matlag

Summary: China is not a friend country. It’s a hostile country. Yes, we know.

But the news is… so is the USA to Canada now. A hostile country threatening to annex Canada and trying to cripple the economy as a way to achieve the goal. So either we slap 100% tariffs on US made cars, which would hurt Canadians, or we apply the same tariffs on Chinese cars, so reduce them from where they are at the moment.

Yes, but Canada had implemented 100% tariff on cars from China, following the US. That’s pre-trade war. The proposal is to lift that one.

Because that’s not about privacy, that’s about the trade war. Retaliatory tariffs on US cars increase cost of cars for Canadians, as there are almost no car assembled in Canada. Reducing or eliminating tariffs on cars from China would lower cost of new cars for Canadians while keeping the tariffs up.

For privacy and security, not a single new car on the market is decent right now. That should be regulated, but that’s no concern for any politician at the moment.

They do. But you need to reduce the generation to make sure you don’t heat up too much the water for the ecosystem that lives in. Less water means the temperature difference before and after the plant is higher. That’s the constrain.

Prices capped have nothing to do with nuclear energy and everything to do with stupid EU price policy.

France used to have a monopoly by a state owned company on electrIcity: EDF. But everyone knows that’s terrible, and private market is the way to go. At the time, electricity in France was the cheapest across Europe, but it’s still terrible because… well that HAD to change!

In order to introduce some competition, generation, network and “distribution” (billing…) activities were separated.

Then private distributors (again: billing companies with 0 generation capabilites and 0 grid network) were allocated some quota of electricity from the nuclear electricity generated by EDF at low cost.

In addition, and that’s the European policy: electricity price on the market would be set at the cost of the most expensive generator at a given time. Example: 100% nuclear today: cost is set at cost of nuclear. 95% of electricity from nuclear, 5% from gas: 100% of the electricity that day is billed at cost of gas! 80% nuclear, 15% gas, 5% coal: 100% of the electricity billed at cost of coal!

Why? So that the priate newcomer would get huge benefits and be able to invest in electricity generation. But: there was 0 constrain in doing so, so they just rack up benefits at the expense of EDF and clients! Even better: since they get such low prices from their quota, they’re cheaper than the EDF split distributor company. So at some point, their quota was insufficient for their client’s demand. Time to invest… hahaha! No I’m kidding: time to ask for a bigger quota, of course granted by Macron and his team.

Then came Ukraine invasion. Uh oooh! Gas price exploses, even the “distributors” start to feel the pain. What to do? Well, kick out their clients! Refure to renew contracts, or ask for such a ridicuously high price to make sure they just go! EDF’s hisorical distribution company is legally obligated to take them back. And that’s where the 2nd joke kicks in: EDF gave s much quota of nuclear electricity that they no longer have enough for these clients they have to take. No worries: the “distributors” sold back the electricity quota… at market price, ie mostly gas price!

With the price of gas multiplied n times determining the cost of the whole production, it became unbearable for clients. That’s where genius Macron and Lemaire (Minister of Economy) set a “shield” (cap) on the bills. It’s no shield nor cap. It’s actually the state of France paying the difference in the bills between the actual bill and the cap they set. That’s public money!

And again, that money didn’t go to resources. It went straight to “distributors” (rather call them parasites).

For sure, the heavy maintenance work on the nuclear power plant done at the time didn’t help. They decided to do it on all plants at once (another bad call) and it lasted longer than planned.

But the price issue has nothing to do with nuclear and everything to do with stupid policies.

And now, lesson learned (not): Spain and Portugal got out of that absurd elecricity market. Germany and France (and many other countries) made a few changes and keep going. Because competition with multiple private actors in electricity is good. Can’t you see it??

Yep, that’s textbook big tech strategy: -Build up the hype -Get the product out there, make sure as many orgs and people start using it as possible. Make it free or sell at loss if necessary -Oh yes, we broke a few laws for this. If we don’t get a waiver, we’ll have to close the service for everyone, do you realize the impact?

That’s Facebook on privacy, Uber on workers rights, etc. Now N+1th: OpenAI on copyright.

In these companies, does anyone check the licenses in details to make sure using them is ok for the company?

Meta will get at least the metadata: meaning they will record who was in which call connecting from where.

For example, if one member is visiting a client, Meta may be able to infer the relation between the 2 companies.

If any of the people in the room click “report”, then the discussion is sent for review without the encryption protection

I’m pretty sure their user agreement translates to “you agree to let us do whatever the f*ck we want with the data you’re purposely disclosing to us”.

And last but not least: if Meta decides to wipe the archives, any info get lost?

There a reasons large companies ban unauthorized apps to talk about work.

