Windvane Lammy… if he’s leaning towards criticism now that suggests tensions are higher than I expected them to be.

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.

I really need people to understand that a) most people neither do or want to pay attention to politics, because they don’t have time or energy for it and because b) they are (rightly) convinced that politica just doesn’t work for them. So what will they do? They will tag on to anything that sounds oine it’s different to the same old bullshit.

Not because they don’t believe the new bullshit isn’t also bullshit, but at least it’s not the same bullshit that got us into our current mess.

Everyone in politics and the media lie to us all the time about everything. That’s not meant to be a true statement, but it is one that clearly feels true to most people. And Hannah Arendt once said something important about how people respond to such circumstances, and about what such a people can be brought to do. It’s not pretty.

Am currently reading the book, it’s a worthwhile read. And I already have a list of people I will recommend it to, because I think it will nudge them in the right direction politically.

It’s arbitrary. The reasoning is based around avoiding inflationary effects, but that’s based on a stupidly simplistic and wrong-headed idea of how inflation works.

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 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.

People seem to be missing something important about this suggestion:

In a market system where solar pv is an option, per-residence efficiency and effectiveness matters a lot and the objections raised here makes sense. But a mandate that all new builds come with solar pv changes that logic fundamentally.

You are now in the domain of grid-scale distributed energy production, grid resilience, and production scaling that will force panel prices much, much further down. This is an infrastructure change and should be considered in those terms.

I would personally have started with residential energy storage for the same reason, but honestly both should happen anyway.

I need people to understand that a private healthcare sector cannot provide a ‘buffer service’ for a public one. The reason is very simple; both sectors hire from the same small pool of qualified personnel, so any capacity gained by one is capacity lost from the other. The only sense in which additional capacity can be added is in infrastructure; beds, rooms, and equipment. But in practice, a lot of private health infrastructure is effectively just timeshared public health infrastructure, and what remains would be more effectively utilised if simply made part of the public sector.

The current approach is effectively the most expensive possible approach to alleviating the pressure on the NHS, save for getting rid of it altogether. But I guess the better alternatives aren’t acceptable, especially not to ministers and MPs who are paid tens of thousands by the sector that would be under threat by such measures.

‘Collectivizing power from the wealthy’ also known as… democracy? Is the anti-communist just saying the quiet part out loud here?

At the same time, when you are repeatedly exposed to the single most contagion-ridden work environment in the country outside of actual medical facilities, and you can point at stats like 56% increase in sickness rates, you would have to be actively dry humping the letter of the law to not just go ‘well… yeah that’s fair’.

I live in the UK, but am from Norway. I know a few librarians though, and I know that community libraries are usually (or at least often) interested in projects that can connect their communities and help them with outreach. Something like this certainly could do that, and with libraries existing in most communities there is a built in network for broader proliferation there.

I’m also just very keen on the idea of libraries having a central role to play in the future of the broader fediverse ecosystem.

Edit: It may be key to pitch this to them not as a platform, but as a decentralised community network.

Loving this concept. May I make a suggestion? Show this to and discuss this with your local library. That strikes me as a good potential partner, and a model that can be replicated in most places to potentially help with everything from hosting to community resources access.

Engagement is merely the ability to, or the degree to which you are able to, maintain interaction with something (a system, a game, a fidget toy, whatever) over time. It has absolutely nothing to do with entertainment, although you can use entertainment as a means of achieving or increasing engagement. However, entertainment is hard. People are entertained by different things to different degrees, and respond to their entertainment in different ways. Engagement on the other hand is a fairly simple behavioural matter and that’s a whole field of science (which is mostly bollocks, to be fair, but its lessons can be very effective when applied at scale).

Source: I used to be a behavioural engineer, specifically a gamification specialist. Engagement was the oil I was employed to extract, and entertainment the excuse my field used to pretend what we were (and still are) doing isn’t just social manipulation at scale.

I really, really need people to grok the distinction between engagement and entertainment.

Removal of dedicated server functionality in favour of matchmaking was always going to be a horrible, horrible idea. And this is honestly the least of its negative consequences. Even before that there was the requirement of multiplayer servers to be set up through ‘official channels’ of various sorts, which has this same problem because those are still platforms with maintenance costs that companies will eventually cut.

It’s the same platforms vs protocols issue that the fediverse is addressing, just in a different sphere of the internet.

Honestly, the game is amazing 95% of the time. But Act 3 feels a bit too packed and a bit rushed at the same time. I’ve not been able to complete it because the game consistently crashes for me at a particular point on what amounts to ‘the final run’.

The fact that instead of just leaving the gsme until patched I instead chose to start over with a second character says something about how good the game is otherwise.

Thing to keep in mind on this is that it’s a national regulatory decision based on an EU regulatory decision, and it is expected to be just the first of several more like it to come from it. Meaning, it is likely to spread and it is likely to escalate over time. And even if it’s just an added cost of doing business, it does impact the financial viability of Facebook surveillance-capitalistic model.