@alcoholicorn It is when it has been privatised to a company that pretty much pays no tax (hi Transurban!), for roads that taxpayers helped to pay for, and those toll roads connect car dependent suburbs that have next to no public transport.
I mean, Windows is just such a weird proprietary distro.
It doesn't use the latest Linux kernel, or even a mainstream POSIX-compliant alternative like BSD. Instead, you have a strange CP/M-like monolithic kernel — I think they used to call it DOS — that's been extended to behave more like VAX and MP/M.
It also doesn't use either X11 or Wayland as a display manager. Instead, you have an incredibly unintuitive overblown WINE-like subsystem handling the display.
Because it doesn't natively use Wayland or X11, you are limited in the desktop environments that you can use. There's really limited support for KDE, despite the best efforts of volunteers.
Instead, there's a buggy and error-prone proprietary window manager that ships with it by default. A bit like how Canonical tried to make Unity the default desktop for Ubuntu.
And confusingly, they've named that window manager Windows as well!
That window manager lacks many of the features an everyday Gnome or KDE user would expect out of the box.
It also doesn't ship with a standard package manager, and most of the packages ship as x86 binaries, so installing software works differently to how an everyday Linux user would expect.
There's also only one company maintaining all of these projects. It insists on closed source, and it has a long history of abandoning its projects.
And sure, if you're a nerd who's into alternative operating systems, toying with Windows can be fun.
But if your grandpa is used to Linux, frankly he'll be utterly bamboozled by the Windows experience.
I'm sorry to be glib, because Windows does have some nice ideas.
But.
Windows on the desktop just isn't ready for your average, everyday Linux user.
#Linux #Windows #PC #OpenSource #GNU #GNULinux #BSD #FreeBSD #Microsoft #KDE #Gnome #Ubuntu #GPL #LinusTrovalds #Linus #BillGates #OperatingSystem #DesktopLinux #POSIX #UNIX #Distro
@Longmactoppedup What you're looking at here are the economic ideas of a late-19th century American economist named Henry George: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George
At its furthest extreme, the argument is that land and licences to exploit finite natural resources (potentially including the rights to mine minerals and emit greenhouse gasses) should be taxed heavily.
For property, the tax should only be levied against the underlying land, and not any buildings or improvements that add value. So you get taxed on what the price would be if it were a vacant lot (the unimproved site value).
Meanwhile, *all* other taxes on productive wealth generation — income tax, company tax, GST, etc., should be completely abolished.
Advocates generally combine this with a universal basic income.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
The logic is that taxing finite natural resources will cause them to be used more efficiently, and the benefits distributed widely throughout society.
Meanwhile, activity that creates wealth or adds value should be encouraged, and that means it should go untaxed.
When land and resource taxes are combined with a universal basic income, what ends up happening is that people with a lot of expensive land or who use a lot of natural resources pay a net tax.
Meanwhile, people who use few resources get a UBI that's higher than their tax bill, and therefore a net credit.
What it offers is a way that free market libertarians can respond to climate change and other environmental issues.
That being said, even if you don't agree with the full Georgist program, there is still a decent case to be made that more of the tax burden should be filled by taxes on land and natural resources.
@deadsuperhero @nutomic I think the concept of a TikTok on the Fediverse is solid. And if short form videos help to get more people on the Fedi, and engaging with the Fedi, that's a good thing in my book.
@vividspecter @M500 It's also important to note that there's a huge difference between a social critique and a personal insult.
The lack of viable transport alternatives is a systemic issue. It's not a personal moral failure.
It is not a personal moral fault to drive where no good alternatives exist.
The solution is not a different personal transport choice. The solution is systemic change to how transport, infrastructure, and planning are delivered.
The survey looks at how people have been socially conditioned to accept the systemic issues.
It involves a lot of blame shifting, and victim blaming.
It involves dropping or changing a number of socially accepted rights and wrongs as soon as a car is involved.
@voracitude I think the biggest subsidy of all is the hidden one.
Burning fossil fuels leads to more frequent and severe floods, droughts, bushfires, heatwaves, and hurricanes.
The costs of rebuilding and recovering from those disasters are a cost of using fossil fuels.
If the fossil fuel companies aren't paying that cost, they're receiving a subsidy. And it's already a massive one.
Also.
I didn't include it in the post above, but apparently the CEO of ExxonMobil is also totally against subsidies...
For climate action:
"The way that the government is incentivized and trying to catalyze investments in this space is through subsidies. Driving significant investments at a scale that even gets close to moving the needle is going to cost a lot of money.
...
"But I would tell you building a business on government subsidy is not a long-term sustainable strategy—we don’t support that."
https://fortune.com/2024/02/27/exxon-ceo-darren-woods-interview-pay-the-price-for-net-zero/
@drolex I'm telling you some arbitrarily designated regions are far larger than most people imagine them to be.
@No1 @Zagorath Especially in inner-city areas, many of those deliveries are done by bike.
And because most suburbs lack proper Dutch-style protected bike lanes, those riders either have to try to avoid getting hit by cars if they cycle on the road, or dodge pedestrians on the footpath.
Fewer parking spots and more protected bike lanes would help, rather than hinder, many food deliveries.
@cosmicrookie @morry040 It's also telling how many of these same managers have never had any problems with outsourcing their manufacturing roles overseas.
Or outsourcing contact centres to India.
Or outsourcing business processes to Manila.
Or outsourcing IT work to a Silicon Valley cloud platform provider.
You can't get too much more remote than being in another country.
@Sina @Blaubarschmann Google is more like a restaurant that has a large chalk board covered with specials. The kind that has a soup of the day, and a fish of the day, and a chef's special.
There are a few core menu items that are perennials on its printed menu. Search, maps, photos, ads, Gmail, Google Docs, Chrome, Android, Chromebook, YouTube...
Then there's the messaging app of the day, the TV platform of the day, the flavour-of-the-month device selection...
@lemmyreader Here's a starting point for a fediverse StackExchange: Make sure it's interoperable with Lemmy.
Now, you may not get the full feature set on Lemmy, but you should be able to interact with it from Lemmy as if it's a group on there.
#StackExchange #Fediverse #Coding