I work at an international business school. I try to stay up to day on world news. There was a paragraph written about “infectious pneumonia” in Time magazine or The Economist the last week of 2019 (so the issue published the first week of 2020, I think).
Returning to work a week later I mentioned it in class, because that year I had about 6 students from different parts of China.
They said, “it’s nothing, just a flu.”
The next week, as numbers started to be published they said, “no, it’s an exaggeration.”
The week after they were the first students to start wearing masks.
Week 4, they told us they hadn’t heard from their families in several days. This would have been February 2020.
I felt so horrible for those students that year. They were only 18 or 19 years old. Sent to France in January 2019 (they are required to come several months before classes start in order to learn French and pass some tests). They were locked down March 16th 2020 and forced to take lessons on Zoom. Unable to return home for the summer. Took another semester on Zoom, etc., etc.…
I think they finally managed to head home in the spring of 2021.
Of all the privacy-related changes I’ve made, Signal is the only thing I’ve managed to get anyone else to use.
It was a matter of saying “I don’t use WhatsApp anymore” and that was that. Some friends didn’t make the switch, but they know where to find me.
Quitting Facebook lead people to believe that I was in need of help, though. They thought I was crazy. Still, today, people ask me why they can’t tag me on FB or why I unfriended them. When I tell them I stopped using FB they’re shocked and say things like, “but you’re such a techy computer nerd guy.”
I can tell some of the people commenting here are holding back, but there is an undertone of something here that isn’t very Beehaw…
Anyway.
As I live in France, I can confirm that something like this was inevitable. First of all, the politician who called the ban is severely disliked. His name is used as a synonym for poop on the internet. That is just a small detail…
It was more or less decided that he cannot put a blanket ban and would need to ban case by case, but I may have missed something since yesterday.
Through migration and gentrification, France has set itself up for minor disasters such as this. Also, through education. I am from Canada, and I remember learning about this conflict in highschool in the late '90s. But, teenager me didn’t even know at the time what a Muslim was or why religion had anything to do with it. Here in France, students do not learn about it at school, they learn about it from parents. The French way of thinking is always about time, context, and place.
So, last week was the time. Context was terrorism. Place was… Israel. The media here can be quite biased. Lots of younger people have no clue what biased means. They consume lots of YouTube and prefer things to be vulgarised, meaning simplified, and will adopt the opinion of a YouTuber or influencer quite easily. This is contradictory to how the French used to think even 10 years ago.
Since Monday, a fake story about Arabs planning a djihad has been circulating on social media. It is all over French Instagram (my partner showed me) and Telegram too.
Ignorance, fearmongering, bloodlust, racism…all the bad shit could boil over. Adding fuel to the fire is the trend of calling out and doxxing anyone who criticises country A instead of county B.
I think the police will have a busy day and some looters will again take advantage of the situation.
Just for clarification, in case anyone is in the same situation as me…
Clicking on that link just takes me to the MSN front-page for some reason… The French version, because I live in France. This article is from The Jerusalem Post and the lead is:
The BBC’s Spanish-language service released a program claiming that “Jewish wealth and influence” in the United States is the reason behind the United States’ ongoing support for Israel, according to a translation produced by Jewish News on October 20.
As a Canadian, as much as I like it when news providers stick to their guns, I think the CBC will also probably need to make some updates to the way they use the “T” words in the future.
As far as I recall, it never was relevant. It was generally viewed as a rant written by a non-professionnel. Perhaps I am wrong? Sorry if I am wrong?? Don’t start reporting me, please.
I am a professor as several different schools in France (business, notarial studies, agricultural engineers, communication). I would day 95% of my students are from well-to-do families. But, most of them are required to find paid internships. The notary students usually get unpaid internships.
As an internship advisor, I can confirm one thing: paid or not, they put in the hours and take the same crap as a paid employee. Sometimes it is worse. For example, if an intern is absent from work, the message gets to me, and I send it up the chain of command and sometimes parents get involved. It is stressful for the students. My business students get paid internships (about €1400/month) but still need help from their parents and many of them will be doing something they don’t really want to do (think finance instead of marketing).
Now, being a professor I am in contact with a rather large network of of profs spanning the private and public sector… My colleagues from the public sector are worried about this looming change to laws. It would lead to an overhaul of the system as the internship is counted as a credit. If it is decided that they should be paid, how many companies will want to pay when they can just hire a part-timer for the summer?
I have a friend / colleague who was a bit like this. It is a “see it to believe” situation. For her it was when she was at work and she watched her mouse stat moving on its own.
When she thought about how she never did anything bad on her work computer, but sometimes accessed her personal email… She got it.
And now she pays closer attention to things. Like in our city you’re pinged via WiFi when you get on a bus, but you can opt-out or jut turn of your WiFi, so she does that. And she makes email aliases now too. Nothing too serious, mind you, but she is 50 and figuring this out on her own and then teaching her friends and colleagues about it which is way better than going down the rabbit hole. Now there’s a bunch of boomers refusing to use Teams or access work email on their personal devices because she explained that they do have things to hide: the names and ages of their children and grandchildren, where they go for drinks after work, what they watch on YT, etc.
I don’t get into it with people though. People just write me off as some nerd, which is not the case.
The distro I came here to mention has been hated on already. My dislike goes to the distros that start off fine, and somehow screw it up.
Honestly, I remember using Manjaro ages ago. It had an official Openbox spin (not a community thing). I had already used Arch but I didn’t even check to see what it was based on when I tried. I thought, “green is nice” and it was. It very quickly became less nice. I didn’t use it after that, but I’ve heard plenty of hate since then.
I’m going to put another one out there just for fun.
Distrowatch’s n°1… MX Linux
Nothing wrong with it, but the fact that it is number 1 (I know their ranking is just for fun and based on page hits) and doesn’t deserve it is the issue. It works great, when I used it I didn’t like how there was a second application for installating certain software. I think I used the Xfce setup. Again, it’s fine, but if a first-time Linux desktop user sat down and installed that, it might not be the best initiation.
Popular and highly ranked distros give Desktop Linux a bad name sometimes is what I’m saying.
Don’t like that he called some distros pointless. I would have found a better word. Lots on there that I have never used, obviously, because I am not a sadist. I couldn’t tell you what would be good for gaming or not, but flatpaks have made some things easier (or so I’ve heard, don’t quote me on that). And Fedora is a “Devil?”
Anyway. While I don’t watch this channel ever, I am aware of it as a reputable channel for things like this, so it might be trustworthy.
Why are Debian and Arch at the top? Debian is one of the grandaddies. Many distros are built on Debian—MX, Mint, Ubunu, Pop, Zorin, Neon, etc.—and there are many packages in the repos, which are divided into stable, and testing, and unstable sections. So, a Debian base can be stable or extremely up to date. The Debian community and maintainers are another reason the distro is so well-liked. Arch also has a large selection of packages, an excellent wiki, and the AUR to have access to anything missing from regular repos. Manjaro and dozens of others are based on Arch as well, meaning the community is rather large.
No need to follow rules and conventions though. There are many people, myself included, that use Alpine for their desktop because the packages are very up to date.
Did you delete them outright or modify the text and then delete it? That is the tinfoil hat way! If you lived in Europe you could request your data to be deleted. You can also request your data and they are supposed to comply at some point. If you did that you could see what they have.
The rabbit hole will drive you a little bonkers so maybe don’t overthink it for now and take a look at www.reveddit.com and archive.org to see if your username pops up.