Notices by Strypey (strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz), page 48

"And what if the peasants resisted, which they did in fact do? 'Send troops into the blazing districts,' screamed Edward Gibbon Wakefield in 1831; 'proclaim martial law; shoot, cut down, and hang the peasants wholesale, and without discrimination'."
http://www.notbored.org/perelman.html

Wakefield founded the #NZCompany, our own shameful version of the East India Company, and this is exactly what British settlers did to the self-sufficient communities of the tangata whenua (indigenous people) of Aotearoa.

@alcinnz there's a reason for that. Constantly retelling stories about WW2, and to a lesser extent the Springbok tour and the anti-apartheid movement, allow us to think about ourselves as an anti-racist nation with progressive race relations. We fought those racist Nazis! We stood up for the black majority of South Africa. We're the good guys. Problem is of course, NZ history didn't begin when we entered WW2 (or even WW1).

The #AlienWeaponry song '#Raupatu', about the NZ Wars confiscations of land and denial of self-determination, sends shivers up my spine every time:
https://invidio.us/watch?v=CrGHGwH2wlg

Raupatu is a word in Te Reo Māori, the first language of Aotearoa, which refers to this practice of mass confiscation.

One of the #NZ's most pernicious colonial myths is that Māori - a post-colonial collective name for the country's indigenous peoples - made a free choice to migratee into the settler cities, in search of jobs and a higher standard of living. In truth, it was a result of the massacres and mass confiscations of the #NZLandWars, stripping them of their independent economic base. Too many kiwis - myself included - still know too little about this history:
https://www.nzonscreen.com/title/the-new-zealand-wars-1998/series

"A great many things stood in the way of a quick and 'orderly' transition from feudalism to capitalism, but especially the remarkable tenacity with which the rural peasants adhered to traditional agricultural practices and subsistence farming. Even when wages in the city were high, the peasants refused to accept factory jobs and stayed on their farms. They preferred a life full of holidays, not manufactured goods."
http://www.notbored.org/perelman.html

@stevenroose
> Of course, growing forests on empty grounds is better, but those are more scarce.

Fair point, but in Aotearoa, we have huge areas of hill country that is used for very marginal grazing of sheep and beef cattle. Replanting it would make it carbon negative instead of producing emissions, as well as revitalizing the watersheds (forested land retains more rainfall), increasing water supplies in the downhill areas, which often suffer bad droughts, and improving water quality.

@stevenroose
> Also, torn-down existing forests might leave more nutrient-rich soil which will grow a new forest faster.

Maybe a little, depending on the forest type. Pine, like other "fire trees", builds very little soil fertility. But like I said, most of the fertile potential in the soil of clearcut forest is killed by exposure to wind, which dessicates it, and sunlight, which irradiates it. Interplanting into existing forest, and maybe selective harvest, makes much more ecological sense.

> Freedom of Speech is a First Amendment right defined in the UNITED STATES Constitution.
https://counter.social/faqs.html

Really? I thought it was a universal human right. Oh wait ...

"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."
https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/index.html

This is hilarious:
https://counter.social/faqs.html

These folks seems to think they can set up a US version of the Great Firewall by controlling which IP ranges people can set up accounts on their server from, while running software designed to connect to a *federated* network *facepalm* People who want this level of safety netting are looking for #Sweet.sh, not Mastodon (as it currently exists anyway).

@mmin got a link about their use of #Bing? That's not necessarily a problem. #Searx instances send their search queries to corporate search engines too. The question is, does Ecosia send searches in batches with no user metada etc, as Searx does?

@Naughtylus @igeljaeger that's a shame, but I remember #WINE used to attract the same kinds of complaints. Hopefully Anbox will improve. Had you filed issues on the project, mentioning the lack of documentation making the problems hard to debug?.

@Naughtylus yes, but you don't have to add to that the weight of a software emulation of an Android device hardware, as you would if running Android in a VM.

@toeplitzer agreed, that's why I object to being forced to contribute my labour to them, to get access to huge swathes of the web (via the nonfree reCAPTCHA JS), and I'm excited to see GL make progress in phasing it out.

@tealturtle https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.dfa.hubzilla_android/

@tealturtle I believe Hubzilla has, although I haven't tried it. Not sure about Friendica.

@toeplitzer
> nonfree Javascript?

Nonfree as in proprietary
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html

If I'm not mistaken, the code implementing GL's invisible capture will be released under the same free license as the rest of their community edition.
@winniehell

@bob
> I guess what you're trying to achieve is robustness, such that if one server fails others keep running.

Basically. But also, the ability to host our groups on our laptops (in a VM or containerized somehow), rather than one of us having to keep a second computer in a closet with a reliable, always-on net connection. With a medium-sized group, especially spread across timezones, there's almost always going to be at least one of us online at a given time.

@lexi it's working for me. #SlashdotEffect?

If a non-geek ever asks you how #WebStandard work, or any other tech standards or protocols for that matter, chances are they're not asking you to explain the arcane technical details of HTTP and HTML, they're asking you what a standard or protocol *is*. One place to send them is this talk by #JeremyKeith:
http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/the-web-is-agreement/