Aren't chips blown to smithereens and then reconstructed with the help of all those random ingredients? I think this is what "ultra-processed" means and what differentiates these foods from getting your bag of potatoes and frying them at home.
I don't know about Pringles / Lays &c, but I've never seen two potatoes of the same size and shape in a bag, so there must be some way they manage to get all their chips to look the same.
Pringles are reconstituted from powdered potato - which should be obvious as they're all the the same size and shape, and have a weird texture.
Lays and nearly every other brand are just thinner versions of potato chips you could make yourself at home (cut thin, fry in oil, dress in salt). Nothing "blown to smithereens" there.
> At my new gig I have to use web Outlook (not allowed to use my finger-memorized mutt setup), and I must say it's a pleasure to look at the UI. Still line drawing icons, but and elegant play with colors at least.
What do you mean "colors"? I have been using Web Outlook for a while, and everything is blue black and grey with a ton empty space.
> "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."
This works great when many more people have "abilities" than "needs". With a declining working-age population and increasing elderly one, the system begins to crack.
> Maybe not on dry asphalt, but bring some rain, sand, whatever and people will fall.
Oh man, here in Paris there's been a huge push for people to take up biking since Covid. But many bike paths are unbelievably stupid. Sure, many are too narrow, switch sides all the time, etc. I understand they had to do those in a hurry, it costs money to make them wider, etc.
But the most baffling thing is that some are actually painted with some slippery paint for some reason. I'm not talking about signs or delimiting lines, I'm talking about the underlying asphalt being fully painted, so that you're riding on the paint.
Bonus points for some of these particular paths going through a pretty pedestrian-dense area, and on the sidewalk, between parked cars on the left and pedestrians on the right who have to cross the bike path in order to reach the waiting area to cross the road. So you're very likely to have to emergency brake. I usually ride using the local bike sharing scheme, and even though those bikes are in questionable state, you're guaranteed to have the wheels skid when braking somewhat hard.
> And, of course, public transportation is often lacking quality compared to individual traffic. (Taking a bike across a bicycle road vs. getting into a crammed subway train in July, for instance.)
Well, it doesn't have to be like that. Riding a bike in July is atrocious where I live, even with an electrical one. I'll end up drenched after my 20-minute commute, even though it's mostly flat.
Cars didn't use to have AC, either, now they do. Newer metro lines where I live also started having AC a few years ago. This can be improved. They also automated some lines, and we now have trains every other minute during rush hour. They're still full to the brim.
What's missing, however, is some kind of reasonable policy. But not only of the government kind.
Why do we all have to commute at the same exact time? Yeah, some people have kids and need to get them to school on time. Others need to absolutely be physically at their work place at a given time.
But huge swathes of the population are not in this situation. Why do they insist on taking the metro at the same exact time as the others? When Covid was still a thing, the government tried asking the people who could, to move their work schedules a little before or a little after rush hour, so as to lower density. Nobody cared. I had already doing this before covid: the commute was much shorter; I had ample seating available. Yet I didn't see any change after this recommendation.
It would be nice to have some kind of government policy that would force companies to prefer WFH except where it's really necessary to be in the office. Maybe some kind of tax on non-remote employees.
But US cities today actually push back against this because more people coming to work at the office from suburbs = more sales tax for the city.
People have been doing this, but the majority doesn't have this sort of flexibility[0]. Particularly any customer-facing job is going to require being there at a certain hour.
[0] Those who do typically could well be working remotely instead.
I think it doesn't need to be a majority for the situation to be a net improvement.
Among my colleagues (~20 people) nobody has a customer-facing job, and only one needs to manage children. The others either don't have kids at all, or the kids are old enough to manage on their own. They all come in the office around 9:30 AM. We rarely schedule meetings before 10 AM and after 5 PM. I'm pretty sure that if even 10% of the people would change their schedules a bit, comfort would improve for everybody. It's the same thing with lunch. Everybody goes down at 1 PM on the dot and complains about there being too many people. I go around 12:30 and never have to wait in line for ages.
Of course, WFH would be even better, but I understand not all people like it. The company I work for is actually quite flexible, but the people do tend to prefer working from the office. I, personally, prefer WFH (which is what I do generally). But my point isn't to push a particular working arrangement, rather to point out that even when there is some inherent flexibility in the system, people seem to choose not to use it.
