What I've come to realize is that the rust belt states have been in huge trouble for decades.
They were living in "benevolent feudalism" when GM, Ford, etc all had factories there. The problem is that these companies effectively owned the cities in which they operated. And then they left.
Since the Reagan years we decided to export everything that built our economy so the landlords in power could have even more profitable quarters in the short term. What this did however is destroy the economies of the non-software states.
The rust belt states are currently being subsidized by the rich states. This has been going on for decades. This vacuum of power has allowed the new landlords in power to swoop in and play city governments against each other with impunity.
The negotiating power of these states is so poor that they present an opportunity for the Metas of the world to make them even worse while becoming the new "benevolent" landlords. There doesn't need to be an NDA and secrecy, and in theory the city could get a good deal out of it, but realistically their utilities will just be abused because the words "civil rights" and "justice" have exited the lexicon.
I want to step in here and point to Strong Towns. It’s easy to say THAT the cities have owners, but not why. The why is the American development pattern that creates suburbia that can’t generate enough taxes to pay to maintain the town.
That’s the problem. Suburban infrastructure is wildly expensive. A return to dense walkable villages would, in large part, fix the problem.
However the conspiracy-theory nutters have done a really good job convincing people in the US that 15-minute cities, or as they're known in Europe, "cities", are some plot by George Soros to... actually I have no idea what sort of crazy is being invoked this time, but it seems to have worked, generating enough opposition to liveable cities to make it a real uphill battle to implement them.
A big part of the problem here is that this conspiracy theory plays right into what its followers want to believe anyway: their idea of an ideal city is one where you can easily get anywhere by car, and there are lots of highways, strips, other roads, and plenty of parking.
It's what they're familiar with, and any suggestion that it could be improved by catering less strongly to individual vehicles and with a stronger emphasis on public transport, bicycles, walking etc. is automatically resisted. The conspiracy theory fits this bias perfectly.
It's not so much that they have "opposition to livable cities," it's that they have different beliefs about what's livable.
The point Strong Towns is making is that whatever you believe, you can’t live outside your means forever. The bill for all that infrastructure will come due, taxes will go up, people who still can will move away, and the town will start falling apart.
Yeah, good point. I was astounded when I lived in the US that it was impossible to get from my temporary accommodation to the place I worked, about 300m away, without driving. I eventually found a place to rent on the one single bus route that served the area. The rental agent treated me with the same level of patience that you use with slightly crazy people.
IMO it's just regression to the mean. The Rust Belt cities benefitted from being in the right place at the right time (post-WWII US during industrialization) for a few decades, but post-globalization they are just one of infinity undifferentiated land masses competing on cost of land and power (vs e.g. SF or NYC which compete largely on access to social networks and institutions).
What is surprising is that to me where you see datacenter build out hand over fist isn’t really in the midwest where one might assume due to low land costs. Surprisingly, the heart of the datacenter buildout seems to be northern virginia. Not exactly a cheap land sort of former one horse town.
Cheap land is nice, but it's not the only concern. Data centres make a lot more money per square foot than things like farming, after all.
You also want cheap, reliable power. Ideally eco-friendly. And you want backbone connectivity, of course. Local suppliers who know the construction and maintenance needs of a data centre. No earthquakes, hurricanes, wildfires, flooding, or tornadoes. A local government that won't tax you too much, and that won't get upset when you employ very few people.
Most large companies impose certain costs on society, and have to manage their reputation. Often it's cheaper to improve public opinion in a peripheral area than to address deep-seated problems.
Putting a data centre close to a hydroelectric dam helps offset your product's impact on users' mental health, your disregard for competition law, etc.
I don't buy that reasoning, even with that desire to manage their reputation:
Those lists are the companies marking their own homework and congratulating themselves as PR, AKA "greenwashing". They can do that just fine by spinning a single metric of their choice where they do less-badly than their pick of mean, median, and mode of whoever else they want to compare themselves against, they don't actually need to be genuinely eco-friendly at anything.
Latency I guess? I'm seeing this in my own country were everyone wants to be close to AMSIX. Which as you may have guessed also happens to be the most expensive and densely populated part of the country...
Yep, Northern Virginia gets you close to the BosWash megalopolis and pretty close to better than half of the US population. It also gives you access to a highly educated workforce and pretty much no natural disasters of note.
There's also network (pun intended) effects. Northern Virginia has been a major internet hub for a long time, with the first non-government peering point and a bunch of telecom companies, including AOL.
