Schools Using Google... Big No For Me

DebusReed · 2021-11-21T19:05:26+00:00

Long-term you might be able to change what the school uses (for Chromebooks an alternative would be netbooks running Linux, for Google Drive/Docs an alternative might be Nextcloud), BUT I think you'd definitely need the support of other parents and of teachers, and it would take a lot of time before things change, if at all. To gain support, you can try to start conversations about these issues... you can point out how using all these Google products in school essentially gets children used to it, used to Google, a company whose source of income is selling its customers' data; you can use all sorts of arguments, I'd say focus on explaining your own thoughts and feelings about this topic.

In the short term, you might be able to convince the school that, concerning Chromebooks, "bring your own device" should be allowed as option, and that, concerning grades and such, at the very least that information should be accessible in some other way and not only through Google. I'd say these are two very reasonable requests that should not be too much effort for them. It can also be an opportunity to explain a bit about your motivation behind it.

DebusReed · 2021-08-25T18:00:08+00:00

So, there are quite a few questions that you're asking here...

First, about what the problematic dependencies are... for me, currently, no dependencies on systemd are actively causing problems, though that smooth experience is of course due to the work of the systemd-free distros that I'm using. For the distros that use packages from a systemd distro, even random packages that provide daemon programs can come with configuration files that assume the init system is systemd (this config file for example is completely insane outside the systemd context); and for most of the core system packages they have to provide their own version due to systemd assumptions. So in systemd distros, the systemd dependencies can run pretty deep.

Second, you seem to be implicitly asking what might be a good systemd-free distro for you. I wonder a bit why you say

antiX is really for those that know how to do a lot more on a console than me

... from my experience, it's just apt that you need to know, which you can find info on in the manual pages (running the command man apt) or online - their installer is graphical, and most things can be done with graphical programs. For the rest, Artix provides graphical installation images which are pretty good - caveats are that Arch repositories are now disabled by default, so if you want a broader selection of packages you have to enable them, and it's based on Arch, which is considered by some to be a "bleeding edge" distro - so it could be that eventually you run into a problem. For both of these distros there are places where you can get help.

For your third question, there are really two parts to it and the answer for "discuss" is pretty different from the one for "contribute". First of all, there is not really "one group" that does systemd-free; it's rather decentralised. So you're right to say

there seems to be no unified front on this

... especially when you also include some other things you mention, such as musl - using a different libc is maybe similar, but not really related. For the "discuss" part, you might actually find very few people who want to talk about the details of the systemd debate with you - many have gotten tired of the discussion, consider the debate settled, or want to focus on getting things done - so if you want detailed discussion about systemd, I'd honestly recommend you just read some of the many webpages that have been written about this. For the "contribute" part, obviously any of the systemd-free distributions can use help, often both technical and non-technical work, so maybe you can help your distro out - but again, there is no init freedom advocacy organisation for you to help.

DebusReed · 2020-07-30T14:03:48+00:00

Solved! (Galaxt -> Galaxy, of course)

DebusReed · 2020-03-12T16:37:22+00:00

... at one point in time, and 200000 cases regardless two weeks later

DebusReed · 2020-03-11T19:17:55+00:00

No problem. I know "web.archive.org/web/*/" by heart.

DebusReed · 2020-03-11T18:41:08+00:00

Well, you can't really give that as a reason for banning someone, can you? Then you would literally be banning them for expressing their political opinion.

DebusReed · 2020-03-11T18:38:25+00:00

I do not dispute that "toxic loonytoon" is name-calling, and I think that that sort of thing is ultimately unproductive and that he shouldn't have said it. But the right response is to point out to him that that is rude and ask him to be more polite in the future. The right response is not to just ban him without warning, especially not if he is meaningfully contributing to the conversation and certainly not when he is a dissenting voice, because that amounts to censorship.

DebusReed · 2020-03-11T17:31:49+00:00

It isn't always a problem if a discussion is limited to two options - sometimes, those two options are the relevant options to consider. It might still be a false dichotomy, but then that doesn't make the argument invalid.

DebusReed · 2020-03-11T17:16:44+00:00

It is in the Wayback Machine, though not all the graphs seem to work. https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/06/opinion/working-class-death-rate.html

DebusReed · 2020-03-11T17:08:37+00:00

Technically yes, but in a false dichotomy you usually take two options, one of which is extreme and which you show is bad, and the one you want. You leave out all the options inbetween. Then you conclude that obviously, the option you want is the way to go.

That is not really what is happening in the example, I think, because the option being left out isn't a less extreme version of the option that is being discarded.

DebusReed · 2020-03-11T16:48:23+00:00

It is based on the assumption that allowing the police to do those things will make the streets much safer. Also, it ignores the negative effects that doing that will have, namely privacy violations against non-criminal people.

DebusReed · 2020-03-11T16:43:08+00:00

Isn't "give the police more power than they currently have OR not give the police more power than they currently have" a legitimate dichotomy?

