barsoap

Middle class is, mostly, simply the newfangled term for that portion of the proletariat which isn't lumpen which is now called the precariat. Low-rank petite bourgeois also counts as the same class as it's actually an economical one (petit bourgeois get shafted amply by capital), not political (what with their penchant for temporarily embarrassed millionaire narratives and support of "business-friendly" policies). That worker / petit bourgeois distinction has always been fuzzy and awkward I mean it's not like there's not workers who think like that.

But for myself, the world and humanity was created with free will and it’s up to us to choose good vs evil.

That's a terrible take: It implies that if you see something that you consider evil, you attribute it to choice, whereas the opposite is generally the case -- once individuals have waded through layers of shit conditioning they are able to make choices that are actually attributable to them and not to society, upbringing, etc, and they very much do not choose evil. They might choose things that are inconvenient to others, or short-sighted, or unwise, but evil? That's not just a different ballpark that's a different game:

There can be no good without evil.

As a mark is not set up for the sake of missing the aim, so neither does the nature of evil exist in the world.

In other words: Noone, willingly, chooses imperfection. Minds, life, that would do so, would use its degrees of freedoms like that, would long have went the way of the dodo.

It's not a blob the client is definitely open source, not sure about the server software but you're not running that. It's an extension like any other, just that it comes bundled with the default install and doesn't use the usual extension enable/disable UI: Go to about:config, set extensions.pocket.enabled to false. It's going to stay that way, this isn't microsoft which likes to "fix" your settings.

There's a subscription if you want and they're also earning some money off referrals. In 2022 they made ~80m dollars off all those side hustles, should probably be 100m by now. Selling the default search engine spot is still the biggest number, about 500m. And they have a piggy bank of over a billion.

During the google money years the ROI on Firefox was so mind-bogglingly high it would've been insanity to drop it all into the browser: It couldn't possibly have soaked up the sheer amount of resources.

Meanwhile, yes they did sink a large amount of resources into it in a way a profit-driven company never would have: They designed a whole fucking new programming language to get proper concurrency into the thing. Rust is, in a very real way, a language to write browsers in. That's its purpose. And then they set the language free because, among other things, you can't make money with it.

Sure, lots of those investments tanked. But OTOH you have stuff like pocket which makes money and could probably keep the lights on by itself. If everything but pocket were to fail Mozilla absolutely would have to downsize, would definitely have to scale back its charity spending, rely more on the FLOSS community to actually write code, but it'd continue with the same kind of force as say Blender, which wouldn't be what it is without its paid staff (both coders and artists) and sidle-hustles (commercial support, training, and cloud services, mostly. Oh, t-shirts and mugs. Don't forget t-shirts and mugs).

I guess overall the gripe I have with the "Mozilla should invest more in Firefox" chorus is that it implies "Do you want Mozilla to be way smaller and less capable of shaping the web than it currently is". People have no sense of the scale of Mozilla, think that it's running on donations etc.

Servo isn't dead it's just on slow burn. Also, under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation Europe. As far as Mozilla is concerned it has served its purpose: Prototype stuff that then got included in Firefox to get rid of a quite large amount of technical debt.

The long and short of it is: Firefox is supposed to make money for Mozilla's charitable causes. It's not an end in itself, but a means to an end.

Mozilla doesn't exist to fund Firefox. Firefox exists to fund Mozilla. It's been that since the very fucking beginning: Mozilla is a general internet charity that makes money with a browser. It's always been that way. It never has been any different. I may have to repeat myself: The purpose of Mozilla isn't to fund Firefox the purpose of Firefox is to be a money-maker for Mozilla's charitable causes.

Yes and no, I think withholding rent is a quite German thing (or, rather, courts siding with you when you do it) and "it's not structurally sound" sounds like a thing rabidly anti-solar landlords would come up with to get around the law.

If your balcony collapses due to 800W worth of solar it'd also collapse due to a couple of planters or a fat friend coming over so I guess you should take such worries as an admission on their part and withhold rent until they prove that the balcony is safe to use.

There's plenty of fixed fees in German electricity bills, on top of that the Wh price contains infrastructure levies. As the network changes so will the mix between fixed and consumption-based prices.

That said yes the Green party and its core voting demographic are notoriously bourgeois. "Let them install heat pumps" they said, caressing the one they installed, completely ignoring that at scale district heating is much more sensible. Their non-bourgeois core voters (the ones with a permaculture garden in the countryside) will then defend that by "but we don't want centralisation" MFs municipality-level is not centralised.

It's not illegal you need to talk to your utility. For one, they probably want you to produce three-phase.

Yes in principle to male plug, no to 240V unless the inverter sees a frequency to sync to. They won't power anything during a power outage that requires the whole electrical installation to be set up for it so you don't leak power to the outside and fry a lineman. Also that inverter attaches to one phase only which means that its power won't even reach 2/3rds of your circuits. It does make the power meter go backwards though which is the point.

That said, ideally you're using Wieland plugs and not Schuko so you won't have exposed prongs. The VDE certified Schuko for feeding in up to 800W though and that's exactly the amount parliament said doesn't require a permit or even talking to your utility. If you're doing everything new going with Wieland is the sane choice those outlets don't cost a fortune, if it's an existing installation though a) your landlord might not like it and b) electricians will demand more in travel costs than the outlet is worth.