Well that’s a shame.

I’ve been looking around for a replacement to my aged Samsung A6 (which has been given an extended life by replacing the factory ROM with something with less bloatware, but is still pretty limited in terms of memory) which is not a Surveillance Outpost for just who knows how many nations and just about any companies willing to pay the 3 cents of whatever for the data, and all the Linux and degoogled Android makers only have 10"+ ones, which are too big for my use case which carry a tablet on a coat or trousers back pocket when I’m going to be sitting down somewhere and waiting for something so that I can read books and maybe browse the internet on their free WiFi.

Personally I would LOOOVE a small Linux tablet, but I’m OK with some kind of privacy respecting Android which isn’t riddled with backdoors mandated by governments which have Information Courts issuing Secret Bulk Information Collecting Orders, like the US and the UK.

Guess I know which brand my next smartphone upgrade will be.

If they did some nice 7" tablets too, that would be perfect.

My point is that forcing age-gates on anything provided via such formal systems incentivizes kids to go around those systems and install themselves an OS that doesn’t do age-gating to evade it, not necessarily at school were they’re unlikely to control the hardware, but at home.

Even before this, MS and Google have used their money to create a situation were very few of the formal systems for kids to access computers, such as schools, put anything other than their OSes in front of kids, so only kids who are naturally geeks/techies might have tried Linux out on their own - those kids would always end up trying Linux out because they’re driven by curiosity and enjoyment from tinkering with Tech.

My point is for the other kids, the ones who wouldn’t try out on their computing devices any OS other than the mainstream stuff that they’ve been taught about at school: with this law California might very well just have created a strong incentive for those kids to go around those formal systems and try Linux out on hardware they control, which not all will but certainly more will that they would if there wasn’t a law in place to limit what they can do when using a mainstream OS - if there’s one thing that is common in all societies and historical times is that teenagers naturally rebel against outside control and try and find ways around it, so limiting what they can do in the officially endorsed systems will push them towards alternatives systems which won’t limit what they can do.

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Think about it this way: how do people learn enough about it to program for and admin Linux systems as adults?

Unless things changed a lot since my days (granted it was over 3 decades ago), the path to knowing all about using, administrating and programming software for running under Linux was through being able to play with it for fun as a teenager.

That said, thinking further about it, this might actually push more teenagers to try Linux out to avoid age-gating since they can just download a distro from anywhere in the World and install it in their own PC.

Ok, that does make sense.

If you’re producing electricity in it, you can always bring some water up and use some of that electricity to extract hydrogen from the water to make up for any leaks.

It really depends how bad the leaking is since that dictates how much weight of water is needed to be brought up and electricity must be used for hydrolysis.

Wasn’t the way the Hindenburg burned due to both the Hidrogen AND the alumium oxide paint covering it?

LibreOffice can be used to produce and consume Pornographic Content in the form of of erotic stories, so it makes sense (within the “logic” of this law) that it’s age-gated.

You’re confusing GenX with Boomers - the explosion in Tech was in the 90s, not the 70s.

Even then, most GenX weren’t involved in Tech since when they learned how to use it, it wasn’t yet normalized and widespread, so only really people who found such things interesting went for it and generally the personality type of those attracted to power over others is almost the opposite of the personality type of those attracted to solving problem which are expressed in strict and complex logical structures (for example programming languages or electronics designs).

Considering the massive number of servers running Linux used in the industry, this sounds like a good way to kill the Tech Industry in California.

Exactly.

People behaving as “consumers” supports the current system and hence supports the harmful side effects of such system, from the systemic suffering from wealth inequality to ecological destruction.

Whilst very few of us, living within this system, can in practice stop living within the system, we can refrain from living in accordance with the rules of the system which are not imposed on us via removing all other choices or force, but which we are “nudged” or manipulated to follow using marketing or even propaganda, and pretty much everything which is “impulse” or “deriving a momentary pleasure from buying” are the latter kind of thing.

So best change your investment strategy, then.

If people persist in riding this bubble out of greed, it’s only fair if they get burned when it blows up.

Agreed.

One single potentially good thing in the middle of bad things still adds to something bad.

My point is that this shit is happening either way no matter how shit it all is, so if we can recognize and extract one good thing out of it at least on the other side we’ll have one good thing, whilst if we don’t, we’ll have nothing good at all.

The silver lining in all this is that when this bubble explodes we’ll probably have a glut in the supply of HDDs and SSDs, driving prices down.

Just hold any plans to upgrade your hardware for a year or two and you’ll end up better of (for many it will even be a good exercise to wean oneself out of the mindless “instant gratification” impulses one is indoctrinated into by Consumer Society).

I, for one, applaud anything that helps destroy the current Intellectual Property system.

Not the other things, though.

I thought that was just in the UK…

Almost a decade in Investment Banking and I started reading a lot about Economics (from books, not random websites) after the 2008 Crash to try and understand what the fuck had happenned and what was being done about it.

That said, take what I wrote with a large pinch of salt, especially the first part which is an idea that I have of how that part of things work (based on Mathematics and Finance industry knowledge), not a proper peer reviewed theory from Economics.

I’ve pieced together a lot of knowledge I read about with understanding I gained from the inside of the Finance Industry (such as their way of valuing future money as well as things like fair value and fundamentals when it comes to markets), but the assembled thing as a whole is my own theory.

That said, my money is were my mouth is, and I’ve been highly invested in Gold (known as the ultimate safe asset) since 2012, and that has so far returned 500% on the original investment during that period, thus so far I seem to be at least partially right about the direction things are going (some kind over overall devaluation of traditional strong currencies and near-stagflation getting worse as the inherent disfunctionalities of the current value allocation system make it harder and harder for it to keep going as is), though that doesn’t mean I’m right on the Why.

PS: Recommended books to read - “This Time is Different” for an Historical perspective on Economic Crashes and “Freakonomics” for a look of on human decision making in an Economics context (which turns out to be very different from the homo economicus human behaviour model that underpins Free Market Economics theories) from Behaviour Economics which is the only part of Economics that actually conducts experiments.

Mainly the poorer owe that to the richer.

Also the richer owe that to each other.

The last part could sorta be unwound in a more or less peaceful way (though very interventionist and the amounts involved are so large that we would see an explosion of corruption as the wealthy tried to extract gains from it by hook and by crook), but the first part would require a Revolution that tore down all existing ownership structures.

Just remember that every year the World’s Economy has to grow enough to cover the interest rate payments in all outstanding debt (or money itself has to inflate away fast enough to offset it, and since interest rates are naturally set up to be above inflation - otherwise Financial Institutions would be losing money - that’s unlikely)

There are two ways to offset this:

• Reduce the amount of outstanding debt.
• Lower interest rates (which is what was done after the 2008 Crash, leading to the slowest recovery from a Crash in at least a century) so that for the same amount of debt there is less interest to pay.

Overall debt is increasing as per the article.

Interest rates are below historical average since what was done after 2008 which was supposed to be temporary wasn’t fully wound back, so there’s a lot less room there for central banks to do something about it.

Actually solving the underlying problems behind the 2008 Crash was pushed to the Future with some interest rate engineering, and it looks a lot like The Future Is Today, and this time around rather than just an over-indebtness plus Finance overextension problem, we seem to have over-indebtness, a massive Tech bubble (like in 2000) AND asset price bubbles in all manner of asset classes, from economically peripheral things like crypto to core things like housing.

I’ve been expecting a massive crash since I saw what passed for a “solution” back in 2009-12, but shit is turning up to be way worse than I expected due to all the additional resource malallocation and mispriceing in the Economy.