4dpuzzle

There was a time when ministers used to resign after taking responsibility for accidents, scams or overall failures. People have forgotten that time. They seem to think that India was like a sub Saharan nation before 2014 and now it’s like Europe. This government has made people comfortable with the stance that ministers are not answerable or even responsible for their piss poor performance.

Vande Bharat isn’t a luxury. It’s a much required evolution of the railways. EMU passenger trainsets are common all over the world. There’s no point in sticking with locomotive driven separateable coaches other than for freight.

The main mistake here is how the railways is neglecting passenger requirements and safety. IR already has an indigenous solution for train accidents - Kavach, a cost effective implementation of the Train Collision Avoidance System (TCAS) requirement. Yet we find that in every single accident in recent history, the trains were not fitted with Kavach.

Another issue is about cheap general coaches and sleepers. The government cut their numbers, despite high demand. That’s just pure dick move. This one could in fact be due to the government trying to make it more profitable before selling it off to their crony friends.

The thing here is that VB and general coaches are not mutually exclusive. You could have VB trainsets with general coaches. Even Sudhanshu Mani said that the reduction of general coaches is a bad idea.

MP is the new UP, I guess. Can’t let this country be devoid of at least one state where the clock runs backwards.

Barely noticed among the mountains of improprieties of the BJP government - the Gujarat model of development is all about the PM misusing his official position to cajole and bribe foreign investors to abandon other states and choose his home state for setting up industries. These charlatans are no better than the British raj by treating the rest of India as a colony to plunder.

Choosing a country that depends primarily on oil for income, to head a climate change conference indicates everything that’s wrong with the current world order.

Fight against climate change headed by oil companies, anti-war groups headed by weapons manufacturers, human rights council headed by regressive kingdoms that still uphold slavery, women’s rights groups headed by countries where women are not allowed to vote or even go outside on their own - the entire setup is designed to pull a massive wedgie over honest hardworking regular people.

Take the lesson people - you are like amusing, but expendable guinea pigs to these rich and evil beasts.

I support India taking the entirety of J&K. The Pakistanis would naturally make the same claim. However, what’s really worrying is that these morons are talking nonchalantly about starting an all out nuclear war. Even the Pakistani leadership is more sensible than that. Indian citizens should at some point think about the best interests of the nation than about an overinflated nationalistic pride.

On the other hand, it’s not economically sustainable for the railways to cater to basic sleeper and seater tickets as those are heavily subsidized.

Some activities like public transport and food supply are not run for the purpose of making profits. They are essential services for the common man and for the rest of the economy. Due to this, their economic values cannot be estimated simply by looking at the profits they generate. Without them, we stand to lose a lot more.

Lack of such concern and vision is why the government makes such ridiculous decisions.

The difference between Indian railways during the British Raj and post-independance is that the former was meant to transport goods and wealth away from India, while the latter was meant to be the poor man’s transport. Looks like BJP is hell bent on taking IR back to its roots, perhaps all the way back to Rama rajya.

The tragedy of democracy is that the voters have a memory span measured in mere minutes.

If you can’t recognize what’s happening in the country, then the education system has failed you. You studied all that history like a cow listening to Shakespeare.

If you think this won’t affect you, you’re just overestimating your invulnerability.

I’m sure that this won’t stop the idiots who argue in support of using Discord as a support channel for FOSS projects.

Imagine the scenario where you have to bribe (disguised as a subscription) each megatech company to respect your privacy. How many times and how much will you be willing to pay for something that should be your fundamental right?

Given Meta’s history, no one should misinterpret their intentions. They should be outright banned for these egregious transgressions.

My point is that it is not correct that only gmail works.

Proton Mail and Fastmail are two such examples

I had Proton and Fastmail in mind when I wrote that reply - along with some others like Migadu. But the point remains - you need to be a large scale mail provider like any of them to bargain your way into deliverability. Self hosting is completely left out - a far cry from the actual federated design of emails.

It is a lot of work and fairly costly to get correctly setup and a real pain to maintain.

That is not necessarily true these days. There are a lot of turnkey bundles like mailinabox, mailu and mailcow that are easy to deploy, maintain and update. There are even projects that aim to combine all the necessary services into a single binary server - like maddy and stalwart. They provide everything necessary for running a mail server and ensuring deliverability. But they still don’t get delivered on those large service providers.

There is very little reason to do it too

Paid services that don’t sell you out is much better than big free ones that squeeze you for data. But I don’t consider having our data on someone else’s server as ideal. The ideal thing is that every home should have a cheap server with net/web applications that can be deployed with the ease of installing a desktop application. But we are going the wrong way. And those big monolithic abusive service providers are the biggest hurdle to achieving that.

Awful as it sounds, it was still data you could hear and decode using handwritten software. Protocols from those days were ones you could interact directly with - using software like telnet.

I thought they shoved a phone inside a PC.

‘It works for me’ isn’t an answer and that doesn’t make it overblown. This is a well known problem for years.

I applaud your intention. But there really is such a thing as peer pressure. The reason why only Gmail/GSuite and Hotmail/365mail is left is because these two ensured that mail wasn’t deliverable from independent email servers. And the fact that a vast majority was on them helped them convert a federated messaging medium into more-or-less centralized service. Even today, there are a lot of people around who knows the harm in using Chrome, but then goes ahead and say - “I would have switched to Firefox, if only some-random-useless-website worked on it”. It’s always possible for people to harass the company/institution to support Firefox. But they would rather make up excuses to stay on Chrome than do something about it. The same happens to every Google service as well - especially Gmail.

A lot of stupid techno wannabes will think that this is cool and ruin it for everyone else. We need that laughing man tech from Ghost in a Shell.

It’s true that most people won’t know or care. But the only ones who can make a difference are the ones who understand the situation. We shouldn’t assume that nobody will listen to us. If we tell a hundred people, perhaps 5 will listen - and even that’s a pessimistic assumption. Even such small changes add up in the long run. The last nail on the coffin of our freedom will be the silence of those with the wisdom to recognize its erosion.

Google has also started delaying the approval of revisions of privacy-related addons. This is an all out war against user privacy. Everyone, please stop using or promoting this Trojan malware called chrome or anything based on it.