Retirning early costs money. A lot. Every year you retire earlier is one year of income to pay extra, and one year of capitalisation less.
To give an idea of the orders of magnitude. France is 70M inhabitants. If 20 million people receive a pension of 24K€ one year longer, that's 480B€. The French yearly budget is 843B€. In total, France has spent between 8B€ - 27B$ on supporting Ukraine since 2022 (one of the other talking points)
France has just managed to increase retirement age to 64 years, and there are voices to re-instate it to 62. For reference:
• Germany: 65 to 67 years (depending on birth year; 67 for those born from 1964)
• United Kingdom: 66 years (rising to 67)
• Spain: 65 to 66.5 years (depending on career length)
• Netherlands: 67 years
The retirement age was moved from 65 to 60 in 1982, by the socialist Mitterand government. Life expectency has increased 9 years since then, and they have been trying (desperately) to move it back up since then.
Not retiring early means that money can be spent on other things. Such as the better schooling that the French kids were asking for.
It will also help in getting the French budget balanced. Something which it has not been since 1974. The EU rules require a national debt of max 60% of GNP. France is currently at 120%. For reference, Germany is at 63%, the Netherlands are at 44%. Spain is at 100%, and slowly falling.
France has much lower per capita debt and deficit compared to the United States. I find it very funny to hear American media talk about the dire situation of French public finances.
They can because the USD is the world's reserve currency. Whenever the economic situation looks volatile, historically, organisations buy up USD and Treasuries as a its seen as a safe haven. That trust has been slowly eroding only due to the actions (and inaction) of the US admin regarding ukraine and iran
They cannot imagine themselves getting less than they put in because of an ever increasing proportion of non-workers.
Ironically, the younger people from whom to extract productivity to pay for the defined benefit pensions are being supplied by immigrants, who are also politically unpopular.
France’s annual spend on defined benefit pensions is north of $400B Euros and north of $300B Euros on healthcare. Seizing and liquidating the equity of everyone in France with a book value of $1B (or even $100M) would make no difference.
The problem is that these types of companies are started by naive idealistic techs who only know how to play by the rules and can't figure out why people would misuse their products
They were very well described by the "rubber hose crypto" XKCD
(Not that I don't think a DNS company stays at the same level of complexity - both legal and technological - as a VPN company, but still)
Or, get this, anything that is useful can be misused, so maybe we should go after the people misusing things rather than locking all of society in a cage to pre-emptively prevent misuse.
"The problem is that these types of companies [kitchen knife manufacturers] are started by naive idealistic [craftsmen] who only know how to play by the rules and can't figure out why people would misuse their products [by stabbing people]."
There are not a lot of situations where you are legally allowed to throw explosives at someone, then say everything is fine because they would have been fine if they just hadn't picked them up
Remind me to not be anywhere near you in a crowd. It'd piss me off to no end if the last thing I saw and had to waste my last seconds of life thinking about was "They're just going to stare until it blows u....."
If you have something that looks like it explodes land next to you in a crowd, and you do nothing simply because you think you deserve it (not talking about freezing up or just ignorant to what it is), you're a morally bankrupt coward that also deserves a share of the blame for harm done to anyone around you.
I certainly wouldn't stare at it until it exploded. I would run away as fast as I could.
It's odd that you think the exclusive options are 1) do nothing; 2) pick up and throw away
Of course, it's extremely unlikely I'd be in any crowd with you. Because we are likely very far apart geographically. And I work to avoid any crowds that may involve flash bang grenades thrown into them. So far, I have an excellent success ratio and expect it to stay steady.
I think kids are seeing videos of people throwing these and, of course, only the successful videos make it to their feeds. As the unsuccessful ones are bloody enough to get filtered out.
Your comment seems a bit hostile and ill willed as there are many who become shell shocked in these situations and freeze up. This doesn't make it "morally bankrupt." It just makes them human.
Good luck with your moral high horse and being so superior. I hope you retain all your digits.
I certainly may be. It doesn't seem ridiculous to me. I've read through all the follow on comments and aside from people saying it's ridiculous, I don't get why others think it so.