The data center land isn't that expensive anyway. Northern Virginia can be tremendously expensive, but the data centers are built out in the relative sticks. I'm sure the land would be cheaper in Wyoming, but it's cheap enough.
I was thinking of a slightly different incentiviser, you're right next to the county's largest collection of bought-and-paid-for politicians, if you need the rules bent a little, or a lot, you can point to your data centre off in the distance and remind them what you're paying them for.
Absolutely this. It's no wonder why these states are also culturally grounded in terms of "command and hierarchy". If GM fires you, it's end of the line for you.. good luck serving hot meals at Cracker Barrel.
Currently using https://getaurora.dev which is basically fedora + kde but curated by people that actually care. So codecs are preinstalled, and other sensible defaults out of the box which makes sense as its in the same family as bazzite (without the gaming focus).
Commodity markets are necessary for survival. If we cannot make them work as a society something is deeply wrong.
Someone needs to be farming the food we all eat... If every farmer decided to just plant saffron who would farm the wheat and rice and vegetables that it is used to season?
I used to buy this thinking, but no longer. People are incredibly resourceful, and instead of innovating towards exploiting and manipulating people, we could choose to innovate towards conserveration of important things, just like we have done in the past.
We don't fund out national parks with advertisements. We don't fund our libraries with advertisements. We could create the same structures for the internet as well, where crucial internet resources are protected and stewarded. They don't necessarily need to be in the hands of ad companies.
Sure, I will not deny that having things be "free" (and paying for them in other ways) has been a huge boon from one perspective, but we can also evolve to put "free" things in different places. Because things are never free. Advertisements are funding mass surveillance. They are encroaching our civil liberties and normalizing it. There is a total cost to things that extens beyond money. What we don't pay out of pocket we pay as a society.
fedora / fedora immutable (the aurora project under the universalblue umbrella has a really nice batteries included setup).
Fingerprint reader, backlight, etc, everything works (at least for my thinkpads). I think any recent model everything should work out of the box.
The Linux foundation is not a nonprofit. It is registered as a 501c6, basically a business consortium, unlike the Python software foundation which is a nonprofit (501c3).
The Linux foundation also stewards way more foundations and projects that just "Linux". They are, among other things, in the business of creating foundations and making money that way. For every organization under the Linux foundation, say the CNCF, to be a part of those subprojects, you need to pay a Linux foundation tax.
The Python Software foundation I don't know much about but their scope seems to be only stewarding python. They seem to have far less corporate outreach then the Linux foundation.
Linux Foundation 990 - note page 16-17 with the salaries - there are for profit entity salaries, not nonprofit salaries.
I have the widget for global menu right now in KDE Wayland. Its supported by all QT apps, and there's a wayland protocol pull request for it (unfortunaly stalled, as is tradition). Overall I like it a lot - enough of the apps I use support it (if you're a GTK fan then tough luck).
Thanks for sharing. Would you happen to know if Electron apps might surface the same menus they do under macOS via this protocol? Between Qt and Electron a lot of stuff would be covered.
Being able to block network access gives me peace of mind regardless if the app is proprietary or open source. Humans are fallible and life can get in the way (maybe the app has old dependecies with vulnerabilities, or any other random thing that I don't want). Being able to set the permissions I want only has upsides.
What would be more useful, however, would be the ability to selectively block network connections: for example, to allow the public transportation app to access its API endpoint, but not the advertising and tracking endpoints. I don't think LineageOS allows that, and I don't know if Graphene does.
I would like to qualify that seL4 (and the entire family of L4 kernels) were created exactly to disprove the idea that microkernels were slow. They are extremely perfomant.
The idea that microkernels are slow came from analyzing a popular microkernel at the time - mach. It in no way is a true blanket statement for all microkernels.
> The idea that microkernels are slow came from analyzing a popular microkernel at the time - mach. It in no way is a true blanket statement for all microkernels.
Don't microkernels inherently require lots of context switches between kernel-space and user-space, which are especially slow in a post-Meltdown/Spectre world? I know that Linux has semi-recently added kTLS and KSMBD to speed up TLS/SMB, and Windows used to implement parts of font rendering and its HTTP server in kernel mode to speed things up too, so this gave me the impression that having more things inside the kernel (== more monolithic) is better for speed. Or is this only the case because of how the Linux/NT kernels are implemented, and doesn't apply to microkernels?
https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1090/the-amphora-of-great-...
https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1092/the-amphora-of-great-...
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