Skull giver

I’ve written a small program to do that for me on a schedule. Deletes on Lemmy are pretty unreliable, though, so I’m not sure if I’ll ever clean up the code enough to release it into the wild.

Many Lemmy servers fail to process/blatantly ignore deletion requests, though. That’s why the program also sends an edit, though that also gets ignored occasionally. Deletes in a federated system are just a request, nothing more, and that request often gets silently ignored.

Your calendars are tied up with your email because Microsoft Exchange decided to bring that feature to business ages ago and everyone else just copied them. There’s nothing preventing you from using third party calendar apps if that’s what you want, and there are standard protocols to exchange calendars between services. Your email address probably comes with a calendar by default already so most people just use that, but that’s your choice.

As for IMAP, there are a few alternative protocols but desktop mail clients are old people tech anyway. Outlook is just storing your email on their servers for a reason, people don’t want an IMAP alternative, they want an app.

I don’t really know what inconsistencies email supposedly has compared to other protocols. I use a bridge to join my Signal/WhatsApp/Telegram/etcetera all in one place, and getting a consistent experience is a layer of hell not even email prepared me for. Telegram doesn’t do some emoji reactions, WhatsApp doesn’t do edits, every messenger needs stickers to be in a specific weird format, and god forbid you try to send files because every service has their own stupid quirks on that. Then there’s formatting, every service supports a specific subset of markdown, all incompatible with each other. And NONE of them allow “line of text, image, line of text” as a single message that can be forwarded. Messenger tech is bound to the same restrictions the Linux kernel mailing lists are. Email is a technical miracle in how it works consistly across platforms.

The only comparable protocols I can think of that come close to email are SMS (awful and insecure), MMS (awful and insecure and unreliable), RCS (only usable if you use Android and insecure in all other contexts). Young people don’t use email because they’ve been tricked into other apps, but it it wasn’t for the “my parents use it so it sucks” attitude that every teenager develops, email would’ve replaced so many shitty messengers.

The entire world relies on email but you can blow people’s minds if you tell them you can read Outlook emails in Gmail or read Gmail mailboxes in Outlook. The days of everyone having a local email client are long behind us, people don’t know the difference between apps and servers anymore.

“It works like email” means “oh, so I need to create a new account, like when I installed the Outlook app” to most people. Shockingly few people know the bare basics of how email works. You’ll be surprised how many people I’ve spoken to don’t understand that someone@gmail.com isn’t the same person as someone@outlook.com. I have been called a liar and a hacker for demonstrating I could send an email from f.l.lastname@mydomain.tld. Whatever you think the base level of technological knowledge the average person has, it’s ten times higher than what people actually know, and that includes young people.

RCS is already enabled on iOS. It it doesn’t work, that means your carrier or the carrier on the other end lacks support.

RCS is already made by an international standards body (except for the encryption part, that was invented by Google, which is why iOS doesn’t do it). Your carrier is supposed to host RCS services on their network and your phone is supposed to register with that, whether it’s a dumb phone or an app you downloaded like Google Messages. The problem with RCS is that carriers rarely implemented it when it came out a decade and a half ago, phone makers didn’t bother to implement it, and the standard kind of bled dry.

The only reason it’s gaining traction now is because Google said “fuck it, we’re building an RCS server for Google Fi anyway, might as well let everyone connect” and so they set their RCS server up in a way the standard didn’t foresee. This meant that everyone could suddenly use RCS, but the vast majority could only use it with Google’s servers rather than their carriers’. They’ve even started renting out their RCS servers to other carriers because Google’s server is a stellar shining example of great programming in the wasteland of awful telecoms service providers.

Apple isn’t connecting to Google’s servers and it’s not running a telco network either, so their RCS works as long as your carrier bothered to set up RCS services, like they were supposed to do when they first rolled out 4G anyway.

Should be noted that standard RCS is unencrypted like SMS is, so don’t use it to talk about things you wouldn’t want the government to read back to you in ten or twenty years (crimes, future crimes like abortion, health information, maybe political opinions depending on how bad the government gets). Google added a layer of encryption on top, but Apple is refusing to implement it until it’s standardised. And encryption won’t be standardised, because the standards bodies work together with law enforcement. No point in adding encryption when carriers are legally banned from/directly liable for “damages” caused by rolling out encryption support. Hell, one of the major reasons Apple even supports RCS is because the Chinese government made them support it, and they sure won’t accept encryption, they’re having Apple run a special version of iMessage so the government can access everyone’s messages for Peter’s sake.

As for alternatives, there are a few ways for a phone to log into RCS, but rhe easiest way (a simple web request) works for any app on your phone. Others require SMS verification or access to the SIM card, which only system apps are allowed to do. None of this prevents phone manufacturers/custom ROM manufacturers from adding their own RCS API, or even other apps from registering themselves with an RCS server if your carrier doesn’t require SIM access to do so. You can read the spec online if you want to know more about how it works, though it’ll take you a couple thousand pages of reading if you want to know everything.

Maybe in time we’ll see an alternative RCS client pop up. So far, nobody seems to be willing to pay for development or invest time in making an open source version, though.

Samsung has access to Google’s RCS implementation I believe. All other apps need to implement RCS themselves, which no real messenger has bothered to do yet. Everyone is waiting for Google to open up their RCS API so they don’t need to go through the complicated RCS API and the real-world testing/verification process themselves.

Depends where you live. I have given money to homeless people three times in my life, all while I was a child. All three times, my generosity was met with “don’t you have any more”. I’ve learned my lesson, at least.

Here, the social safety net is giving these people more than enough to pay for the homeless shelter and groceries. My change isn’t going to buy them anything the government isn’t allowing them to buy anyway. Sure, there are lots of things that can be improved about the safety net (and the housing, and everything else), but you don’t need to go hungry here.

I’m no longer giving money to beggars. If you want to help, fund local charities. Donating stuff is often appreciated, but what charities really need to help is cold hard cash, so that’s the best way to help the most people.

Also be wary of beggar gangs if they’re active in your country. Some criminal organisations will send out children, women, and anyone looking sad and unfortunate enough in an attempt to get strangers to donate money to them. A well-placed beggar can earn way more than a day’s wage, and criminals are eager to abuse that.

If your country doesn’t have a good social safety net, I’d still donate to charities before I’d give any money to the homeless directly, but it does change the situation a lot. I guess it depends on how good the local charities are (i.e. are they money hogs, do they require people to join their religion for aid, are they corrupt).

[This comment has been deleted by an automated system]

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

Are there people of voting age that are exempt from paying taxes? Because I’m pretty sure the federal government has a huge database of its citizens already through the IRS. People who became adults after the last tax season and people committing tax fraud would need to register manually once, but I don’t think that’s such a big risk.

How would an illiterate dude living in a cave register to vote?

I guess America just can’t pull of what just about every European country does, but even then you don’t need this recurring manual registration mess. Just register everyone who filed a tax form last year and you should get most of the voting age population already.

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

deleted by creator