volkris @volkris@qoto.org

@wjmaggos I know @freemo is addressing the path forward, but I still want to focus on the path backwards.

How did the gazillionaire get that money?

Every rich person became rich because they provided value to other people who themselves judged that whatever the person was doing was of such tremendous value that they were willing to give up their own money in exchange for that value.

Whether you agree with them is immaterial.

The money doesn't grow on trees. The rich person provided value to society sufficient to obtain that status.

It's like complaining that a doctor got a large paycheck. Well, the paycheck was a result of the doctor providing medical care. If you just look at the paycheck while ignoring the value provided that led to the paycheck you aren't seeing the full picture.

Gazillionaires are nothing to be avoided because becoming a gazillionaire is necessarily the result of providing more than a gazillion worth of value to others.

That there are gazillionaires is a positive sign of people working for others.

@edwardchampion@universeodon.com ha, Yeah and my just personal preference is, I hate all of that tinkly stuff 🙂

My personal preference is to have dry, university lecture style content. Like, if you mention a train, you don't have to put a train horn in there, I know what a train is!

All the sound effects and fancy editing really take me out of the raw information that I want to learn from the production.

Anyway, that's just my personal gripe 🙂

More substantially, style aside, I just don't think they do good work, I think they do a mediocre job and then dress their work up with all of the silly sound effects.

I think that serial had potential but they sort of didn't do as much with it as they could have, they were aiming for an accessible, popular product, and that held them back.

@timokl

So there are two different issues that you are bringing up.

One issue is with the platform, the behind the scenes communication protocol. That's not something Mastodon controls in the same way that your cell phone doesn't control the communications network that it operates over.

You mentioned a decentralized structure, but that's not quite right. It's more that this behind the scenes system REcentralized around many different central instances (the servers are called instances here) where all of the users on one particular instance are reliant on the functioning of that instance.

So I would emphasize that it is federated, not decentralized. It's still centralized, just among many different central instances that federate and cooperate among each other.

My user experience and yours will be shaped by the policies of the instance administrators that is beyond our control.

The second issue is with Mastodon itself. Like I said, Mastodon is like the cell phone that we use to interact with the system.

Mastodon has long had a culture where the developers behind it think they know what's best for you, so they intentionally keep features away from you, for example, and don't let you choose for yourself whether you want to use those features.

It would be like your cell phone manufacturer deciding that Bluetooth is bad and so they publicly declared that you can't have Bluetooth because it's bad for you.

I would rather put users at the center in both contexts. I would rather the power go to users instead of instance administrators, and I would rather users choose what features they want to use and not leave that to the Mastodon developers.

I hope this makes sense.

Two different levels of problem but really it's the same philosophical choice being made.

@mho

@CisopSixpence he doesn't have control over us.

But for some reason we keep promoting and building up these mythologies around the guy.

In reality he's just not that important, but he is a troll, so he really enjoys all the attention people voluntarily give him.

Let's ignore him so he goes away.

@edwardchampion@universeodon.com frankly, I've never figured out why anybody thinks NYT/Serial/This American Life is particularly good journalism, investigative or otherwise.

I know they put splashy editing and fancy sounds to dress up their productions, but on the substance, they're pretty much crap.

@qkslvrwolf hey, this is a problem that solves itself.

Give each person a dish, and if they want it clean they'll clean it themselves!

@wjmaggos you are literally talking about destroying wealth generators by taking their resources away.

You seem so obsessed with money that you can't look beyond it to see the transactions that got them there.

Follow the money...back.

@freemo

@freemo

Sure, but my point here is that even if we accept the argument, it still doesn't really work.

I think that in reality people do have some skill that choosing the better risks to take. But even if we set that aside and we accept the argument that people like @wjmaggos seem to be making, even if it is pure chance with no skill at all, even in that unrealistic case their argument still falls flat.

Even if there is zero skill to choosing the flip of the coin that might or might not benefit humanity, it's still a good thing that these people with resources take the risk and risk their resources for the sake of the coin coming up heads and benefiting us all.

The billionaire didn't work harder than the millionaire and it was all luck? Fine! Either way, their luck benefited us all. Even if you want to ignore the reality that there was work involved.

