Country has public health system and runs extensive preventative health campaigns to reduce preventable illness and burden on healthcare system.

Meanwhile encourages people on bikes on to roads with vehicles which weigh over a tonne and have extensive blind spots with nothing more than some polystyrene on their head.

This is blatant corruption of the political process by the motor vehicle lobby. Call it out wherever you see it. Vehicularisation of cycling is a dead end. It only works for a minority if risk taking, super fit cyclists willing to play chicken. Everyone else is excluded.

Oh, I wish public education in SA was funded properly. The costs to parents are good but schools often get shafted. Particlarly capital works like new buildings. The difference between a rural public school and one of the favoured city schools or a private school are still huge. They probably do what they can with the revenues they have but there is a lot of federal money going to private schools that could be redirected to state public schools where it would make a huge difference.

Our public school fees have been reduced to almost nothing under South Australian Labor. And we get a sports voucher for the kids sports. None of it means tested. And low income families have school cards.

Unfortunately private schools are clearly still over funded and very influential in politics. I am sure they lobby heavily to keep public schooling slightly underfunded to push kids into their schools. Our premier is a Labor Right SDA Catholic bro so they aren’t getting their public funding cut.

I don’t mind making moderate voluntary contributions if they are being used for desirable but non-essential things. They are a trap if they are being used to fill a hole in state funding. Schools in poorer areas end up becoming highly disadvantaged.

Many older ICE vehicles can be modified to use LNG which we practically give away. We also have plenty of oil but we mothballed or closed most of our refineries as they were too small in scale to compete internationally. We had a vehicle and parts industry here and we still have some people who can make parts for ICE vehicles even if we don’t have the equipment to do it at scale anymore.

Based on that I think if it went Max Max here it is more likely someone would be driving a 100 year old guzzoline powered Ford Falcon than trying to keep an EV running past 10 years.

All the value of the vehicle is created overseas so I don’t see the sovereignty argument. We are a net energy exporter. Energy independence is only one aspect. How are people going to get parts for their BYD when the US starts a war with China?

EVs have their advantages and disadvantages. They are all effectively disposable and don’t have a good recycling story so I think there is a huge amount of green washing. We need to adopt EVs to reduce emissions but they are terrible for the environment in other ways. Better to focus on public transport, urban planning, e-bikes IMO.

The EV parts and supply chain is all foreign and there aren’t enough options for “dumb” vehicles which aren’t dependent on software services and updates. A home grown ev running on open source software would be brilliant. As it is I would prefer to drive my decades old ICE vehicle smaller distances and less often and use other forms of transport to fill the gaps.

Local community run childcare has its north facing roof absolutely covered in pv. Has been like that for many years. Every homeowner and business that can afford it does the same around here. Small scale PV installs on non-productive bits of farmland as well.

We don’t get many power outages. I am not sure if batteries make economic sense everywhere currently. Their time will come I am sure.

I guess a lot of childcare around the country is dodgy commercial operations where they are pocketing all the government grants while their buildings fall apart. Perhaps we should get rid of those and have more community run operations they would put profits back into improving the care and facilities including capital investments like solar.

Yeah, Its is sickening and goes against the spirit of open source. We work around restrictions in creative way to give people the freedom to control their software and have access to the source. We don’t deny people trapped in shitholes with bad laws access to open computing. Force them onto Windows and Apple. I don’t get what is wrong with people these days. They have lost all reason.

Yes, many people can work around the laws in various ways. And some of them can’t. Its not for us to judge. We offer possibilities. Everyone knows many distros will patch this field out. Many will just ignore it like we do the GECOS fields. And where its is unfortunately required its still going to be better than running Windows. Its completely orthogonal to political participation and fighting these laws.

I am in Australia. Searches on local content and niche tech subjects don’t do very well compared with other engines. It might be lack of tuning more than index and I am sure it will improve. Latency might be due to lack of local servers or resources or my choice of browsers but Qwant breaks all the time. It runs a lot better if I keep ad blocking on. Noticeably faster and more reliable though still high latency on the first result showing. If you turn ads on to support smaller companies you immediately get punished. Ad supported businesses aren’t compatible with good quality service unfortunately, no matter where they are based.

It is amazing that Google was so usable for so long really. Their search people must have fought hard to balance out product quality against the demands of the money people for a long time. I think every service that follows in Google’s footsteps will inevitably repeat all their mistakes.

I recommend trying Qwant, Ecosia and others though. It is my default browser search at the moment, mostly because it isn’t US based. It might be all you need.

There are a few probs with qwant unfortunately and I assume ecosia might be the same. It isn’t available in all countries so it’s sometimes blocked when I am on a VPN. The performance is shocking on the other side of the world. Terrible latency. Often fails completely to return results. Then the search results aren’t really good enough either. Tends to return a lot of links from similar sources like it doesn’t have much of an index. Its ok for really simple mainstream searches but I regularly need to fall back to no AI ddg or udm14 google.

Unless I want a clanker response. Actually I never want a clanker response but web indexing has become so poor in the pursuit of ad revenue then AI that sometimes it’s hard to get anything useful out of search queries these days. It’s very frustrating.

In my opinion Github in its current incarnation mainly exists to steal the IP of programmers and lock it up in proprietary AI services controlled by Microsoft. It dominates for the same reason Facebook or Youtube dominate. It is the only platform normies know and it benefits from massive network effects. It is US owned and operated which is becoming an issue for lots of people. Github is a proprietary closed source platform. I believe it was originally mostly written in Ruby but they have likely replaced all the performance bottlenecks using other languages. In my opinion their site is a usability nightmare.

Forejo is a fork of Gitea by Codeberg, a community run non-profit from Germany (still a liberal democracy under the rule of law) and hosted in Europe. They provide free hosting for open source projects or it is easy to self host. Gitea is a fork of Gogs and remains active. All those forks are written in the Go language and it requires a single exe, a config file and an sql database to run making it very easy to self host even without containers.

Gitlab is a service like Github or Codeberg that can also be self hosted but it is written in Ruby, a slow and inefficient interpreted language, which like Javascript or Python has lots of crazy fragile run time dependencies. The open source project was originally a work of Dutch and Ukrainian programmers and it was a Dutch company but they took VC money and IPOed and I don’t know that I would assume it is European controlled. Some open source projects like Gnome moved there as it was the main alternative to Github. Can’t recommend vs Gitea/Foejo for self hosting.

For single developers, small groups, arguably all you really need is git and email if you don’t need or want all the extra fluff. That can work even for large projects like the Linux kernel. Sites like github tend to serve as single points of contact for lots of projects. It is their front page, issue tracker, everything which is one hell of a dependency on another company. It has Facebook-ized the code ecosystem. I think it also sort of serves as a linkedn for some people.