Truly an xkcd #1172 situation.

I think the idea is that the funding might come with conditions to reach a significant % of the audience. E.g. often public broadcasters have a remit of 99% of population coverage with their broadcast technology, while private stations have much lower or no legally obligatory reception target.

I don’t think that’s a big obstacle in this case though.

Given that the article is not about the UK, I don’t see a good reason to reach for a UK-specific definition.

It’s one of the most blatant self-made problems around migration that populists very disingenuously employ to paint their favourite picture of the “welfare queen” which has been a bold, racist lie since it was first used.

But I’m also a bit sceptical of how you can do this in a country without mandatory collective agreements in all sectors. Germany at least has a minimum wage, but that just means wage dumping can only go as low as 12 Euro per hour. Back in Cyprus, where the same question is constantly in the news, the most notorious anti-worker industry, the tourism sector, is begging for asylum seekers to be allowed in the jobs that they have most trouble filling with citizens, EU-residents, and work-permit holders. But they want to do so outside a collective agreement (one used to exist, but for various reasons is now dead-letter) and essentially without even the protection of a minimum wage (which Cyprus didn’t have until this year, and now it has an idiotic version of it which defines a monthly minimum wage without a limit to hours worked).

I think that the introduction of asylum seekers in the workforce should happen, but it should happen in tandem with a massive pro-union legislation change that will make collective agreements mandatory across the board (similar to the Swedish and Finnish models, as far as I understand those). That might require re-aligning the way unionism is understood in Germany from per-workplace to be per-industry.

https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/68004.html

Garrett’s post makes a great point in only a handful of lines. Strongly recommended reading for anyone who organises a community of any kind.

I would agree. To the extend that OP’s thesis is true (which I don’t think is fully true, but also not fully wrong either), I also find that the readiness to compromise both at the EU level and in most member-state parliaments that eventually need to transpose the directives into national laws, is a difference that stands out.

A multi-party system helps too, because there can be situational alliances that do not divide the parties internally. E.g. in one topic the Social Democrats, the Moderate Right and the Liberals can be on the same side and pass something (probably a free-trade deal) and on another topic the Social Democrats, the Greens, and the Left can pass something else (probably an environmental regulation). When there are only two parties in the legislature, such alliances break party lines, so it’s a higher hurdle to overcome.

Thunderbird’s Calendar supports local, off-line calendars and tasks.

It’s the best FOSS calendar I have used, even if it has its rough edges.

That’s how American ISPs do it.

That’s how the German Telekom does it too with other connection options. It’s definitely not an insurmountable problem for ISPs.

My intention was to suggest that you make those businesses unprofitable by intervening in the market with far-reaching regulations.

I’m not sure if we are on the same side, and honestly in this case it doesn’t matter, since you are right: a corporation only has to care about the externalities as much as they are forced to and not even an inkling more than that.

People who think that an enterprise in a free market will respond to any other force than economic force are wasting activism time that could be better used elsewhere.

If you want a corporation to stop performing a socially harmful business, you need to make that business unprofitable.

This is ultimately a minor story on a European level, but I am just astonished on how creating a price comparison tool has become the most hot-button topic in Cyprus right now.

Before I finally came across a piece that describes what the proposal is, I only saw the opposition statements which never clarified what they were against, just that those proposing it want to destroy their businesses. I was imagining then that this was attempt to set price caps. Nope, the huge scandal is a price comparison tool for groceries (something that Cyprus already has for fossil fuels)

Something that I mentioned to a Ukrainian colleague who asked for my take as someone who is coming from Cyprus is also the effect of time on a conflict.

A politician can make passionate speeches about how faits accomplis will never be accepted and that justice cannot be anything other but the return to the previous condition and so on, but at the end of the day most Greek Cypriots understand that almost a century later, you cannot start kicking people out of the houses they lived for three generations without becoming the bad guy, even if the grandfather stole that house in the aftermath of an illegal war. You can’t punish the grandchild for the sins of the grandfather, you need to find a way to work with them.

So, for Ukraine, the moral of the story is that if it becomes a frozen conflict, every next attempt to settle it will require more compromises on humanitarian grounds. And so far, I think they get it, since they do not consider a ceasefire. But if they end up having to agree to a ceasefire, they should be very suspicious of politicians who tell them at there’s no need to rush to pursue a settlement because “in the future we can negotiate something better”. With every passing decade, fewer and fewer aspects will be up for negotiation at all.

Let’s not overstate Duolingo’s effectiveness for language learning.

The technological challenge to adopting a self-taught language learning method into an app is rather small. You just need the content. Either you develop the course under a Free Culture license, or you purchase the rights for an existing method and you port it. Plus maybe some volunteers to handle user-interaction.

A good example is the VHS Lernportal which implements three levels of German class in a way that actually has some pedagogical merit. It’s killer-feature is nothing technological, but that they have some teachers in the backoffice that will read your occasional text-production exercises and offer corrections (no, language tool wouldn’t be able to replace humans in that case, because language tool doesn’t know what you are trying to say and therefore gives you multiple guesses but no way to know which one you actually need).

The problem with that stance is that there are always behind the scenes talk, before the actual parliamentary vote. So the CDU and FDP-Legislators didn’t just coincidentally voted the same way as there AfD colleagues. There worked actively together to let this law pass.

I will accept that perhaps this might be the case in the specific case, and then I agree with your judgement.

But we have seen the AfD exploiting this in secret ballot votes, from Thuringia for the OG fuckup all the way to the recent repeat elections in Berlin where they wanted to cast doubts on whether the CDU-SPD coalition was voted in by them in the end (and iirc, they pulled something similar with a Left mayor in one of the districts).

I stand by my main thesis, the strategy has an expiry date and it also hasn’t produced the expected results. AfD has grown despite this strategy. There needs to be an escalation of measures against them, because otherwise thinking that only refusing to vote the same way as them is enough to push them away verges increasingly on Aktionismus.

EDIT: Rebuttals are welcome, otherwise I have no idea what you are negatively reacting to.

The cordon sanitaire approach always had a definite expiry date. Once the excluded party grows big enough to be able to make or break majorities, it’s inevitable that they will use that power.

Then what? Do we say that we will withdraw any law proposal or bill that doesn’t have a majority without the excluded party? Then congratulations, you now gave them veto power over all legislation. They can set the agenda.

The goal of refusing cooperation was to deny them the change to grow bigger and win time to deal with them. If they grow bigger regardless, the strategy has outlived their usefulness. We need a new strategy.

As another comment says, the problem with CxU and FDP is not that they were seen to work together with the AfD. It’s than on many issues they have the same or similar policies to the AfD.

Greece is a relatively large country though, it’s not a city-state by any means. Tourism can still be possible there without over-burdening the few islands that suffer under their name recognition.

Greenshot (GPLv3) is a powerful screenshot tool with its own basic image editor.

How is it breaking new legal ground, if toll roads already exist and are legal and overnight stay tax (aka tourist tax) is too?

Not sure if relevant, but in recent years, several countries have proclaimed universal jurisdiction for certain crimes. Increasingly often, countries assert the right to prosecute their own citizens for abuse of children even when committed abroad, which has been deemed necessary to counter “sex tourism”.

Given that this is an accusation of sexual assault, I won’t be surprised if Spain claims jurisdiction for sexual abuse of/by its citizens anywhere in the world.

I have been very disappointed that Fedora stopped making changelogs accessible for years. It used to be that you could easily toggle them on in Yum, but with DNF it’s always “no info found”.