It’s actually far worse than that. Trailer park Millionaires is a report from 9 years ago following wealthy investors who were buying up trailer parks so they could Jack up rent. Investors specifically targeted sex offenders, convicted felons, and other desparate tennants, so they could mercilessly exploit them since they truly had no place else to go.

The investors were also trained to exploit families, since more members in the household means more potential workers, and that means they’ll be more likely to tolerate a rent hike.

Communication Workers of America is probably the closest to what you’re looking for. You’re definitely better off working with an established union instead of trying to build one from scratch, they have a lot of valuable experience and resources that you’ll need to pull off a unionization attempt. If you reach out directly to CWA, or any other union, they’ll work with you to help organize your workplace.

If you are serious about unionizing: first, see if you can get a few of your coworkers on-board by talking to them outside of work. Do this in-person or on voice calls that aren’t recorded, it’s crucial to keep the company unaware as long as possible so they have less time and ability to oppose you.

Ah, I see how what I wrote before didn’t clearly express what I was thinking, and didn’t address the issue of private contractors intentionally pushing for bloated contracts.

If public money for public code is mandated at the federal level, then private contractors would be bidding for work that ends up in the public domain. I am assuming that wasteful & bloated contracts will be underbid by contracts that fork or add features to existing projects. Either way, if the end result is in the public domain, then the project is still reusable.

I definitely don’t believe that such a mandate would be easy to implement, or separate from a wider policy platform. I see private capital influencing government decisions as the crux of the problem with passing such a mandate. However, private capital influencing government decisions is an issue that unites many activists, organizations, and social movements. If FLOSS can be integrated into organizations and social movements pushing for institutional reform, then that might be a viable pathway toward meaningful policy change.

Capital interests certainly oppose the public domain, but I don’t think it’s a pipe dream, I think it’s a policy change. Everything has swung in favor of private capital for long enough that it’s time for the pendulum to swing back toward the public interest. I think the iron is hot, and right now is the time to start imaging and building better institutions.

I disagree, those consultants and lobbyists are working for proprietary vendors. If, instead, public grant money & public purchasing contracts were mandated to go towards free and open source technology, then the nation’s technology infrastructure would eventually become free and open. Such a mandate would reduce the opportunity for corrupt contracts in the first place, because it would be substantially more expensive to start a project from scratch if there are already viable solutions in the public domain assuming wasteful & bloated contracts will be underbid by contracts that fork or add features to existing projects.

Public money for public code can dramatically reduce the waste caused by corrupt grants & contracts. If a project falls through, then at least the technology would be in the public domain for another organization to pick-up development. Currently, when a project falls through, it is usually a total loss because the technology remains intellectual property that can not be reused.

Just like with the Linux kernel, if a free and open source solution exists, it can be adapted to meet countless needs with far less effort and cost than starting from scratch with a proprietary solution.

Absolutely, and I’m glad someone else has thought the exact same thing! “Public money == public code”.

Unfortunately, generics can vary wildly in efficacy & quality. As @Aradina pointed out, sometimes the encapsulation is different (e.g. extended release coating vs. standard release), but also the form of the drug can differ (e.g. capsule, tablet, softgel, chewable, etc), chemical by-products from different manufacturing techniques may be present in different amounts, and different manufacturing processes can also yield different chiral enantiomer ratios in the end product.

The “same” drug from different manufacturers may vary in effectiveness / side-effects, and brand-name drugs aren’t always the best formulations for most patients.

Thank you! Lemmy is a tremendous contribution to the wider Fediverse, and no amount of “thank yous” is ever enough for people like you writing free software and giving freely to the public domain.

I have been on Lemmy, and around the Fediverse on various accounts since ~2021, and a suggestion I have seen promoted countless times is for communities which federate across instances. e.g. posts to [email protected] will show on [email protected] as long as lemmy.ml and lemmy.world federate with one another. If I remember correctly, each of you have previously opposed this idea for multiple reasons. If you do still oppose such a feature, will you please reiterate why you think this is the wrong direction for Lemmy? Also, have you considered adding a multi-community feature similar to Reddit’s multi-reddit feature which allows end-users to combine multiple federated communities into a single page just for them?

I highly recommend Framework laptops for Linux. I have not used the Framework 16, but I can attest that Linux support for the Framework 13 (intel 11th & 12th gen) is excellent. I have used Fedora on the Intel 11th gen and Intel 12th gen, everything worked immediately on a fresh install without any workarounds or issues. Other distros might require a few package installs, but Fedora, Ubuntu, and Ubuntu derivatives should work out-of-the-box without any additional configuration. The Arch Wiki article for the Framework covers pretty much everything you might need to know to have an optimized Linux experience with any distro.

Aside from Framework’s excellent Linux support, I really have to stress how cool and unique it is as a laptop for developers and tinkerers. This thing is literally designed to be opened up, repaired, and modded. All of the internal components are clearly labeled and easily accessible, there’s even a little spot inside the laptop chassis just for spare screws in case a screw ever gets lost! Another awesome obscure feature of this laptop is the ability to use a Storage Expansion Card for dual booting. I just plug in the expansion card to boot into Windows, then unplug it and I’m back in Linux. It is absolute bliss compared to Windows and Linux sharing a bootloader.

