FailForward @FailForward@social.cleverlibre.org

@pluralistic Man, please tone down this ridiculous conspiracy stuff. The world is not run by one big secret cabal, although it's easier to believe that of course. Are we here in the Q-territory?

Re KHN etc, c.f., e.g.,
- here: https://qoto.org/web/statuses/105640418268143292
- or here: https://qoto.org/web/statuses/105828205878427895

A good question to ask yourself is: what would you do if you were in a position to influence such policies?

You know, every single business person is a monopolist. It's in the nature of running a for-profit organisation. And that is a good thing (if you want to know why, go ask anybody from the former communist block what's wrong with the other ways). And yes, every now and then one of these people becomes filthy rich. And then what do you do?

Actually, I think we all should be glad somebody like Bill Gates is there in our time. The guy is heavily subsidising our civilisation's failures elsewhere. I do not think it's a job of an individual to fight to eradicate malaria, or polio. He does it because we, the rest of the world's affluent population represented by our elected governments miserably failed on those fronts. Because we care about something closer to home (read: our own bellies) and let people on the other side of the planet go down the drain just because they were not lucky enough to get born elsewhere. This guy at least does something. And man, he's even succeeding at that! And here we tear him apart in some conspiracy thread. IMO, it's just sick.

@piggo Does not have to be that small in the end. An old toothbrush perhaps. Good luck there.

@piggo Instead of waiting for an insect, try to use a small brush yourself.

@academicalnerd What's with you? You went silent. Not that I care too much, but a small bit yes :-). I hope you are doing well.

@tn5421 Most. But many don't advertise it anymore. If you install a browser extension like Feedbro with automated RSS/Atom discovery, you realise feeds are far from dead.

# The world breaks everyone (musings)

> “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”
>
> ― Ernest Hemingway, [A Farewell to Arms](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/6592630-the-world-breaks-everyone-and-afterward-many-are-strong-at)

> The vicissitudes of existence over time, to which all humans are susceptible, could not be clearer than in the breaks, the knocks, and the shattering ...
>
> — Christy Bartlett, Flickwerk: The Aesthetics of Mended Japanese Ceramics, via [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kintsugi) on Kintsugi. C.f., also [here](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/apr/10/kintsugi-helped-me-to-understand-my-brothers-death)

## The world will break you

**Hypothesis:** _Each of us has a blind spot in the gear we use to live our lives. Either you do not mess with the world enough and thus lead a somewhat dull life, or eventually you will meet you nemesis: you get badly stuck (trauma-level stuck)._

As children we learn to live our lives. We observe our parents, our broader relatives, people around. We absorb their ways of problem solving, relationship management, way to introspect, seeing ourselves in the world. We tend to think others are like us. We live our lives and it works well. Actually very well most of the time. We get confirmed that our ways of seeing the world are right.

As we move through it, the world poses new and new challenges. You sort out your work life, career, family stuff, relationships, we fail, sometimes more, sometimes less, we succeed a lot too, we go on. We hone our abilities to live.

Then cracks start to appear. But we know how to move on, we are professionals of our lives. We step on the gas pedal and push through because we know how to do this. More of the good stuff will solve it, right?

Until not. I postulate that beyond certain intensity of "living" eventually, we get stuck. You hit a wall. That's when _the world will break you._ It is not a question of _if_, but **when.**

## Those that will not break it kills

I tend to think that it is inevitable that you eventually crash. It is futile to try to avoid it. You are fooling yourself if you think you can.

What matters is what you do during and _after the crash_. Will you break, or will it kill you? Getting killed metaphorically means to remain stuck and unhappy for the rest of your days (or at least long-term). If you break and have an ability to put yourself back together, though, you not only survive, but you get stronger along the fracture lines. Those who can have the ability to renew, reinvent themselves. Perhaps even more than once. It just **hurts a lot**. Always. That's life.

## Get ready

So what can we do to get ready for the crash? Remember, you can't avoid it, you only can get ready for what comes afterwards. What can we do to prepare our children for their own crash day which will eventually come?

If we knew, we wouldn't get into crashes in the first place, right? We wouldn't have a blind spot. But the definition of a blind spot is just that: it's there and you don't even know about it. And when somebody tells you, you ignore them, because you know better anyway. Until it's too late. Life.

But perhaps there are clues about things which can be done to get ready.

> If you are a part of inertial system, you cannot say anything about whether it moves, or not. You need and external observer for that.

Being introspective helps. Avoidance kills. Especially avoidance of your own emotions. Seeking external observers helps even more. Letting people in helps. Keeping people out leads to a kill more often than not (I believe). Acceptance helps. Especially that of oneself. Single-mindedness and pushing through tends to kill too. Rich and vibrant social fabric of friendships helps. Isolation tends to do the opposite. Resilience helps. Knowing that failure is part of life helps. Perfectionism and high standards tends towards the opposite. Optimism helps a lot. Negative thinking most of the time not so much.

