It is important to understand all of the factors contributing to this disproportionate figure. To believe it is the work of politics alone is to give politics far too much power. The rational you are using to suggest it here can be applied to nearly everything one encounters in any country. To me your suggestion here only demonstrates your profound naivety (at worse your willful ignorance) on the subject.
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Maybe we could focus on the Linux phones …
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Yes, I agree. This is not a forum for political dialog. As the statistics show a great interest in a Linux (open source) phone. Still using a BQ Ubuntu phone and waiting for Evergreen 
You can trace the high US incarceration rate to specific political decisions. The decision to criminalize marijuana in 1937 was racist in its origin because it was perceived as a drug used by blacks and Hispanics. Harry Anslinger, the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, a predecessor to the Drug Enforcement Administration, believed that drugs had an “effect on the degenerate races” and his motivation for advocating their prohibition is shown in these quotes:
“There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S., and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others.”
“Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men.”
Richard Nixon’s domestic policy chief, John Ehrlichman, said in an interview that Nixon conceived of the war on drugs as a political tool to attack the blacks and anti-war leftists. Nixon pushed through the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 through congress, despite the fact that his own commission recommended decriminalizing marijuana. Nixon’s decisions were guided by his own prejudices, rather than the recommendations of experts.
Reagan ramped up Nixon’s old “law and order” rhetoric and used it to attack Democrats who he portrayed as being soft on crime during the 1980s. The policy was to focus on more punitive sentencing, less tolerance of minor offenses, and less focus on reformation of prisoners. The Democrats responded in the 1990s by claiming they were just as tough on crime as the Republicans and politicians like Bill Clinton and Joe Biden saw being tough on crime as ways to win elections, which is why the Democrats pushed through the 1994 Crime Bill, which increased incarceration rates.
There was more privatization of prisons, and especially prison services during the early 2000s, which was pushed by Republicans who are ideological proponents of privatization. The companies that offer privatized prison services and exploit prison labor became a political lobby that promotes incarceration.
Property crime peaked in 1980 and violent crime peaked in 1991, so there was little justification behind the massive increase in incarceration:
I haven’t read Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness so I can’t really comment on its argument, but most expert don’t think that incarceration is the right response to drug usage, and “3 strikes and you’re out” laws, the increased use of the death penalty, and longer mandatory sentences are not recommended by criminologists as a way to reduce crime.
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Y’all take this somewhere else.
You can trace all incarcerations to laws which established what actions are criminal in nature to political decisions. It is the political decisions which determine what laws are enforced. Once again calling people in prison political prisoners is a ridicules argument that can be used to describe every single person in prison within the US.
I agree. I just don’t like nonsense just being left to appear as though it is valid.
Without taking sides here or commenting on the discussion - calling the opinion of others nonsense doesn’t look very respectful to me…
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That is fair to say. I’m referring to the argument and not the individual. But I’m done with the conversation. It is widely off topic and not appropriate on a computer company’s individual forums.
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I originally wrote this reply before reading the last 8 or so posts. So, I’ve deleted all but the last line:
Huzzah to Purism, huzzah to Pine64, huzzah to all who stand for liberty!
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I can’t put a lot of faith on Google stats because we don’t know if Google numbers are unique requests, or same, or include TOR, or same-person. Last week , “facebook” was the top request. I know many people that open their browser, and there is Google and they type in “facebook” and up comes Facebook links many times, and they click the main one and fazoom - they’re at their Facebook page.
When I ask why people do it that way, the paraphrased response is usually ‘because it’s on Google’. At least I know where they are when it comes time to round them all up 
As for the rest of your ‘public interest’ in Librem 5, I think L5 has to be just as easy and simple to set up and use as are the stalker-phones. Accessing Linux and Librem, to me, has been a difficult journey; learning new phrases, acronyms, processes, and such. I got the feeling that Linux stuff, including PureOS has a tendency to appear to be trying too hard to be different, and not enough on a KISS entry level that’s easy.
If I point out that Facebook is NOT on Google and that they can get to Facebook direct via a Bookmark or shortcut, I get the Homer Simpson stare - like a deer in headlights. Too, if I type into the URL puri.sm, does Google count that as a search, if I type that while browser is at Google?
Plus, my trust in Google is at a all time low and going lower.
Just my opinion - nothing more.
~s~
or they auto-label you an elitist and arrogant prick “pff ! who does he think he is ? trying to make me change …”
The peaks in searches match precise times when critical events happened with the Librem 5. That is pretty good evidence that Google is measuring something in the real world.
I’m pretty sure that Google has figured out how to filter out duplicate searches from the same person. The vast majority of people are logged to Google when doing Google searches, so Google has their username. At any rate, Google can collect enough info from IP address, browser type, machine type, etc, to track most people even when they don’t login.
Google has to get this stuff right, because its $135 billion in annual ad revenue depends on it.
I think we should be careful with numbers and statistics because we are talking about a very small part of the population with specific interests (Linux, privacy). But I am not surprised that Northern Europe is in the top positions. Lack of fluent English is perhaps not so important because we speak of a such specific layer where people usually have much better knowledge of English than the average citizen. In this case interest in Linux is perhaps less important than interest in privacy.
I can only speak for myself but I have followed this forum much less frequently since the main details about the Librem 5 phone were revealed (in the spring). I simply do not have so many questions left and just sit and wait for the shipping of Evergreen to start.