@rameshgupta I love how you ignored everything in my post just to repeat your same disputed claim.

@TruthSandwich@toad.social

@timo21

Are you under the impression that Texas doesn't outlaw littering like that?

@JamesK

@wjmaggos

I would just point out that luck counts in favor of the system, not against it.

Yes, people risk their capital against luck. They bet on questionable investments. Is this R&D on solar cells going to pay off? Are we going to be able to build this wind farm? Well, we put our cash on the line and we hope fortune favors us.

Yes, a lot of that does come down to luck, but we want people to be betting on these efforts that end up helping humanity.

Just because there's luck involved doesn't mean the effort isn't worthwhile. It's even more reason that we should applaud the people who put their own money toward these risky efforts.

The billionaire got lucky. That just means he risked his resources on an effort that ended up succeeding and helping others.

@freemo

@JamesK nope. Fuck the imaginary people living in the imaginary wasteland that these sensationalized hot takes are promoting.

If you're going to create fictions you might as well make them good.

@timo21

@rameshgupta first of all, a lot of those stories were sensationalized and debunked, but setting that aside,

You're asking why one branch of government was not subject to the mechanisms of an entirely different branch of government. It doesn't even matter what allegations you're making because the two branches are separate with different rules and different mechanisms.

It's like saying, you took a bribe, and why weren't you held accountable to the laws of a country on the other side of the world? Well the answer is clear, and has nothing to do with the bribe, it's that that's a different country without jurisdiction over you.

You think these justices took bribes. I think you're wrong, but whatever, the mechanisms for addressing that aren't the ones that you are proposing.

If you think justices took bribes the resolution isn't censure but impeachment. So don't complain about censure, which has nothing to do with it, push for impeachment.

It's just pointless to ask why a justice wasn't censured since censure isn't the resolution for accusations in the entirely separate branch of government.

@TruthSandwich@toad.social

@wjmaggos you are literally describing destruction and asking how it's self-destructive?

Great! You want things destroyed on your own terms! Don't we all wish to have that power?

It's for the best that we don't sanction it.

@freemo

@wjmaggos Well that's just a bad idea.

What you're describing is tearing down instead of building up, or more practically, it sets up cross purposes for the practice while supporting really unrealistic mythologies about how political power works.

If taxation is about political power then the country is generally going to reject it because most people aren't interested in social manipulation like that.

So when you inject such an idea it's very counterproductive. At least don't say it out loud even if you believe in such foolishness.

@freemo

@mho IMO a problem is that Mastodon doesn't focus on empowering users to craft their own experiences but rather centralizes the user experience, or otherwise takes it out of users' hands, so that we all have to argue about what the user experience should be like instead of simply tailoring it for ourselves.

To put it a different way, Mastodon seems to have a one size fits all mentality, so we all have to argue about what size.

This is a gripe of mine.

@rameshgupta You're trying to make some sort of point by comparing apples and oranges.

It's not a valid argument, and it promotes this ignorance of how the US government is actually set up, ignorance of civics, that people really need to know if they want to engage with their government.

No, justices aren't treated the same as legislators because they are in a completely different branch of government that is specifically designed so that they won't be treated the same as legislators.

It gets us nowhere to discuss US government operations while ignoring the structure of the US government.

@TruthSandwich@toad.social

@DavidBruchmann but our trust and judges should be rooted in their opinions, not their personalities.

In the US judicial opinions are public so that we can look at the opinions themselves and judge their output.

Unfortunately we have all of these media outfits and special interests that are encouraging us to judge the messengers instead of the messages, judging the books by the covers, whatever idiom you'd like to use.

In dramatizing the judicial system like that It distracts us from actually judging the judges based on their actual jobs.

It's really unhealthy for society.

@AnthonyFStevens

@AnthonyFStevens That's probably a good sign for UK judges.

FAR too often, and you're committing this yourself here, people talk about judges' supposed politics instead of actually looking at the logic and reasoning in their opinions. It's a strawman tactic.

Judges' opinions are right or wrong regardless of their personal politics, and yet we have so many in the press and on social media politicizing that non-political core of the issue.

If the UK manages to escape that misdirection, well I'm jealous.

@DavidBruchmann