AggressivelyPassive

  • 8 Posts
  • 494 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • I see that problem also in a kind of “contact guilt” in certain topics.

    That is, if there’s any polarized issue, there’s always the liberal/left/progressive position with extremely clear boundaries to what is acceptable to even discuss. And then there’s the vast conservative-fascist spectrum. If any problem arises within that issue, even mentioning it is immediately labeled as outside of the acceptable part, simply out of fear that this could be used as a wedge against the liberal position.

    That in turn alienates people, they see an actual problem and the liberal side either ignores the problem or says it’s fascist. And the actual problem never gets solved or even tackled, simply because nobody wants to touch it.

    This leads to a situation where for a whole bunch of people the fascists seem downright reasonable and then the radicalization pipeline kicks in and suddenly they think Hitler might not be such a bad guy after all.

    So essentially, the left feeds the right gullible people out of fear they might legitimize some of their points.

    Just an example from Germany: when the first wave of Syrian refugees came to Germany in 2015, they were greeted with literally open arms. Great thing. But if you let about a million people into the country, you also need about 500k new apartments for them, the bureaucracy has to be capable of processing everything, language courses have to be expanded drastically, job trainings have to be organized, etc etc. A whole bunch of problems.

    Now, what happened? Nothing. There was great fanfare, the local governments did their best, but nothing substantive happened. Nobody talked about it, because that might fuel the existing resentments. Nobody tackled the problems. And within a few months, we had tens of thousands of young men, who had nothing to do, were not allowed to work, were completely alone and had no money or social safety net. Well, of course a bunch of them turned criminal, which then fueled the resentment even more, because suddenly the fascists actually had what they hoped for: criminal foreigners. Even if the actual problem was tiny, it was the spark that ignited the fascist resurgence.



  • That’s decades of legacy for you…

    I bet each step/arrow/decision had a good reason at some point, but most of them probably back when computers lived in caves and hunted their tapes using spears and rocks.

    I feel like we’re slowly reaching a point where the complexity is collapsing in on itself - just look at the absolute chaos a modern web app is.


  • That’s the point.

    In Germany there was a battle between left and right back then. The economy boomed in the 20s and faltered in the 30s. Capitalists saw the threat of socialism looming just behind Poland and so they supported fascism.

    The Nazis funneled billions into large businesses. It was unsustainable and morally multi-level wrong, but they skimmed a lot of profits from these agreements. They got rich, while the economy started to collapse - even before the war.

    Even after the war, most of them got away. They kept much of their wealth.











  • That is absolute nonsense. SUSE mostly serves large enterprise customers.

    And where do you think the people deciding what to buy get their information? Mind share is important.

    I’m pretty sure SUSE is bigger than Canonical.

    That’s actually surprising to me, but I’d argue that Suse offers more products, it seems like Rancher, Longhorn, etc. have no canonical equivalent.


  • Yeah, I’ve seen the same pattern with knives. If you just want a decent kitchen knife, you’ll find tons of people who are absolutely certain, that it’s physically impossible to cut anything unless the blade has been sharpened by a Japanese virgin under moonlight.

    I assume, the value for money curve is a sigmoidal, where at a certain, relatively low price you get almost all the value and afterwards it only gets more expensive, but not better. But you never know, when you’ve reached the plateau.


  • And that’s already a whole lot of money for next to no value for 99% of the people.

    Let’s be honest, most people listen to Spotify in a room that’s not ideal for listening. And I’m also very very certain that most of the higher end stuff (and I’m counting everything over 200€) is esoteric. You can’t hear a difference in quality. Maybe a difference, but not objectively better or worse.

    Problem is, where exactly is the line? It’s almost impossible to tell whether this one speaker is garbage with a markup or actually high quality.

    And more fundamentally: I can buy a brand new smartphone, with absolute top notch technology for 200€, but speakers and amplifiers, technologies that existed for decades and should be out-scienced by now still cost that much without any guarantees for quality? Sound should be a solved problem.


  • I know this is meant as a joke, but I have to say, it’s incredibly hard to get proper audio equipment without paying idiot tax like crazy.

    I want neither China crap, nor overengineered German CD shavers (those really exist, BTW), but just decent audio. If you look for reviews, everything under 2000€ is utter garbage, apparently, and you should be sterilized for even thinking about spending less than that. Or you go on Amazon and even a brick wall will have stellar reviews, because it sounds really awesome and even has Bluetooth!

    Extremely frustrating. No middle ground.



  • And you really think, people who are willing and able to buy enterprise support for their Linux distro get confused by the naming? Sure, there’s that one confused dude, but you also have people asking Facebook where they left their keys.

    OpenSuse is essentially free marketing for SUSE, nobody would know them otherwise. Why would you give that away?

    Suse is not a huge company, it has neither a large enterprise backer nor any killer features, and its market share is relatively small compared to Red Hat or Canonical. Throwing away free marketing while alienating a relatively passionate community is a kind of brainrot only MBA can come up with.