Vinegar

It's actually far worse than that. Trailer park Millionaires is a report from 9 years ago following wealthy investors who were buying up trailer parks so they could Jack up rent. Investors specifically targeted sex offenders, convicted felons, and other desparate tennants, so they could mercilessly exploit them since they truly had no place else to go.

The investors were also trained to exploit families, since more members in the household means more potential workers, and that means they'll be more likely to tolerate a rent hike.

Communication Workers of America is probably the closest to what you're looking for. You're definitely better off working with an established union instead of trying to build one from scratch, they have a lot of valuable experience and resources that you'll need to pull off a unionization attempt. If you reach out directly to CWA, or any other union, they'll work with you to help organize your workplace.

If you are serious about unionizing: first, see if you can get a few of your coworkers on-board by talking to them outside of work. Do this in-person or on voice calls that aren't recorded, it's crucial to keep the company unaware as long as possible so they have less time and ability to oppose you.

Ah, I see how what I wrote before didn't clearly express what I was thinking, and didn't address the issue of private contractors intentionally pushing for bloated contracts.

If public money for public code is mandated at the federal level, then private contractors would be bidding for work that ends up in the public domain. I am assuming that wasteful & bloated contracts will be underbid by contracts that fork or add features to existing projects. Either way, if the end result is in the public domain, then the project is still reusable.

I definitely don't believe that such a mandate would be easy to implement, or separate from a wider policy platform. I see private capital influencing government decisions as the crux of the problem with passing such a mandate. However, private capital influencing government decisions is an issue that unites many activists, organizations, and social movements. If FLOSS can be integrated into organizations and social movements pushing for institutional reform, then that might be a viable pathway toward meaningful policy change.

Capital interests certainly oppose the public domain, but I don't think it's a pipe dream, I think it's a policy change. Everything has swung in favor of private capital for long enough that it's time for the pendulum to swing back toward the public interest. I think the iron is hot, and right now is the time to start imaging and building better institutions.

~~I disagree, those consultants and lobbyists are working for proprietary vendors.~~ If, instead, public grant money & public purchasing contracts were mandated to go towards free and open source technology, then the nation's technology infrastructure would eventually become free and open. Such a mandate would reduce the opportunity for corrupt contracts in the first place, ~~because it would be substantially more expensive to start a project from scratch if there are already viable solutions in the public domain~~ assuming wasteful & bloated contracts will be underbid by contracts that fork or add features to existing projects.

Public money for public code can dramatically reduce the waste caused by corrupt grants & contracts. If a project falls through, then at least the technology would be in the public domain for another organization to pick-up development. Currently, when a project falls through, it is usually a total loss because the technology remains intellectual property that can not be reused.

Just like with the Linux kernel, if a free and open source solution exists, it can be adapted to meet countless needs with far less effort and cost than starting from scratch with a proprietary solution.

Absolutely, and I'm glad someone else has thought the exact same thing! "Public money == public code".

Unfortunately, generics can vary wildly in efficacy & quality. As @Aradina pointed out, sometimes the encapsulation is different (e.g. extended release coating vs. standard release), but also the form of the drug can differ (e.g. capsule, tablet, softgel, chewable, etc), chemical by-products from different manufacturing techniques may be present in different amounts, and different manufacturing processes can also yield different chiral enantiomer ratios in the end product.

The "same" drug from different manufacturers may vary in effectiveness / side-effects, and brand-name drugs aren't always the best formulations for most patients.

Thank you! Lemmy is a tremendous contribution to the wider Fediverse, and no amount of "thank yous" is ever enough for people like you writing free software and giving freely to the public domain.

I have been on Lemmy, and around the Fediverse on various accounts since ~2021, and a suggestion I have seen promoted countless times is for communities which federate across instances. e.g. posts to [email protected] will show on [email protected] as long as lemmy.ml and lemmy.world federate with one another. If I remember correctly, each of you have previously opposed this idea for multiple reasons. If you do still oppose such a feature, will you please reiterate why you think this is the wrong direction for Lemmy? Also, have you considered adding a multi-community feature similar to Reddit's multi-reddit feature which allows end-users to combine multiple federated communities into a single page just for them?

It is misleading to attribute too much credit to a single individual, even a president. There was a significant clash of social/political forces when Obama was in office. Off the top of my head I can think of the following major forces: War in Iraq & Afghanistan, Great Recession & Occupy, DREAMers, ACA, Gay marriage, Environmentalism / Inconvenient Truth, Global outsourcing & job loss, Tea Party & the rise of militant christian nationalism. That's the landscape in which progressive policy ambitions were compromised to death to avoid total gridlock.

It's also worth giving credit where it is due: those auto safety and emissions regulations achieved their goal... for regular cars. Unfortunately, Republicans insisted on exceptions for body-on-frame vehicles (trucks, vans, SUVs). In the years since, those types of vehicles have steadily become the most common in the US, because they are the most profitable for the auto industry.

Straight up saucy, but I hope you compiled VSCode from source. Otherwise, shame on you for not using VSCodium :)

Also, I really like your Conky config. I really want to add a month & year percentage progression status bar on my desktop now.

When I install Linux for friends and family the only distro I use anymore is Fedora. I have used just about every major distro, and Fedora is the only one that has "just worked" on every computer I have tried it on.

Love them, or hate them, Red Hat is by far the single biggest company in the Linux community, and their Red Hat Enterprise Linux is renowned for being stable, performant, and very well supported. Fedora is where most of the updates that make their way into RHEL are initially available, so with Fedora you get a cutting edge distro with the backing and resources of a massive corporation that employs many of the top Linux-desktop contributors.

If you want a distro that "just works" I strongly recommend you give Fedora a try.

DietPi! It's one the most resource efficient distros that is easy to set up. It's ideal for single board computers and virtual machines, so I use it as a low-overhead Docker host on my Raspberry Pis. The dietpi-software tool installs optimized versions of most software you might use for SBC projects, but if it doesn't have what you're looking for, you can also use APT to install packages from the Debian ARM/ Raspbian repos.