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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 17th, 2023

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  • In germany - I think - blood and plasma donations are most commonly done with the DRK (German Red Cross). I might be wrong, but DRK is not a for profit organization, but “gemeinnützig”. Organizations with that status get controlled by the government for it, so they are non-profit. I think the 25€ are an incentive to come and donate, just as the chocolate and drinks and the small goodies, that you get there. And you only can get the money, if you go to one of the fixed DRK locations. If the DRK comes to somewhere near you (as they often do with churches, town halls, schools and universities) you don’t get any money. I can at least believe, that these two are monetarily similar for the DRK. If you come to them, they don’t need to pay for getting the equipment and people to you. And providing incentives for donating blood is in effect a good thing, as they are working, thus we have more blood to save lifes.

    Ofcourse actors later in the chain are probably profit oriented. Though there I would see the discussion disconnected from the donation. It is more about if we want profit oriented actors in healthcare.

    And - as always - the US healthcare system seems to do the worst thing possible every time. Sorry, americans, don’t want to bash you, but capitalism…


  • An interesting customer base might be small communal organisations. At our local scouts troop I had a discussion with a friend, who is also in IT. His idea (not fleshed out) was to provide small local organizations with a stack of already configured open source software to support the typical needs of such organizations (like a wordpress website, a nextcloud for file storage and common calender, limesurvey for surveys and event registration, mailman3 for mailing lists,…). Depending on the needs you could sell the initial setup process (your personal work in setting up and skill transfer) or ongoing support. Though such organizations normally don’t have much money to give away. So probably its not really worth your time financially (though probably really appreciated in the community).





  • Yeah, sure, delusional. Until you call a local polititian “so 1 dick” on some online platform, leading to you and also your ex grilfriend getting raided by the police, all electronic devices taken by them as evidence for an undetermined time and the low key threats from the prosecutor about what would happen next. Or until a journalist dares to link to a website, that the state recently criminalized the creators of, though the state itself links to that specific site, too. And depending on how easy the access for the police is: You might wanna refrain from being too popular (like a famous singer or actor) or from being active against climate change or right wing extremism. Your personal data is easily leaked through the police to anyone of their friends.

    You might think, that this is overly specific and won’t really happen? Well, it already did. In germany. Sure, most people won’t have the states crosshair on their forehead. But nontheless you might easily be one of the exceptions.






  • It was a friend who helped me install ubuntu 8 on my PC in dualboot when I was like 14/15 years old. Was already a computer nerd, though my friend was way more into everything Linux related. I got hooked there, though at that time it was a real pain in the ass to use wifi in ubuntu. I wouldn’t call me obsessed, but I really don’t like using Windows. I have to for work and I despise it.







  • One big problem that I see with the current system is, that - like everything in capitalism - it works with the attention economy. Big projects with many functions (like computing platforms) get much attention, especially from companies, who donate and contribute for their own good. But there are many small projects, often small libraries, that are developed by single persons for free, but used everywhere. If I remember correctly the disaster with log4j was such a case. Real developers surely know even better examples. The funding of such widely used software can effect the security of our whole IT stack.


  • The average user only uses what is already in their devices or very easily obtained and already known by them. On PCs you got Windows and Microsoft of course pushes their products (Edge, MS Office, OneDrive,…). On Smartphones you have Apple and Google controlling the devices way more than with PCs and being Gatekeepers through their appstores and preinstalled apps. Why would the average user try to research to find FOSS alternatives in that big pile of proprietary and monetized apps or jump through hoops to actually use them (keeping things FOSS is not easy on smartphone due to policies from google and apple)? The big players are controlling the market and they try to only allow FOSS when it benefits them.