I know I’m rambling, but I really could keep going on and on about Frameworks. They truly are unlike any other laptop, in all the right ways.

I avoid Ubuntu because Canonical has a history of going their own way alone rather than collaborating on universal standards. For instance, when the X devs decided the successor to X11 needed to be a complete redesign from scratch companies like RedHat, Collabora, Intel, Google, Samsung, and more collaborated to build Wayland. However, Canonical announced Mir, and they went their own way alone.

When Gnome3 came out it was very controversial and this spawned alternatives such as Cinnamin, MATE, and Ubuntu’s Unity desktop. Unity was the only Linux desktop, before or since, to include sponsored bloatware apps installed by default, and it also sold user search history to advertisers.

Then, there’s snap. While Flatpak matured and becoame the defacto standard distro-agnostic package system, Canonical once again went their own way alone by creating snap.

I’m not an expert on Ubuntu or the Linux community, I’ve just been around long enough to see Canonical stir up controversy over and over by going left when everyone else goes right, failing after a few years, and wasting thousands of worker hours in the process.

I worked at a sandwich shop and had given my two weeks notice a few days earlier. My manager came to me and asked me to clean up the bathroom…alright. I could smell it before I even opened the door.

I told my manager I’d clean it if he’d still give me the employee discount after I was gone. “Done”. That’s when I knew it was really bad.

When I opened the door I discovered someone had ass-blasted the bathroom. I’m not talking about blowing up the toilet, they did that too, but they had dropped their drawers and point-blank diarhea shotgunned the pipes under the sink.

My manager didn’t honor the employee discount after I was gone, either.

It’s good that this discussion keeps coming up; federated instances are not meant to get so large. Once communities become too large they lose cohesion and culture, invariably they eventually sacrifice users’ well-being for practical purposes like funding, and at that point they become no better than the platforms they replaced. The cycle of exploitation continues.

There are communities online that have preserved their community culture and have not resorted to unethical practices to maintain themselves for more than 20 years, they are always smaller more intentional communities that value quality interactions over quantity of users. Given all the evidence showing how mentally and socially harmful large centralized platforms are - should we really aspire to recreate those unhealthy spaces in the fediverse?

The fediverse is an opportunity to take things a different direction, a direction in which smaller more cohesive communities share with each other without any one community dominating and suffocating the others. Federation is a fundamentally different model that challenges the centralizing paradigm “growth is good”.

Police spend most of their time on routine traffic stops, and routine traffic stops could be eliminated by transit and walkable infrastructure. It’s almost like it’s a racket…

I expect to see further erosion of Net Neutrality if big tech firms are required to pay for internet infrastructure. I have no love for big tech, but if they are required to pay for infrastructure, then how long until smaller companies and hosts are required to pay? The Biden administration seems to agree: “[it] is difficult to understand how a system of mandatory payments imposed on only a subset of content providers could be enforced without undermining net neutrality.” I have no love for ISPs either - ISPs should be run as public utilities, not as for-profit private corporate conglomerates.

As others have already pointed out the US government (and Comcast, Verizon, & Century Link customers) have been defrauded by the major telecom companies for nearly 30 years worth at least $400 billion dollars (data from 2014, the current total is likely over $700 billion). They’ve been pocketing obscene amounts of money instead of investing in infrastructure for decades, at this point additional infrastructure should be publicly funded, owned & operated and the telecommunications companies should be forced to sell the internet infrastructure to local public utilities.

The Irregulators are a group of experts who have been fighting this fraud since 1999, and they have a couple books about this:

• The Book of Broken Promises- $400 Billion Broadband Scandal & Free the Net

• DISS-CONNECT - How America’s Big Telecoms Stole Billions from the Public and Created the Digital Divide

As everyone else has confirmed - the title is incorrect, medical debt absolutely can be sent to collections

What OP likely misunderstood is the practice of validating a debt - this is not a loophole to get out of paying your debts, this is a basic legal protection to prevent malicious collection agencies from fraudulently pursuing invalid debts. When you get a bill in the mail from a collections agency you can request that the agency validate the debt, and they will have to formally provide the following information before you are required to repay the debt:

• [collection agency’s] name and mailing address
• the name of the creditor you owe it to
• how much money you owe, written out to include interest, fees, payments, and credits
• what to do if you don’t think it’s your debt
• your debt collection rights, including your right to get information about the original creditor if you ask for it within 30 days of getting validation information from the collector

A collector has to give you “validation information” about the debt either when they first communicate with you or within five days of the first contact. The collector has to include the following

Federal Trade Commission - Consumer Advice - Debt collection FAQ

I live in an area with only 2 ISPs to choose from: AT&T or Comcast, and they both have data caps. The FCC has a publicly available Data Cap Experience Form on their site basically all you do is write a paragraph summarizing your experience with data caps.

If anyone wants help, fill out the form and let the FCC know much you hate data caps.