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MomsAVoxell commented on Adafruit: Arduino’s Rules Are ‘Incompatible With Open Source’   thenewstack.io/adafruit-a... · Posted by u/MilnerRoute
SV_BubbleTime · a day ago
After Qualcomm bought them? Who could have seen this coming? Hang on while I get back to arguing with my MSP that I really would prefer ProxMox over HyperV to replace VMWare.
MomsAVoxell · a day ago
Proxmox is awesome, just do it. Ask for forgiveness not permission.
MomsAVoxell commented on Rio de Janeiro's talipot palm trees bloom for the first and only time   apnews.com/article/brazil... · Posted by u/1659447091
MangoToupe · a day ago
An annual, except for every x years where x is greater than 1. Or am I missing something? Why is this interesting? Many plants only bloom once before dying.

Edit: for those of you unfamiliar with the term, an annual only blooms once a year before dying. This is opposed to a perennial.

MomsAVoxell · a day ago
It is of interest because these palms only bloom once in their entire lifetime and then they perish. This has relevance to us all, because it’s literally a once in a lifetime event, and a beautiful one at that. Imagine spending your entire life storing energy for your one and only act of reproduction, and then dying.

Plants are beautiful systems, and for those of us who pay attention there are is lots of beauty in the way they work.

MomsAVoxell commented on Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options   arstechnica.com/gadgets/2... · Posted by u/fleahunter
wiether · 3 days ago
Exactly!

I have to have a kettle for other purpose (including heating water for other mugs than mine), and no self-heating mug is going to be as efficient as a kettle to heat water.

Furthermore, I also put cold or room temperature liquids in my mug. With a self-heating one, I would be carrying the heating parts for absolutely no reason.

Same goes for a TV. By keeping things separated, I can decide what I do which each device and manage their lifecycle separately. If the device reading video files is included in the TV, I can't plug it to another TV or a projector or even take it with me to use it elsewhere. While I've upgraded three times my video playing device to follow tech evolution, I've kept the same TV to plug them in.

MomsAVoxell · 3 days ago
I have a multi-purpose kettle that I can use to boil water, heat the room, cook a small amount of food, or use as a sand battery for when its cold in the desert, where the kettle is designed to operate as long as there is a handful of material to burn.

It is fair to observe a separation methodology, but I also have to say, in some cases multi-purpose devices have their place.

If, say, the self-heating mug involved solar harvesting, I'd put a couple in my kettle bag, for sure.

MomsAVoxell commented on Germany's train service is one of Europe's worst. How did it get so bad?   npr.org/2025/12/12/g-s1-1... · Posted by u/pseudolus
MomsAVoxell · 3 days ago
I moved to Germany from Southern California in 2002 and as a conscientious objector to gridlock and indeed any grid whatsoever, I experienced very distinct happiness at the change of transportation paces between those two worlds, and the very first thing I did was get myself a DB (Deutsche Bahn) membership, which gave me so many nice memories.

I'm very fond of those years of easy train rides all over that part of Europe, and indeed internally within Germany, too. The overnight trains to Munich and Hamburg, Berlin and Vienna (ÖBB membership too), the easy rides between towns all over the Rührgebiet and NRW, the delightful weekend trips to Wuppertal and Bonn and so on. The sleeper cabins, the disco car, the wonderful cold beers served during a summer sojourn to The Hague, and so on. Yes, German trains could get you around, and connected, and after all - the rail systems of Europe are a reason to live there.

So I'm kind of saddened to hear of the demise of things, having left Germany for another land with well-laid rail (Austria), which I use with little sense of a lack of quality. But I do remember days of being very impressed with Germanys' transportation services .. it seems the nation of unlimited speed limits on the autobahn did, in those days, have superlative rail as well.

(Still, that was ±20 years ago. I suppose I shouldn't be that shocked to see time take its toll.)

MomsAVoxell commented on Berlin Approves New Expansion of Police Surveillance Powers   reclaimthenet.org/berlin-... · Posted by u/robtherobber
MichaelZuo · 4 days ago
> The underlying reason is a lack of cultural fluidity, or in other words, an over-abundance of cultural rigidity

And how do you know this? What’s the actual argument for why that must the case?

MomsAVoxell · 3 days ago
The abundance of evidence that humans will fight to death to be the clean ones.
MomsAVoxell commented on Berlin Approves New Expansion of Police Surveillance Powers   reclaimthenet.org/berlin-... · Posted by u/robtherobber
MichaelZuo · 4 days ago
I don’t see how this addresses the issue of there being an underlying real reason?

Of course the reason then subsquently can be inflated, conflated, mixed together strangely, contorted, etc… I’m not doubting that.

