Frederick C. Howe: This is the story of something for nothing—of making the other fellow pay. This making the other fellow pay, of getting something for nothing, explains the lust for franchises, mining rights, tariff privileges, railway control, tax evasions. All these things mean monopoly, and all monopoly is bottomed on legislation. And monopoly laws are born in corruption. The commercialism of the press, or education, even of sweet charity, is part of the price we pay for the special privileges created by law. The desire of something for nothing, of making the other fellow pay, of monopoly in some form or other, is the cause of corruption. Monopoly and corruption are cause and effect. Together, they work in Congress, in our Commonwealths, in our municipalities. It is always so. It always has been so. Privilege gives birth to corruption, just as the poisonous sewer breeds disease. Equal chance, a fair field and no favors, the "square deal" are never corrupt. They do not appear in legislative halls nor in Council Chambers. For these things mean labor for labor, value for value, something for something. This is why the little business man, the retail and wholesale dealer, the jobber, and the manufacturer are not the business men whose business corrupts politics. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7180
Paulo Freire: The generosity of the oppressors is nourished by an unjust order, which must be maintained in order to justify that generosity. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7181
Heads Up For Possible Outage
A reminder that I'm located in the US, and more particularly in Texas and this is a server run out of my home.
With the massive freeze incoming this weekend, there is a decent chance of a significant and extended power outage (Texas has a notoriously awful and poorly managed power grid, notably run completely separate from the rest of the country).
Vanessa likes this.
DDOSed by... facebook chat?
Apparently some facebook interface decided to DDOS the site a little over an hour ago.
It's not overwhelming the network, just an absolutely ridiculous number of requests.
I've solved it by instituting a global rate limit. It should be high enough to not affect anyone actually using the server.
Basic gist is that any more than 10 requests a second gets a 429 error (Too Many Requests, like all error codes with this site it'll give you a cute cat picture specific to that error). This is purely per second, so if you see that error at any point the time it takes you to refresh again the limit will already be reset.
Vanessa likes this.
Confused
in reply to Server News • •Server News likes this.