Notices by Elias Mårtenson (loke@functional.cafe), page 8

@angristan Please open laptop more often

@patchman @orbifx And one more thing. Of course you can have all of these benefits without being a member of the EU. Iceland, Norway and Switzerland have that. However, that is not appealing to some parts of the UK for crazy political reasons. Most of them really bad

@patchman @orbifx The EU has tools on imports, yes. But they are standardised across all EU countries. In other words, if I want to import to any EU country, the toll is the same. Likewise, if I export to a country outside the EU, the toll will be the same no matter from which member state you export from.

Of course, if there were no tolls at all, that would be even better (conveniently ignoring world politics of course) but the solution isn't more tolls, which is the result of leaving the EU.

@patchman @orbifx It's not VAT specifically (that's an area where the EU has failed, in my opinion) but rather all other kinds of taxes that are harmonised across the EU.

Also, it's a real mess if you need to certify a product for use in every country (things like emissions ratings, and food safety for example). All of these things are incredibly complex, and does apply to small vendors as well (it's often mostly enforced against large companies, but they still apply to all vendors)

@patchman @orbifx It might not be a great idea to reply to this (and if it isn't, I'll just delete the message later) but the premise of the question is problematic. Just because you find decentralisaion to be a good thing does not imply that one has to be against the EU.

Let's say you're a UK citizen and you make something that you want to sell to people (some art perhaps). It would be beneficial if you could just sell the things without having to worry about the tax laws in other countries.

@kaniini I didn't know about that one. I just read the manual page, and the examples was interesting. Specifically the home directory.

@isolategab Surely there must be a good meme picture to use where thousands of self-hosted Mastodon instances with no income are questioning that message.

@Miredly What is PD? This looks like something I'd like to play with.

@erinbee @burgin What isn't chemical? Water is a chemical.

Also, “natural”. What does that even mean?

@quad
Where did you find this quiz?

@welshpixie No expressions or words from other languages like Zulu?

@welshpixie In SA, do you mix words from different languages, even if you don't actually speak the language?

Here in Singapore, there are lots of words that are commonly used which are from the various languages spoken here. If I want to order a milk tea with no sugar, I'd order: Teh Si Kosong, where Si is Hainanese for milk and Kosong meaning empty in Malay (i.e. no sugar).

@welshpixie I've seen the same. I think anyone who speaks more than one language can see through that nonsense. 🙂

Of course, there are differences in the way you express things in different languages, but that's more cultural than linguistic.

@vertigo Actually, my learning is very slow due to the fact that it's so different from anything else, and that there isn't much resources for a beginner. But I've learnt a bit, and I've even been able to write a FORTRAN program. 🙂

I'm pretty sure you could teach me a lot about it.

@vertigo ISPF is not available on the free version of MVS. However, there are some other tools that are similar that are available. I'll have too boot (sorry, IPL) it and have a look.

@vertigo I'm currently trying to wrap my head around MVS (on Hercules) and as best as I can tell, partitioned datasets seems to be quite popular.

At least that's what I thought they are, but after reading what you wrote, I'm not entirely sure they are partitioned. How can I tell?

@thegibson Is it? The tootflow seems to be rather torrential this morning.

@natecull I'm looking forward to when write.as supports federation with comments.

I might even start to write some blog posts again when that happens.

@kurtm
I'm sure systemd is on the case.

(no, that was not a post in favour of systemd)