Trying a switch to tal@lemmy.today, at least for a while, due to recent kbin.social stability problems and to help spread load.

  • 0 Posts
  • 129 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 13th, 2023
  • tal@kbin.socialtoSelfhosted@lemmy.world•A self-hosted wiki that can integrate with a fediverse instance
    12·
    1 year ago

    Reddit had the ability to have a per-subreddit wiki. I never dug into it on the moderator side, but it was useful for some things like setting up pages with subreddit rules and the like. I think that moderators had some level of control over it, at least to allow non-moderator edits or not, maybe on a per-page basis.

    That could be a useful option for communities; I think that in general, there is more utility for per-community than per-instance wiki spaces, though I know that you admin a server with one major community which you also moderate, so in your case, there may not be much difference.

    I don’t know how amenable django-wiki is to partitioning things up like that, though.

    EDIT: https://www.reddit.com/wiki/wiki/ has a brief summary.

  • tal@kbin.socialtoAndroid@lemdro.id•Android helps Apple "Get the Message"
    451·
    1 year ago

    The rest of the world doesn’t use SMS/RCS/iMessage as much as WhatsApp and the like

    SMSes use a standard available to any app. WhatsApp is controlled by a single company.

    If you were arguing that XMPP or something like that should be used instead of SMS, okay, that’s one thing, but I have a hard time favoring a walled garden.

  • tal@kbin.socialtoWorld News@lemmy.world•California sues oil companies claiming they downplayed the risk of fossil fuels
    2·
    1 year ago

    So, first, that text is from the Declaration of Independence, not the US Constitution, which defines legal rights.

    But, secondly, the right to “pursuit of happiness” needs to be understood in the (somewhat euphemistic) language of the time. It is generally understood as referring to a right to property; this right was a core dispute in the American Revolution, and mirrors a nearly-identical “life, liberty” phrase from John Locke where the term used is explicitly “property”. That is, the right is not to never feel unhappy or depressed, but rather to not have one’s property taken away by non-elected parties.

    https://www.crf-usa.org/foundations-of-our-constitution/natural-rights.html

    The Tea Act, which imposed taxes on American colonists, was a critical dispute in the American Revolution:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Act

    The Tea Act 1773 (13 Geo. 3. c. 44) was an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain. The principal objective was to reduce the massive amount of tea held by the financially troubled British East India Company in its London warehouses and to help the struggling company survive.[1] A related objective was to undercut the price of illegal tea, smuggled into Britain’s North American colonies. This was supposed to convince the colonists to purchase Company tea on which the Townshend duties were paid, thus implicitly agreeing to accept Parliament’s right of taxation. Smuggled tea was a large issue for Britain and the East India Company, since approximately 86% of all the tea in America at the time was smuggled Dutch tea.

    At the time, it was generally accepted that in England, only elected officials had the power to tax; this is one of the rights of Englishmen.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rights_of_Englishmen

    The “rights of Englishmen” are the traditional rights of English subjects and later English-speaking subjects of the British Crown. In the 18th century, some of the colonists who objected to British rule in the thirteen British North American colonies that would become the first United States argued that their traditional[1] rights as Englishmen were being violated. The colonists wanted and expected the rights that they (or their forebears) had previously enjoyed in England: a local, representative government, with regards to judicial matters (some colonists were being sent back to England for trials) and particularly with regards to taxation.[2] Belief in these rights subsequently became a widely accepted justification for the American Revolution.[3][4]

    However, American colonists had no elected MPs in Parliament. Parliament was willing neither to grant them elected MPs, nor to refrain from taxation and have locally-elected legislatures perform taxation. Parliament’s counterargument was that Americans had “virtual representation”, in that MPs elected by people in the UK – though not elected by American colonists – had their best interests at heart.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_representation

    Virtual representation was the idea that the members of Parliament, including the Lords and the Crown-in-Parliament, reserved the right to speak for the interests of all British subjects, rather than for the interests of only the district that elected them or for the regions in which they held peerages and spiritual sway.[1] Virtual representation was the British response to the First Continental Congress in the American colonies. The Second Continental Congress asked for representation in Parliament in the Suffolk Resolves, also known as the first Olive Branch Petition. Parliament claimed that their members had the well being of the colonists in mind. The Colonies rejected this premise.

  • tal@kbin.socialtoWorld News@lemmy.world•California sues oil companies claiming they downplayed the risk of fossil fuels
    171·
    1 year ago

    My assumption is that that’s gonna get thrown out because they don’t have standing. Probably some kind of case law along those lines already, since I figure someone’s probably tried that before.

    googles

    Looks like it.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juliana_v._United_States

    Juliana, et al. v. United States of America, et al. is a climate-related lawsuit filed in 2015 by 21 youth plaintiffs against the United States and several executive branch officials. Filing their case in the United States District Court for the District of Oregon, the plaintiffs, represented by the non-profit organization Our Children’s Trust, include Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, the members of Martinez’s organization Earth Guardians, and climatologist James Hansen as a “guardian for future generations”.

