Exactly. I’d say this is currently the best everyday example of the phenomenon.

IMO you’re doing it the right way.

If there’s a single indicator to pay attention to, it’s the source of funding. Where does the media outlet get its money from?

Next is professional ethics: does it employ real journalists? Journalism is like medicine, it’s a profession with a code of conduct. In this case, a commitment to factual accuracy, a good-faith search for the truth, fairness in choices about what to cover, transparency about sources, etc.

And if you feel the journalists are doing a bad job, then go back to point 1 and ask: Who is paying them? Are you? The reason for today’s crisis in journalism is not that journalists are lazy or evil, it’s that the internet cratered their business model. More of us need to step up and pay. It’s that simple.

I have a couple of paid subscriptions. If that’s the cost of living in a properly informed society, it’s a great deal.

OK. Not sure how far that recipe gets us in practice, but it’s a respectable argument.

You’re not my audience,

That’s a good point and I work to this principle myself. So my observation was pretty redundant, yes.

I already know you’re anchored in your convictions

To the extent you know anything about me, I also “know” that your own convictions are just as unmovable.

Looked at another way, it’s a good thing to have convictions.

Not reasonable because you’re making a broad generalization

Generalizations are broad by nature, that does not mean they have no value.

But in reality the majority of people who oppose immigration also oppose LGBT+ and freedom of religion so it’s unlikely they’ll use this argument.

Can’t speak for the USA but that is absolutely not the case in Europe.

Otherwise you make some decent points. In any case, IMO discussions like this would benefit if we accepted from the outset that nobody is going to be convincing others to change their opinions. The best that can be hoped for is to understand the opposing side better. That would be an achievement in itself.

These sources don’t prove anything. This is about values. If you want to convince people who are not already on your side then you need to begin there.

That’s a specific case that doesn’t falsify my claim that most people in this discussion, here, are inflating away the meaning of the word Nazi so that it equates to, roughly, “somebody I don’t like who is to the right of me politically”.

This precise argument can also be made to justify a tightening on immigration from countries where religious intolerance is the cultural norm, on the grounds that “if you allow [them] to spread their ideology eventually there will be enough [of them] to be able to take the power by force, and when they do they’ll setback all of the tolerance that was advanced”. Reasonable?

My thoughts are that most people in this discussion have little idea what the word Nazi actually means and that therefore this silly question is a bit of an insult to the victims of Nazism.

Would be interested in an intelligent rebuttal to this seemingly decent argument, if anyone has one.

Another option: encrypt a sparse file rather than a disk volume. Mount the file to local filesystem and open and close it there.

Fair enough!

So you would suggest to get bigger and bigger storages?

Personally I would suggest never recording video. We did fine without it for aeons and photos are plenty good enough. If you can still to this rule you will never have a single problem of bandwidth or storage ever again. Of course I understand that this is an outrageous and unthinkable idea for many people these days, but that is my suggestion.

The local-plus-remote strategy is fine for any real-world scenario. Make sure that at least one of the replicas is a one-way backup (i.e., no possibility of mirroring a deletion). That way you can increment it with zero risk.

And now for some philosophy. Your files are important, sure, but ask yourself how many times you have actually looked at them in the last year or decade. There’s a good chance it’s zero. Everything in the world will disappear and be forgotten, including your files and indeed you. If the worst happens and you lose it all, you will likely get over it just fine and move on. Personally, this rather obvious realization has helped me to stress less about backup strategy.

Amusing. This conundrum, exactly as described, has also been bothering me, on and off, for years. Having tried a bunch of solutions, I have recently settled on one that I’m quite pleased with.

A bumbag. AKA waist pack. (AKA another name which sounds both comical and vulgar to British ears.)

You’re not gonna look cool but it works.

battle between Ubuntu and Fedora with their derivative

Agreed in general. Except that Ubuntu is itself a derivative, of Debian. Technically it’s Debian that’s the peer of Fedora.

XDG Desktop Portals as a standardised way for applications to access resources that are outside of the sandbox

It is designed to enable desktop applications to take full advantage of snap packaging

So all this only affects Snap apps, is that correct?

Indeed. The moral purity issue has always been the Achilles heel of progressive politics. It makes compromise hard and it drives heretics - i.e. the people whose votes you need - crazy.

This is great news! Debian is back in contention for me.

Recently Debian developer Helmut Grohne initiated the Debian development discussion around removing more packages from the unstable archive. He argued in favor of more aggressively removing unmaintained packages from the archive given the QA-related costs, additional work/complexities when dealing with major fundamental changes to Debian, and other non-trivial costs

Useful insight, thanks. And somewhat reassuring.

I have no intention of using Arch (btw). I’m the kind of insufferable idealist who wants to use Debian for the high-minded principle of it. I consider Arch a toy distro for gamers. :)

Great question. Democracy is all about compromise. I am bothered by how few people seem to grasp this fact. Personally, when I hear the phrase “squabbling politicians”, I roll my eyes - to squabble is their job! They’re doing it on our behalf because people have different interests and different values and so we don’t all agree, and that is a good thing. A polity where everybody agrees - well, there are names for that kind of political system and none of them are democracy.

Over here in Europe, I just wish the progressive parties (for whom I vote) would do the obvious deal and sacrifice their dilatory approach to immigration and in particular border security. This issue is undermining all their other policy goals. The obvious allergy of voters to porous borders is not just a result of disinformation, and taking a tougher line on it does not necessarily mean infringing human rights.