Yeah.

Sadly I think email will be with us for the foreseeable future. It’s broken, sure… but it’s just so fundamental to the web.

An alternative would need to be ubiquitous, and that seems unachievable.

I don’t think the SPF / DKIM / DMARC stuff is overly complex nor the core of the problem.

In my case it was recipients with bonkers microsoft exchange servers that just had weird ideas about who should be sending them emails.

For example, one thing that tripped me up forever ago was grey listing. Apparently the receiving server just wouldn’t acknowledge the sending server for an arbitrary period of time, say 12 hours or so. Spam senders would usually give up long before then, while a legit server would keep trying because it’s legitimately trying to deliver an actual email.

So my email-in-a-box type self hosted set up was fine really. Compliant you might say. But to send emails to this one in a thousand recipient I had to investigate what was going on and reconfigure things to ensure their server would interact with mine.

Another thing that can happen is that spammers just put your email address in the “from” field and fire off a few million emails. Obviously the DKIM signatures and SPF won’t match but it still just makes your future legitimate emails look spammy. Having the credibility of a larger organisation goes a long way in this type of instance.

I’m absolutely in the “don’t self-host email” camp. That said, I think it could be done reliably if you wanted to use someone else’s SMTP server and let them worry about deliverability. As in, have your mx records on your domain route to your MTA and dovecot, but set your DKIM and SPF records to match a third party SMTP server. You could use mxroute as an SMTP server very cheaply. There are others like the email API type services. I still can’t think of why I’d want to self host with all this drama but just an idea I’ve heard.

Indeed.

The whole mess seems to have gotten so much worse.

Do you mean to tell me that wealthy people own most things? I’m shocked!

I didn’t say mum and dad own Walmart. My point us simply that the “buy local” catch cry of small business owners isn’t as simple as you’re making out.

Again, I didn’t say small business owners aren’t allowed to go overseas. Merely that there’s no guarantee that buying local means your money stays local.

Settle down mate.

I don’t think you really understand pension plans.

When you shop at a large conglomerate store, the profit goes to shareholders. Most people are shareholders.

A small business owner is just as likely to spend the profit on an overseas holiday.

The idea that buying local helps your local economy is reductive, and doesn’t bear scrutiny. The only reason it’s a popular idea is that local business owners like to say it.

I struggle with this narrative, because it’s just not that simple. This is pretty much just something that small business owners like to say to guilt people into buying their stuff. Small businesses still need to compete on price and quality.

Large retailers still employ local people, and your pension fund probably owns shares in them, or you can buy shares directly yourself.

Some small local retailers have very shady employment practices. I don’t think employees are necessarily paid or treated better in small businesses. Some might be great, others are terrible.

Having said that, buying locally produced seasonal food directly from growers makes a lot of sense. Fresher, more nutritious, fewer food miles, less middle men.

Basically, local Butcher baker and green grocer.

For sure there are plenty of people that don’t produce any real value in their work, but that’s been the case since forever and they’re hard to weed out because in some ways their full time job is to ensure their ongoing employment.

As in most things, it’s a question of extent.

The most accurate statement you can make is that AI will make “most” office employees “more” efficient.

The thing is, this has been happening with every technological advance for hundreds of years.

There’s no evidence that “more advanced AI” is going to emerge in the next few years.

Sorry this is just plain wrong and there’s no evidence of this at all.

People have been saying this since the invention of the comptometer.

Anyone who’s job can be replaced by an LLM isnt producing any value.

For the rest of us it’s an incremental improvement at best.

I don’t really care whether you engage.

It’s an absurdity to suggest that my comment shifts blame to an 11 year old victim.

Sure ok maybe some asshole Alex Jones type might try to say she over reacted, and they might do that by undermining her agency.

That doesn’t mean that someone wondering about what an 11 year old’s understanding of suicide might be, is doing anything other than grieving for our collective loss of innocence.

It’s a perfectly reasonable thing to wonder in trying to process the death of someone so young.

if the question is about whether or not they know about what death is, then yes they know

It’s not that simple though is it.

An 11 year old can probably explain what death means, but not really understand the permanence or significance of the event especially in the context of the transience of bullying.

I’m not blaming her?

Sorry I don’t really understand what’s so dumb about this question.

If she actually intended suicide (which we don’t know), then to what extent did she understand the permanence of death in the context of the transience of feelings.

Committing suicide?

Yeah I’m kinda speechless. It doesn’t bear thinking about but I kinda wonder how aware she was of the consequences of what she was doing.

Kennedy said he planned to dedicate money generated from a sales tax on cannabis products to “creating wellness farms—drug rehabilitation farms, in rural areas all over this country.” He added, “I’m going to create these wellness farms where they can go to get off of illegal drugs, off of opiates, but also illegal drugs, other psychiatric drugs, if they want to, to get off of SSRIs, to get off of benzos, to get off of Adderall, and to spend time as much time as they need—three or four years if they need it—to learn to get reparented, to reconnect with communities.” The farm residents would grow their own organic food because, he suggested, many of their underlying problems could be “food-related.”

Hol up. They’ve gotten rid of all the people who used to pick fruit in rural areas, and now they want to send arbitrarily diagnosed “addicts” to these rural areas to live for “free”.