Denys Nykula

There doesn’t have to be a sinister plot for the result - mandatory, ubiquitous tracking and bank commisions in the middle - to be real and problematic, is what I’m saying. The governments have all the resources they need to make it possible to pay with cash anywhere you go, but the trajectory they choose is the opposite. Regarding the costs, I think IT and integration work required for cashless payments are an order of magnitude costlier than cash and coin slots, because of the telecom equipment, data centers and IT professionals working on it.

Before city bus cards, there was cash. Then cashless was made mandatory, but possible to prepay with cash anonymously. Then the anonymity was forbidden.

Cash is under attack even in public transit, you are required to provide a working phone number and government name to put money on a city bus card. Here at least. It’s being made inconvenient on purpose.

And the lawyer too? These types of transactions involve contracts and intermediaries.

How would the muggers even know you have the money?

Depends on where you buy a house. There are many rural houses and small apartments in tower blocks. And why a suitcase? You probably have a few dozen low-value banknotes lying around at home, stack them together and see they don’t take up much space (high-value banknotes aren’t thicker).

People who have lived through numerous economic crashes and bank closings. In Eastern Europe, cash in EUR and USD has good reputation, despite efforts by governments to bully people out of paying with cash altogether.

For plain text files, such as changelogs and translation updates, I have a pull request that makes FreshRSS track diffs, without overhead of a full browser: https://github.com/FreshRSS/FreshRSS/pull/8107

Unsurprisingly, only the countries that export very little meat and dairy have a smaller problem, that nonetheless remains significant. There’s no “overuse” as in the title, because for the machine that enslaves and slaughters billions of animals every year antibiotics are an absolute requirement. This industry needs to be abolished.

Because their app is essentially a website. News, videos, photo galleries. WP REST API is useful for writing a front-end using a different language than PHP while keeping the very convenient admin interface that most content managers are familiar with.

I do blame few EU citizens coming to help fight against the empire, for Ukrainians and Finns etc having to carry almost the entire weight. This isn’t a matter of conscription however, fuck conscription due to all the abuse it involves. International volunteer effort is needed.

Looks like a good starting point for municipalities implementing live bus location maps.

It’s like they don’t understand the reason for this success is how different their road taken has been compared to all-in on AI companies.

Remembered that I made such a tool for myself ten years ago. Dusted off a backup, updated dependencies (and replaced some), refactored somewhat, changed license to AGPL and uploaded here: https://codeberg.org/nykula/imgie

Should be very easy to install because the backend is just ImageMagick and SQLite.

Beware of a 250M node_modules, though. My code is less than 1K lines in the initial commit, but the linters, bundlers etc are the same as I use for big projects.

Note: Lufi encrypts uploaded files and lets one share a link containing a decryption key. It doesn’t let one expose images for other websites to embed. Thus a good tool but not for OP’s purpose?

Slink might be easy enough to set up with Docker: https://docs.slinkapp.io/getting-started/02-quick-start/

Upd 22:04: tried setting it up with Podman instead of Docker, and the instructions didn’t work, first because of missing directories and then a permission issue. However, this can be because I tried on WSL rather than a dedicated GNU/Linux box.

Thanks for a detailed response. It feels weird that in a globalized world an attack on a people isn’t felt by others as an attack on someone they know, with whom they or their friends directly talk online, whose loss would personally affect their projects and friend circles. I admit I also don’t know many names from African countries, for example, or from Palestine, or even from some EU regions. Inequality of recognition and, as a consequence, a lack of personally felt solidarity, is definitely a weakness of the world-system we live in; well, not for the system itself but for the invaded peoples.

I understand your position, despite disagreeing with it, as it was once mine as well. Would you mind answering two questions on a related, but different topic, closer to OP? First, when a more authoritarian party comes to rule in your country, are you confident they’ll keep conscription more-or-less volunteer, or will one of the first things they do, besides stripping minority rights, be making refusal punishable, canceling alternative service options, widening the recruitment age range and making most people with disabilities not “serious” enough serve as well? Second, since the war on Europe has been ongoing for twelve years, why wait until your country is invaded, and not go here to help defend so that it doesn’t get to the point when your state or a neighboring state of yours is invaded?

The existing protections for minorities, if we trace them to Stonewall and the Civil rights movement, are won by minorities organizing self-defense and causing enough ruckus when discriminated that the state starts worrying about its monopoly on violence. Then, when the state, against the discrimination by which the minorities have successfully organized, has a cultural and economic hegemony, the won rights slowly “trickle down” to some (but not all) of its allies, but are quickly rolled back at a whim when their leadership changes if there’s no functioning self-defense remaining and widely supported.

It’s very important not to disband the self-defense after any concession, and to organize it even, especially, when achieved peacefully. I’m from an Eastern European country where LGBT people don’t currently have self-defense, instead trusting the police and NGOs who started promising them protection because European integration requires that. Their promise is an utter lie; there are hundreds of attacks by boneheads (who are not the masses, but rather an extension of the state’s arm of violence) every year and the police does next to nothing, with the NGOs urging the attacked people and their friends to limit themselves to petitioning their representatives, who also do nothing.

What I’m trying to say is, the minorities have to protect themselves whether the state exists or not, and where the state exists, the defense has largely to be targeted against the state discrimination, the police violence, and the religious and press propaganda supported by the state. Once a group is able to protect themselves and their friends, it starts being respected by the majority of the people, so the despotism of the masses is not a threat, unlike the states, who have illegalized and then starved or otherwise killed minorities en masse numerous times. There are states where the situation is at the moment better, but that’s in such contrast to what states in general have done in the past that I can’t help but realize that the protections are temporary and under threat of a rollback at any moment.

I strongly agree about an unmatched level of cooperation being urgently needed for feats like slowing down climate change, but disagree that states are the type of organization required to even imagine it. Every state in history is exactly that, an armed actor, a gang who has militarily forced its way through enough territory to do protection racket over entire peoples. Gangs might introduce democratic elements (parliament, constitution) for efficiency and to calm down those people whom they don’t yet have the potential to repress. Gangs might recruit local population to sustain their numbers or provide skills and knowledge. Gangs might provide a few socially welcome policies in the territories they control, as long as they’re in charge of the provision and haven’t found a way to survive while avoiding them altogether. Gangs might call a truce and maintain it for many years while they’re fighting a bigger, more powerful gang. Some gangs have sold away a part of their weapons and instead rely on protection from neighbor gangs with more impressive arsenals. They’re still gangs, self-sustaining machines of violence, organized armed actors deontologically doomed to set the world on fire, precisely because if one armed actor decides to do good, other armed actors will eat him alive.