Saw a bit behind the scenes of another plastic recycling company once a long time ago. It looked very dodgy to me. I probably can’t say much more since the fraud case ended with a not guilty verdict and I don’t want to risk defaming anyone but the actual processing part looked like a pilot plant to me and couldn’t have been doing much volume while the offices were in a high rent location. It didn’t add up. I think it is in the interests of a lot of companies to green wash plastic packaging and some government funding of recycling operations has possibly been fraudulent.

Plastic packaging needs to be viewed as harmful waste again and not as a recyclable product and consumers need to change their purchasing habits to avoid it.

I am just old enough to remember there was barely any plastic packaging as a kid and we coped fine without it.

Opening up private company communications to the government makes that data a huge target for foreign intelligence and criminal organisations. Even our allies will happily pass on valuable company secrets to their own companies. Everyone is out for themselves. The software our government uses to analyse data will generally be closed source and supplied by a foreign power and not sufficiently audited.

Unfortunately our politicians are dangerously ignorant about the techological risks to national sovereignty and our economy. So they rely on often dubious advice from parties with a vested interest that is opposed to the public interest.

There are a number of good alternatives. Signal wins because it’s well known, easy to use and install. Governments are targetting private communications, not a specific app so their entire class is under threat and alternatives that can be backdoored will be.

It’s all very short sighted. If you really want to stop private communications you have to outlaw all people with technical knowledge and access to general purpose computers. I can cobble something together that is secure enough for a criminal or terrorist to communicate with freely available software but it won’t be full featured or nice to use.

Taken to the extreme this thinking ends with sending all the people with glasses to “work” some fields in the country because intellectuals challenge the security of the regime. That makes no fucking sense in a liberal democracy. So why even start down this path. Get a warrant and surveill people at the end points. It’s the only acceptable solution.

I think YT Kids is shit as a babysitter for little kids particularly when we have the ABC. But my kids are older and have individual accounts with age based limits and it is working really well along with parental guidance ofcourse.

I do not give a fuck about foreign multinationals in general, particularly not tech ones, and I’ll back a democratically elected Aussie government and our sovereignty against them on principle. But Youtube’s account system is working out well for our family and I don’t want to lose it otherwise I am going to have to spend effort on circumvention which is just a waste of everyone’s time.

It’s just an extension of extremist Christian white nationalism/neonazi shit. They realized terminally online young men were very vulnerable to this sort of grooming way back before gamergate even. It was definately weaponized in the US against Clinton and Harris. It’s 90% political in origin.

It is arguably true that many young men are shat on by the world we have created for them compared with the past. Stupid fucking gig economy, home ownership, cost of living, transition from manufacturing to service economy. But the people enslaving their brains are the same people with a foot on their necks keeping them down economically and socially. Pull back the curtains and its a handful of mega rich cunts protecting their fortunes by raising a compliant army of cucks to distort the democratic process.

Young men need to open their eyes and tell the sketchy old pedo dudes trying to manipulate them to fuckoff, NYPA!

There is that other country as well. The one you can get in serious shit for questioning or mentioning genocide.

Being a sovereign nation should mean we can tell the yanks they can fuck off.

Unfortunately they have their corporate and defence hooks into us really badly.

If the current US administration has any global impact it is this: We all need to wake the fuck up, diversify our strategic relationships, and reduce our dependence on the US.

I had moved from Slackware to Debian but by 2004 the long release cycles of Debian were making it very hard to use any Debian with current hardware or desktop environments. I was using Sid and dealing with the breakages. Ubuntu promised a reskinned Debian with 6 month release cycles synced to Gnome. Then they over delivered with a live cd and easy installation and it was a deserved phenomenon. I very enthusiastically installed Warty Warthog. Even bought some merch.

When Ubuntu launched it was promoted as a community distro, “humanity towards others” etc despite being privately funded. Naked people holding hands. Lots of very good community outreach etc.

The problem for Ubuntu was it wasn’t really a community distro at all. It was Canonical building on the hard work of Debian volunteers. Unlike Redhat, Canonical had a bad case of not invented here projects that never got adopted elsewhere like upstart, unity, mir, snaps and leaving their users with half-arsed experiments that then got dropped. Also Mint exists so you can have the Ubuntu usability enhancements of Debian run by a community like Debian. I guess there is a perception now that Ubuntu is a mid corpo-linux stuck between two great community deb-based systems so from the perspective of others in the Linux community a lot of us don’t get why people would use it.

Arch would be just another community distro but for a lot of people they got the formula right. Great documentation, reasonably painless rolling release, and very little deviation from upstream. Debian maintainers have a very nasty habit of adding lots of patches even to gold standard security projects from openbsd . They broke ssh key generation. Then they linked ssh with systemd libs making vulnerable to a state actor via the xz backdoor. Arch maintainers don’t do this bullshit.

Everything else is stereotypes. Always feeling like you have to justify using arch, which is a very nice stable, pure linux experience, just because it doesn’t have a super friendly installer. Or having to justify Ubuntu which just works for a lot of people despite it not really being all that popular with the rest of the linux community.

Non-murican - strongly feel preference should be given to genuine refugees fleeing war, famine etc where they have absolutely no ability to influence their fate other than escape. The US is a failed democracy but the people there have barely begun to challenge their government compared to what we have seen elsewhere in the world. And there is still refuge available in blue states. US citizens need to stand up and fight. Then if they fail, only then do they get to go in the queue with the genuine humanitarian refugees. I don’t like queue jumpers. Sorry but impingement on your civil liberties doesn’t compare with families in war torn parts of the world living in fear fear of having their limbs blown off every night.

