That trivial definition sees limited use in the real world. Few countries that are popularly considered democratic have direct democracy. Most weigh votes geographically or use some sort of representative model.
Most established definitions of democracy goes something like, heavily simplified:
1. Free media
2. Independent judicial system
3. Peaceful system for the transfer of power
The most popular model for implementing (3) is free and open elections, which has yielded pretty good results in the past century where it has been practiced.
Considering social media pretty much is media for most, it is a heavily concentrated power, and if there can any suspicions of being in cahoots with established political power and thus non-free, surely that is a threat to democracy almost by definition.
Let's be real here: It has been conclusively shown again and again that social media does influence elections. That much should be obvious without too much in the way of academic rigor.
Of course social media influences elections. Direct or indirect, the principle of democracy is the same: the electorate hears a diversity of perspectives and votes according to the ones found most convincing.
How can you say you believe in democracy when you want to control what people hear so they don't vote the wrong way? In a democracy there is no such thing as voting the wrong way.
Who are you to decide which perspectives get heard? You can object to algorithmic feed ranking only because it might make people vote wrong --- but as we established, the concept of "voting wrong" in a legitimate democracy doesn't even type check. In a legitimate democracy, it's the voting that decides what's right and wrong!
You write as though the selection of information by algorithmic feeds is a politically neutral act, which comes about by free actions of the people. But this is demonstrably not the case. Selecting hard for misinformation which enrages (because it increases engagement) means that social media are pushing populations further and further to the right. And this serves the interest of the literal handful of billionaires who control those sites. This is the unhealthy concentration of power the OP writes about, and it is a threat to democracy as we've known it.
By that logic, the New York Times also threatens democracy. Of course, it doesn't, and that's because no amount of opinion, injected in whatever manner and however biased, can override the role of free individuals in evaluating everything they've heard and voting their conscience.
You don't get to decide a priori certain electoral outcomes are bad and work backwards to banning information flows to preclude those outcomes.
> it seems like the were fulfilling their legal obligation (at the time)
Rather, their illegal obligation (at the time)?
It was clear from the start these import tariffs are illegal. Only congress can set them. It says so in the constitution! Hand waving at some pretend emergency doesn't give you the right to ignore constitutional law.
The logistics companies should probably have fought these clearly illegal tariffs from the start. Instead they played along and collected the fees. There's probably some interesting legal precedence here to be made, should this argument hold in court.
There are many reasonable ideas for import taxation. But what you describe was not what happened. China fought back with their own tariffs, and you may well have paid less import tax on your Temu knock-offs than you did for some widget made with both higher environmental and labor standards in some western European country.
I never understood this. Why not use Ansible instead, especially if you already use it? Doubly so when you have Cisco config to manage. The experience is generally so much better it's not comparable, and it is much easier to infer running state.
Ansible and terraform have some overlap, but they do tend to serve different purposes. The consequences of terraform having a state file should steer your decision.
However, I often find ansible modules to be confusing to use. Maybe with LLMs it's now easier to draft ansible roles and maintain them, but I always had agro whenever I needed to go to the docs for something I've done many times just because the modules are that much inconsistent.
Setting aside the turing completeness of them, in practice Ansible is a complete superset of Terraform. From experience, the only times you appreciate the state file is when you have uncontrolled changes, in which case you are in for a bad time anyway.
Ansible modules are trivial to write and more people should. Most are trivial in practice and just consists of a few underlying API calls. A dozen line snippet you fully understand is generally not a maintenance burden. A couple of thousand someone else wrote might be.
It's not the same purpose. Ansible is useful to configure your IAC, terraform to deploy and handle the state, which is very useful when you have multiple teams working on the same infrastructure.
What you can do if you _really_ like ansible is to use it to generate the terraform files (typically from Jinja2 template). In practice, i think Terragrunt is easier to use if you already have terraform modules. But if i was back at my first "real" job, where we had between 50 and 80 ansible modules (very short ones, it was really good, i've never saw an infrastructure that complex handled that concisely and easily), and if we had to use terraform, i would use ansible to generate terraform files 100%.
I don't think it's exactly the same thing as sssd is primarily a cache. You can use pam_krb5 on Linux too. But can you disconnect your FreeBSD laptop and work as normal from cache? I agree that sssd is quite finicky however, and I'd love a simpler alternative.
You are correct, sssd has a ton of features (like basically replicating the entire domain locally and caching passwords so you can roam away from your corp network). If you need those things, you need sssd.
Someone here needs to brush up on their Icelandic!
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