There is one though: when you're throwing it as part of an organisation which has the official monopoly on violence - the police - in the context of controlling others who are violating that monopoly. Police are allowed to use violent means to suppress riots and that includes the use of flashbangs, stun grenades, tear gas and other similarly dangerous items. The boy who picked up the flashbang/grenade (unclear which one it was) was part of a group of rioters and as such had put himself in a position where he could expect to be exposed to police violence. Had he not been rioting he'd still have his hand but alas, he was, he did pick it up and his hand is gone.
If you have children tell them not to participate in these riots - which seem to be either organised by or used by both Melenchon's communist party as well as several islamic groups to achieve their goals - and, if he ever gets embroiled in one, make his way out as quickly as he can. Tell them not to be like Lenin's useful idiots, henchmen for the revolution who are discarded as soon as the goal is achieved. To those who think this means they should just accept any and all governmental abuse and neglect, think again. There are many ways to act against such abuse and neglect without feeding the communist/islamofascist/${extremist} beasts.
Yes, I think I would react pretty rationally- run away or duck and cover. Zero chance I pick it up. And I was a super stupid and irrational teen. (And am still rather stupid and irrational)
When I was 14 I used to think I could shoot a kamehameha if I tried hard enough. Even then I would have made fun of people thinking they'd know what to do when a fucking grenade was thrown at them.
Are you still 14? When I was 14 there were situations where tear gas grenades were thrown in the city where I went to school (Amsterdam) in the context of squatter riots. I did my best to avoid these, never felt the need to play edge lord and join the mob, don a keffiyeh and shout inane phrases. I did do plenty of 'stupid' things but picking up live grenades was just too damn stupid. The Darwin Award was still decades away but had I known the term I'd have applied it to those who do such things whether they're 14 or 41. If you really need to get rid of the thing you at most kick it away - also risky - but best just to move away from it until it detonates. I knew that at 14 and I still know it. Didn't you? Don't you?
The conversation is about rioters and those who confront them. Whether it is tear gas grenades, flashbangs, smoke grenades, stun grenades or any other non-lethal weapon is besides the point. It is about suffering the consequences when you pick up a live piece of ordnance.
While it is generally not the brightest move, they might have been thinking it was a tear gas grenade, which are not uncommonly picked up and thrown back at the cops (using thick gloves or a rag). This is because tear gas canisters get hot instead of exploding. I'm not sure I'd be able to tell the difference in under a second and maybe the tear gas reaction was just slow-starting on that one.
> If you have a USB drive or other external storage device, you can use Time Machine to automatically back up your files, including apps, music, photos, email, and documents.
The "3-2-1" strategy is even possible if you rotate drives between locations:
> For extra security and convenience, you can back up to multiple disks. If you work in two locations, you may want to keep backup disks in both places.
You’d think a network drive would be included. Apple used to also provide instructions for connecting a network drive but they stopped with macOS 15 or 26. Now a drive that is physically connected to a Mac is the only method of using Time Machine that Apple officially recognizes.
edit: to be clear you can still use a network drive, but how well that works is the big question. It will probably depend on the user and the setup. The Macs in my house backup to a share on a Pi 4. They can still restore files from it just fine.
Thunderbolt external SSD, would be the only Apple-ish thing. (Formerly of course, FireWire.)
To be absolutely complete, I could mention that at least one SAS HBA PCIe card exists on the market with support for macOS 27, even. Sometimes bundled with other products...
What would be the benefit of a thunderbolt to PCIe enclosure with an HBA SAS SSD card inside, instead of just a regular external thunderbolt SSD drive? Apart from many thousands of dollars of course.
The point would be to have an enclosure of several/many SAS HDD's that you want to connect. The Thunderbolt to PCIe enclosure holds the PCIe card only, and a separate SAS enclosure holds disks. (The spinning rust type, surely.)
People also connect LTO tape drives using this interface.
Having many SAS drives on the end of a single Thunderbolt connection completely defeats the point though. whats the point of the fast PCIe link and the fast SAS drives when you are bottlenecking them all on a single thunderbolt cable?
I’ve been using Time Machine with my synology nas for ~5 years. Works pretty well. I’d say once every 2 months it looses connection but seems to re-connect itself after a few minutes.
