2. The ruling party for over a decade is the VVD, a Republican Party with training wheels, with Tea Party like spinoffs in varying degrees over rabid idiocy. The VVD heavily depend on a small network of big donors and as such are strongly nudged to source the policy advice from those networks. The IT backbone of those government agencies are thus run by big corporate IT shops, which is also politically convenient as you can shrug of responsibility when it turns out there is some light between the theory and the practice of the neoliberal doctrine.

When power fears death, some strange things happens.

EDIT: link to the interview with Thiel <https://xcancel.com/rcbregman/status/2036113528126394834#m>

  > much more compelling than those found in the various "manifestos" which come out of Silicon Valley.

As an aside, at least Trump is drawn to the grandeur of high culture from historical times, but he also doesn't understand a jota about aesthetics, and so the White House gets turned into a tacky gypsy-style abomination with one dollar ornaments.

  > why not? i'm sure they can jump into the hustle.

mirror for <https://www.ft.com/content/57334fae-a475-4ab0-a202-8df376692...>

  > would gladly use similar mechanisms - so they wouldn't change structurally that much even when they get to the levers.

The second part, «so they wouldn't change structurally», is a real problem. There is quite a bunch of senators and people clinging to their position and their networks, standing in the way of real chance. Franklin D. Roosevelt had the same problems. The moneyed interests are a big problem too. From a distance I think AOC is the most clear-headed and general interest driven person, but she has to overcome established interests in the Democratic Party. That requires money and backing from influential people.

And frankly, the press might sometimes sound critical about current affairs (out of necessity, they have to maintain strata-specific degrees of credibility), but they don't raise the alarm (which has been several years overdue). For some politicians and power brokers, just facing up to the consequences of their (in)actions would be too unpleasant, let alone they would want to give up their interests. So they gladly let themselves be lulled to sleep. If the editorial boards would stop down-playing and bullshitting, those "all is more or less fine" people would start to face electoral heat, but you can safely bet the corporate incentives aren't aligned with that.

EDIT: A bit more background @<https://medium.com/@meriffa/net-core-concepts-simd-avx-intri...>

  > if allowed to run fairly.
  > Trump’s response to that landslide will tell us whether there’s hope.

But that isn't even the most important part. Imagine the Dems win next round. What then? I have the impression that the Americans do not fully grasp the structural damage that has been done. The Dems won't be able to clean up the mess that the conservatives had left them as they have been doing traditionally. This time the US is highly isolated, the economy is under severe threat from the GOPs own doing; Iran, almost unlimited lawless access to European markets (contrary to popular belief) for the tech oligarchy, institutional knowledge gone, soft power gone.

Also imagine throwing the owners of fake news blasters like Fox News in jail, would you think that would be possible? When an outsized portion of the populace think this is Free Press, there is a cultural problem that prevents root causes to be dealt with. The commercial apparatus is necessary for "flooding the zone", but doesn't function as the Fourth Estate, a required function the general population would not even know about.

The Heritage Foundation at alii have a large time horizon, they have been working on overthrowing democracy for decades. The asymmetry of having no regards for the rule of the law versus having to follow it is another disadvantage for the Dems. It is a seduction to join the dark side, to let the Dems play the game the other party is good at.

The Dems are setup for failure; they need a bizarre effort to overcome the structural damage and the corporate occupation of culture. Notwithstanding the neoliberal factions inside, which are equivalent to the "GOP of older times sliding into autocracy but not there yet". The GOP is bad, but I don't want to portray the Dems as 100% good, on the contrary. The Democratic Party is a big tent, and should rather be broken up in different parties, so Americans have something to choose from actually.

In short: people should not hope that the other party will fix their problems; they should start to question themselves, the cultural beliefs they have been fed and most importantly, they need to understand their own and their peers role in this mess. The change should come from bottom up, grassroots style.

If you find yourself in a "only Internet Explorer 5.5 is supported" situation, you could perhaps use Ungoogled Chromium and manually install Ublock Origin to buy yourself time to get out of that dead lock.

  > Um BILD.de kostenfrei nutzen zu können, ist für einige Verarbeitungszwecke Ihre Einwilligung erforderlich. Für andere Verarbeitungszwecke können Sie hier eine Auswahl treffen. Wenn Sie zu allen Verarbeitungszwecken eine Auswahl getroffen haben, können Sie diese speichern. Sie können Ihre Auswahl jederzeit über den Link „Privacy-Manager“ ändern.

EDIT: bild.de offers a fake consent choice screen. They fail to provide a "decline all" next to their "accept all" option, but even if you disable every tracking choice and choose to persist your choices, it does nothing and keeps the blocking cookie wall.

  > Serious question: do you think it is actually obvious and technically accessable to everyday people to have the thought "I should run this in a sandbox" and do it?

You have a point though that non-technical people are screwed, but they have always been. Their whole lives and biometrics rest on Google and Apple servers anayways, while a good part of their identity is being traded by non-scrupulous commercial predators under the veil of advertising purposes. They are so beyond f*cked that I did not include their concerns wrt Obsidian plugins.

  > Germany is pretty hopelessly behind on everything except GDPR enforcement.

So I did the (imho) only sensible thing, and run Obsidian in a sandbox (bwrap). By doing so, I also made sure it runs in a separate networking namespace. For now, I disallow any internet access.

The amount of rage I see here is a bit strange, the whole attraction of Obsidian is that you can turn it into a Swiss army knife (that can hurt you too ofc).

@kepano: you would greatly help me if you could force plugin authors to list the urls they want to access inside the manifest, then let the user per url decide if they want to enable it. I still see some stupid plugin authors download their assets from a CDN or a vague website, from deeply buried in their code. Making url depencies explicit helps firewall automation at a first step. Maybe you could revoke direct network access from plugins, but i am not too knowledgeable about Electron.