Questionable news plus four paragraphs of highly partisan commentary

Even Reddit news is superior, and that place is a shit hole

If you really wanted to, couldn’t you just compile it yourself?

You’re probably right. At the same time, stability and the right environment for business can do wonders for a country’s economy. Just compare the dirt-poor China that Deng Xiaoping opened to global investment and the now-dominant regional superpower of today.

However, birth rates are more correlated to wealth, not to religion. Poorer people have more kids than wealthier people. Palestine is much poorer than Israel, partly because of the constant war and unrest there, as well as the lack of a strong state apparatus. This means nobody wants to invest money to start businesses and create good jobs Meanwhile, Israeli companies and people exploit this by hiring Palestinian workers at very low wages.

Palestine is also beholden to the monetary policy of Israel as they are forbidden by treaty from establishing a national currency. Thus, the currency of Palestine is largely the Israeli new shekel.

Once there is peace, there can be work to fix these problems and increase the living standards of Palestinians. Once that happens, history tells us that their birth rate will naturally decline.

Wow. Shocking.

Not going to lie, I thought it was fake news.

Hang on a minute—the population of Israel is some ten million but the population of Palestine is only some five and a half million. Israel is 74% Jewish and 18% Muslim. Palestine is 93% Muslim. The rest follow other religions or no religion (they are mostly Christians).

This seems to mean that there are 7 million Muslims and 7.5 million Jews. And these figures predate the Gaza war; no doubt the number of Muslims in Palestine has gone down, due to obvious reasons.

Well, we’ll see. The thing is that if the Palestinian Authority wants to be recognised as a state, it needs to act like a state and not like an ephemeral government-in-exile. Democratic governments can change through elections, but the state as an organisation is still there. The PA uses the name “State of Palestine” in its formal communications, so it needs to live up to that instead of acting like a ragtag band of desperados begging for whatever scraps of power Israel tosses to them.

Does the current government of the Palestinian Authority have the confidence of the people? Maybe. We don’t know. But I assume the answer is “no” until I am proven wrong. Fatah controls the PA but technically lost to Hamas in the 2006 election. Again, that was 18 years ago. A lot has changed since then! Hamas has turned Gaza into a shit hole. The pockets of the West Bank run by the PA at least are serviceable.

I’ve never heard of that. Do you have any further reading?

Do you think before you post?

Netanyahu has not come up with any end plan for his Gaza war (because the whole thing is a ruse to keep him in office and out of jail at this point). It seems the Palestinians have so generously done so for him.

The logical end plan is probably a tenuous peace with Israel. The Palestinian Authority is smart they’ll either make peace with Hamas or betray them all and turn them over to the Hague. The former will stabilise the Palestinian state at the expense of risking another Israeli invasion. The latter will stabilise relations with Israel in exchange for potentially weakening the unity of Palestine. But the PA cannot keep their heads in the sand and ignore Hamas.

Elections must be held. The Palestinian Authority has no claim to any mandate from the Palestinian people. Their latest election was over 18 years ago. If they want international legitimacy then they will need to demonstrate they have the confidence of the Palestinian people.

With a strong PA, there are two logical endpoints—a two-state solution with strong cooperation between Palestine and Israel, perhaps even to the point where there can be freedom of movement between the two or even united citizenship; or a one-state solution with the entirety of Palestine being absorbed under the state apparatus of what is now Israel, forming a bi-religious or secular successor state (due to the new voting power of Palestinian citizens).

Nobody will be entirely happy and get everything they wanted in the end, nor will everyone think that the result was totally fair, but I think at some people, people get tired of endless war and become willing to compromise. This may not happen in our generation, but it eventually must.

TIL the version numbering scheme changed. LibreOffice 24 is the next major version after LibreOffice 7.

I’m going to toss in another recommendation for Linux Mint. The interface is very similar to classic Windows and it has a large user base so it shouldn’t be hard to find instructions online if you get stuck. Software-wise, Linux Mint 21.3 is entirely compatible with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. Use the default Cinnamon version.

Coming from Windows, the only other very important non-obvious thing is that you should look for software on the app store application first instead of downloading packages from the Internet. Unlike the Microsoft Store, Linux app stores are often connected to a variety of software sources, and they will also update your software to the latest versions automatically whenever you download system updates. Almost all of the software you mentioned can be found in the app store. It’s very convenient!

🥴

Yes, because it’s easier to take care of octogenarians than people who might actually put up a fight to having their laptop batteries replaced with a pipe bomb.

SystemD will consume the entirety of Linux, bit by bit.

• In 2032, SystemD announces they’re going to be introducing a new way to manage software on Linux
• In 2035, SystemD will announce they’re making a display system to replace the ageing Wayland
• In 2038, the SystemD team announces they’re making their own desktop environment
• In 2039 SystemD’s codebase has grown to sixteen times its size in the 2020s. SystemD’s announces they’re going to release replacements for most other packages and ship their own vanilla distro.
• In 2045 SystemD’s distro has become the standard Linux distribution. Most other distros have quietly faded away.
• In 2047, SystemD announces they’re going to incorporate most of GNU into SystemD. Outrage ensues from the Free Software Foundation, which vehemently opposes this move.
• In 2048, Richard Stallman dies of a heart attack after attempting to clone SystemD’s git repo. SystemD engages in a hostile takeover and all resistance within the FSF crumbles
• In 2050, SystemD buys the struggling RedHat from IBM for $61 million.
• In 2053, most world governments have been pressured into using SystemD.
• In 2054, Linus Torvalds, fearing for his life, begins negotiations to merge kernel development into SystemD
• In 2056, the final message on the Linux kernel development mailing list is sent.
• In 2058, Torvalds dies under suspicious circumstances after his brand-new laptop battery explodes.
• In 2060, SystemD agents assassinate the CEO of Microsoft.
• In 2063, after immense pressure from SystemD-controlled human rights organisations, Arch developers discontinue development.
• In 2064, the remaining living Debian developers release the next stable version of their clandestine and highly illegal distro.

🤮

Well, it’s complicated, isn’t it?

Ubuntu is built on Debian’s skeleton. RHEL is built on Fedora. Many more examples.

Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu, but in a much deeper and more connected way than Ubuntu is based on Debian. It even shares many of the same software repositories.

The next closer level is how Xubuntu, Lubuntu, and Kubuntu are just slight variations of Ubuntu. People like to call these “flavours”.

Finally, you get to the closest layer—the thousands of people who have taken a stock Ubuntu installation and swapped out one or two components to meet their requirements. We don’t even think of these as distros in their own right.

It’s a continuous spectrum, and any labels we try to apply will be pretty much guaranteed to have fuzzy edges.

I gave up Ubuntu when they switched Firefox to a snap

Whatever happened to “We’re firing people because we realised we can do the job with fewer workers so we want to save money”?

At least then it’s honest.

What I predict will happen is that Microsoft will offer them Windows for free or bribe the relevant decision makers with free Surface Pro laptops (for “evaluation”) or other Microsoft paraphernalia.