abrambleninja

They at least have made a strong argument for their case [1]. I don't read this as taking Hamas claims as valid by default because they backed it up with reasoning from their sources. Are they correct? Hard to say for sure, but there's more evidence for it than just "Hamas said this so we believe it."

[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/19/what-hit-ahli-hosp...

Honeybees are actually not very good at pollinating plants; they take most of the pollen back to their hive instead of spreading it between plants. Furthermore, they often outcompete (non-honey producing) indigenous bees that are actually good at pollinating plants.

> processed sugars aren’t vegan because the whitening stage uses bone meal

This is a good rule of thumb for North America, but not true all the time.

In the USA, organic sugar cannot be processed with bone char. Also, beet sugar is never processed with bone char, only cane sugar.

Also, not all non-organic cane sugar is processed with bone char. For example, in Canada, neither of the two main sugar companies (Rogers/Lantic and RedPath) use bone char for processing their sugar anymore (RedPath never did, and Rogers/Lantic stopped within the last few years).

Finally, all sugar in Australia and the EU (and probably other places) is processed without bone char.

In addition to what ipqk said, a large amount of deforestation is for growing soy. Approximately 77% of global soy production [2] is used for producing animal feed. It's much more environmentally friendly to just get eat soy directly, rather than eat meat, because animals are very inefficient at converting food they eat to food that people can eat [2].

[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/soy [2]: https://awellfedworld.org/feed-ratios/

In general I agree with you about the ability to customize Linux, but the author could be referring to systemd, which (from what I've seen) has been the target of many complaints about being too central and hard to replace, especially with how it is required by so many projects in the Linux ecosystem (from distros like Debian and Arch to DEs like GNOME).

Cory Doctorow has an excellent blogpost on Amazon's delivery service partners[1] and why it's a very difficult situation for the workers to demand better working conditions. It's very eye-opening in my opinion.

[1]: https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/19/the-shakedown/#weird-flex

> Really? And whats with all the proprietary blobs? The Modules (like nvidia), for the end-user it changes absolutely nothing, having bad firmware your wifi will not work, the license is absolutely not important for the end-user.

I think the sibling comment covered most of this well, but I just wanted to add that relying on closed-source drivers is far from necessary with many setups of modern day Linux. All of the drivers on my computer, save for the processor microcode, are open source and for the most part, bug free. In fact, they are probably mostly bug free because they have so many eyes on them.

> Nearly no one cares that most Androids have stoneage Linux kernels, whats important for them is that the Android-Runtime (aka Play-store) can download and execute "Apps".

While many users might not know this is the reason, I think the copyleft license of Linux has let it become where it is currently, as it forces vendors who might otherwise release proprietary blobs addressing issues must instead release the changes with a license such that it can be improved upstream. This pushes companies who spend the energy to fix the bugs in an otherwise good kernel to give those changes back to the community, similar to how the companies took from the community in order to use the kernel.

> > potentially improved kernel

> Or potentially worsened kernel, which now sits in you closed down IoT device, again the license is NOT important for the normal end-user.

Well I think this is a great argument in favor of GPLv3 over GPLv2, which bans this (see [1]). This is another reason why end users could care about the license used in the code. GPLv3 code guarantees the end user the freedom to modify the code and run it on their device (or apply other people's modifications). Though I will concede that this is less of an end-user-centric idea because it requires a decent level of technical competency.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization

The freedom for the user that comes with using Linux as a result of it being GPL-licensed is that entities have to contribute any changes they make to the kernel back to the community if they intend to distribute their modified, potentially improved kernel. This results in a better end-result as the kernel can integrate changes that others wrote if they provide a better experience in some way.

When I pre-ordered the phone, I also saw it as donating to (or at least contributing to the development of) open-source software in a way -- Purism is a for-profit company, but they've been doing a lot of software work on this phone and they've been pushing the changes upstream, too. I highly recommend looking through their blog (https://puri.sm/posts/), especially the Librem 5 [month] Software Update posts for the work they're doing.

As a big tea drinker, my solution to this when I've been on long road trips has been to use a car-outlet-powered water boiler (the coil kind). You can get them on Amazon for under $10 and they work alright. Though it's hard to do without a passenger unless you're willing to pull over and wait 10 minutes for the water to boil. And where I've driven (up the 15 from Los Angeles to Montana), there are somewhat-frequent Starbucks, though I like my own tea better.