I get your point, but mine is that transit isn't all that bad. For my needs, it works better than private transportation. I don't have space to store a bike at work nor at home, and theft is rampant where I live. Bike sharing is nice, but it can be hit and miss, especially if you need to get somewhere at a specific time. I also sometimes like to grab a drink with colleagues after work and would rather not ride a bike afterwards.
I'm not saying there should only be transit and no bikes. I think each means has its own merits, but my point is that these should be improved such that we can take full advantage of them. Just like bikes require infrastructure, or else they're much too dangerous, so do trains require maintenance and being kept up to date, or else they're a PITA to use.
I don't know about Chile, but I think the issue isn't so much the system being public, as in run by some form of government. Rather, the issue is in how "socialists" tend to run systems: everything is great until they run out of other people's money.
Now, I'm not in the "free market will solve all our woes" camp, either, especially when it comes to what we call "public service" in France. Over here, transit systems are facing a push from the EU bureaucrats for "opening up to competition". I'm bracing for the shit to hit the proverbial fan.
Sure, our national rail company is world-famous for being on strike all day every day and twice on Sunday. But, when they do run, they work fairly well and serve most of the country, including random, middle-of-nowhere towns. New companies coming in for the competition only serve the most profitable routes. Of course, I don't know all the laws, but I haven't heard of any obligation for new companies to serve the less profitable routes. So, the SNCF will have less money from the profitable routes to subsidize these lines. This means that either service will degrade, or the State will have to increase funding [0]. Now, I'm generally fine with paying (reasonable) taxes and whatnot, but I'm less fine with having to pay more taxes just so that some random foreign company can make money.
So, what will become of these people? When, at the same time, there's a push to restrict private vehicle ownership, and, especially, to limit access to town centers for older cars? Think these people can afford brand spanking new electric cars? Think again.
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[0] I think the EU doesn't allow States to directly subsidize the rail company, it would be some form of unfair competition or similar. But the State is allowed to spend on social programs, so there could be some kind of program to help with transit, which, in the end, is the same thing: the people will have to subsidize service for less profitable routes because a chunk of the income from profitable ones has moved to a private company which doesn't care.
EU does allow states to subsidize transit (including trains) but the subsidies are subject to all sorts of regulations. They have to be of "public interest" and to not generate (excess) profits for the companies. At least in theory.
Look, if you're that uninformed, why bother commenting at all? Especially if you're in France, your takes on what constitutes socialism are weird to say the least.
SNCF operate those unprofitable routes in the middle of nowhere only because they get told and paid to do so by the state (Intercités) or the regions (TER). Private operators can bid to operate those routes too, and some do (soon Keolis, an SNCF subisdiary operated as a private company, will operate the first non-SNCF TER network).
Besides that, any operator with a license can apply to operate any route they deem profitable. And so far this has been a roaring success, with Trenitalia on Paris-Lyon (and now Marseille) and Paris-Milan being better and cheaper than SNCF. SNCF added low cost (Ouigo) trains on multiple popular routes mainly because they knew competition is coming (postponed by Covid), they probably wouldn't have bothered otherwise. This is a win-win-win for the average user.
The services that need to be maintained will be, regardless of who is the operator. Some of the profits of the private operators will pay for them (because they pay for network access, which covers the costs of the infrastructure + profit margin).
> the issue is in how "socialists" tend to run systems: everything is great until they run out of other people's money.
That would seem true of any organization other than a self-funded one. All corporations, banks, governments, etc. use investment by others (including taxpayers) and cease operations if that investment stops.
The bland generalization about 'socialists' isn't meaningful without some evidence and a specific falsifiable claim. We can make statements like that about anything.
This is what kills me where I live, too. I can’t understand why everyone insists on commuting exactly at the same time.
Before WFH became a thing here, I just moved my office hours one hour earlier. I went from being sardine-packed to ample seating space. Bonus points for the buses and trains running faster, so my commute was not only orders of magnitude more comfortable, it was also much shorter !
Yes, I understand not everyone can do this, but the point is for people to be spread over a wider time range. Many people don’t have children to get to school and whatnot, a sizable chunk of them could probably move their hours a bit earlier or later.
