Also worth pointing out: referendum campaign has less strict spending limits compared to parliamentary elections so this is one more way (on top of utilizing state media and state owned enterprises) that PiS can outspend competition in upcoming elections which are held on the same day.

Building complex systems involving humans is hard because humans are flawed. The best thing we’ve come up so far are systems involving extensive checks and balances to prevent thing happening too rapidly and without necessary oversight and even then it’s a tricky part to balance.

For the record, I’m not for entirely cashless society but organisations that are cash heavy have proven to be source of many headaches. There is a balance to be found on thresholds and barring some types of businesses from using cash and where digital money transfer is required. Banks and other money transfer entities will have to deal with scenarios where malicious parties will try to obfuscate their intent outside of those thresholds.

This is all technically true but cash is not the answer.

Right now there are so many easily accessible ways for governments to spy on people (cell phone geolocation, call metadata monitoring) that I’m not sure that for the purposes you think of you aren’t screwed already anyway. From this perspective fight for cash use becomes a bit theoretical.

The only people that I know of personally that are strongly for cash are either people that frequently skirt around taxes (“minor” stuff like car repair shops) and unfortunately conspiracy nuts. Genuine privacy oriented people exist but realistically the majority will be there for selfish reasons.

The societal cost of tax evasion, money laundering and financing organisations that legally require transparency (political orgs, NGOs etc) are massive and immediate.

What we really need is strong oversight of institutions, government transparency, rule of law and healthy democracy. Those are the things you want to enshrine in your constitution.

It’s easy - tax evasion, money laundering, secret financing of things you wouldn’t want others to know. All perfectly fine reasons to fight for.

Let’s do whodunnit, part 2, continued from Nova Khakovka dam debacle.

Let’s not rule out that russia damaged the bridge. By redirecting civilian traffic to Melitopol they could be using it as human shield to military supply lines.

Back in the day, like many people then, I had a couple of different accounts across multiple messaging platforms. 2 domestic ones, couple of international ones. It was a fun mess but people were tired of running multiple apps and so loads of multi-protocol apps were developed.

Usually messaging protocols were simply reverse engineered and some apps also used plug-ins so that niche protocols could be added by community. Some also did gateways that translated proprietary protocols to XMPP.

By the end of that era many platforms opened themselves up with XMPP. It was nice because most of those multi-protocol apps didn’t have to support as many different platforms explicitly.

But that’s about it. I had a Google Talk account too and found it cute that I can use it to add my friends on other platforms. I was a nerdbut barely knew any other people that were utilizing it. Realistically it didn’t make any difference because you still had to use multi-protocol app for the ones that didn’t open.

Soon platforms that were never on or barely on XMPP started to take over. Messenger was the biggest in my country and it was always a PITA on third party apps.

Google Talk doing a rug pull on XMPP didn’t to anything meaningful to XMPP itself. It was never that big and simply remains a niche to this day.

I too get an impression that a single article on XMPP Gtalk drama made round on Fediverse that many made their opinion solely on it.