It's actually far worse than that. Trailer park Millionaires is a report from 9 years ago following wealthy investors who were buying up trailer parks so they could Jack up rent. Investors specifically targeted sex offenders, convicted felons, and other desparate tennants, so they could mercilessly exploit them since they truly had no place else to go.

The investors were also trained to exploit families, since more members in the household means more potential workers, and that means they'll be more likely to tolerate a rent hike.

Communication Workers of America is probably the closest to what you're looking for. You're definitely better off working with an established union instead of trying to build one from scratch, they have a lot of valuable experience and resources that you'll need to pull off a unionization attempt. If you reach out directly to CWA, or any other union, they'll work with you to help organize your workplace.

If you are serious about unionizing: first, see if you can get a few of your coworkers on-board by talking to them outside of work. Do this in-person or on voice calls that aren't recorded, it's crucial to keep the company unaware as long as possible so they have less time and ability to oppose you.

Ah, I see how what I wrote before didn't clearly express what I was thinking, and didn't address the issue of private contractors intentionally pushing for bloated contracts.

If public money for public code is mandated at the federal level, then private contractors would be bidding for work that ends up in the public domain. I am assuming that wasteful & bloated contracts will be underbid by contracts that fork or add features to existing projects. Either way, if the end result is in the public domain, then the project is still reusable.

I definitely don't believe that such a mandate would be easy to implement, or separate from a wider policy platform. I see private capital influencing government decisions as the crux of the problem with passing such a mandate. However, private capital influencing government decisions is an issue that unites many activists, organizations, and social movements. If FLOSS can be integrated into organizations and social movements pushing for institutional reform, then that might be a viable pathway toward meaningful policy change.

Capital interests certainly oppose the public domain, but I don't think it's a pipe dream, I think it's a policy change. Everything has swung in favor of private capital for long enough that it's time for the pendulum to swing back toward the public interest. I think the iron is hot, and right now is the time to start imaging and building better institutions.

I disagree, those consultants and lobbyists are working for proprietary vendors. If, instead, public grant money & public purchasing contracts were mandated to go towards free and open source technology, then the nation's technology infrastructure would eventually become free and open. Such a mandate would reduce the opportunity for corrupt contracts in the first place, because it would be substantially more expensive to start a project from scratch if there are already viable solutions in the public domain assuming wasteful & bloated contracts will be underbid by contracts that fork or add features to existing projects.

Public money for public code can dramatically reduce the waste caused by corrupt grants & contracts. If a project falls through, then at least the technology would be in the public domain for another organization to pick-up development. Currently, when a project falls through, it is usually a total loss because the technology remains intellectual property that can not be reused.

Just like with the Linux kernel, if a free and open source solution exists, it can be adapted to meet countless needs with far less effort and cost than starting from scratch with a proprietary solution.

Absolutely, and I'm glad someone else has thought the exact same thing! "Public money == public code".

Unfortunately, generics can vary wildly in efficacy & quality. As @Aradina pointed out, sometimes the encapsulation is different (e.g. extended release coating vs. standard release), but also the form of the drug can differ (e.g. capsule, tablet, softgel, chewable, etc), chemical by-products from different manufacturing techniques may be present in different amounts, and different manufacturing processes can also yield different chiral enantiomer ratios in the end product.

The "same" drug from different manufacturers may vary in effectiveness / side-effects, and brand-name drugs aren't always the best formulations for most patients.

Thank you! Lemmy is a tremendous contribution to the wider Fediverse, and no amount of "thank yous" is ever enough for people like you writing free software and giving freely to the public domain.

I have been on Lemmy, and around the Fediverse on various accounts since ~2021, and a suggestion I have seen promoted countless times is for communities which federate across instances. e.g. posts to [email protected] will show on [email protected] as long as lemmy.ml and lemmy.world federate with one another. If I remember correctly, each of you have previously opposed this idea for multiple reasons. If you do still oppose such a feature, will you please reiterate why you think this is the wrong direction for Lemmy? Also, have you considered adding a multi-community feature similar to Reddit's multi-reddit feature which allows end-users to combine multiple federated communities into a single page just for them?

It is misleading to attribute too much credit to a single individual, even a president. There was a significant clash of social/political forces when Obama was in office. Off the top of my head I can think of the following major forces: War in Iraq & Afghanistan, Great Recession & Occupy, DREAMers, ACA, Gay marriage, Environmentalism / Inconvenient Truth, Global outsourcing & job loss, Tea Party & the rise of militant christian nationalism. That's the landscape in which progressive policy ambitions were compromised to death to avoid total gridlock.

It's also worth giving credit where it is due: those auto safety and emissions regulations achieved their goal... for regular cars. Unfortunately, Republicans insisted on exceptions for body-on-frame vehicles (trucks, vans, SUVs). In the years since, those types of vehicles have steadily become the most common in the US, because they are the most profitable for the auto industry.

Straight up saucy, but I hope you compiled VSCode from source. Otherwise, shame on you for not using VSCodium :)

Also, I really like your Conky config. I really want to add a month & year percentage progression status bar on my desktop now.

When I install Linux for friends and family the only distro I use anymore is Fedora. I have used just about every major distro, and Fedora is the only one that has "just worked" on every computer I have tried it on.

Love them, or hate them, Red Hat is by far the single biggest company in the Linux community, and their Red Hat Enterprise Linux is renowned for being stable, performant, and very well supported. Fedora is where most of the updates that make their way into RHEL are initially available, so with Fedora you get a cutting edge distro with the backing and resources of a massive corporation that employs many of the top Linux-desktop contributors.

If you want a distro that "just works" I strongly recommend you give Fedora a try.

