As for not wanting to force companies to release only "safe-for-children products", I do actually agree. However I consider it to be a matter of degree, and in this case for example, I think that if nothing else, Google should say the very least make the disclaimer a bit more prominent and maybe tweak the model so that it's not quite as confident in its claims in the AI Overview.

Do you really want to go there? That everything in the world would have a literal "caveat emptor" attached to it?

Now, land value taxes obviously have their place in the gamut of different taxes to levy, so I don't wish to badmouth them too much. But as a consumption tax, VAT also does have its place. Sure, they are absolutely regressive, but this also helps them to act more like Pigovian taxes, since they can be used to make certain categories of goods and services more expensive. And so if one can afford to pay the value of the negative externalities, why not. And hopefully it can then steer people towards better choices.

Would such legislation be perfect for dealing with these kinds of things? Of course not, but it would be better.

Does it actually matter? And if so, why?

> You can try to distract and do as much mental gymnastics as you want but everyone rational can clearly see that one thing is doing politics for software (free drivers, open source, no DRM, …) and the other is about virtue signaling about subjects that are completely unrelated.

Okay, but you would still have to answer a really important question. Why does it matter?

Let's say that it's virtue signalling, for the sake of the argument (although people tend to not know what virtue signalling actually is, and just claim any public acknowledgement of one's values as such, which is incorrect).

So, why does one being virtue signalling and the other not being such actually matter? Does it actually change the messaging in any meaningful way? Does it make it less legitimate or whatever?

> Btw, feel free to label me however you want (others did already), which shows that they have no arguments and resort to pidgeonholeing and name calling.

I wasn't going to, but thank you for the invitation!

You can disagree with the politics in question, but to say that FLOSS has no room for politics is itself a political position, leading you to a paradox!

Introducing a non-binary mascot for KDE is no more or less political than for example Richard Stallman demanding that printer drivers should be free, back in the 1980s. And same way the use and preference of the term "open source" over "free software" -- or vice versa -- is also very political because it depends on if one wants to go with the described values or not necessarily want to stand behind them.

The Free software community involves people, and with people come shared values and politics. That's kinda what "community" implies. And if we really want to go into it, given the circumstances of the invention of things like computers, the Internet, etc. it'd be very erroneous to asset that software in general has ever been value-free or non-political. Computing artillery trajectories is political just the same way as promotion of LGBTQ+ people, even if people get more upset about the latter rather than the more kinetic kinds of politics implied by howitzers et al.

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And there are probably even more.

As a tech industry we'll probably be complacent on whatever is coming up in the future, no matter if it's something like this or something far more insidious. But hey, some of our class got very wealthy and got to enjoy material prosperity so it's all good, right? People would chase ever higher wages and shiny trinkets and end up working for Evil Megacorps because "one needs to be able to afford to live comfortably".

Sometimes it might just be better to not do the thing, especially if it conflicts with one's morals. And well, the idea that "if I don't do this, someone else will" seems to not work out well in practice.

More money and material comforts? Well perhaps, but then again, I do wonder just how many would willingly take that rather than for example a proper work-life balance or clean environment. And we'll probably have to rethink the relationship of our societies with material consumption etc. in the coming decades anyway due to the climate emergency, and so maybe it'd actually be better for the US or China to adopt our "less competitive" stance rather than for us to try to agonise on trying to get ourselves competitive with them.

No one has yet figured out just what one's material possessions will do for them after they're dead. At best you can pass them to your next of kin, but that doesn't need the kind of hyper competitive, hyper capitalistic mindset espoused by the US or China.

Besides, even if that wasn't a consideration, only posting the announcement to X is just crazy. As others have said, you'd expect for GitHub to make the announcement on their official website. Any paying client would then just follow that for their announcements.

Of course, the USD has been for a while the largest one of these, but as you say, they're really trying to get away from that. And a currency falling in relevance isn't new, one can always ask the Pound about that.

Well, it does require you to install an extension[0], but it can be done.

[0]: <https://github.com/mozilla/video-bg-play>

Yes, both have a prompt where you type text to do things and get text back, but the type of text you write in one is very different than what you'd write in another. Prose versus commands and so on. Oh, and normal terminals don't waste electricity and water in amounts approaching small countries.

So Apple could give people the ability to use their oh-so-superior Lightning cable while also being able to use USB-C for charging. If nothing else, it means that there are no longer any "does anyone have an iPhone charger" discussions at parties because people can just charge all their phones with USB-C.

Hell, this thread even has a person whose argument against USB-C is that mandating it will mean that the EU will get conquered by Russia.

Well, the USB committee did ask Apple for the superior connector, but for whatever reason they said no. So we're stuck with this.

OTOH, USB-C is not nearly as bad as your bizarre post would seem to imply. It could be better, but as we know from experience with things like micro-USB, it could be much, much worse.

> Future historians will do a postmortem on the EU and discover the USB-C enforcement act as an inflection point that marked the downer trend to the EU’s eventual collapse, and the reclamation of its land and people to the great nation of Russia, where it always belonged. > > Or some other equally as dreadful outcome befitting the UBS-C Bike Shed & Enforcement Committee formerly know as the European Union.

Russia can't even handle Ukraine, a country significantly smaller in population, economy, and land area than Russia. And you think that they could take on the EU‽ A block, mind you, which has more population and a significantly larger economy. Oh, also nukes.

And you think that the EU would fall in this case because of... USB-C? Please explain the mechanism which would lead to this situation.