(I’m living in Sweden and Finland)
There is a saying around here (at least): “Lie, big lie, statistics”. I think the Google trends is… indicative… but it’s difficult to make specific analysis just based on it. Firstly, because it’s relative and I’ve yet to see what is in relation to what and how accurately that represents a comparison between countries. And even setting the statistical mathematics aside, there are factors like the language issue: something similar could be searched that has nothing to do with L5 (but admittedly Google is somewhat good enough to tell the difference - which in different context is causes problems, the other side of the coin) etc. But even the open statistics of Trends are indicative enough with enough datapoints.
I wouldn’t give language quite this much weight when thinking what are the underlying reasons. Surely it helps and Nordics have a good education system, but L5 is an early adopter’s device and knowing English is more understood (at needed technical level at least) there. There are other intersecting enabling and motivating factors too: available funds and income, availability on broadband and 4G internet, (relative) price of 4G data, how data driven and interconnected the society is, attitudes towards privacy and security [these are separate and can be interpreted differently in different countries] including how related info is handled in media or how they are portrayed by authorities [for instance GDPR and felt threat of election influencing], attitude towards Linux in general (Linus is from around here), existing ecosystem of security and privacy related services and devices (at least for companies, which may just keep reminding people that something might be needed for personal use too), feelings of threat and risk about own or foreign entity, ability to pay online overseas, ability to reliably receive valuable/sensitive parcels, local chatter and enthusiasm towards L5, attitude (trust/understanding) towards a US/western company [unconnected to FOSS], and so on. And on the other side, there are probably aspects that act against this interest. Anyways, for anyone, interest is affected by a combination of all these - and a few hundred more. And interest does not equal action (or in this case, purchase).
Because the Trend numbers are relative, I expect that underneath it’s an equation of “how many searches per all the searches of this area/country”, which would mean that large populous country, like Germany would go up and a small nation from the north go down in rankings of number of individuals. The main idea of Trends is not absolute numbers: it’s about relative change and comparability. Or, so I’d guess. I’d interpret the graph as evidence of how badly Purism communicated and lost the momentum when delay/batches were announced [disappointment], and how Pine was able to seem more “sure thing”. “Linux phone” I’d see more like background noise, as it didn’t change along with the others - not much connection there. It would be more revealing if there’d be combined graphs that include other language searches as well, but that may be a bit difficult to compile.
What this graph and statistics also tell, is that there is a need for more internationalization and translation efforts. As in, to whom is that tech savvy early adopter going to keep in touch securely if not to their less technologically inclined and less linguistic parents that they want to keep safe too (and not be a weak point in their immediate circle).
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Or similarly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statistics
Another more specific way of looking at the “interest in Linux phones” would be simply to look at the sales distribution by country of the Librem 5. However I don’t think Purism has published that information. Likewise for the PinePhone. That goes beyond “interest” though to a level of interest that involves parting with money.
I’d forgotten about that, thanks. Funny how that same idea appears in different cultures 
True, sales info would say something. Then again, there is a difference in current sales and future sales - interest may mean potential (probably some fraction of interest turns into potential buyers and some part of them actually buy and some part of them… something… and some end up becoming contributing members of Linux community and some part of them… something). If the point would only be to make money, parting with it would be as far as that goes, but as a community (and the type of operation that Purism tries to be) the later fraction becomes meaningful. At the moment we only have some indications to… indicate… what the future may look like - where the most interest may be.
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I think interest or the lack thereof isn’t surprising. It is another wheel being reinvented. Consumers have seen numerous other attempts at this very thing, and what has been demonstrated time and time again, is that the platform can be the greatest in the world, but if it doesn’t have an army of developers behind it, the consumer just has no reason to jump ship.
The L5 is different in that, it doesn’t really need to reinvent the software distro wheel. It plans to tap into the Linux one already. Of course people will need to do some work to get it working with phosh and compiled for ARM, but I think that shouldn’t be too difficult for many.
On top of this, I think Android app emulation will be something that comes to the L5 pretty quickly and will serve as yet ANOTHER bridge.
I just wish the L5 really had a powerful CPU and double the RAM.
Still I am of the belief that in terms of taking advantage of the hardware we have, we are all too quick to move on. Hopefully PureOS is light weight on the mobile and leaves RAM for applications.
Really looking forward to getting mine!!
I believe that by typing, for example, within Firefox address bar (location bar or URL bar) about:preferences#search someone might adjust (add/remove) which one to use. Otherwise you are stuck with default ones. Is it DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials addon reliable option to be used? Anyway I’d agree (and recommend) that using/typing direct address puri.sm under address bar might be considered as one to one dialog, me asking Purism directly: “How they are today?”, without involving others (filling out somewhat relevant statistics), but who knows?
None of the prisoners in Gitmo are political prisoners. We don’t care what any of the people in Gitmo believe, nor what they lobby for using peaceful means. They are not imprisoned for their beliefs nor for exercising their inalienable rights. When they violently attack other people, you lock them up for committing those crimes of violence. When they travel from their home country (so they’re not really defending their homeland when they fight), and voluntarily enter a war in another country without wearing the uniform of any country, and then kill or attempt to kill American and other Western soldiers, you lock them up and throw away the key. Those people are not political prisoners, they’re criminals. Without Geneva Convention protections afforded to those who wear the military uniform of a recognized signatory of those conventions and without the protections of their home or guest country, they put themselves in to peril when they commit crimes against those who round them up and lock them up for the crimes they commit. Without American citizenship nor being on American soil, they don’t even have any civil rights. But it’s not a political issue nor about punishing them for peaceful protest.
Why not bring them in court, before an independent judge (or to The Hague before the ICJ)? What against the process of justice, show proof and allow a proper defense?
Do we have no law in this country anymore?