I like the straw man attempt, but it’s kinda weak because not so many people hate her. She wasn’t around long enough, she hasn’t done enough.

What would people recommend in the short run as an alternative?

It has to be there, because politics is connected with lawmaking, and open source software is dependent on laws.

A lot of people like to say that politics isn’t in their life or that they keep politics out of their life, but the reality is that’s just not true. The rules that govern society affect you, always, either with or without your input, either with or without your acknowledgment.

You’re probably trying to say that we should keep pointless politicking out of open source software, and I agree, but that’s going to come down to personal definitions of pointlessness.

The shape of my body.

Nintendo has been a dominant company in the video game industry for decades. It should come as no surprise that they’ve made some amazing games.

Is it any less reliable than other state-affiliated news agency? Maybe. Depends on your perspective.

In recent years I’ve found NextCloud to reasonable. A little delicate initially, but once you have it working, the upgrades are very easy.

If that was is trying to minimize deaths, we’re totally incompetent. But I don’t think we’re that incompetent…

Capitalists hate capitalism. Competition is so irritating, because someone might undercut you. (And other people would cheat to win, just like you would, so you can’t ever relax.)

Many of us realized that the simplistic labels don’t apply. We have views on issues, some of those views are quite clear and others less so, but you can’t capture our positions in a few words.

Honestly, you just become more protective of your stuff and things you consider yours as you get older.

Isn’t that plainly false? When I was in college, and just after that, I had almost no money, so I was incredibly protective of my stuff and things I considered mine. Later my income went up, so I didn’t need to worry about it as much. Surely many other people have had similar experiences.

You’re bringing up a good point. People who say we’ll become more “conservative” are usually equivocating on the meaning of the word. It’s not like we’re going to wake up tomorrow and decide that global warming is a hoax, or that we should stop eating cats and dogs. Of course we’ll keep doing those things.

You’re talking about the wrong thing. The Mozilla Foundation is and has been acting a fool in recent years. Firefox, the open source program, is doing mostly OK. Obviously the two are closely connected, but they’re definitely not the same thing, and this matters when discussing policy.

Now now. If Mozilla is breaking the law here, of course someone would report them for it. There’s no need to shoot the messenger when everything was predictable.

I appreciate your apprehension. Fortunately, you don’t need to speculate. Go try it and find out.

For the most part? That’s an empirical claim. Any evidence? My gut disagrees with you, but my gut also has no evidence.

I might help people because it makes me feel good, sure. But I might also do it because those are my values, long since established, and I try to live by said values. So it’s about what following a self-imposed expectation, not about getting something. For some people, some of the time.

Similarly, the argument that “being selfless is selfish” is not useful and provably false. Just go ask people, and they’ll tell you why they did things and how they felt. Then you have to argue that many of them are either lying or mistaken, which doesn’t seem like a winnable argument.

I’m not a professional code monkey although I’ve done a fair amount of coding, and every time I tried to do parsing myself, I later regretted it.

But telling people that they’re doing it wrong is rarely met with positivity. :-)

I think there’s an element of responsibility that some people feel when they respond. If you’re asking for a very niche solution that is likely to create other problems in the future, should anyone else look at your code or refactor it or rely on it, or should you forget how it works, perhaps people are going to be less inclined in helping you craft it.

If you still want to craft it, that’s okay, but you have to expect that some real percent of the answers are going to be those folk who know what the tried and true solution is, often because they’ve lived through the reality that you’re attempting to create and they’ve dealt with the aftermath of doing it special and different.

I feel like you’re ignoring a lot of background, but let’s run with your argument. Let’s assume that we have to have some elected politicians and some appointed or elected bureaucrats, and either we should try to have a capitalist system or a communist system of some kind.

Let’s try to keep things as equal as possible, knowing that we really can’t, but just for the sake of argument. Which system is more likely to be corrupted? Remember, the express goal of capitalism is to throw wealth at the capitalists. If the regular person gets screwed, that’s not corruption, that’s a feature of the system… Oh, wait a second, I guess we already have an answer to our hypothetical, don’t we.

But you did raise a good point. Any government, if it’s to function somewhat reasonably, needs to be one that has a lot of transparency, oversight, and accountability. If you don’t have those, it doesn’t matter how you start off because it’s going to end badly. So I agree with you, we shouldn’t be trusting politicians.