There is too much BS out there. Let's save everybody's time.

I have a hard time reading "amazon" and "lower costs" in the same sentence.

The cloud is consistently an order of magnitude more expensive than self hosting, even when including people cost, unless you need every single bit of load balancing/high availability/normalization they provide.

The vast majority of projects don't.

People tend to just judge Mozilla way more harshly.

It's very unfair: they do good, and we ask even more of them.

Can we seriously not even contemplate the idea that there might be a certain corporate entity out there with a vested interest in ensuring that Firefox usage is kept deliberately low while at the same ensuring they _just_ enough funding to keep going so they can point to it and say "look, we're not a monopoly!"

It doesn't take a lot of mental effort to realize that the userbase left doesn't want telemetry and third party partnerships; Mozilla knew this, they tried to get away with it and lost goodwill.

It's not the thing, it's the attempt to get away with it that irks me. No one except The Paid wanted pocket integration and Mr Robot promotions.

Meanwhile google is pushing an attempt to strangle the open internet to death, in the open, for all eyes to see.

But no, lets keep pretending that mozilla doing a poorly executed ad is comparable to THAT

What does this mean? My experience using tabs in firefox has not changed in like twenty years!

Look what an unholy mess the new change to audio playing status has caused.

To summarize, in compact mode you will get the audio playing icon on a tab but it will hide the favicon in that case.

In normal mode, and only if you have a small number of tabs, you will find a tiny 'PLAYING' text instead. If you hover over it, you will find the playing icon...which will have hidden the favicon then.

UX geniuses with too much time on their hands.

It's a self-inflicted problem though. Mozilla uses every opportunity to claim they're on your side and want to protect you from the evil guys.

The nagging itself is annoying to begin with (and incomprehensible - at least ads make sense from a business point of view - but why interrupt my workflow to let me know about Colorways?), but it's made even worse with all their self-righteous BS about privacy while the browser actually being pretty poor (and not GDPR compliant due to default-on telemetry) in its default configuration.

It was a good tool, and it still is. There is no marketing, no fluff, no buzz world.

It gets the job done.

That's what's good about it.

The tenacity library comes with an intriguing mix of iterators and context managers to allow the users to retry blocks with this syntax:

    from tenacity import Retrying, stop_after_attempt

    for attempt in Retrying(stop=stop_after_attempt(3)):
        with attempt:
            1 / 0

    class YouAndIhaveUnfinishedBusiness:
        def __init__(self, notify_success, attempt_number):
            self.notify_success = notify_success
            self.attempt = attempt_number

        def __enter__(self):
            pass

        def __exit__(self, exc_type, exc_value, traceback):
            if exc_value:
                print(f"You have disappointed me {self.attempt} time(s).")
            else:
                self.notify_success()
            return True

    class DoOrDoNotThereIsNoTry:
        def __init__(self, max_attempts):
            self.max_attempts = max_attempts
            self.success = False

        def __iter__(self):
            for i in range(self.max_attempts):
                yield YouAndIhaveUnfinishedBusiness(self.succeed, i+1)
                if self.success:
                    print("You are ready for the Kumite.")
                    break
            else:
                print("We trained him wrong on purpose, as a joke.")

        def succeed(self):
            self.success = True

Ok, but I think your point means like refined starchy foods, and not fibrous vegetables and grains?

Just like when people say "sugar", they usually mean the white stuff, or fructose syrup, not carbs in general nor fructose in fruits.

Everytime you pay anything with something else than cash, it is recorded: the amount, the time, the place, and the nature of the thing you buy.

There is no way to go to a gay bar (or another place loaded with consequences) without a trace. And this is needed for human dignity.

There is way to support a controversial political movement without a trace. And this is necessary for new idea to come up.

There is not way for kids to do dumb things without a trace. And this is necessary for growing.

There is no way to pay for something when electricity or network goes down. And this is necessary to deal with crisis.

Basically, cash buys humanity margin of maneuver, and a fallback against any decaying societal or technical system.

But the rest of your point stands. Cash grants a lot more flexibility.

CC processing today 100% requires power and network.

