Agree. One place to start would be that the company that sells ads (Google Ads) should not be the same as the ones that buy ads (Search, YouTube, etc.). It creates a situation where one company has both a monopoly and monopsony, which is just far too much market power.

Gimp is still useful for quick and simple edits

See, the problem with that is that that’s precisely not how I use Photoshop. I don’t use it often (certainly not often enough to actually pay for it), but when I do, I tend to go fairly deep.

I should try out Darktable though. I used to use Aperture until it was discontinued, and these days I frequently use Lightroom, though I don’t really love it.

There definitely exist paid players out there (or at least used to…dunno if they still exist), but there are also “free” (as in beer) non-free (as in speech) options, like the ones included out of the box in a Windows or macOS installation.

So, there are a few different categories of TLDs. com, net, and org are among the original generic TLDs, which had the ideas of being for specific types of site, but in practice have always been available for pretty much any purpose.

Then there are country-code TLDs, your au, ca, and tv domains. In these, the registrar of that particular country sets the rules. au domains require some specific connection to Australia, while Tuvalu has seen it as a good source of income for the country to sell .tv domains to sites that want to have a domain that recognises their primary purpose as relating to video.

In 2012, ICANN opened up the ability to buy new TLDs with almost no restrictions beyond the minimum 3 character length. Though technically com, net, org, etc. are considered generic TLDs, when you see people say gTLD they almost always mean those created under this new scheme. Examples include zone (which my instance runs on), new (owned by Google and restricted to people who use it to perform “new” actions, like Google’s own docs.new which creates a new Google Doc), and tokyo (intended for use by things related to Tokyo, but not restricted to such. Other city gTLDs also exist, like melbourne which restricts to businesses and citizens of Victoria). gTLDs are very expensive to create, but whoever owns the gTLD can choose what rules it applies to domains registered under it.

So if you want a domain name that calls to a particular thing, you can find a gTLD that matches that thing and is open for registration for your purpose, or you can spend big to register a gTLD for yourself, or find a ccTLD that’s open to those outside the actual country and which fits your purpose.

Mali’s a weird one because the reports were that .ml domains not related to Mali were being restricted last year, and fmhy.ml lost their domain over that. So it’s weird that lemmy.ml did not.

Except it does stand for that in this context. It’s like saying “the TV in twitch.tv doesn’t stand for television, it’s Tuvalu”, like, yes the ccTLD tv is Tuvalu’s, but twitch wouldn’t have chosen that TLD if it weren’t for the “coincidence”.

They referred to ML as “centre-left”, so their perception is obviously very skewed.

Sometimes slightly worse. Like LibreOffice.

Sometimes actually better, like VLC.

Sometimes about the same, like the latest version of MuseScore (older versions were, in fact, quite a bit worse).

But sometimes, like with older versions of GIMP (I’ll admit, I’ve not tried its latest major version release candidate) it’s significantly worse.

Yup, America also bad. I suppose you could say the difference is that America pretends to be good, while China is openly totalitarian.

You’ll note that at no time did I try to make an argument that America is good. That’s…the whole point of this post

And btw Hawai’i would have been a much stronger example to pick to highlight American imperialism.

Even if you buy into all the best Chinese propaganda (oh, so it’s “terrorism” when Uyghurs fight against the state, but you’re ok with Palestinian freedom fighting? Where’s the consistency, tankies??), there’s no denying that China is imperialist by virtue of the fact that they rule over the Uyghur and Tibetan peoples despite enormous cultural differences to the ruling imperial core and a demonstrated desire for independence.

No, I’m not going to spend effort engaging in good faith with an argument clearly made in bad faith.

Jesus fuck tankies are fucking morons. Do you actually think anybody buys your shitty argument?

Oh, so you did! I missed that.

I’ll just say, having lived in Vietnam for quite some time, it certainly is a much better country than China, but describing it as “mixed” and “partially socialist” understates its issues. Corruption is rampant and open, and is the way of things in both the private and public sectors.

As just one example, the Saigon Metro project began construction not long before I stopped living there in 2012, and was scheduled to finish in 2018. Rampant corruption with that project has meant multiple times it’s just stalled with seemingly no progress made for years, and the Japanese construction company hired to do some of the work threatened to pull out over cost overruns caused by the corruption. It’s a lovely country in so many ways, and its government is so much better than those that tankies usually love to praise in terms of the degrees of gross authoritarian bs, but it’s got a long it could improve in many regards.

Not being arrested for publicly disagreeing with the government is a good thing.

Sorry, I thought we were talking about democratic countries. Didn’t realise it was “make up whatever shit makes you feel good” time.

Connections
Puzzle #527
🟪🟪🟪🟪
🟦🟦🟦🟦
🟨🟨🟨🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩

Skill 98/99
Uniqueness 1 in 1,338

I only got blue from what was left over after solving the rest of it. And yellow was the last one that I actually did find.

the most democratic nation currently on the planet

Sorry, but I didn’t see anyone mention Denmark or Norway anywhere in this thread.

Unfortunately tankies throw out the good parts of liberalism along with the bad, and endorse throwing people in gaol for wrongthink.

If I’m put in charge, that guy is the first to go.

Is there any language in which a definite article on its own is a perfectly valid sentence or phrase?