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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SA has struggled to be economically viable almost since the first settlers. While Perth might be shooting ahead now, I think it was on a similar trajectory to Brisbane for most of that time while Adelaide flatlined… South Australia is a difficult place to maintain long term growth I think. On the plus side without the boom you don’t get the bust and growth has its own challenges.

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.

The account posts a large volume of articles critical of China in some way and the angle doesnt have to be as obvious as Uyghur genocide or conflicts in the South China sea. It could be criticism.of deepseek or surveys of regional influence or whatever else comes up on their media filters as China related. You have to be aware of the volume of posts over time and not look at a single post.

I don’t have a problem with criticism of China or the USA or any other government including Australia’s. It is really a question of balance and volume of posts. It’s either one hell of an obsession or an organised campaign to shape opinion.

Criticism of the Chinese government is sometimes warranted but the volume of posts from Hotznplotzn on the topic across the lemmyverse is massive and on a small instance with very low traffic the posts tend to overwhelm the discourse. I think it gives a very unbalanced view of Australian-Chinese relations and I wish it could be rate limited to fit the community as this sort of in your face proselytizing is a large part of the reason I don’t use other social media.

Can you imagine tabling this evidence in a civil case against police brutality. It would be a slam dunk if the US police were accountable like in civilised countries. The fact that they can say it out loud is indicative that the US is beyind fucked.

The US has gone from my let’s organize an intervention for that fuck up friend list to their fucking poison and will drag the rest of us down with them if we don’t keep our distance.

Paying to get access to data and eyeballs. Social media is about mass surveillance and influence. The customers pay the service for access to the stupid people. Always have.

It doesn’t feel like an exaggeration to call it extortion either.

If you maintain the cheapest qualifying policy you are almost guaranteed to be paying for something of such little value that you will never choose to use it. Nobody benefits other than health insurance hareholders.

One of a large number of social, economic and environmental injustices that the ALP should fix but will not. They have the numbers. It’s a rare opportunity.