The people who are pro-Government and in this case pro-Corporate do not have any success stories that they can share. Hence, most of the time the arguments are that the other are bad. For e.g. quite a few people argue that we don t need farmers, we can just order from restaurant. They have completely disassociated the idea that even then you need farmers as unless the farmers put the seed in, till the soil and wait for the rains or have irrigation you won t get ripe vegetables which then has to be taken out, and somehow sold to the wholesaler from where it comes to the restaurant and then to your plate. Sadly, even the farm-to-fork infographics are so depressingly sad, you want to look away. If you see the infographic you see it is just not non-veg but also vegetarian food grains which go under lot of questionable practices. Even, with such scenarios that is done by corporations our people want to go ahead. I will share stories from other countries which tell how they are doing more.
The Soldier-Farmer
Another sad part of these protests have been soldiers who have been returning their medals. The ones who oppose have the gall to say they should return the cash rewards they got. So just like farmers, seems soldiers also do not need money to survive. They are supposed to live only on air and water. This is after the present Govt. has reduced their pensions after retirement and that too without any discussion
GOI pensions to ex-servicemen
Now I nor anybody else would have minded if these conditions were shared going forward rather than doing it retrospectively. People who usually go to the army are not in it for money but for the adventure and glory they bring. But they do also have a family and have a family responsibility. In most other countries, the soldier and his families are well-looked after. If you know that even after you die, the Government would look after your family, you will do your best. Unfortunately, many veterans in India themselves are asked to help by many war widows as the widows don t get family pensions. The proposal naturally has left many miffed. In fact many of the veterans who used to advise people to join the armed forces now advise young people to pursue civilian life and careers. This is when Indian Army has been ironically having shortage of officers from well over a decade and stresses felt by Army personnel also known for a long time.
Even under this nationalistic Government, if it cannot take care of its soldiers, then forget about others.
India Defence Spending vis-a-vis other countries.
Now it is nobody s argument that India needs to improve its tooth-to-tail ratio but this is the wrong way to go about it. I would probably talk about that some other time as that totally needs its whole place.
Even OROP, which was the mandate of this Government hasn t had been done in full as there are quite a few cases in the Supreme Court. Almost all the cases have been heard and only decisions have to be given which the SC for whatever reason doesn t want to give. They just keep changing the date of the hearing. Nowadays, in many suits/cases, the SC asks for fresh hearings even though all the old records are there. This is a newish phenomena which is being observed in SC. Why is it being done? Your guess is as good as mine. One thing for sure has changed, the SC which used to be citizen-focussed or enabler of human rights and used to be held as a beacon for judicial activism has changed but these are other topics which need their own space.
Update 16/12/2020 The SC recommends setting up a committee to discuss farmer issues. And this is nothing new. This is called death by committee. When there is already so much literature on the subject, including the works done by Swaminathan Commission. There has been 6 reports which do look at farmer issues in a holistic manner. This is the Supreme Court giving an escape route to GOI. They also have abstained from having a whole session citing Covid. This is when the ruling Govt. is putting a massive 1000 crore on a new building on which the SC has put on hold. And even then the GOI went ahead and did a Bhoomi-Pujan (traditional ceremony when making a new construction from scratch.)
Naturally due to the double whammy of both the pension reforms and now the laws to make corporate farming more aggressive has left a deep impact on the soldier-farmer that the state does not think or feel for him.
Even the United States farm-aid eloquently describes how corporate farming has made independent farmers suffer. You read that, and it seems it is as the state of our farmers here in India. Even their average land-holding has dropped a bit. I have shared about the state of farmers in India, in twoblog posts previously. And it is not just farm owners who have had it bad, even farm workers in U.S. The issue may look to be about the pandemic but goes far deeper.
The Israeli Model
The Israelis have always used collective farming and do have a large share in farming there. The old model called Kibbutz is what made Israelis self-sufficient in food and water and actually are world-leaders where they export their services to other nations on the same thing.
