Martin Gilens: Analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. ... When the preferences of economic elites and organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy. ... Our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts. Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association, and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America's claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8193
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Ravi Batra: American government is corrupt. Those who have enough money can almost get anything they want from our government, whether it is tax breaks, or subsidies, or policies and laws changed, removed, or added. ... Money controls U.S. politics as never before. As a result, the tax burden has gradually shifted from the wealthy onto the backs of the poor and the middle class. From 1950 to 1980, the top-bracket income tax rate ranged from 70 to 90 percent, while the Social Security tax imposed on lower incomes varied from 4 to 9 percent. By 2005 the top income tax rate was down to 35 percent, but the Social Security tax had jumped to 15.3 percent. Such are the tangible benefits that moneyed donors receive from politicians. ... Today CEOs and wealthy businessmen are the ruling elite in the Western world, especially the United States. Their donations finance elections and even education, which they are constantly saying has to adapt itself to the needs of the market (that is, be molded to inculcate their views. It should come as no surprise therefore that the theories offered by economists rationalize the self-interest of big business and the wealthy. Overtly, of course, such theories claim to benefit society and the public's well-being. But covertly, they do just the opposite: they make the great mass of people poorer while making the rich fabulously richer. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8194
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So the temporary system had some sort of failure, I'm not even 100% sure what caused it to be honest. It went down sometime yesterday and some of the virtual drives got corrupted, which caught the database and the virtual gateway device.
I was able to restore the system... most of the way. Thankfully there are backups of the database, but some of them were also flawed as well, the most recent intact one was from 5/16, so 5 days were lost.
To be clear, this problem was exacerbated by the fact that there's not as much redundancy in the temporary setup (sadly it looks like it'll be a few more months before I have a place of my own and can spin up my own hardware again). But I'm going to still look at how I might get those in better shape.
As far as how long it took: I had a busy day yesterday and didn't see that the server was down until I was too exhausted to do anything about it, so it had to wait until I got off work today... each attempt at restoring the database takes around an hour, so that took *a while* to get restored.
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Image Upload Trouble
If y'all have had issues uploading images... sorry about that.
I missed a setting when re-configuring the server after transfer to it's current environment and it's fixed now.
Longer Explanation: there are two servers involved, a reverse proxy and then the actual Friendica server. The Friendica server accepted uploads up to 100MB... the proxy didn't have that setting... so it would just go for a bit, then timeout. Added that setting to the proxy and all solved.
Server Migration Complete
Thank you for your patience!
The server has been migrated to a new dedicated remote server (hosted with OVH) and to the newest version of Friendica (2024.03, previously it was 2023.12).
Things should stabilize mostly for the time being, but I will be on the lookout for bugs.
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