But even if it did, how would visa process the recipe without power ? Their money is all bits.

Cash is cash, even when there is no accounting.

We should remember that this is also true about phones.

-- "Every exchange will leave a full track - where, when, what" already should raise a "you'd better be joking".

-- Failsafe fallback: a system depending on running infrastructure (electricity, internet, servers etc.) is badly conceived.

I've noticed that the loudest voices in favor of getting rid of cash usually seem to live in places that have few, if any, natural disasters.

Infrastructure does not fail only because of natural disasters.

Everyone has good ideas, hell, I just had 3 good ideas this morning, the point is the intentions of political ideas, and he's intentions are purely for gathering populist support and votes from those doing tax fraud (a large sizable percentage in Austria) as going cashless was never an option in Austria anyway so it was a non-issue to begin with, a nothing burger if you will.

And all cash users don't just keep their all cash under their mattress to be eaten away by rats and inflation, but still use banks and assets to hold their money and use ATMs to get cash as needed, so the government can still lock your banc account leaving you penniless regardless if you used to pay by cash at the supermarket or by card.

But having your entire population tracked when they pay and a way to shut down the money of anything because it has no cash fallback helps a lot setting one up.

You can't function in a moderns western country without a bank account anyway: rent, salary, utilities, all are fully wired now (I can't go pay my utilities at the counter in cash or get my salary in cash), so even if you buy your groceries and weed with cash, the government can just lock your bank accounts making you broke overnight, and unless you got close friends and family to shelter you indefinitely, you're a few weeks/months away from homelessness deepening on how much you got saved under the mattress.

If the government wants to track you, they'll do it whether you use cash or not. Just look how effective the KGB and Stasi were at tracking people when cashless payments weren't even invented yet.

Your clutching at straws at this point trying to prove that cash plays such a big parts in preventing authoritarian regimes.

What helps prevent authoritarian regimes is a separation of powers in government and an accountable political class. The nordic countries have more or less given up cash, yet I doubt they're at the risk of political authoritarianism and have the lowest corruption index in the world. If you feel like your country is at the risk of becoming an dictatorship, maybe focus more on how you can become more like the nordics instead of sticking to cash.

The contrapositive is not true.

but srsly, "cashless" used to be a FPÖ (the far right party in Austria) topic, now the conservatives have finally picked up on it. I don't like either of their agendas and nobody seriously suggested going cashless in Austria.

However, I'm also not a fan of being forced to use a private company just to pay for my basic necessities. And it seems plausible to me that after a certain decline of cash usage and the corresponding decline in infrastructure, there will be a tipping point when handling cash becomes so expensive that it will be shut down for cost reasons.

A good question to ask imo is: Is it possible to hold a view that's not held by my political ingroup?

Why not focus on the bigger fish that actually impact everyone? If I'm bleeding from my severed artery, I'm gonna care about that more than my chipped tooth.

Politicians focusing on mediatizing bogus issues to keep voting population attention away from the real issue is the oldest trick in the book ("hey don't look at our corruption scandals and the rising CoL, look at how we're gonna defend your use of cash").

>However, I'm also not a fan of being forced to use a private company just to pay for my basic necessities.

What about your bank? Necessities are more than just paying for groceries at the supermarket by cash, you know.

All your other actual necessities like salary, tax-returns, insurances, utilities and sometimes rent are deducted automatically via direct debit from you bank account, not via cash-in0hand trasnations. You can't live cash-only without a bank as an intermediate anyway.

>handling cash becomes so expensive that it will be shut down for cost reasons.

But handling cash the right way (counting it, accounting it, carrying and storing it securely, etc) already IS more expensive that contactless transaction fees, but cash-only businesses offset that by doing tax-fraud, and as an honest tax-payer I want tax-fraud to end. Getting rid of cash completely is just a bonus and a means to ending tax-fraud. Tax fraud is a bigger issue in Austria.

> people consider it unnecessary

In fact, I've discussed a cashless society with friends, and the majority is against, precisely because of this.

Now it may be my bubble, and not apply to the average French citizen.

When did it become so hard to pay for fuel with cash in your territories?

The matter is creeping in...