France
Just like many other countries, France also seems to have favored farmer co-operatives. Almost 75% of all farmers are in co-operatives.
Italy
The country world-famous for its wines and cheese are made by its co-operatives. In fact co-ops are the buzzword it seems in Italy, more so in Northern Italy.
Asian economies
Even Asian economies, especially East Asian economies by and large have been turning to co-operatives.
Brazil
Now Brazil is almost 40% more than India. In fact, in most of the indices, Brazil beats India handsomely. So one would be forgiven to think that Brazil must have corporate farming. But nothing could be further from the truth. The only downer is that they have high crime in some areas. Otherwise, they are in many ways better than India. In fact, I was surprised a few years ago to learn about Mercsour. I would have to admit though I learned much about Brazil when Debian was holding a debconf about a year back. Otherwise, I had known about the country for number of years but apart from its carnival and samba, hadn t known much about it. I did come to know that most of Latin America also loves spices as much as Indians do. They show that love by using hot sauces. I do one day wanna try one of their sauces to see what makes it tick. I do know they like to barbecuevegetables as much as barbecuing non-veg food. This is going a bit OT but then that s the foodie in me Conclusion
I could have shared more countries which have chosen the co-operative way rather than corporate farming and that is simply because they know what is best for their people and what is best even politically. The new farm laws are neither grounded in farmer s welfare nor anything else. The Govt. has been trying to undermine the farmers for years together. In fact, Madhya Pradesh has openly said that they will not allow farmers from other states to sell in their state. Although, even before these laws there was nothing to restrict the farmer from selling his produce anywhere in the country. Angering the farmers is not good politics as was found sometime back but guessing some lessons need to be re-learned.
One comment though, on social media I have seen many people especially youngsters having no real understanding of what inflation is all about. For e.g. if you ask them how come we are having a sort of record inflation in a technical recession (there has been a contraction, actually) and you see them putting themselves into bigger and bigger ditches. This does explain in part why the BJP wins in elections. If you do more rhetoric, which BJP is good as, rather than educating people than you are bound to win. You don t need plans, you don t need a vision, just rhetoric will do. What more evidence is needed when the economy is and was in a worse shape even before the pandemic and BJP won. I would probably write about that as that again needs lot of background and understanding as well as related terms.
One of the points Flanigan makes in her piece Seat Belt Mandates and Paternalism is that we re conditioned to use seat belts from a very early age. It s a thing we internalize and build into our understanding of the world. People feel bad when they don t wear a seat belt.(1) They re unsettled. They feel unsafe. They feel like they re doing something wrong.
Masks have started to fit into this model as well. Not wearing a mask feels wrong. An acquaintance shared a story of crying after realizing they had left the house without a mask. For some people, mask wearing has been deeply internalized.
We have regular COVID tests at NYU. Every other week I spit into a tube and then am told whether I am safe or sick. This allows me to hang out with my friends more confident than I would feel otherwise. This allows me to be closer to people than I would be otherwise. It also means that if I got sick, I would know, even if I was asymptomatic. If this happened, I would need to tell my friends. I would trace the places I ve been, the people I ve seen, and admit to them that I got sick. I would feel shame because something I did put me in that position.
There were (are?) calls to market mask wearing and COVID protection with the same techniques we use around sex: wear protection, get tested, think before you act, ask consent before touching, be honest and open with the people around you about your risk factors.
This is effective, at least among a swath of the population, but COVID has effectively become another STD. It s a socially transmitted disease that we have tabooified into creating shame in people who have it.
The problem with this is, of course, that COVID isn t treatable in the same way syphilis and chlamydia are. Still, I would ask whether people don t report, or get tested, or even wear masks, because of shame? In some communities, wearing a mask is a sign that you re sick. It s stigmatizing.(2)
I think talking about COVID the way we talk about sex is not the right approach because, in my experience, the ways I learned about sex were everything from factually wrong to deeply harmful. If what we re doing doesn t work, what does?