> Another (simpler) control we offer users is, to drop all connections made to IPs that the user-set resolver did not do name resolution for.
This sounds good, and I've wondered how I could implement such a thing.
However, with the clearly hostile approach all IoT appliances are taking, I wonder if they'll actually fall back to a "degraded" (for them) config with the network-provided DNS, or whether they'll just fail and complain the network is broken or something.
> Devices trying to use DoT or DoH??? Blocked, PiHoles take over.
How? I can see you only allowing some ports through the firewall, but presumably TCP 443 is one of those. According to Cloudflare [0] DoH uses that. What if Samsung uses that, or figures DoT on port 443 works better? Do you only allow specific destinations for these devices?
I actually use a similar setup, only I removed pihole and just use some lists in my opnsense's unbound (didn't notice much difference).
My "smart" TV is pretty awful, so it's just unplugged (which makes it dumb, so now I love it). I've tried putting it on a dedicated VLAN with no internet access so I could try using the built-in Chromecast functionality – didn't have much luck. I've set up the mDNS repeater and allowed ports through, but that doesn't seem enough.
Like you said, you cannot just block 443, the dynamic firewall uses a public list,
which contains all the public DNS known to man ( the last bit was just to sound a little dramatic haha )
So OPNSense will block anything within that list in both 443 and 853.
So my Samsung QLED TV can no longer use Google:443 for DNS resolution.
OPNSense blocks it and redirect it to PiHole, a NAT is also required to avoid devices getting mad.
I didn't pay a kidney for that smartTV back in 2019 to make it dumb, when it is on, PiHole logs goes brrrrrrrr
It is also one of the reason why my whole network was going down, it was making too much request exhausting PiHole 150 concurrent DNS requests,
there is a flag to increase that and no more issues.
Google:443: DNS request only, not actual 443 request gets blocked
Cloudflare:443: DNS request only, no actual 443 request gets blocked
etc etc
Read that blog I shared to understand it.
If I run a dig google.com @8.8.8.8, PiHole terminal shows the request
If I run 8.8.8.8:443 on the browser, OPNSense firewall log shows access denied, the same msg when my TV turns on or my Home Assistant goes on.
DoT on 853 is simple to block on its own, no much secret there.
Not all devices support proxies and it means you are blocking all UDP traffic (RTP, QUIC…) traffic, this will definitely not make your internet experience better…
> There would be no reason to ban a party if they could be ignored (see the NPD)
But this is the problem. It means that a party being illegal isn't such a big deal in and of itself. It's only a problem if it challenges the mainstream parties. You can see why people would think it's just a political maneuver if they're trying to ban X party only when many people vote for them. Bonus points for this party portending to "represent the voiceless" or whatever.
If some party is illegal for whatever reason, it should be banned right away. Just because you can ignore it doesn't mean it should be ignored. It would also be much easier to prevent having a sizeable chunk of the population vote for an "illegal" party and the headaches coming from that once it becomes big enough.
> But this is the problem. It means that a party being illegal isn't such a big deal in and of itself.
Yes, this is what the constitutional court decided.
> If some party is illegal for whatever reason, it should be banned right away.
It should be hard (and is very hard) to ban a party. Thus if every party illegal should be banned right away, a large amount of effort would need to go into banning by the highest legislative and judicial bodies in the nation. It's furthermore quite hard to definitively establish a party as such, which further makes such things much slower (calls to ban the AfD have been happening for more than a decade now).
Only two parties have been banned in Germany's post-war history. Banning a party is a rightfully a huge hurdle, because it goes both ways: While it can be a part of a self-defence mechanism of democracy it is also a way in which Hitler & Co consolidated their power. Hence it can be only used after a ruling of the Constitutional Court – it is in a way a constitutional question.
> ... right away
Apart from the constitutional hurdles there is also the question of "right away": The AfD of the early 2010s is not the same party as today. Back then they were ... well cranky but not extreme. Banning it in 2013 would have been unjust. Over the decade it moved further and further to the right. Pretty much all the founders and bigwigs of the early generation left the party and distanced themselves from it. But radicalisation is a process not a binary switch from one day to the next.
I don't know about Pringles / Lays &c, but I've never seen two potatoes of the same size and shape in a bag, so there must be some way they manage to get all their chips to look the same.
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