I think it's better that some people have strong opinions. For example, the world would suck if everyone was rms, but he has nevertheless had a positive impact on the world imo.
RMS is extremely radical but he's also reasonable and consistent unlike these guys. There's also GNU Guix which recently banned AI-assisted contributions [1] due to copyright infringement concerns and licensing doubts. This is an entirely reasonable take for a hardcore free software codebase, it's literally built around this political concept.
On the contrast, libreboot's stuff reads like a parody or a shitpost. It's hard to believe they're being entirely serious.
The libreboot maintainer has always seemed irrational, but then again, a rational person would have just left their proprietary bios alone and we would never get projects like this.
i don't live in a free country. the UK has enacted several laws impeding fundamental civil liberties in recent years. rolling back on several human rights laws, now they're even removing the right to trial by jury, etc. it's quite troubling actually.
I'd rather have the project that works, rather than one that has the correct political stance.
You can look at what being achieved right now with AI, GoW3 (an absolute master piece BTW) on the PS4 Remaster can be played on Linux at 120FPS thanks to some decompilation/reverse engineering framework with AI.
I am generally also fed up of politics (whatever they are) forced into projects.
Also AI doesn't make you stupid. It is bullshit, he has cherry picked information to sooth his own biases.
It is bizarre having conversations with some people. There is a reverse engineering framework that had God of War 3 remaster running natively on Linux at 120 fps and all this tech is AI-assisted. A friend of mine was demonstrating it running to me last night, and then people like yourself tell me AI can't do anything when you can download and run it yourself.
I just had it write a bunch of script hooks for gamemoderun and at work I had it do probably a week's worth of work in an afternoon earlier today. It also smoke-tested everything for me.
It is utterly bizarre, and I think you are just denying reality.
You didn't get my point. It might very well be that the only project that lets you actually freely boot a computer in 5 years will be this one, specifically because they did not let an AI touch it.
In that regard, it will be the only project, like you put it, "that works".
Like I said, I don't necessary subscribe to their view, but the diversity of opinion matters, it helps with minor things like, oh, survival.
What you are saying is utter nonsense. I really don't know where to start.
Why would AI matter? If you say legality, I really don't care that much about copyright law (I run a torrent box 24/7), and I would just git clone the repo and put it on tor. That is what people have been doing with plenty of projects that are more legally dubious.
Also, diversity of opinion doesn't necessarily help with survival either. I swear people just say things because other people have said it.
But they're doing it under the banner of the libre software movement, whose raison d'être is free (as in liberty) software. Having political strings attached is antithetical to the movement.
Libre software is a political movement. And it makes sense for libre contributors to be highly skeptical of a tool that may or may not violate copyright, profits from the work of other libre codebases and is controlled by tech giants.
I think there is a deeper point regarding software freedom specifically - if a person is unable to understand the source code of something, then they are less able to modify it. It's why the definition of libre software centers around source code, even though modifying binaries is entirely possible. Despite being able to have a libre vs non-libre disassembler (analogous to proprietary vs open weight AI models), needing to use a tool at all diminishes your own ability to make changes to the code.
Now having said that, AI also increases software freedom in that it enables many people who aren't otherwise able to understand codebases (or even write simple code) to create/modify their own software. When we're talking about AI in the context of libre software, this is the constructive aspect we should be focusing on! Well defined plugin APIs that we know people are going to lay slop upon, etc.
But still, this doesn't have much bearing on a well-established fundamental systems project that needs to remain generally concise and human-understandable.
> Having political strings attached is antithetical to the movement.
I believe you may have a rather narrow notion of what politics are.
In my book, politics is the art of making choices when your ability to predict the future is limited, and therefore the willingness, courage and fortitude to make choices under uncertainty.
Under that definition, they're making a choice, one that materially and obviously can't be backed by sound reasoning or logic (because predicting the future is hard), that's politics.
Agree in general, though with Libreboot the pedantry is more or less the point of the project. You fork a project and put 'libre' in the name, I personally see that as a statement of dedication and expect you to stick to those guns. The experiment isnt much of an experiment otherwise.
When the alternative is being surrounded by rabid AI enthusiasts who absolutely lose their shit whenever anyone says "no" to them, being left behind is a great choice.
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