The boiling frog of digital freedom

And I believe in actual government - government that builds roads to deliver food on, government that agrees ways to make researchers to discover medicines and hospitals and nurses to inject them, and governments that force companies to label their food with their ingredients (or their ISP adverts with their fees). I call this real government. not the arguing fools on TV. We can argue how much much of it is too much. We are. But I refuse utterly that "doing real government" is immoral, that any attempt to agree common standards is tyranny.

I believe that the real moral failing is to chip away at real government so much that services collapse and harm is done to real people. We can look at failed states like Niger or Haiti in horror, but we can also look at the mismatched life expectancy across our own rich countries and ask why?

I reject the idea that we can roll back government so much we can lose driving licenses and just be more careful out there, that we can ignore food safety standards and just look at the restaurant kitchen carefully. I reject libertarianism because it knows as much about the real world as central command economics.

I want government run on empirical data with justice and equality at its heart.

I am happy to accept the grey areas, will stand up for democracy will argue we can always do better. But buggered if it's because I secretly yearn to control your life.

It just makes me angry that Microsoft seems to have no clue what they're doing now. They seem to put their own agenda above all else. They base their system requirements on their misguided vision, not on the actual technical requirements of their software.

And ReactOS is still unfortunately as far from being usable as it's ever been.

How does that mean they have no spine? It sounds like they made a decision on what was more valuable to them. You could argue that they might not have been fully informed. But I think the reality is that they just don't care that much because they don't feel harmed by it. The segment of people that are going to even consider trying to repair a digital device rather than paying to get it fixed or getting a new one is probably vanishingly small (and very over-represented on this site).

I could easily see things going the other way, where the lack of digital privacy becomes even more of an unquestioned norm. These things can hold in a kind of equilibrium as long as the entities that hold the power don't use it to cause perceived harm above a threshold. We have the technology to do a lot more scanning of license plates, facial recognition, automated speeding tickets, etc. I'm kind of an optimist in that I think people will generally maintain this balance (or maybe a pragmatist - it's not really in their interest to upset the apple cart, but they will test the limits sometimes).

- 20 years ago it was impossible to buy a PC, especially a laptop, without MS Windows : today there are several suppliers: System76, LaptopWithLinux, TuxedoComputers, to name but a few.

- It is only in the last few years (less than 10) that Linux is perfectly usable on the desktop, so I don't care what decision MS will take for Windows, it is irrelevant if you have other options. For office suites we have: LibreOffice, OnlyOffice, FreeOffice

- FreeBSD has come a long way as a desktop too,in the long run will be usable as Linux

- There are now many alternatives (free or paid) to all the Google services. What Google decides to do with its own services is irrelevant to me, there are alternatives: ProtonMail, Tutanota, Infomaniak, OpenStreetmap, MagicEarth, OrganicMaps, ...

- There are several open source alternatives to Google Android, solid, complete and usable: Iodè, e/OS, to name a few, and we already have an open source app store: F-Droid.

- Linux is also making huge improvements on mobile phones (see PinePhone). It will take a few years, but I'm sure we'll have a viable alternative to Android in the near future.

- There are many messaging apps and protocols that are decentralised and resistant to censorship.

What is really in danger, in my opinion, is net neutrality and the clamps that Google and other big tech companies and governments will try to impose, but in the recent years we have seen a rise of decentralised protocols and services.

My humble suggestions:

- don't use the services of the big tech companies : look for and use only open source alternatives, if possible

- use an open source version of Android on your phone, without the Google services

- prefer decentralised solutions whenever possible