You probably never used Maemo, whose UI (and also Palm's WebOS UI) were ripped off for later versions of Android and iOS, which wasn't even multitasking yet. Literally hired the same people to do them. Jolla started with the FOSS parts of Maemo but went proprietary.

If Nokia hadn't been intentionally destroyed by its board in a romance with Microsoft cash, through a Canadian snake, Maemo would have been a real contender. You can get an vague idea what it looked like from here: https://maemo-leste.github.io/

Also, I don't know what's motivating you to just make negative shit up from whole cloth. Where did Linux touch you?

Hear, hear.

I once asked David Potter what happened post-symbian, and he smiled and shrugged

Again, starting from elements of Maemo is a surefire way to ship a ghastly user experience. The N800 that I still own had the most hostile UI of any device I ever bought with my own money. The reason it flopped was because it is really bad, not a great conspiracy.

Look at the TODOs for Maemo Leste, which you just referenced. "Phone calls should work, with audio, when alsamixer is set up properly". That is F-tier user experience. OpenMoko-level garbage.

Two words: Nokia N9.

It was a child of times when stuff like proprietary banking apps were not a thing.

Still, I think the Jolla Phone would make a great second "toy" phone, if you have the budget for a 500€ toy.

> leaving backers with no tablets and most with no refund.

I'm pretty sure we eventually all got refunds after they got the Russian cash. My refund came a couple years later iirc, with a check for half the amount coming a few months before the check for the second half.

If you are a monopoly, there is no incentive to do anything well. You've saturated the market, the incentive is to cut costs.

In fact, there are incentives for public failures: they'll help the politicians that you bought sell the legislation that you wrote explaining how national security requires that the taxpayer write a check to your stockholders/owners in return for nothing.

You failed to explain why seeds that might fail to make the "best crop possible" would be banned, while leading with a promise to do so. Instead, you explained the concept of "hybrid vigor."

Then you talked about the counterfeiting of seeds by imitating a coating, a concept completely unrelated to a law banning sharing seeds, and unlikely to be hindered by it at all.

Unless I am missing something.

Also, are they not capable of buying seeds from reputable sources in Kenya? I assume there is some sort of farmer seed-shop in most places which has been around for more than a year, known to be reputable. If they buy below-market priced seeds then those are going to be dodgy. That is why they are below market price. These people are poor not stupid. It'd be like my buying a cheap Rolex from a street vendor - I might buy it, I might not but I'm not going to be confused if it turns out to be a fake. It isn't hard to find a reputable seller of something and if you go to the unreputable sellers the reason it is cheap is because it might be bad quality. Don't go to a community seed store that lets in random seeds if the quality matters.

I assumed that there was unwritten context where some seed vendor with genetically enhanced seeds was corrupting the legal process to try and protect their IP.

> “…are they not capable of buying seeds from reputable sources…”

I don’t know the answer, but the op’s answer does point to corruption. This reminds me of early 20th century reforms in the meat industry in the United States a hundred years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upton_Sinclair

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Meat_Inspection_Act

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Era

I am kenyan,let me put it into context since its a bit nuanced. We have a very corrupt parliament, they were bought off way back in 2012 when the law was introduced. Mainly by big corpos like Monsanto & the Apollo guy above. They basically wanted full dependence on these companies for seeds, without giving farmers a choice. Maize is the staple of the country and big bank for anyone who captures the supply chain at whatever level. There has always been contention on GMOs since contrary to what you may have read in your media, kenyan farmers are perfectly capable of feeding their families & the nation at large. Now farmers fought back the law was suspended in court since 2012 but during that period a lot of big seed companies found a way to capture the market. Its a victory since the fines and jail time were really extreme & seed sharing is an age old tradition here, so picture a bunch of foregin companies lobbying your government to criminalize your traditions because its a direct threat to their business model

That is why this is a big deal and for more context on why interfering with agricultural sytems at this scale is a doomed excercise; The gates foundation tried this shit in Zambia, and it worked they produced more till covid hit, supply chains were cut and they are still dealing with a famine

Thank you so much for this first-hand insight! It takes the conversation out of theoretical law intentions, and into real-world actions.

In fact its basically a monopoly play to sideline the longstanding seedbanks that have existed, both government ones and co-op based seed banks. Hence the law that proposed: Fines could reach up to 1 million Kenyan shillings (approximately $7,700) and Offenders risked imprisonment for up to two years.

Think about that for a second in a economy where approximately 40-50% is subsistence agriculture.

Basically a ploy to force the small farmers off the land and leave it to plantation and multicorps.

Its really sad but KE is in the grip of one of the worst neoliberal experiments since post Soviet in the early 90s. See recent news where all the country's healthdata has been auctioned off to the US big pharma for 25years for 1B.

Please see linked Harvard study for partial explanation of difficulties and challenges in local supply chain.