MomsAVoxell · 4 days ago
The underlying reason is a lack of cultural fluidity, or in other words, an over-abundance of cultural rigidity, which manifests as a desire to be free of other cultures.

The most effective antidote to totalitarian-authoritarianism is a one-way ticket to somewhere distant.

German villages, as comfortable as they are, don’t really promote this antidote.

MomsAVoxell commented on Berlin Approves New Expansion of Police Surveillance Powers   reclaimthenet.org/berlin-... · Posted by u/robtherobber
MichaelZuo · 4 days ago
This seems a bit incoherent, there must be a real reason for them to start thinking the “filth of others” has some basis in reality…

It couldn’t have arisen just randomly or on a lark.

MomsAVoxell · 4 days ago
The “filth of others” can be described in as many ways as a human might use to justify their elevation of one tribe over the degradation of another.

Look at it critically - whenever you encounter a totalitarian-authoritarian personality bloviating about “those people over there” (others), its usually based on the totalitarian mechanism of ‘avoiding affinity with attributes considered unsavoury’ (filth).

This concept has other applications. If you have two villages, separated perhaps by a near-insurmountable mountain or lake, or if one of those villages raises cows while the other raises goats - this is usually the basis of the formation of a new dialect, accent, or indeed entirely new language. However, when civilization occurs and those two villages merge into a broader community, that language changes to become a unity.

This is observable at an individual level, too. Any unacknowledged or under-recognized similarities/identities/differences between two or more entities will inevitably be used to justify segregation of those entities. The solution, as always, is to identify similarities/identities/differences in a cohesive manner - this is anathema to the totalitarian-authoritarian personality, who is usually pretty stubborn about enforcing, in totality, those under-acknowledged facets.

Dead Comment

MomsAVoxell commented on Berlin Approves New Expansion of Police Surveillance Powers   reclaimthenet.org/berlin-... · Posted by u/robtherobber
jerf · 4 days ago
In a nutshell, the sovereign debt crisis. If you don't realize there's a sovereign debt crisis (ongoing across years), or even more accurately, a wide variety of sovereign debt crises, or even more accurately, a wide variety of debt crises of both sovereign and private entities, well, your governments and some of the more government-adjacent private entities have bent a lot of resources into make sure that's the case and convincing that it's just peachy when they borrow money, if not outright a boon, without regard to how much they borrow or how much they've already borrowed. They may have convinced you that this is true, but they know better.

Whatever happens and however it resolves, there aren't a lot of options where they retain as much power as they have now for very long. (Even if the top people maintain control they're going to be cutting loose a lot of lower level elites because they'll have to because they won't be able to maintain their upkeep.) The wheel turns and we're in that phase where they're still in power, but have begun to feel their decline. Human psychology fears and feels loss much more keenly than gain and they both fear and feel a lot of loss of power underneath the veneer they maintain.

MomsAVoxell · 4 days ago
My theory for your downvotes - even though you are directly over the target - is that folks in Europe would rather blame Russia than address the very real dysfunction in their own societies. In fact, I tend to think that the degree to which an individual blames Russia is directly related to their failure to take responsibility for the crimes and misdeeds of their own state.
MomsAVoxell commented on Berlin Approves New Expansion of Police Surveillance Powers   reclaimthenet.org/berlin-... · Posted by u/robtherobber
SoftTalker · 4 days ago
What is it about German culture that makes authoritarianism so popular?
MomsAVoxell · 4 days ago
In my opinion its: Village life. Germany is a state of small villages/towns/cities/city-states, interconnected with fairly productive lines of communication - but it is very easy to live ones entire life in a German village and never leave.

At village scales, authoritarianism is given more credence by the individual because ones life boundaries are reduced to the immediate environment, which is not really sustainable without structured hierarchy.

Incidentally, this is also a factor in why American’s adopt authoritarianism so rapidly as well - spending 3 hours of ones life in a bubble, on the freeway, commuting, is extremely damaging to ones psyche. Road-rage and neighbor hatred abound in such circumstances.

The solution to authoritarianism is travel beyond ones bounds. The roots of totalitarian-authoritarianism grow deeply in the desire to be free of the ‘filth of others’ - once you expand your horizons to embrace that ‘filth of others’, through travel and cultural interaction, that ‘filth of others’ becomes ‘the flavor of others’ instead.

This is easily demonstrated: talk to a German who has never left their home town/talk to a German who regularly visits vastly different parts of the world. You will see the authoritarian in the former, but the libertarian in the latter.

u/MomsAVoxell

KarmaCake day544August 21, 2024View Original