A few months ago a german activist (I think it was Arne Semsrot) wrote a book about how low and middle positions in government agencies can work against the governments intentions in case of a extreme right wing takeover by the AFD. Though I don’t know, if it was translated to english or would be 1 to 1 applicable to the USA.

In germany - I think - blood and plasma donations are most commonly done with the DRK (German Red Cross). I might be wrong, but DRK is not a for profit organization, but “gemeinnützig”. Organizations with that status get controlled by the government for it, so they are non-profit. I think the 25€ are an incentive to come and donate, just as the chocolate and drinks and the small goodies, that you get there. And you only can get the money, if you go to one of the fixed DRK locations. If the DRK comes to somewhere near you (as they often do with churches, town halls, schools and universities) you don’t get any money. I can at least believe, that these two are monetarily similar for the DRK. If you come to them, they don’t need to pay for getting the equipment and people to you. And providing incentives for donating blood is in effect a good thing, as they are working, thus we have more blood to save lifes.

Ofcourse actors later in the chain are probably profit oriented. Though there I would see the discussion disconnected from the donation. It is more about if we want profit oriented actors in healthcare.

And - as always - the US healthcare system seems to do the worst thing possible every time. Sorry, americans, don’t want to bash you, but capitalism…

An interesting customer base might be small communal organisations. At our local scouts troop I had a discussion with a friend, who is also in IT. His idea (not fleshed out) was to provide small local organizations with a stack of already configured open source software to support the typical needs of such organizations (like a wordpress website, a nextcloud for file storage and common calender, limesurvey for surveys and event registration, mailman3 for mailing lists,…). Depending on the needs you could sell the initial setup process (your personal work in setting up and skill transfer) or ongoing support. Though such organizations normally don’t have much money to give away. So probably its not really worth your time financially (though probably really appreciated in the community).

I cannot find callibreoffice. Where can I get it to try? Or do you mean Collabora?

I really need a libreoffice calc on my android phone. Not just opening (where currently only Microsoft Excel on Android works for me) but also editing and saving to my connected nextcloud (where I have also problems with Excel)

Or different managers in the company each send a weekly newsletter to all employees. Additional to the Did-you-see-this-shit-on-our-comporate-social-media-platform mails, for which I don’t know any colleague, that actually reads them.

Do english speaking dads really do that? Kinda weird

Except for my mother in law. She hooked it up to the hot water to save gas (through solar thermal panels). In summer the hot water gets up to 70°C. So we need to shower first to lower the temperature again before she can start her dishwasher XD

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYCRwcz2aV8 is really crazy, that americans seem to think, that you need to be able to get out of everything by yourself. In the line of: If something bad happens to you and you are not able to get out by yourself, then it is your own fault and nobody should help you. Though this is already often talked about.

Another scary thing is how little you like your government (being it of the State or federal). It seems Americans don’t want the government to do much, not seeing at as a tool to handle modern problems. Back when I was at Reddit I read a thread about why americans opposed state run free healthcare for all. One user wrote something like “Don’t see, why we should solve the price issue by letting the state (so taypayer) pay”. The user just ignored the immense power, that a government of a big and wealthy nation has. It can easily press pharma companies to set prices low enough, without stiffling research and innovation. But that would be against freedom, I guess? Really difficult to understand.

Though changing the american system is a big task. Months ago I’ve seen a good video on youtube on that topic by TypeAston. I think its this one Would Universal Healthcare Really Work in the U.S.?

Maybe Miaou meant the gender gap in medicine. The big difference in studies looking at the medical details (for example of drugs) in female bodies vs in male bodies

It was a friend who helped me install ubuntu 8 on my PC in dualboot when I was like 14/15 years old. Was already a computer nerd, though my friend was way more into everything Linux related. I got hooked there, though at that time it was a real pain in the ass to use wifi in ubuntu. I wouldn’t call me obsessed, but I really don’t like using Windows. I have to for work and I despise it.

That sounds really cool.

@fellow_germans: How can I express this in german? The literal translation “Was ist deine aktuelle Obzession?” doesn’t sound right, because of the different meanings of obsession. Maybe “Welches Thema beschäftigt dich gerade?”, though this also doesn’t seem to have the correct ring to it.

Isn’t your shell showing autocomplete options on oressing tab? Like the subdirectories? That way you don’t need multiple cd and ls calls

I’m going with the niche german option: Jan Philip Zymny. He is a former Poetry Slammer and writes hilarious dadaistic texts. An he can also do that spontaneous together with the audience.

And of course the german comedian Thorsten Sträter.

And the PineTime as an Open Source Smartwatch. I’m not using much of the fitness tracker functionality, but counting my steps is very important for me.

One big problem that I see with the current system is, that - like everything in capitalism - it works with the attention economy. Big projects with many functions (like computing platforms) get much attention, especially from companies, who donate and contribute for their own good. But there are many small projects, often small libraries, that are developed by single persons for free, but used everywhere. If I remember correctly the disaster with log4j was such a case. Real developers surely know even better examples. The funding of such widely used software can effect the security of our whole IT stack.

The average user only uses what is already in their devices or very easily obtained and already known by them. On PCs you got Windows and Microsoft of course pushes their products (Edge, MS Office, OneDrive,…). On Smartphones you have Apple and Google controlling the devices way more than with PCs and being Gatekeepers through their appstores and preinstalled apps. Why would the average user try to research to find FOSS alternatives in that big pile of proprietary and monetized apps or jump through hoops to actually use them (keeping things FOSS is not easy on smartphone due to policies from google and apple)? The big players are controlling the market and they try to only allow FOSS when it benefits them.