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The existence of secondary sources doesn't reduce the need for primary sources. Before something can be published everywhere, it has to be published somewhere.

The CIA World Factbook is a tertiary source.

But treated by Wikipedia as _the_ primary source. /s

The CIA was a secondary source. This bulk of this material is all drawn from other publications. Which you can now access in ways you could not before.

We get it, you can't see any utility in having this information aggregated anywhere in a consistent format.

Not if everything is made up on the spot for clicks and views, which is where we're heading.

Why would that disqualify them? Those are also the reasons that people volunteer in soup kitchens.

The intention is to benefit financially. They are not doing it for "volunteering". But I get what you are saying. I am looking at it from a moral perspective.

What does it mean for volunteering to be "recognized" in Germany?

Certain reimbursements/allowances for volunteering are treated favorably for tax purposes if conditions are met, e.g. ehrenamtspauschale (volunteer allowance).

Also, as Gemeinnützig, for tax and for issuing donation receipts.

It could also function as community service hours ordered by a court (sozialstunden).

Stuff like that.


In addition to tax stuff there's a card you can get in most states, issued by cities/districts based on certain criteria, like doing a certain amount of hours per week of volunteer work, that will give you a discount or free entry to museums, pools, movie theaters, events.. There's listings online of all the institutions and businesses that give a discount.

For this, and for the criminal justice use case, it seems to me that it isn't possible for "work on open source" to receive this kind of formal recognition. Anyone is free to self-certify that they're working on an open-source project headed by, and exclusively contributed to by, themselves.

You'd need to formally recognize open-source projects that the German state approves of, on a case-by-case basis.

And even then you have questions like "If Hans Reiser is sentenced to community service for killing his wife, can he satisfy that by working on reiserfs? How is that different from sentencing him to no punishment?"


the punishment argument makes no sense. it is already a problem if someone volunteers in any capacity and then commits a crime. sometimes community service is not the right punishment.

Community service is not supposed to be a punishment but rather an opportunity to offset wrongs done by doing more good than the average person. If someone was already doing good deeds before then that is not an issue. If anything, courts already consider past good deeds when determining sentencing.

It's obviously not something that is an appropriate remedy for all crimes.


True. It would need to be something associated with a registered non-profit organization/NGO. But isn't that already the case with other types of volunteer work?

But in that case, what is this petition hoping to achieve?

Maybe this would have helped with something like Mastodon losing non-profit status? https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/04/mastodon-forms-new-u.s...

Though the petition is about Germany, in the US some entitlement programs come with work requirements that can be satisfied by volunteer work. Given the tech job market and how the US government's labor policies are detrimental to native workers, allowing them to keep their skills sharp through open source work while also satisfying the work requirements of various social programs, it seems like a decent trade-off. This presumes the government and the donors to the politicians that run it don't really want native workers to be unskilled. Their actions indicate the opposite, so that throws a bit of a wrench into things.

Tax exempts (I'm not a German, but I was curious about the same and this is what ChatGPT told me :) )

I assume in France international stoners' day falls on the 4th of Duodevigintiber.

> Those countries have more interest in competing with each other to get access to other markets than to work/stick together in any way.

Access to markets isn't an exclusive asset. They don't compete over it, and mostly they can't compete over it, because they already have it.


> The only few places where binary prefixes are used are to refer to RAM capacity and file sizes, whereas decimal prefixes apply to all other areas and all units (not "only bitrates"): storage capacity, clock frequency, stream bandwidth, baud, pixel numbers, data throughput, processing power

Storage capacity also uses binary prefixes. The distinction here isn't that file sizes are reported in binary numbers and storage capacity is reported in decimal numbers. It's that software uses binary numbers and hard drive manufacturers use decimal numbers. You don't see df reporting files in binary units and capacities in decimal units.

Of that large list of measurements, only bandwidth is measured in bytes, making the argument mostly an exercise in sophistry. You can't convince anyone that KB means 1000 bytes by arguing that kHz means 1000 Hz.


> They are so unhealthy because in the quest to keep the price something that people can afford (or for greed in profits) companies are forced to turn it into processed zombie garbage

Well, sort of. That processing is generally there not so much specifically to keep the price down as to prolong the shelf life. But it's true that without the preservatives you'd be paying higher prices.


Tastykakes[1] are about the same price as Twinkies but have half the shelf life (or less, depending on the product) due to fewer preservatives and better ingredients. They don't have the distribution that Twinkies have, but it's grown to include the entire East Coast at this point, I think. Still pretty bad for you but several rungs up the garbage ladder, for sure. I don't understand how Twinkies are able to compete in their market.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tastykake


I don't think thats true, I looked them up and this looks just as processed: https://www.heb.com/product-detail/tastykake-butterscotch-kr... (scroll down to see the ingredients)

Perhaps you are referring to a Tastykake from a bygone era?


It is true. The shelf life of those Tastykakes is three weeks. A Twinkie's is six. The shelf life of a Tastykake pie is seven days. They haven't changed much or at all since I was a kid.

Have you tried a Tastykake (and a Twinkie)? The difference is obvious if you can spare the calories.


I have tried almost all of the Tastykakes that I could purchase here on the east coast. They seem quite average in terms of quality. While I have never eaten a Twinkie and Tastykake side by side I do concede that Twinkies these days are a bottom of the barrel level of quality and TastyKakes are at least a small level above. I'm just looking at that ingredient list and it seems quite processed.

I think you misinterpreted my original comment, but I applaud your diligence in sampling the entire Tastykake product line. The pies are my favorite, though I rarely eat them as I value my health. I would not touch a Twinkie unless I were starving, or perhaps as part of a paid stunt if the money was right.

Understood. I do enjoy the coconut juniors Tastykake but I am focused on cutting out all processed and unnatural ingredients so I am forced to produce more at home. Its just the world I feel we are stuck in now.

Regarding Twinkie, did you see my other comment on producing them at home using natural ingredients? https://youtu.be/lD2OOTx2G9k?t=592

You may be able to hopefully recreate the original quality using this(if this is something you'd like to try).


> I don't understand how Twinkies are able to compete in their market.

Branding is very powerful.

(Never rebrand, it'll just disturb pleasant memories)


True, I imagine the Twinkie Pavlovian response is a tough one to shake.

Its a combination of three things: A triple whammy. Yes preservatives are extremely important. But we are now seeing reduced sizes as well as ingredient substitutions to preserve some semblance of the taste while using cheaper ingredients.

No, the article is quite explicit that that isn't what happened.

I assume she calls it grout, like a normal person. ;D

Caulk and grout are different things. She calls the sandy stone stuff between the tiles the same thing as the rubbery bead in the corner?

If it were me, I'd call a rubbery bead in the corner "sealant".

It's actually a terrible sport for covid, involving heavy breathing in close proximity to other people indoors.

Any outdoor sport would be better.


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