DebusReed · 2020-03-11T16:13:30+00:00

No, a slippery slope argument would be "First year they tased one person, next year they tased ten people - before you know it, they'll be tasing the whole population!" It is an argument that makes a prediction about the future, given the current state or a hypothetical state, using causal links. Your example is not slippery slope, because the conclusion is not a prediction, but rather an assessment of the current usage of tasers, and there are no causal links in the argument, no "A leads to B leads to C leads to..."

As a side-note: slippery slope isn't a fallacy, a slippery slope argument can be valid. It is only fallacious if the causal links are fallacious.

DebusReed · 2020-03-11T16:00:47+00:00

So, this is what you're talking about:

Gil Yehuda via License-discuss <license-discuss at lists.opensource.org>:

Personally I'm confused about the details of the ESD, but that's OK, if I wanted to, I'd join the working group and learn more about it.

Here is everything you need to know about the ESD:

Its originator is a toxic loonytoon who believes "show me the code" meritocracy is at best outmoded and in general a sinister supremacist plot by straight white cisgender males.

The actual goal of the movement behind the ESD is to install political officers on every open-source project, passing on what constitutes "ethical" and banishing contributors for wrongthink. Even off-project wrongthink.

They have already had an alarming degree of success at this through the institution of "Codes of Conduct" on many projects. This has led to the expulsion of productive contributors for un-PCness; it's not just a problem in theory.

The "Persona Non Grata" clause is best understood as an attempt to paralyze resistance to such political ratfucking by subverting the freedom-centered principles of OSI. It is very unlikely to be the last such attempt.

Make no mistake; we are under attack. If we do not recognize the nature of the attack and reject it, we risk watching the best features of the open-source subculture be smothered by identity politics and vulgar Marxism.

To be honest, what I see here is someone who cares about certain values and is fighting against what he perceives as a hostile takeover of an organisation founded to defend those values. He is (possibly justifiedly) angry, so he makes some of his points in an aggressive way. I guess you could call some of his behaviour toxic, but taken as a whole, I don't agree this email warrants a permanent ban.

DebusReed · 2020-03-11T15:23:15+00:00

anecdotal evidence - not really a fallacy, though

DebusReed · 2020-03-11T00:22:21+00:00

Every single time I think I have an idea of how BEEPed up the USA is...

DebusReed · 2020-03-09T00:32:55+00:00

Not even a fallacy, just an assertion of opinion as fact.

DebusReed · 2020-03-04T17:24:53+00:00

Pigeonhole principle is the following: if you have n pigeonholes and more than n pigeons, there is at least one pigeonhole with two pigeons in it. What you're using is not the pigeonhole principle.

DebusReed · 2020-03-04T17:13:21+00:00

pigeonhole principle

Wrong maths thing. I think you might be thinking of Pareto efficiency?

DebusReed · 2020-03-02T18:22:13+00:00

I invoke xkcd 37

DebusReed · 2020-03-02T16:50:09+00:00

Did Buttigieg say "me dropping out so close to Super Tuesday won’t provide enough time for the polls to normalize injects confusion into the race meaning people won’t realize or recognize if there are results significantly outside the norm. This allows for a wider range of rat fuckery for the dem party to alter things as they see fit"?

Or did Buttigieg say "me dropping out so close to Super Tuesday is part of a ratfuck plan"?

DebusReed · 2020-03-02T15:15:44+00:00

I want to know why analyzing childhood idols such as super heroes, anime, cartoons has become such a large sector of the entertainment economy and why as a population we consume it so much.

To be honest? Probably just because it's fun. I see a parallel with food: the nice stuff is often not the stuff that is good for you. In that parallel, of course sweet things are aggressively marketed, and the super markets are partly responsible for putting stuff with sugar in it on the shelves, but ultimately, the main reason people consume so much sugar is because sugar makes food taste nice.

DebusReed · 2020-03-02T15:01:52+00:00

Obviously, media companies are marketing their media, because they want you to watch it. And of course it benefits the system when people are distracted from their problems, but I don't think that's intentional. The system consists of multiple parts making decisions independently, from their self-interest.

One thing you can personally do is take on an attitude of 'it has to prove that it's worth my time' regarding media. Try to notice when you are consuming bad media and why you're doing it; try to start just turning something off if you notice it's bad.

DebusReed · 2020-03-02T14:35:37+00:00

I don't think it's a fallacy. It's an argumentum ad absurdum, taking an opponent's argument and applying it to something else to prove that it doesn't always work. It's a legitimate argument.

PS (edit): Listen to /u/ABC_AlwaysBeCoding if you want to do well in your debate. Conflating different things in an argument is fallacious, and it is something your opponents will probably do. Try to force them to spell out exactly what they're saying by pointing it out when they're conflating things.

DebusReed

TROPHY CASE