Organic Maps (google maps replacement) - https://f-droid.org/packages/app.organicmaps/

AntennaPod (podcast app) - https://f-droid.org/packages/de.danoeh.antennapod/

So yeah “things” are shittier, because nowadays we have the ability to live in a nearly post-scarcity society but we just don’t wanna.

Humankind could have been living in blissful peace for centuries. We’ve always had the ability to not kill each other or fight for resources. But many people, then and now, don’t want that.

The way civilizations/empires/countries have operated has largely been competitive. It’s naive to think we’ll all just come together and solve these very complicated problems.

Saying that people are stupid or racist… I don’t think that barely has anything to do with what prevents all major countries of the world to work together to combat things like disease, climate change, inequality, etc.

How do you define “things”?

On a global scale and on average, life for humans is getting significantly better than, say, a century ago. The number of people dying from preventable diseases, war, natural disasters has been steadily going down for a while now.

Of course there are many more people on earth than there were 100 years ago, so accumulatively there is a lot more suffering now.

Also, the lives of individual people, the state of certain countries and areas are certainly getting worse.

As for non-human animals… For most of them the world is getting increasingly less habitable and for those who are raised in an industrial setting for human consumption, living conditions are largely atrocious.

I think your question is too broad for a single answer. But you might be interested in this now 17 year old (!) TED talk by the late Hans Rosling, which at least partially answers your question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVimVzgtD6w

Seven

Only know him from Party Down but this sounds cool!

No this is a great thing. His opponent is an ally of the former president Rafael Correa, convicted of corruption and now hiding out in Belgium. She would bring him back and pardon him.

Correa constantly attacked the press, forced the US to close a naval base which kept the waters around Ecuador safe from drug cartels, and Correa himself has ties to criminal organizations.

If you only know this new president is center right and the woman who lost center left I understand you would think this is not a good result, but as a left of center person myself I am immensely relieved.

Same here. And their mortgage is lower than my rent.

Can’t complain too much though cause at least I can afford rent. Many other young people are still living with their parents, need housemates (who aren’t their significant other), or live in squalor.

Still, our generation has been fucked over in terms of housing. Home owners get so many benefits (loads of tax breaks, ability to install solar panels, etc) while renters are stuck. I don’t see it getting better anytime soon either.

Sounds like a nice setup. I have an old laptop I could potentially use for this.

Thanks, will check it out!

Politically also a non-brainer, right? I would think the vast majority of voters would be in favour of higher wages for teachers. All over the world teachers don’t get paid enough and I don’t understand what the objections are to paying them more. Sure it costs money, but a highly educated new generation will pay that back manifold. Not to mention it’s obviously the right thing to do to pay people a decent wage.

Haha yes fingers crossed more people get into financial problems! :P

Your wish has been granted, there are plenty of countries other than Bhutan with relatively few tourists. Pakistan, Laos, Cambodia I think are all way less popular with tourists than Vietnam and Thailand, for example. Loads of countries in Africa are barely visited by tourists too. No need to pay a daily fee in those places.

With that attitude it sounds like they wouldn’t even want you to visit. A huge part of the appeal is that Bhutan remains very unique, with a distinct culture and few tourists.

They don’t want people to come who are looking to climb a famous mountain, go partying, chill on the beach, and other things people go to nearby countries for.

I’m from the Netherlands and certain parts of Amsterdam are full of tourists almost all the time, with very few normal people living there. Venice is an even more extreme example, or some party islands in Asia or the Mediterranean.

Bhutan goes in the opposite direction. By making it so expensive to visit they filter out a whole bunch of people who could/would ruin what they want to preserve.

as long as there are others making more off my labour than I do

This could be also be reached by working for a non-profit ;)

if those were his actual proposals of course he wouldnt be the best candidate

OK but my question still remains: where is the line for you? Because I think it’s fair to say that he would want to make abortion illegal, abolish sexual education in its current form, and let terrible things happen to the environment because he doesn’t believe in climate change.

