@hex@kolektiva.social2025-10-30 10:05:59
The fracturing of the Dutch far-right, after Wilder's reminded everyone that bigots are bad at compromise, is definitely a relief. Dutch folks I've talked to definitely see D66 as progressive, <strike>so there's no question this is a hard turn to the left (even if it's not a total flip to the far-left)</strike> a lot of folks don't agree. I'm going to let the comments speak rather than editorialize myself..
While this is a useful example of how a democracy can be far more resilient to fascism than the US, that is, perhaps, not the most interesting thing about Dutch politics. The most interesting thing is something Dutch folks take for granted and never think of as such: there are two "governments."
The election was for the Tweede Kamer. This is a house of representatives. The Dutch use proportional representation, so people can (more or less) vote for the parties they actually want. Parties <strike>rarely</strike> never actually get a ruling majority, so they have to form coalition governments. This forces compromise, which is something Wilders was extremely bad at. He was actually responsible for collapsing the coalition his party put together, which triggered this election... and a massive loss of seats for his party.
Dutch folks do still vote strategically, since a larger party has an easier time building the governing coalition and the PM tends to come from the largest party. This will likely be D66, which is really good for the EU. D66 has a pretty radical plan to solve the housing crisis, and it will be really interesting to see if they can pull it off. But that's not the government I want to talk about right now.
In the Netherlands, failure to control water can destroy entire towns. A good chunk of the country is below sea level. Both floods and land reclamation have been critical parts of Dutch history. So in the 1200's or so, the Dutch realized that some things are too important to mix with normal politics.
You see, if there's an incompetent government that isn't able to actually *do* anything (see Dick Schoof and the PVV/VVD/NSC/BBB coalition) you don't want your dikes to collapse and poulders to flood. So the Dutch created a parallel "government" that exists only to manage water: waterschap or heemraadschap (roughly "Water Board" in English). These are regional bureaucracies that exist only to manage water. They exist completely outside the thing we usually talk about as a "government" but they have some of the same properties as a government. They can, for example, levy taxes. The central government contributes funds to them, but lacks authority over them. Water boards are democratically elected and can operate more-or-less independent of the central government.
Controlling water is a common problem, so water boards were created to fulfill the role of commons management. Meanwhile, so many other things in politics run into the very same "Tragedy of the Commons" problems. The right wing solution to commons management is to let corporations ruin everything. The left-state solution is to move everything into the government so it can be undermined and destroyed by the right. The Dutch solution to this specific problem has been to move commons management out of the domain of the central government into something else.
And when I say "government" here, I'm speaking more to the liberal definition of the term than to an anarchist definition. A democratically controlled authority that facilitates resource management lacks the capacity for coercive violence that anarchists define as "government." (Though I assume they might leverage police or something if folks refuse to pay their taxes, but I can't imagine anyone choosing not to.)
As the US federal government destroys the social fabric of the US, as Trump guts programs critical to people's survival, it might be worth thinking about this model. These authorities weren't created by any central authority, they evolved from the people. Nothing stops Americans from building similar institutions that are both democratic and outside of the authority of a government that could choose to defund and abolish them... nothing but the realization that yes, you actually can.
#USPol #NLPol
@thomastraynor@social.linux.pizza2025-11-14 14:25:47
I upgraded an old Acer laptop to the latest #mxlinux. It didn't take much work and went smoothly. I still have to put a guest user on and then tweak waht runs, but the basics are there.
@leftsidestory@mstdn.social2025-11-11 00:30:01
Moody Urbanity - Relations III 🧶
情绪化城市 - 关系 III 🧶
📷 Minolta Hi-Matic AF
🎞️ Shanghai GP3 400 Pan
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite
@inthehands@hachyderm.io2026-01-09 20:35:22
Re “apply the pressure anyway:” that’s advice I got from…Keith Ellison.
I was part of a citizen group pressuring him to vote for the ACA when he was in the House. He met with us, and gave us an impassioned speech about universal care and how the ACA was a good first step but insufficient, relating it to the less-remembered civil rights acts of the 1950s that laid the groundwork for the big one in 1964.
Somebody from the group finally asked him, “Why are we meeting with you? You’re already convinced!”
He replied (paraphrasing here): “I •need• your pressure. I need it even if I already agree. If you’re pressuring me, then I can get on the floor of the House and say ‘My constituents are beating down the doors of my office! This has tremendous support!’ I can tell my colleagues in private about how agitated voters are. If you apply pressure, I can pass that pressure forward. I need you to do it! •That• is why you’re meeting with me.”
And now Keith Ellison is MN Attorney General. He’s already started doing the right thing. Follow his advice, and apply that pressure!
@Erikmitk@mastodon.gamedev.place2026-01-12 07:34:49
I completely disagree with the premise of this piece but I agree with it's overall conclusion… so this is awkward.
It's plain wrong for me to claim AGI is here and then only focus on LLMs being useful in a general sense.
Intelligence is only brought up as a segue to ask what technology ultimately should be used for.
Discuss the question at the end, for sure, but the first part is wholly unnecessary since the conclusion (here's the twist) is kinda general in its…
@Techmeme@techhub.social2025-11-12 04:30:55
South Korea's KT Corp. launches a sovereign cloud for Korean enterprises built on Azure, with encrypted in-memory computing and strict local data governance (Jie Ye-eun/The Korea Herald)
https://www.koreaherald.com/article/10614445
@mgorny@social.treehouse.systems2025-12-06 17:32:10
Worked on some more #Gentoo global #jobserver goodies today.
Firstly, Portage jobserver support patch: #PyTest jobs will also be counted towards total job count.
Again, it's not a perfect solution, but it works reasonably. The plugin still starts -n jobs as specified by the arguments, but it acquired job tokens prior to executing every test, therefore delaying actual testing until tokens are available. It doesn't seem to cause noticeable overhead either.
@paulwermer@sfba.social2025-11-07 14:28:13
Love the impartial both-sided-ism of "even though the shutdown is the result of both Republicans and Democrats refusing to agree to a deal."
Who has refused to call the House back in session? Who has said "Don't negotiate"? Who has refused to fund #SNAP?
@deprogrammaticaipsum@mas.to2025-11-02 19:55:03
"The study of programming history might not be the solution to all the problems in our industry, for sure. It is also worth pointing out that most university curricula simply do not include any mention whatsoever of such subjects. Maybe it is time to start providing such information to students."
https://dep…
@Techmeme@techhub.social2026-01-01 22:10:43
Brookfield is launching a cloud company called Radiant and a new $10B AI fund, and plans to acquire up to $100B in land, data centers, and power assets for AI (Miles Kruppa/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/brookfield-start-cloud-b…
