balsoft

Here's the thing, you're right, you individually can't directly influence the current government because it is only answerable to a class you don't belong in, the capitalists. The only way to change things for the better is to organize with your fellow proletariat and change the class dynamics enough such that the government is answerable to your class, whether through a revolution or a credible threat of one. A good way to start is to read some theory, join a union at your workplace if there is one, and join a local socialist/communist party - they will have both the resources and the ideas on what to do next.

When "conservatives" are in office: "well, you should've voted for liberals, they are easier to sway towards progressive policies than conservatives"

When "liberals" are in office: "well, there's not much I personally can do to change the government's minds"

BTW Guix+Hurd, a fully GNU OS, has been around for quite a while now: https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2020/a-hello-world-virtual-machine-running-the-hurd. You can even run it on real hardware: https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2024/hurd-on-thinkpad/

I technically have three names (given name, patronymic, family name). I've lived in a few countries, all with different name systems. I've found that this is the best easiest rule set to avoid trouble:

• If possible, use only the first and family name, those are very widely understood.
  • If possible, when making a passport in your country of origin, request that those are the only names recorded, and they are transliterated into latin according to some official (or at least widely recognized) ruleset.
• If possible, use the latin transliterations as written in the passport.
  • Otherwise, look up official transliteration rules from latin to local language and use those.
  • Don't try transliterating by yourself, or transliterating from the original names, it will cause issues.
  • If some system somewhere transliterates your names otherwise, complain loudly before they get committed anywhere.
  • If the local system forces you to have a "common" first name and your name doesn't fit, choose one that's as close as possible to the rules described above. If there is no close alternative, choose the one you like, but be prepared for issues down the road.
• If possible, leave all other names as blank, otherwise as -.
  • Don't try fitting a "middle name" from one system into another.
  • If possible, avoid fitting into the local system at all, e.g. don't make up a second family name even if the system calls for it. In my case, I didn't reuse the patronymic even when the local system had it as well, because my father's name is obviously not a local name so it would look really weird.
  • If asked, say you don't have any other names.

Of course, this is just what worked best in my specific situations, other countries may be different.

And also, I don't care at all about my legal name (all my friends call me by another name anyways) so I'm fine dropping a part of it, the goal here is to just make interactions with governments, banks, etc as smooth and easy as possible.

Pauses? PAUSES? Fucking cancel it now, the head of a fascist state threatened a military invasion against you and all you do is temporarily pause a new trade deal with that same state?

They should be trying to stop all trade right now and pivot to different markets, european companies need to start looking for a US market exit, and treasuries need to start looking for US debt buyers. EU needs start re-industrializing and arming up, ideally with nukes, because US leadership openly claims it will not care about anything except sheer military power.

Who am I kidding, european leaders are vassals to the US and will not stand up to US aggression until it's too late and they are invaded or overthrown. Maybe a real Greenland invasion would wake them up without irreparable damage to the power structures, but it's probably not happening now (they must have caved on something to trump already). They are deliberately ignorant of their fate because quarterly profits must increase. Shame on them.

Seems unrelated to the other issue, look through the stacktrace, it's complaining about home-manager.users.claymorwan.fonts.fontconfig.configFile.fonts.text

There are some good ideas in there (the main one IMO is structured objects as the main form of IPC, instead of text), but the execution is really bad after XP and maybe 7. They stuck to a lot of legacy garbage in the name of "compatibility", but in the end it's an inconsistent mess of dozens of frameworks, and yet many old programs run worse than they do in WINE on Linux. Now with the advent of vibecoding the core components, it's pretty much over unless they literally start over from an old checkout.

In that case consider your accounts on "everything else" to be compromised already. It can be a pretty significant vector for identity theft for example.

I don't think China would willingly hand over precious data to the US/Canada governments. But it might be willing to sell it.

Yeah, honestly, all modern cars are spying on you already, and if something it to spy on you I'd prefer if it was reporting to someone on the other side of the globe vs. some company or government in your jurisdiction. The former may show you more annoying ads, the latter may literally put you in prison. (of course, it is possible that the former will sell your data to the latter, so it's better to avoid spyware alltogether)

Eww. Yet another reason why tying health insurance to employment is a horrible idea.