It if wasn't farmers making your food, it would be you making it. If it wasn't other people providing all the goods and services farmers need, they would be doing it.

Human society is interdependent. Farmers are not aristocrats, they are ordinary citizens providing a service in return for money. Including quite a lot of taxpayers' money, incidentally.

Farmers are on the wrong side of history but we continue to empower them for irrational sentimental reasons. An unfortunate cocktail.

Alternative utopia: do online banking in a desktop web browser while seated comfortably at home, rather than on a street corner in the sun squinting at a tiny screen.

Just to push back, a littie, on an easily caricatured picture.

China is looking far less strong economically than it was just a few years ago. In the coming years the Chinese economy will face challenges at least as big as any facing the West. The notion that China will buy up and thus vassalize Europe is not, on balance, very rational. In the 1980s the USA was seriously concerned that Japan would eat up the world. Japan.

The Economist looked into the BRI recently and came to the conclusion that the scheme was essentially economic rather than political - a way to get rid of excess capital in the 2010s, with some potential political benefits on the side. Not the other way round.

None of this justifies Chinese abuses or Hungary's anti-EU antics.

Approximately 5 days before the day in question, "next" becomes "this".

That's the answer.

Excellent question that has always bothered me too.

In theory, if a good number of public libraries and and the Internet Archive each has a paid-for digital copy of a book, and decent infrastructure to ensure redundancy, plus a paper copy as the ultimate backup, then it seems unlikely the book's content will actually be lost before centuries have passed.

The problem I want solved is this: how do I get my money to the author of a book without needing to use DRM software and without paying tax to gatekeeping corporate monopolists?

Anecdata. I was hooked by RSS right from the outset in the mid-2000s. I used Google Reader for a bit and Netvibes for several years. It was amazing. This was the way the open internet was supposed to be. I had a dashboard to follow a whole bunch of cool sites and blogs, with not a scummy ad in sight. At one point there was even this cool tool whose name I forget which would filter RSS items, by means of multiple dials, based on their social-media buzziness. This was obviously a dangerous slope to be on, but at the time it felt safe enough and it was incredibly powerful at fine-tuning the signal. Again: all without any advertising or spying.

Then websites began to drop their feeds. Stuff began to break. I succumbed to the prevailing wisdom that RSS was on the way out, and tried other things. Lots of things, including Twitter and Pocket and Reddit and Google Alerts and probably even email at one point. Nothing came close to the functionality and freedom of RSS.

So, to cut the story short, I went back to RSS. It hadn't gone away after all. In fact, the rot seems to have stopped. Major blogging software like Wordpress still provides it, obviously. But so does Youtube, if you hunt a bit. Some news sites have even improved their offering. Maybe they finally grasped that RSS is like email: it's an ally against big tech domination. And for the rest there are now lots of tools to generate RSS feeds on the fly. Right now I use a modified Python script that does this for a couple of news sites I can't live without. It works great, although this is obviously not a solution for normies.

RSS is just an acronym but the principle is as relevant as ever. There needs to be an open standard for getting a summary of recently-published content on their web. RSS is the plumbing solution that works best and I hope it can be improved and made better still.

My theory is that The Godfather suffers from pioneer syndrome. It was incredibly modern at the time of its release, with ultra-naturalistic acting and new techniques of cinematography. Which everyone proceeded to copy. So that now it looks like just a decent film, maybe from the 80s. But at the time it was a breakthrough. That's what it's getting the credit for.

It certainly feels depressing but let's try to look on the bright side.

What we can do with FOSS is orders of magnitude more than what was possible a decade or two ago. Even geeks used Windows in the 1990s. Android is a privacy nightmare, but its forkable FOSS version is not so far upstream. For the hardware and low-level software, the open options are getting better: CoreBoot, Pinebooks, RISC-V etc. As are the services: E2E messaging, Fediverse, OSM, Wikipedia.

It's just that we're asking so much more of of these tools than we did before, because the internet has taken over everything. And the corporate spyware always looks slicker, and its UX is better, and it stays one step ahead, and most people don't care and take what they're given.

But the reality is that things have never been better, if we can accept that we will not have the cutting-edge convenience of Big Tech's options.

And of course we have to stay on our guard over certain red lines. I'd say the most urgent red line is the web, which is the world's de-facto open software platform. We need to defeat Google's evil plans for it, at all costs. That one is existential, but for the rest I'm fairly optimistic.

Slightly tangential, but why is "one of the two major Lemmy instances" using a TLD under the authority of the government of frigging MALI, a semi-failed state that has nothing whatsoever to do with Lemmy or its mission?!

Come on internet, grow up and show some respect for internet architecture. TLDs are not just for jokes or decoration, they actually mean something.

Completely agree in substance and spirit, but not on this framing of everything as about ownership. Personally I don't want to "own" data any more than I want to own a car. What I want is control, rights, privacy and personal freedom. The ownership obsession seems to me a red herring that just proves how much we've been taken in by consumer capitalism.

Forgive the rant. I agree with you on the substance.

This attitude makes my blood boil. Firefox is the last FOSS web-rendering engine standing against your privacy-destroying FAANG oligopoly. If we lose Firefox, the web becomes de-facto privatized.

Some trust-busting is in order. Hopefully Brussels is on the case.

NB: this vituperation is obviously directed to your company, not you personally.