DietPi! It's one the most resource efficient distros that is easy to set up. It's ideal for single board computers and virtual machines, so I use it as a low-overhead Docker host on my Raspberry Pis. The dietpi-software tool installs optimized versions of most software you might use for SBC projects, but if it doesn't have what you're looking for, you can also use APT to install packages from the Debian ARM/ Raspbian repos.

I highly recommend Framework laptops for Linux. I have not used the Framework 16, but I can attest that Linux support for the Framework 13 (intel 11th & 12th gen) is excellent. I have used Fedora on the Intel 11th gen and Intel 12th gen, everything worked immediately on a fresh install without any workarounds or issues. Other distros might require a few package installs, but Fedora, Ubuntu, and Ubuntu derivatives should work out-of-the-box without any additional configuration. The Arch Wiki article for the Framework covers pretty much everything you might need to know to have an optimized Linux experience with any distro.

Aside from Framework's excellent Linux support, I really have to stress how cool and unique it is as a laptop for developers and tinkerers. This thing is literally designed to be opened up, repaired, and modded. All of the internal components are clearly labeled and easily accessible, there's even a little spot inside the laptop chassis just for spare screws in case a screw ever gets lost! Another awesome obscure feature of this laptop is the ability to use a Storage Expansion Card for dual booting. I just plug in the expansion card to boot into Windows, then unplug it and I'm back in Linux. It is absolute bliss compared to Windows and Linux sharing a bootloader.

I know I'm rambling, but I really could keep going on and on about Frameworks. They truly are unlike any other laptop, in all the right ways.

Numix-Circle has been a favorite of mine as long as it has been around. Now, I mostly use Breeze because it is highly compatible, beautiful, and widely used which makes it less jarring when I use other computers.

Back in the Plasma 4 days I joked that the default oxygen theme was ugly on purpose, so users would be forced to dive into customizing their own configuration (which is where KDE Plasma really shines above the rest). I think the defaults have come a long way, and it's nice to have a stock desktop ready-to-go without much customization.

Companies DO analyze what you say to smart speakers, but only after you have said "ok google, siri, alexa, etc." (or if they mistake something like "ok to go" as "ok google"). I am not aware of a single reputable source claiming smart speakers are always listening.

The reality is that analyzing a constant stream of audio is way less efficient and accurate than simply profiling users based on information such as internet usage, purchase history, political leanings, etc. If you're interested in online privacy device fingerprinting is a fascinating topic to start understanding how companies can determine exactly who you are based solely on information about your device. Then they use web tracking to determine what your interests are, who you associate with, how you spend your time, what your beliefs are, how you can be influenced, etc.

Your smart speaker isn't constantly listening because it doesn't need to. There are far easier ways to build a more accurate profile on you.

I avoid Ubuntu because Canonical has a history of going their own way alone rather than collaborating on universal standards. For instance, when the X devs decided the successor to X11 needed to be a complete redesign from scratch companies like RedHat, Collabora, Intel, Google, Samsung, and more collaborated to build Wayland. However, Canonical announced Mir, and they went their own way alone.

When Gnome3 came out it was very controversial and this spawned alternatives such as Cinnamin, MATE, and Ubuntu's Unity desktop. Unity was the only Linux desktop, before or since, to include sponsored bloatware apps installed by default, and it also sold user search history to advertisers.

Then, there's snap. While Flatpak matured and becoame the defacto standard distro-agnostic package system, Canonical once again went their own way alone by creating snap.

I'm not an expert on Ubuntu or the Linux community, I've just been around long enough to see Canonical stir up controversy over and over by going left when everyone else goes right, failing after a few years, and wasting thousands of worker hours in the process.

I worked at a sandwich shop and had given my two weeks notice a few days earlier. My manager came to me and asked me to clean up the bathroom...alright. I could smell it before I even opened the door.

I told my manager I'd clean it if he'd still give me the employee discount after I was gone. "Done". That's when I knew it was really bad.

When I opened the door I discovered someone had ass-blasted the bathroom. I'm not talking about blowing up the toilet, they did that too, but they had dropped their drawers and point-blank diarhea shotgunned the pipes under the sink.

My manager didn't honor the employee discount after I was gone, either.

COP28 failed just as the previous 27 COPs did, this was always the most likely outcome and it is no cause for despair. It has been clear for a very long time that climate-solutions are not going to come from the top-down, and are not going to come from some miracle technology. The facts about climate-change have been clear for 60+ years, if you stick to the facts you'll find confidence knowing you're just plain right. It is more obvious and self-evident than ever that bottom-up organizing is the only way meaningful change is going to happen.

So, organize! Find local organizations fighting for eco-policy change in your area, and join them. See if there's a green party chapter near you, and join them. Donate as much as you can to organizations in your area that are putting pressure on your representatives. If you can, vote in every single election local, state, and national (or the equivalents in your country) for the candidates endorsed by your local green party/ green organizations. The connections you make now could very well save your life in the future.

The stakes are literally poisoning all life on earth until the vast majority of all life has died, including you. Seriously, at this point the only thing left to do is to make change happen by joining others who are genuinely trying to change things. Authorities aren't going to solve this and aren't going to save you, it's up to you to save you. Real change is going to require A LOT of people working together, so go be one of them in any way that you can wherever you are.

I know this comment is pretty dark. Hope is something you're going to need, and it's something you're going to have to give to yourself by imagining better possibilities and working towards them.

Ever since Signal removed SMS capability I've really hoped to see SMS added to the FOSS fork Molly.

You've listed a lot of good reasons why open-source for business isn't used more frequently, and they're all consistent with my experience as well. Are you familiar with any consulting companies / vendors who DO advocate open-source solutions?

I've been considering starting a FOSS MSP / FOSS B2B consulting firm, but I've consistently come to the same conclusion that the tech industry and business culture here are almost innoculated against open-source. If you know any firms that DO recommend open-source solutions I'd love to check them out.