(1) Yes, I know not everyone.
(2) Many men who don t wear masks cite it as feeling emasculating, rather than stigmatizing.
The wiki page TimestampsProposal has been extended to cover more usage examples and to list more softwares supporting SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. (Axel Beckert, Dhole and Ximin Luo)
h01ger started a reference card for tools and information about reproducible builds but hasn't progressed much yet. Help with it is much welcome, this is also a good opportunity to learn about this project The idea is simply to have one coherent place with pointers to all the stuff we have and provide, without repeating nor replacing other documentation.
Toolchain fixes
Alexis Bienven e submitted a patch (#824050) against emacs24 for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH support in autoloads files, but upstream already disabled timestamps by default some time before.
proj/4.9.2-3 uploaded by Bas Couwenberg (original patch by Alexis Bienven ) properly initializes memory with zero to prevent the nad2bin tool from leaking random memory content into output artefacts.
Reiner Herrmann submitted a patch (#825569, upstream) against Ruby to sort object files in generated Makefiles, which are used to compile C sources that are part of Ruby projects.
The kde pkg set was extended, though the change ain't visible yet, as there are currently non-installable packages in it (and so the set can't be computed). (h01ger)
Misc.
Mattia improved misc.git/reports (=the tools to help writing the weekly statistics for this blog) some more.
This week's edition was written by Reiner Herrmann and Holger Levsen and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible builds folks on IRC.
Excellent organization, orga team fully deserved all the praise they got.
Meeting people - it was the first DebConf I attended in person, so it was a pleasure to meet lots of folks whom I’ve only known online before.
Quite a few interesting talks (videos are available, or will be available shortly, in DebConf8 video archive). Particularly recommended: quality assurance talks/BOFs by Lucas Nussbaum, BTS development progress by Don Armstrong, method diffusion in large volunteer projects by Martin Krafft, talk and debate on OpenSSL security issue by Luciano Bello, various lightning talks.
Deserving a special mention, a talk by Mark Shuttleworth on Debian and Ubuntu relationship. I thought that he said all the right words and, judging by reactions, attitude towards Ubuntu has changed significantly during the last year, turning from hostility to peaceful cooperation.
Argentinian food: steaks, empanadas, alfajores.
What I did not like
People pay much less attention to fixing RC bugs than they used to, the two BSPs organized during DebConf8 attracted only 3-5 people.
Some nice ideas being thrown around without anyone volunteering to work on them. Not really surprising, given that most of the core teams are short on manpower.
Almost complete lack of events targeted at engaging users and beginner contributors.
Quite a few specialized talks, interesting (IMHO) to only a minor percentage of the attendees.
Lots of discussions with few or no specific decisions or action items.
Pretty long trips to and from Mar del Plata (about 30 hours door-to-door travel time for me), luggage was lost for 2 days on the way there.
What I did
Attended about 75% of talks, tried to contribute to discussion in constructive, non-flamy ways .
Participated in BSPs, contributed debugging information, patches or fixes for about a dozen of release critical bugs, started triaging sparc-specific bugs.
Last week, Terah, Jacob, and I boarded a train in Kansas. We were bound for Los Angeles, then would go up the coast of California, eventually winding up in Portland for OSCON.
Our first train was the Southwest Chief out to LA.
Jacob had a great time on the train. This is a picture of Jacob and Terah in our sleeping car room. Jacob slept in his carseat at night and played with us during the day. See all recent photos of Jacob.
We had the option to get off the train for a few minutes in La Junta, CO. I took some photos trackside.
Here's Jacob enjoying the lounge car. There were dozens of Boy Scouts on our train, heading to the Boy Scout camp near Raton, NM. Many of them hung out in the lounge car, so Jacob had plenty to watch and keep him entertained.
The lounge car has wrap-around windows. We got an expansive view of the Rockies on the first day of our trip, and of the California desert on the second. This route really gives you a feeling of being alone sometimes. There are times where you can look out the window, and as far as you can see, there is no evidence of people or civilization.