Those things are apparently not enough for you because you still say he’s the best candidate. Maybe you disagree, but I think it would be terrible if women lost their right to a safe abortion or if children wouldn’t receive sex education.

Why not cast a voto en blanco? Just because other politicians are worse doesn’t mean you have to vote for Milei.

You say Argentines aren’t stupid and I agree. Americans and Brazilians are also not stupid. But how did far-right populist presidents work out for them?

I’m not saying the current politicians in power are good, but why support this asshole just because he opposes who you oppose?

The enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend, it could just be another enemy.

So by that logic as long as a candidate doesn’t support the “practices that put us in this decadence” they are good enough to vote for?

If this guy would be in favor of rounding up all gay people and shooting them, would you still vote for him? What about making it illegal for women to do paid work? What about shutting down all newspapers? If he proposed those things, would you still think he’s the best candidate?

If not, then where is your line? Because to me he already seems pretty fucking extreme.

You can also not vote or cast a voto en blanco as a protest. Why not do that instead of vote for a Trump / Bolsonaro type person? Do you think they were successful presidents who made things better in the US / Brazil?

Bizarre. But the article outlines a lot more vulnerabilities. Seems like every part of this device is poorly secured.

IOActive’s hacking technique exploited glaring security vulnerabilities they found in the shufflers, the researchers say: They bought their own Deckmates for testing from second-hand sellers, one of whom told them a password used for maintenance or repair. They found that this password and others they extracted from the Deckmates’ code were configured in the shuffler with no easy way to change them, suggesting they likely work on almost any Deckmate in the wild. They also found that the most powerful “root" password to control the shuffler—which, like all the Deckmate’s passwords, they declined to publicly reveal—was relatively weak.

This is just ridiculous / hilarious.

This makes me so sad. Goddamn Correa fucked up the country with his corruption, idiotic economic policy (an insane reliance on oil), connections with organized crime, attacks on the press… Now he’s fucked off to Belgium (where his wife is from), who refuse to extradite him.

Ecuador is seeing a big increase in drug related violence which until like ten years ago it didn’t have. Covid made things a lot worse for sure, but the country was already going downhill and Correa’s regime was a huge factor.

Lasso (the current president) certainly didn’t make things any better. He’s pro business, anti-abortion, part of the elite, and besides being anti-Correa not someone who I want in power.

Ecuador needs its own Nayib Bukele! But this assassination is going to scare a lot of candidates. Imagine wanting to implement a harsh crackdown on drug gangs… You’re gonna put a massive target on your back.

I’m hoping Yaku Pérez can do well again, but I’m very worried about Luisa González. If she wins I can see her pardon Correa and bring him back to Ecuador. If that happens the country is truly in deep, deep shit. Even more so than it is now.

May I ask why you use maps.me? As far as I know that’s just a worse version than Organic Maps at this point.

Yes that’s indeed great and I have contributed to OSM, but even for places with tags in multiple languages the search still didn’t work great.

Perhaps it’s been improved, but I think Organic Maps first searches for the primary name tag first and only later name:es or name:ca. But that means that when searching in Spanish in Valencia (where the name tags are in Valencian/Catalan), it would often give me results outside of Valencia but that would have the name of what I was looking for.

That’s not impossible to improve, but it’s difficult to get those things consistently right. Google knows so much about its users it can make really accurate predictions about which results are most relevant.

But what’s for me way more significant is that OSM is quite unforgiving when it comes to typos or slightly inaccurate spelling. Organic Maps has that problem and openstreetmap.org as well. As an example: there is a part of the city called l’Eixample. If you search for l'Eixample on OSM you will find it no problem: https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=l’Eixapmle

But if you forget the apostrophe, lEixample, or if you switch around the m and p, l'Eixapmle, you get no results: https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=lEixample

For me that is really frustrating when I’m outside somewhere and have to quickly look up some place on my phone. Most of the time I can still find it with organic maps, but it can definitely be more cumbersome than with google maps.