XMPP is so bad it was the baseline for Whatsapp. You know: that minor platform that feels like IRC and never took off. A lot of the techno around you are old stuff that evolved, “new” techno usually comes with new unexpected issues. Then they mature, get better and… old?

That’s why you get “don’t put living animals in the microwave oven” in the instructions.

If Tesla didn’t explicitely wrote “don’t put your f***ing finger in the way on purpose after multiple attempts to close it!” he may have a chance.

He will plead a trauma from the loss of trust in his beloved car brand and the credibility damage on his Youtube channel and ask for M$.

Alternative answer: "We understand your issue and will fix it as time and priorities allow. Please note that customers paying for support always get higher priority. Given MS contributions to the project, this ticket was ranked 42nd in our priority list.

Have a pleasant day! FFMPEG support team"

I’m sorry if that’s harsh, but my feedback would be: drop that chart!

It’s daunting, it’s going to freak out many newbies. Too much choice kills the choice.

You have one “default” at the bottom, Mint, so stick to that. Tell the newbies they can switch anytime to something else once they’re a bit more comfortable with the Linux-world. And if I’m not mistaken, you can install and try the main DEs with Mint also. Or you can recommend Ubuntu, or any other newbie friendly distro. Just pick one and don’t lose them over what they could see as an important difficult decision before they even get started.

What’s interesting here is they no longer need to hack and crack devices through loopholes and backdoors schemes.

All the data they need are already collected by private corporations with the pro-active collaboratron of the users themselves (“Click here to agree to the terms and conditions”).

Assume the communication with the app it through Internet. The car must have a 4G chip (too early to see 5G in cars, I think?). So no matter what you pay, it won’t work when 4G is retired. With marketing pushing to get new standards always faster, 4G may not last another 20years.

Anyway, bear in mind that once you subscribe, they will most likely collect detailed data about how you use the features and sell that as well…

This might be an unpopular post but so’ll be it: Mastodon is the existing proof that Meta could kill Mastodon any time.

Mastodon was using a protocol compatible with GNU Social: OStatus, but some features were quickly added without consideration for other implementations.

So when per-post privacy were introduced, for example, they were very public on GNU Social, because their devs had no idea this was coming. And GNU Social was blamed for it.

https://privacy.thenexus.today/mastodon-a-partial-history/#mastodon-gnu-social-and-the-early-fediverse

Instead of having more users, GNU Social is now (almost?) dead. Of course it’s not just because of the above. But it wouldn’t have been set back so much without Mastodon.

Now, Mastodon is opensource, has more features and some compatible implementations. I run Pleroma myself. But why would one think Meta could not cripple them both?

Nuclear plants consist mainly of a shitton of concrete (and only the best sort is good enough). The production of that concrete causes a terrible amount of carbon emissions upfront.

Actually, if you compare them to solar or wind at equivalent service, it’s not that straightforward:

Renewables installed capacity is nowhere close to their actual production, nuclear can produce its nominal capacity in a very steady way.

Wind turbines also need a lot of concrete, and much more metal for equivalent output. Solar panels need a lot of metals.

Renewables need a backup source to manage their intermittency. It’s most often batteries and fossil plants these days. I don’t think I need to comment on fossil plants, but batteries production also has a very significant carbon emission budget, and is most often not included in comparisons. Besides, you need to charge the batteries, that’s even more capacity required to get on par with the nuclear plant.

With all of these in consideration, IPCC includes nuclear power along with solar and wind as a way to reduce energy emissions.

Don’t know if that covers your need, but at least their angle is privacy:

https://puri.sm/products/librem-awesim/

Not going to happen. They charge such an insanely high premium vs real cost for a very primitive messaging system, they’re not letting that go!

For example:

https://farm.bot/

There are others. Plenty of small/medium businesses just don’t have the resources to develop small computers and the matching software stack. In that regards, the RPi is an appealing choice.

All bills targeting your freedom are labelled “child porn” or “terrorism”.

After terrorists attack in France, state of emergency was declared, special powers to restrainesuspicious powers at home. We MUST protect people frometerrorists, right? If you’re against that, which side are you on? Very first usage of the power: restrain non-violent eco-activists to their home so that they don’t disturb the COP.

That pattern repeats over and over. They’re counting on you being sensitive to “child porn”, I bet you the initial list will include “eco-terrorists” sites (label used on anyone attending a climate protest they tried to prevent), political activists sites (you try to be anonymous on Internet? That’s SO suspicious!).

I’m sorry for what happened to you, but ri seriously doubt this bill is really intended to prevent that.

I wouldn’t set expectations too high though: for the retirement bill, there were many protests, millions of people in the streets, all surveys showing a very strong reject by the people, and the reaction was basically: “I got elected, I do whatever the f**k I want!”.

Short of a revolution, nothing can change their mind. I’d rather push other parties to include this in their program for the next elections: repel this absurdity.