Here's a picture out the lounge car, looking at the train as it rounded a curve.
The lounge car was in the middle of the train, so the train really was longer than it might appear here.
We had a bit of an adventure in Lamy, NM. Apparently a terminal cancer patient was riding the train, and died in the night. We were held up for about 2 hours for authorities to arrive, perform their investigation, etc.
While we were there, passengers could get off the train and look around. I took a few photos there.
This is a photo looking towards the front of the Chief. It uses bi-level cars, so every car has an upstairs and a downstairs.
Just outside the Lamy station is an old dining car. It is now a stationary restaurant. The restaurant had closed just before we arrived, but they let me in to take a few quick photos anyway.
Just past Albuquerque, one of the two locomotives on our train failed. That meant that, combined with the delay at Lamy, we were more than 3 hours late into Los Angeles. That, in turn, meant that we missed our connection to the Coast Starlight. So the new plan was to take a bus to Bakersfield, then the San Joaquin train to Sacramento, where we could catch up with the Coast Starlight and get to Portland as scheduled.
Jacob really enjoyed the Bakersfield train station. I carried him up to the stone walls, which he enjoyed exploring with his hands.
This is the Bakersfield station. It's a nice building. But their large metal sign reads "To trains and busses." Someday I will forget about them misspelling "buses" on a large metal sign.
I've got two more pictures of Jacob at Bakersfield that you'd enjoy: one, two. He sure was a popular baby. We got countless compliments from strangers, and he got even more smiles and greetings from people. Even when he was fussy, people kept saying what a good baby he was. We were a little surprised at that. A few people even found his cry to be cute and funny!
One of the nice side-effects of missing our connection was seeing the grand old Sacramento train station. A beautifully-decorated building. We were there until about 12:30AM because the Coast Starlight had been delayed as well.
Terah saw a sign out the door saying "Quiznos: Now Open." I figured that meant that the store was open, not that the place was open late into the night, but she wanted to check. She stepped out and then back in again. "As soon as I got out, homeless people started yelling at me! Plus the store wasn't open," she reported.
On the Coast Starlight, we discovered the absolutely stunning Pacific Parlour Car. These cars were originally built in the 1950s for the Santa Fe railroad, and have been renovated and restored by Amtrak for service on the Coast Starlight. That's the only train where they run, and they are available only to first-class passengers.
I noticed stairs going to the lower level of the Parlour, and was curious what was down there. So I went down to check it out, and it is a small (18 seats, I think) theater!
We sat down there for awhile and talked to some of the other people.
The view from the Coast Starlight was amazing. The trip through the mountains was particularly nice. We saw mountains from the distance, up close, and at some points could look out our window directly down into a deep valley below. There were lakes, waterfalls, and little creeks all along.
And finally, this is the grand Portland train station. Still an active station and a sight to see, though not as nice as Kansas City's.
So that's the trip to Portland. More to come on the convention and the city itself.
(update: numerous typos removed)
This year, attending the whole Solutions Linux event wasn't
compatible with my paid work (for those who care, I'm since September head
of the Personal and departmental computing unit in the Networks and
Information Department of ONERA,
the French Aerospace Lab).
Despite this, I booked at least yesterday afternoon to visit the expo and
more particularly the Debian booth. It is always a pleasure to meet again
French developers and contributors as well as all these old dinosaurs which
I learned electronic communications with 1200bps modems with, some time ago.
The Debian booth was as crowded as usual. It was still featuring a Babelbox, built
in one night by Pierre Habouzit and Julien Blache. Congratulations, you did
an awful job here.
I'm glad I saw all those good people. I was tempted to cite everybody and
will finally refrain because I'm too afraid of forgetting one of you guys.
For our international readers, this includes several of the people I may
have had a few flamy discussions and even blog "wars" with in the recent past
(I'm just missing you, Joss, being told that you couldn't attend that
Wednesday). As usual, we all survived very well.
