The zeal for equality is the marketing line. Believe it or not, the bean counters did the math and figured out it was cheaper, at least in the short term

That’d be less bad if this particular educational structure wasn’t getting mandated as a “legal right to equal education”, with any alternate structure being fought at every step by an array of institutional forces.

The lessons of the 20th century have mostly been forgotten. Re-learning them is going to be very expensive - not just in money, but in lives.

User accounts are a reasonable isolation mechanism for reasonably trustworthy server software.

How is making Facebook pay for user-posted news links a good idea?

Should every instance this post shows up on pay the WSG for this link? Should there be piracy charges for the use of the archive service?

Which investment generates more energy? How about weighted by usefulness in various ways?

How much hotter? What concrete harms will result? How much can that be reduced by different levels of reduction in fossil fuel use? What are the harms from that reduction? How do those harms compare? What are the second order effects and their consequences for all of the above?

Now, let’s step back and accept that nobody actually has reliable answers to most of those questions. Further, nobody actually gets to make global policy choices. Even worse, the people who do make national policy choices don’t seem to make those choices based on collecting the best data and then rationally trying to serve the public interest.

Nether the “humanity will die” and “climate change isn’t real” claims are honest attempts to accurately predict the future. They are strategic attempts to influence public perception in a way that is hoped to lead to specific kinds of policy choice that benefit coalitions of special interests at the expense of most of humanity. Most people would be significantly better off if neither of those buckets of policies were implemented.

What’s your basis for making those factual claims about the future behavior of complex systems?

This sort of rhetoric is absolutely counter-productive. The human species is obviously not going to get wiped out even with the most extreme climate change scenarios.

Further, the tradeoffs of using fossil fuels are not even close to simple. Energy is wealth, and in a very real sense wealth is both health and quality of life. The whole campaign against fossil fuels frequently seems like the ultra-wealthy trying to consign the entire world middle class to poverty in order to keep polar bears pure (not even to save the species, just to keep them from going south and merging into a grolar bear population).

Oracle a company to actively avoid doing business with or realying on in any way.

Spend the $5 for a commodity VPS from literally any standard vendor. I suggest Vultr.

I haven’t gotten a good chance to re-evaluate the PinePhone recently, but aside from that Android is basically the only option out there.

I’ve got a couple VPSes, hosting

• Mailcow, because email is identity.
• Asterisk, because phone #s are also identity.
• Matrix-Synapse, for personal messaging even though XMPP is probably better.
• ttrss, even though it’s junk software with a jerk developer.
• A bunch of self-developed web apps

Self hosting email is obnoxious, but it’s also one of the only remnants of the traditional distributed internet that’s still broadly accepted.