volkris @volkris@qoto.org
I think the most pressing and fundamental problem of the day is that people lack a practically effective means of sorting out questions of fact in the larger world. We can hardly begin to discuss ways of addressing reality if we can't agree what reality even is, after all.
The institutions that have served this role in the past have dropped the ball, so the next best solution is talking to each other, particularly to those who disagree, to sort out conflicting claims.
Unfortunately, far too many actively oppose this, leaving all opposing claims untested. It's very regressive.
So that's my hobby, striving to understanding the arguments of all sides at least because it's interesting to see how mythologies are formed but also because maybe through that process we can all have our beliefs tested.
But if nothing else, social media platforms like this are chances to vent frustrations that on so many issues both sides are obviously wrong ;)
Joined Dec 2022
@Ruthie@mstdn.social
What in the world? Where did Mitch say he was going after Medicare or Social Security to pay for tax cuts?
That's not really how those programs interact.
To be just a bit more specific, because I happen to have it in my copy/paste buffer:
> "In this Court, the sole question presented is whether the first fair use factor, “the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes,” §107(1), weighs in favor of AWF’s recent commercial licensing to Condé Nast."
To be fair, that's a tradeoff many on that side are happy to accept.
I often hear conservatives talking about how "big business" takes advantage of "weak" immigration policies to lower wages in pursuit of profit, and they want to change that even if it means fewer workers.
(Their perspective, not mine.)
Sure, if you only interact with yourself on your own instance.
But the moment you federate, you're trusting the instance owners of those you federate with.
@nyquildotorg
Well, right, they're different things.
The law is what it is regardless of science, regardless of whether the lawmakers even knew what science is, and judges rule based on law as it is, even if our democratic process lead to really awful, unscientific laws.
That's why we need to push for better laws, not yell at judges for giving us the outcomes that we, through our representatives, set up.
It sounds like a pretty narrow ruling in an unusual case without much implication for fair use:
> 'In this Court, the sole question presented is whether the first fair use factor, “the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes,” §107(1), weighs in favor of AWF’s recent commercial licensing to Condé Nast.'
it sounds like you're overlooking that deference to administrations is a double-edged sword.
Really, this isn't about what courts do as it's about what presidents do. Should a president be able to reinterpret laws at will? What of the next time a president reinterprets a climate law to say he doesn't have to regulate pollution?
These justices are trying to rein that in, saying that presidents really do have to follow the laws as Congress passes them, without such reinterpretation.
Yep. UI/UX is always the stumbling block for this kind of thing.
It's a crime that we don't have a norm of encrypted email messages, but the UI was never developed to make that happen.
Solutions we've had in academia for decades are just never mainstreamed because the UI never implements them.
It's a longstanding tragedy in tech.
ActivityPub was designed with the instance focus, so that ship has sailed. A user focus is just not in the cards for this system, having already been passed on.
Well, it's a story of putting all the eggs in one basket, with upsides and downsides.
The downside is that it's one-stop-shopping for information. The upside is that it can be a single, professionally managed, legally accountable operator.
In Fediverse there's no way to know what those servers involved are doing with the information. You definitely can't hold 20K instances to any particular legal standard.
So it's a mixed bag, a wild west, for better or worse.
I mean, it's not up to judges to approve drugs. That's not their function in the US system.
Their job is to rule on whether laws have been properly respected, and in this case the FDA didn't follow the law, which is something the president really should see to.
We should also look into reforming the laws, but in any case that's not up to judges either.
But the distributed design of Fediverse requires it to broadcast content in ways that make it easier for third parties to vacuum content.
Not only is it still possible for instances to set up fingerprinting and cookies, but there's the new vector of all of the connectivity stuff normally inside a centralized system being broadcast to the world as it has to traverse between instances.
But YES, let's argue about the effectiveness to figure out whether it's effective before society responds together with ineffective and cumbersome reactions!
@gotofritz@fosstodon.org
I know it's a bit pedantic, but I still think it's slightly useful to point out that "show things in chronological order" *is* an algorithm.
People here celebrating the lack of algorithm on #Fediverse miss that there is an algorithm, just a really simple one, and maybe they'd be better served by a little more intelligence in the system.
I point out that there is an algorithm to try to get past that barrier of thinking there isn't one. Then the discussion is about how to improve it, not whether to accept it.
Right, but the determination of harmful is set by policy under the authority of the president, so presidents are pretty much by definition immune from the requirements of the act.
It basically says people can't do things counter to the president's wishes. The president himself will never be in a position of doing something counter to his own wishes.
@newsopinionsandviews@masto.ai
The story has its facts wrong, though. In particular, Citizens United *supported* campaign limits and regulation, ruling against the challengers that wanted those regulations declared unconstitutional.
But overall the piece talks as if the Supreme Court is a legislature, crafting policies and shaping laws concerning campaigning. That's simply not the role of the Court in the US system of government.
The Court merely points out that we have constitutionally protected rights to engage in the democratic process, even if politicians wish to control us, and it "guts" those efforts to silence political speech.
ActivityPub spam, onboarding
This kind of thing is why I really wish ActivityPub had focused on users, not instances, and included Web of Trust sort of functionality in its core.
Always remember the answer to your question: voters elected representatives that thought it was a very good idea.
Democracy stinks sometimes. But dealing with it means addressing these issues in the general public to nudge people into electing better representatives.
This whole mess is about the people we elected to Congress. The last ones left a mess and the new ones are doing a questionable job cleaning it up.
We should probably stop electing such people.
I imagine the legislation isn't particularly workable, and if enforced MT will send Google a bill to collect a fine, and Google will laugh the letter's way to the garbage can.
I would be nice, though, if this resulted in a court case that emphasized that no, states can't regulate the internet itself.
Here's the bill that you can read for yourself, without having to rely on outfits like NYTimes.
After all, there's a reason people have lost so much faith in press organizations: all too often their reporting just doesn't pass fact checking.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/2811/text
I think the most pressing and fundamental problem of the day is that people lack a practically effective means of sorting out questions of fact in the larger world. We can hardly begin to discuss ways of addressing reality if we can't agree what reality even is, after all.
The institutions that have served this role in the past have dropped the ball, so the next best solution is talking to each other, particularly to those who disagree, to sort out conflicting claims.
Unfortunately, far too many actively oppose this, leaving all opposing claims untested. It's very regressive.
So that's my hobby, striving to understanding the arguments of all sides at least because it's interesting to see how mythologies are formed but also because maybe through that process we can all have our beliefs tested.
But if nothing else, social media platforms like this are chances to vent frustrations that on so many issues both sides are obviously wrong ;)
Joined Dec 2022
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