The other "big" event was also the first formal meeting of the Debian France non-profit organisation.
Everything is pretty young but the hidden creation work done by the founding
members has been huge and the base is now here. Debian now officially exists in
France. I'll do my best to play my part in this action and work with other
members of the board to fit
the organisation goals and bring Debian more prevalence in our country.
I also had a very long talk with Bruno Cornec and Louis Bouchard from HP. We
discussed about HP customers needs for official support for Debian on HP
machines, and not only servers (ONERA has an internal project to deploy a
few hundreds of workstations aimed at being the scientific platform for
ONERA scientists and PhD students. We already have more than 100 of these,
based on RHEL and guess what are my mid-term plans for them? :-)). We just
need some official commitment from HP to support using Debian to unlock the
internal fears.
It sounds like HP could go this way if customers show enough interest. Of
course, ONERA's project is pretty small but we are one of the key players in
out domain in the country so that could be kind of interesting marketing for
HP...and Debian..:-). Bdale, I need to talk with you soon....
Back to work now, for a few days. Then,
I'll take 3 days off next week to attend the 3rd
Free Software World Conference in Badajoz and present the results of the
Extremadura i18n session we held in September, along with other people who
held some of these sessions, namely Frans Pop (about the D-I session),
Wookey (about the Embedded Debian session), Knut Yrvin (about the Debian-Edu
session) and Martin Michlmayr (about the QA session). All people who I will be
very glad to meet again.
The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:
The people who are pro-Government and in this case pro-Corporate do not have any success stories that they can share. Hence, most of the time the arguments are that the other are bad. For e.g. quite a few people argue that we don t need farmers, we can just order from restaurant. They have completely disassociated the idea that even then you need farmers as unless the farmers put the seed in, till the soil and wait for the rains or have irrigation you won t get ripe vegetables which then has to be taken out, and somehow sold to the wholesaler from where it comes to the restaurant and then to your plate. Sadly, even the farm-to-fork infographics are so depressingly sad, you want to look away. If you see the infographic you see it is just not non-veg but also vegetarian food grains which go under lot of questionable practices. Even, with such scenarios that is done by corporations our people want to go ahead. I will share stories from other countries which tell how they are doing more.
The Soldier-Farmer
Another sad part of these protests have been soldiers who have been returning their medals. The ones who oppose have the gall to say they should return the cash rewards they got. So just like farmers, seems soldiers also do not need money to survive. They are supposed to live only on air and water. This is after the present Govt. has reduced their pensions after retirement and that too without any discussion
GOI pensions to ex-servicemen 
India Defence Spending vis-a-vis other countries.
Conclusion
I could have shared more countries which have chosen the co-operative way rather than corporate farming and that is simply because they know what is best for their people and what is best even politically. The new farm laws are neither grounded in farmer s welfare nor anything else. The Govt. has been trying to undermine the farmers for years together. In fact, Madhya Pradesh has openly said that they will not allow farmers from other states to sell in their state. Although, even before these laws there was nothing to restrict the farmer from selling his produce anywhere in the country. Angering the farmers is not good politics as was found sometime back but guessing some lessons need to be re-learned.
One comment though, on social media I have seen many people especially youngsters having no real understanding of what inflation is all about. For e.g. if you ask them how come we are having a sort of record inflation in a technical recession (there has been a contraction, actually) and you see them putting themselves into bigger and bigger ditches. This does explain in part why the BJP wins in elections. If you do more rhetoric, which BJP is good as, rather than educating people than you are bound to win. You don t need plans, you don t need a vision, just rhetoric will do. What more evidence is needed when the economy is and was in a worse shape even before the pandemic and BJP won. I would probably write about that as that again needs lot of background and understanding as well as related terms.
The idea is simply to have one coherent place with pointers to all the stuff we have and provide, without repeating nor replacing other documentation.
What I liked
.