Ole Jeff Monsanto at it again. Testing chemical sprays next to Hawaiian elementary schools just doesn't hit the same anymore.

Smarter to do it where you can buy off an entire national government.

Please try reading the whole comment again, I think you are missing most of the comment?

I read the comment and for context I am also a farmer, and stripping farmers of a choice with excessively high fines and jail time will never be correct no matter how you frame it or whatever goodwill you pupport to have, you are in it for the money not to help out “poor” farmers

That still doesn't give any context that would support the action.

If seed counterfeiting is "a big problem", then banning seed sharing is "an even bigger, worse problem". What context justifies causing a bigger, worse problem to address a smaller problem?

Occam's razor suggests that the primary motivation was protecting corporate profits anyways, not addressing seed counterfeiting.

> That still doesn't give any context that would support the action.

That's because if the true context in support was given, it would be: "because seed sharing reduces our rate of sales, and our resulting profits".

Somebody said "easier" and you said "more secure." Then, your argument that it was more secure (which nobody was discussing) is that it is "basic." Then you added an irrelevant strawman with a slur in it against the person you were arguing with.

Yes, it is more secure against the user. That is not a desirable characteristic for the user, it is a desirable characteristic for the controller of the operating system.

Corporations and center-left/center-right liberal governments support now and have always supported mass immigration because it lowers wages. Nobody especially cares about identifying them, the reason they flooded in recently (over the past couple decades) is because they were deliberately let in through written policies. They did this despite public objections. In the US, we know exactly who they are; we issue illegal immigrants special IDs and business licenses. They get bank loans; they're homeowners. They get in-state tuition at colleges.

Starmer is currently using anti-immigrant sentiment to push his digital IDs, but that's because he is a cynic. He does whatever he needs to do to satisfy his bosses.

> That movie Scarface in the first 25 minutes tells you something.

It tells you that the US puts nations under siege for decades for committing the crime of self-determination, then lets in with absolutely no obstacles all of the economically destroyed and desperate, the extremely right wing, and the participants in CIA-financed death squads who flee, then uses them as a voting block (and a resource) to support the continuation and escalation of those sieges.

edit: immigrants commit less crime in the US than natives. Their children commit more crime, because they rise to the level of natives at their socioeconomic bracket.

> As I grew up in the 80s, there were two kinds of gifted kids in school: The kind that would ace everything anyway, and the kind that, for a variety of reasons, lacked the regulation abilities to manage the school setting well, with the slow classes and such. A lot of very smart people just failed academically, because the system didn't work for them. Some of those improved their executive function enough as they went past their teenage years, and are now making a lot of money in difficult fields.

Somehow it is impossible for people to blame the system, but instead they diagnose physical deficits in children based on their inability to adjust to the system.

Maybe the random way we chose to mass educate children a couple hundred years ago isn't perfect, and children are not broken?

If you're not familiar, you might like reading about the social model of disability: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_model_of_disability

TL;DR: Disability is not inherent in difference, but rather a combination of the difference and an environment in which that difference is not well-supported. For an analogy - a deep-sea fish is blind, but not disabled by their blindness. Similarly, a kid who "can't sit still" isn't disabled unless we put them in an environment where they have to.

> It comes as no surprise that psychiatry, and medicine in general, is suffering from a massive reproducibility crisis.

Psychiatry still hasn't coped with the fact that it spent most of the 20th century taking Freud seriously. More recently, it still hasn't figured out a way to repudiate the Satanic Ritual Abuse panic in the 80s. The people who were involved are literally still working, and have moved on to Facilitated Communication in severe autism, Gender Identity, and are still pushing around the fraud of Multiple Personality Disorder. Literally the same people involved in all of them, and now their children. [edit: forgot about one of the most important, Recovered Memory Syndrome]

There's just no scientific method in most of psychology, it's simply guru-led systemic theories delivered mostly (but often entirely) by a single person who is licensing practitioners. What comes along with that is a complete inability for any of these theories to die. They just eventually become unpopular and unprofitable, and people jump onto the next thing.

The psychopharmacological revolution has complicated this even more, because now there are billions of dollars wrapped up in it. The only advantage to SSRIs and the new generation of knockoffs was that they didn't cause tardive dyskinesia, there was never any statistical evidence that they performed any better than the previous drugs. And in the case of the previous drugs, they weren't ever shown to have much of an effect other than quieting down patients. They were all based on the wackjob theory that people having epileptic seizures suddenly became sane, and were one of the ways of inducing a seizure-like state, along with freezing baths, saline injections, electrocution, etc. All of the pioneers were also enthusiastic lobotomists.

How can we say that these new tactics are medicine or science when the statistics on mental illness keep getting worse?

It's kind of weird how you downplay tardive dyskinesia, as if it was kind of a no big deal, whatever kind of thing. Would you accept having tardive dyskinesia induced by a drug?

Is that really your position?

Your other words seem fine, but that is a standout sentence!