    They call for the government to offer “both declaratory and injunctive relief for their claim—specifically, a declaration of the federal government’s fiduciary role in preserving the atmosphere and an injunction of its actions which contravene that role.”

    In January 2020, a Ninth Circuit panel dismissed the case on the grounds that the plaintiffs lacked standing to sue for an injunction.

    Legal actions to affect climate change by federal and state-level governments have been attempted since the 1990s; one of the first known cases was led by Antonio Oposa, a Philippine lawyer that represented a class-action suit of 43 students against the Philippine government to protect a forest surrounding their village.

    Since 2011, Our Children’s Trust has been filing various state and federal lawsuits on behalf of youth, though most of these have been dismissed by courts, as courts generally have not ruled that access to a clean environment is a right that can be litigated against.[8][5][6] Such cases are also generally dismissed as lawsuits cannot be initiated by “generalized grievances”, and require plaintiffs with standing to sue and can demonstrate concrete harm that the government has done, and that the courts can at least partially redress the harm by order of the court.[9] Further, cases cannot be brought to court if they deal with a “political question” which cannot be resolved by actions of Congress and the President.[9]

    The “political question” bit should be inapplicable, since this is a company, but the lack of standing to sue for climate change probably does apply.

    I assume that this is a crowd-pleaser by the California executive, that they expect it to get tossed out but want the political points.

  • tal@kbin.socialtoAndroid@lemdro.id•Google pays $93M to settle Android tracking lawsuit in California
    115·
    1 year ago

    That ratio doesn’t matter.

    What matters is the value derived from some prohibited activity relative to the fine/lawsuits resulting from that activity.

    Let’s say that Company A sells oranges, and uses some pesticide that isn’t approved, and gets a fine for it.

    Let’s say that Company B sells apples, and improperly claimed that the apples were fresher than they were to grocery stores and is sued for that.

    Let’s say that Company A and Company B merge and form Company C. The value of Company C would be larger, but it would make no sense for either of the above two disincentives to be larger. Being part of Company C doesn’t make engaging in bad behavior more-desirable than it does for when A and B were separate, and so the disincentives one establishes for bad behavior shouldn’t grow either.

  • tal@kbin.socialtoWorld News@lemmy.world•UN expert sounds alarm over ‘contemporary forms of slavery’ in Canada
    377·
    1 year ago

    Yeah, sorry, but no. That’s not slavery. If you’re present in the country illegally and working illegally and could be returned home at any time, you may not be making as much as you would if you were present legally, but you are not compelled to work. You can always terminate working and return to the country where you are legally supposed to be. If you choose to be in Country A illegally and working there rather than in Country B legally and working (for less) there, that is your choice, and you are not being compelled to work.

    Slavery entails someone being compelled to work.

  • tal@kbin.socialtoPrivacy Guides@lemmy.one•How you can be deanonymized through Tor
    16·
    1 year ago

    JavaScript can be used to identify a user through Tor in a number of different ways. This is why Tor Browser comes pre-bundled with the “NoScript” plugin. This plugin can either reduce or disable JavaScript’s ability. When the plugin is set on the “Safest” setting, JavaScript is completely disabled. This level of security is required to completely stay anonymous and secure on Tor.

    There was a point in time when I used NoScript, but years back, I stopped, as it had simply become impractical to browse the web with the degree of breakage that switching off Javascript by default produced.

    I’m not saying that the article is wrong about it being necessary, but I think that from a functionality standpoint, that bar may be a high one. Maybe if you are just browsing a specific site or so, but I think that for general use of the Web, it’s going to be a problem.

  • tal@kbin.socialtoSelfhosted@lemmy.world•This should be a pinned post as it really captures the essence of my experience so far.
    4·
    1 year ago

    I broadly agree that “cloud” has an awful lot of marketing fluff to it, as with many previous buzzwords in information technology.

    However, I also think that there was legitimately a shift from a point in time where one got a physical box assigned to them to the point where VPSes started being a thing to something like AWS. A user really did become increasingly-decoupled from the actual physical hardware.

    With a physical server, I care about the actual physical aspects of the machine.

    With a VPS, I still have “a VPS”. It’s virtualized, yeah, but I don’t normally deal with them dynamically.

    With something like AWS, I’m thinking more in terms of spinning up and spinning down instances when needed.

    I think that it’s reasonable to want to describe that increasing abstraction in some way.

    Is it a fundamental game-changer? In general, I don’t think so. But was there a shift? Yeah, I think so.

    And there might legitimately be some companies for which that is a game-changer, where the cost-efficiencies of being able to scale up dynamically to handle peak load on a service are so important that it permits their service to be viable at all.