Self-healing is a difficult thing. Yet, exciting.

@chemelia

**I hate you - don't leave me!**

Disorganized fearful attachment?

https://www.attachmentproject.com/blog/disorganized-attachment/

I also think this whole story will have further repercussions and reverberations in the upcoming debate with and in German govt which seems to be interested in this vaccine too. Certainly it's not a very good marketing there. Let's see what the German regulator says...

@academicalnerd Well, unfortunately this is being turned into a geopolitical influence weapon - from my PoV primarily Sputnik, but certainly not only that. I think that is very unfortunate. Ironically, the Russian agency finished their final tweet on this story like this: "1) screw you idiot!, 2) Together we are stronger." What fun is this!

https://twitter.com/sputnikvaccine/status/1380158711403048960

#sputnik #corona #vaccine
Not that I care too much, but this is interesting.

1. few weeks ago (in a desperate PR action) the govt of Slovakia bought 2Mio doses of Sputnik V vaccine.
2. instead of directly distributing it, the govt asked the national testing institute for medicines (or whatever is the name) to approve it
3. the institute finally delivered a report stating that a) the docs to the vaccine is severely incomplete, b) the Russian producer refuses to answer further questions both from the institute and from EMA and c) they noticed that the vaccine batches across countries significantly differ in what they are and how they are handled. Most importantly d) the batch used for Lancet study of efficacy is different than the one Slovakia bought so it's unclear what are the real performance properties of this stuff. In turn, the institute recommended to use the vaccine only at significant risk as they are not equipped to evaluate this more thoroughly (only EMA is).
4. in turn, the Russian producer (after speaking to the now ex-PM of Slovakia) alleged this as fake news and
5. requested return of the whole delivery on the ridiculous ground that in a breach of sales contract the vaccine was put to test by a 3rd party lab.

Source of the latest points: https://twitter.com/sputnikvaccine/status/1380158709985329155

Well. Personally, I totally agree with the view that the conditions and scrutiny for admitting this vaccine shall be the same as for other producers, but Russian producer thinks otherwise and thereby withholds important information. They obviously try to force other countries to use this on the basis of plain belief that it works as marketed. And these antics about requesting it to be sent back, well... If they fully refund it too, I guess it should be OK. We learned something new about vaccine politics here though.

@DavidMarzalC

This is really interesting. It seems to be all in spanish though. Do you have 1st hand experience?

@fribbledom

@keithzg

Interesting. This looks like going Inkscape way. It's a vector editor. The problem with Inkscape for this is that it cannot properly open and edit multi-page PDFs. Does this Karbon thing do it?

(before I try I better know, becuase that would require me to pull in GBs of KDE dependencies first, I guess)

@brolf @tn5421 @fribbledom

@tn5421 I wanted to say "I wonder why NO non-Adobe solution emerged". Stupid me... Sorry.

@brolf @fribbledom

@tn5421

Well, whatever we think about the outside world, the unfortunate reality is that sometimes we are forced to interact with big entities which require stuff like PDF signature. I still wonder why non-Adobe OSS solution emerged. It's crazy. Everybody needs it and nobody does it. SO is full of question about this.

So after lots of struggle in alternatives, I just gave up. After all, I have better things to do with my life than waste time on futile ideological battles with myself...

@brolf @fribbledom

@tn5421

Well, to be precise, Oracle did not write it in the first place. They bought it (Innotek GmbH acquisition). I also understand VirtualBox is open source, or something like that. But OK, if you are sufficiently ideological about it, then your options are accordingly limited, I guess.

@brolf @fribbledom

@fribbledom Forget Android, forget Linux. It's a waste of time. Get yourself free demo Windows VM in VirtualBox, install Adobe Acrobat and go ahead.

@tn5421 @brolf

@tn5421

Honest answer: Get yourself Adobe Acrobat Reader (Win only). Even the free version allows you to do add a signature be it free-hand sketch, or as an image (they also have a cloud version of that). It's a pain, but does the job. Also,you can generate a SMIME certificate and add it into the document. Again, Adobe-specific solution. It's the only reason I keep Windows VirtualBox VM around.

If you don't want to go Adobe way, another option is to use Xournal to open the PDF in question and scribble your stuff onto it. Not great, but again, does the job. Sort of... Finally, there's LIbreOffice Draw which opens any PDF and allows you to edit it and scribble into it. The only problem is that when you save it back to PDF, sometimes it screws up fonts and there's little you can do about it. So YMMV. Optionally, there are some SaaS options for this out there, but I did not try (except the original Adobe thing).

Oh, and there is also Master PDF Editor which could help. I think the life-long license is worth avoiding the Adobe crap. Free version adds some watermarks, but if you are OK with that, you might be good.

@brolf @fribbledom

@trinsec git-branchy like

Branches.

Morning light.