Ofcourse business around the world would like to cherry pick talent for in demand jobs. They prefer not to invest in developing local people when they can import experienced talent for less. So people with in demand skills will get in that way, not as refugees.

Do you mean to say what is wrong with US multinational tech companies forcing Australians to log into their services so they can extract more value from them under the cover of a voluntary industry code of conduct they wrote and submitted to their US born ex-employee that isn’t mandated by any Australian legislation and isn’t part of any Australian party policy to my knowledge?

Ranked choice is bare minimum for a democracy these days. Whatever ancient shit the US has doesn’t count anymore. Also get rid of the elected tyrant bullshit and upgrade to parliamentary democracy. Then go for mixed-member proportional for extra credit. Also get rid of voting machines and do it all on paper.

But ripping off vulnerable people is for winners who can pay off politicians.

The for profit social media companies profile users and know their demographics in great detail. Kids are obviously watching different content to adults. They are in an equivalent position to a bottleshop employee letting a 12 year old walk out with a carton of premixes and claiming not only that they didn’t know (false) but they want to keep not knowing because it is good for business. The industry only cares about money and has proven they can’t self regulate.

The only question is how to react. Not whether to react.

The social media companies are obviously scare mongering and spreading misinformation to protect their financial interests. We need to balance peoples very reasonable demands for privacy with holding predatory corporate behaviour to account. The most likely outcome will be a requirement to use a third party age verification service subject to Australian privacy laws to verify a new user to a service so that there is no need to provide that informtion to the social media companies. People willingly, enthusiastically give their entire life history to Meta along with all their friends, colleagues and family along with photos that allow biometric fingerprinting of their children for life. Giving them a simple yes/no to the question of if you are legal age based on a trusted third party seems a very reasonable request in comparison.

The policy is predicated on protecting children for their mental health and development when they are at a very vulnerable age. Not all kids have responsible and capable parents. Lots of kids live in abusive circumstances, with absent/negligent parents and some kids are forced by circumstances to effectively be the the care givers/providers in their household as their parents guardians may be incapable. The world is really fucking sad sometimes.

When you go into a pub or supermarket and ask for beer or smokes they don’t give them to anyone who doesn’t have a child lock on them. They ask for proof of age. You can defeat that in various ways but they too are illegal and create risks for those involved. It isn’t perfect but it works well enough to reduce harms.

You want something available only to adults, then the convention is you provide proof you are an adult. That is a privacy nightmare if poorly implemented but then so is the entire digital realm right now.

I think we are missing the big opportunity as a society. The social media platforms are making shitloads of money through predatory manipulation of user habits because they get shitloads from advertising. Just ban the fucking advertising. Most of the bad shit goes away overnight for kids and adults because without the advertising the incentives to keep people trapped in a dopamine loop is mostly gone. The big platforms either learn how to produce viable paid services or people move to community run alternatives like this one.

My kids run Arch linux on their desktops. I won’t let them use a closed source foreign adware/spyware operating system that doesn’t give full control of hardware on principle while they live under my roof and expect me to provide tech support. So operating system restrictions are out of the question for me.

My kids have zero curiosity or interest in social media outside of youtube where they mostly watch really cool creative, education or gaming content which I support or if I think content is low quality brain rot it is something we discuss.

I am very content not to engage in social media if age verification proves too intrusive. Its a time waster for me and increasingly I feel like I am responding to prompts to train corporate AIs to replace employees, creatives etc. The human aspect of it all is getting lost. I think we need to learn how to live offline more. It could be our national competitive advantage. We are half way there already with our shit Internet.

How much tax did they pay? There is the real crime.

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I would say the US has an executive with aspirations to implement aspects of a fascist state. As long as millions of people are protesting in the streets, the courts are ruling against the executive on points of law and people are standing their ground it is still a long road for the executive to get where they want to go. If the country really was full fascist you would be totally fucked and being shipped with your family to a concentration camp for disloyalty to great leader right now.

Unlike some other countries where law enforcement and prisons might be state run on principle, the US has a history of privatizing such functions. They had the union busting Pinkerton thugs, for profit prisons and bounty hunters. A society that didn’t cry out when the Pinkertons were busting the heads of working people or kids were being railroaded into for profit prison slavery shouldn’t be surprised when thugs are clearing the streets of immigrants. That is just America sadly. That nastiness has always been there.

As we dont have the gaps in my country my guess is it a US interpretation of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon as applied to the shitter.

I expect in the USA people, particularly the out groups, are believed to be inherently criminal/immoral and need to be observed to make sure they aren’t doing anything undesirable.

As the US public toilet is primarily a place for moral judgement and not elimation of waste you then get the crazies questioning if people’s gender and equipment meets moral standards for use of the facilities based on casual assessment of their appearance.

It’s just another money/power grab. Tech bros want to spy on your kids to train their mythical AGI God, make shit loads of money and be in a position of influence.

Take away people’s economic independence. Take their intellectual capital. Take their capacity to learn and think independently and ultimately their capacity to play and imagine.

The sheep are being led towards a very fucking grim world.

Lets be clear it isn’t the tech that is bad. Self hosting a model for a task that suits it like speech recognition for a disabled person is righteous and liberating.

I hate to agree with the Marxists of Lemmy but the problem is very much capitalism as it is with global warming, pollution and a social inequality. Where I will split with them historically is I still believe in liberal democracies capacity to regulate capitalism for a common good. But when everyone has outsourced their thinking to a corporate AI from birth to death democracy is fucked isn’t it.

We need to be aware of how we are being fucked over, sceptical of people pushing this shit and engaged politically to make sure it is regulated appropriately otherwise these cashed up AI fuckers are going to write legislation for our politicians to rubber stamp.