by Ursula LeGuin.

It’s an incredible work of classic sci-fi that very realistically depicts how society would function without any money, and honestly I think the way it’s shown could absolutely work.

Ah, so you are! My mistake :p

until they work on the UI toolkit to allow a different approach (like e.g. Firefox does allow)

Like how Firefox lets you drag and drop icons and spacers around? That would be cool to have in Libreoffice.

Apple’s UI is good not because it’s ‘bare-bones’, but because it organises elements visually instead of piling them all into a giant toolbar for the user to wade through.

Could definitely see that as a big improvement, even as someone quite used to the Windows 95 way of doing things (or at least, I prefer the old way to the ribbon), hopefully someone who has a similar itch to us as well as the capabilities to implement it does so someday :)

Ah, I assumed you were comparing it to MS Office as the gold standard, and chose the tabbed mode to make it closest to that, though I don’t personally use it that way myself.

LibreOffice has a simpler mode, though not quite as bare-bones as your Apple example. It’s how I how use it personally:

There’s also a Sidebar mode, which can collapse out of the way when not in use, or be brought back by pressing a small button on the side of the program.

I agree it could stand to offer a mode with much more spacing and just the essential options, but I think for the most part, the simpler toolbar mode which I use is pretty adequate, and doesn’t feel overwhelming to use.

Alternatively, Libreoffice is quite customizable, so a user can remove every option from the toolbar they never use, and make it appear nicer and less cramped.

"Every machine has had the same history — a long record of sleepless nights and of poverty, of disillusions and of joys, of partial improvements discovered by several generations of nameless workers, who have added to the original invention these little nothings, without which the most fertile idea would remain fruitless. More than that: every new invention is a synthesis, the resultant of innumerable inventions which have preceded it in the vast field of mechanics and industry.

Science and industry, knowledge and application, discovery and practical realization leading to new discoveries, cunning of brain and of hand, toil of mind and muscle — all work together. Each discovery, each advance, each increase in the sum of human riches, owes its being to the physical and mental travail of the past and the present.

By what right then can any one whatever appropriate the least morsel of this immense whole and say — This is mine, not yours?"

-Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread