Yeah one of my more… tech adventurous friends had the most insane series of security breaches (to out it mildly) potentially related to this and some other recent ridiculousness.
BJHanssen
joined 2 years ago
30 years ago today, Edward Bernays, an American pioneer in the field of public relations and propaganda, died. He is referred to in his obituary as "the father of public relations".
Thing about social democratic bureaucracy is that it tends to end up being extremely rigid with politicians who are particularly entrenched in this rigid system of rules. So in these states, things like ‘not hurting long term goals too much’ matters because going at cross purposes with legally stated aims in any way is more than good enough reason to not do it at all. You don’t get to interpret your way around the law in states like Norway.
Add to this that the same politicians also have entirely forgotten what social democracy is supposed to be - maintaining a capitalistic market economy while leveraging state power to counteract its negative social effects and ensure the social security of the people - in favour of some idea that it’s actually just a set of basic institutions that were invented one to two hundred years ago that don’t need any kind of updating outside of just the bare minimum of maintenance, and… well, you end up with states that run relatively well but increasingly keep creaking at the seams, everything increasingly underfunded, with politicians who seem convinced they can’t actually do anything apart from tinkering at the edges.
This breeds discontent and political distrust. And in such conditions, it doesn’t really matter if the vast majority would want us to support good causes abroad, people will still be angry about it because it feels like they are getting stepped on in favour of someone else. They couldn’t tell you exactly why they feel that way, so they grab on to the nearest idea - cognitively speaking - that they can spin an understandable narrative about. Immigrants is the obvious one. Political elites playing their games the obvious next one. Then comes the common misunderstandings about economics, especially where inflation is relevant.
Basically our politicians have put themselves in a corner they are unequipped to get themselves out of, and everything they do ends up producing backlash one way or another.
Yes, the rule is up to 4% of annual proceeds can go into the national budget for covering spending. That rule, however, is arbitrary nonsense and only serves to limit the size and scale of investments on the budget.
The actual limiting factor is that the law states that the purpose of the fund is to save for the benefit of future generations. That’s something they will have to navigate. Personally I would like for there to be a mechanism that basically requires a ‘business case’ outlining how any proposed investment/spending will align with that stated aim of the fund. Making such a case here should be pretty straightforward, as allowing one of our neighbouring countries to militarily invade and conquer their neighbours wouldn’t be good for said ‘future generations’.
I think one of the more important things you can get across to him is this:
Porn is fine, but it’s fiction. It’s no more real or realistic than the latest superhero blockbuster, and should be thought of that way. It’s entertainment, not education.
There are sex ed channels on Youtube. Good ones. Sexplanations is one, but there are also others. Seek those out.
I know this is going to be a very awkward conversation, but you have to understand this: he will be finding and watching porn, and most likely already is at 14. Don’t shame him for that. In any way. Let him know that you know, and that it’s normal, but that it’s important to think of it like it’s just the movies. Cos that’s what it is.
I feel like probably the biggest UX improvement Lemmy, and the fediverse more widely, could do is to make user migration more seamless. I’m thinking federated SSO, basically, where once you have an account anywhere on the fediverse you should a) be able to use that account anywhere else in the fediverse and b) move where that account is hoeted to anywhere else in the fediverse.
I believe this is related to whatever the hell ActivityPod is doing? Feel free to correct me on that. Regardless, get something like this in place as well as better instance and services discovery (and maybe the ability to find your other connected services from you ‘account’ pages on whatever service you’re on) and I think people might start to think of fediverse as less ‘an alternative’ and more ‘the better one’.
Basically, we need standard protocols for user data management, transfer, credentials management, and service and instance discovery. I’m sure some of that exists, the important thing will be to streamline and standardise the actual UX.
SI just isn’t, or at least hasn’t been, set up to do this kind of step-change development. It’s been streamlined essentially since the split from the Championship Manager series to operate on an iterate-on-what-we-have basis with overlapping one-, two-, and three-year dev cycles geared toward developing annual refreshes of essentially the same game.
Everything from the dev cycle through AA, marketing, publishing, and even licensing is based on that fundamental structure. But that’s a model with an expiry date, and the kind of complete refresh they are currently attempting has been sorely needed for years already.
But they should have just announced a hiatus year at the start to get this done. They were never going to be able to do this within their regular annual cycle.
Thing is, (successful) mutation rate is just a statistical probability rising to inevitability following from a virus’ replication rate. Pure numbers game. The only way to stop it is to prevent the virus from replicating to numbers large enough that you never reach that inevitability threshold, AND with wide enough immunity in the herd that even across the entire potential base of infection it can’t get there.
And with the coronavirus causing covid-19, by far the most infectious natural disease known and that happens to rely almost entirely on an insane replication rate in the mucosal immune system, you would need a vaccine that is delivered via the airways and you need to somehow completely reverse half a decade (plus) of reactionary brainfucking across most of western society.
Good luck. (No seriously, I wish you all the luck in the world cos this virus sucks ass and we need to make it gone somehow)
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Very high up on the list of worst persons in history.