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
@freemo it's not factually true that people will always give everything they own to live even one more day suffer free.
I know plenty of counter examples personally, and they show up everywhere from politicians engaging in rhetoric about people choosing to forego prescription refills through public policy complaints about folks taking risks with regard to mask mandates.
So no, in reality we see that people DO make exactly those choices in very capitalistic ways.
@freemo if you go with the definition that a free market must be devoid of influence then there cannot be any market, ever, regardless of government since all markets function in the context of influence.
If you go with your definition, then markets cannot ever exist regardless of government.
It's a useless definition.
@dashrandom assume? No. I'm emphatic about it!
Yes, capitalism is default human behavior, and we can see that evidenced around us every single day.
Heck, at the moment you're investing time typing your message. You're spending resources on that project in hopes of some return on your investment in time, typing into some device that you invested into in the past, all with trade involved, all looking for increased value to come out in the end.
You've invested your capital in hopes of future gain.
That's capitalism for you, the default human behavior.
Did you ask permission to write your comment? Were you forced to make it? Unlikely. And yet, even such force would be overriding the capitalistic default.
When Marjorie Taylor Greene hammers Johnson on the basis of his being "the Republican leader" she shows her own ignorance, but more importantly, she expresses a critical misunderstanding that's pretty rife throughout the US population.
No, Johnson is not the Republican leader. As Speaker he's the voice of the entire House, including Democrats, in contrast to Steve Scalise, who as Majority Leader is the actual Republican leader.
The reason this isn't mere technicality is that Democrats absolutely have a say in the Speaker and can support or oppose the ouster of a speaker and choice of a new one.
#MTG is an idiot, though the public can be excused for not knowing this detail. Unfortunately, politicians take advantage of that, contributing to congressional dysfunction.
@tusk81 I go the other way.
The election interference claim generally rests on election regulations that are pretty questionable in their own right, handcuffs on ways that candidates wish to interact with potential voters that are pretty in the legal weeds.
Hush-money and prostitutes are probably more important to so many voters than technical accounting compliance.
@codeyarns Starship has flown successfully.
No, the launches didn't reach stretch goals, but they certainly hit their milestones, as announced before each attempt.
@atheistengineer at this stage in the process it's a question for the other two branches of government, not the Supreme Court.
@karlauerbach but if IP addresses change, DNS permanence is undermined by that other weak link in the chain.
Again, I don't think you're using the right tool for the job, and then complaining that the tool doesn't work well.
@freemo but that there would indeed be a market proves my point.
You say the market may not exist if if governments pass laws, and yet, there it is.
The rest gets into rabbitholes of what constitutes market freedom. I'd say that markets always react to influences, and government influence is not particularly different from any other.
A market will react to the influences of weather or tech advancement or government dictat or a viral video. No market is free from influence; that's in fact the value of markets, the ability to respond to those influences.
I'd say the critical freedom is the ability of the participant to choose whether or not to accept a transaction, no matter the source of influences going into the transaction.
But at the end of the day, capitalism exists regardless of governments, requiring neither support nor sanction from government.
@happyborg you can't have permanent content accessible data. That is a pipe dream. All data accessibility relies on someone being around who is willing to expend resources to serve it, and that cannot be guaranteed.
So first step is to get away from talking about permanence, which is just not something that can be promised.
Second step is to separate different roles being provided by different tools here.
DNS does not serve the content--That's just not what that tool does, not the role it plays-- so you can't really talk about keeping data alive in the same context as DNS. DNS doesn't do that in the first place.
In the end, you're free to run your own DNS. Any of us can start our own name servers to provide whatever lookup we want, for as long as we want.
I think you are just really confusing a lot of different topics here.
@witchescauldron but there's no running away, and that's what I'm trying to point out.
Spacex didn't run away with public money.
Rather, they provided services to the public that our elected officials thought were worth purchasing. But you can't address that reality without looking at what was actually purchased.
In fact, some of the services that SpaceX provided were purchased specifically to help with climate change issues! Some of the orbital infrastructure is focused on exactly that topic and related ones.
Again, if you look at only the bill without looking at what was published then you don't see the full picture.
@karakam King seems to be overlooking something that's incredibly important right now: Democrats far outnumber radical Republicans, so it requires Democratic support for them to make their stand.
We see this over and over again in the voting rolls.
We really need to be holding the Democrats accountable for partnering with the hard line Republicans.
@nadiaalbelushi@mastodon.social Well that's not right, BlueSky also provides more tools to help users protect themselves from seeing racist content.
The BlueSky moderation system is one of its more interesting features.
@witchescauldron but you're not considering what the money actually paid for, specifically.
The US didn't just throw money at SpaceX. It bought goods and services from them. So this picture is incomplete if you don't consider what it received in exchange.
@lawprofblawg seems like that would be quite the leap
@karlauerbach sounds like a good time to bring up #IPFS where content is located by its hash rather than some location or DNS record.
Really, it sounds like you're trying to use DNS for something it was never intended for, and complaining that it doesn't do well something that it was never supposed to do in the first place.
DNS was not supposed to be about permanence.
@freemo you talk about governments passing laws, and that's exactly it: governments are extremely limited in what they can do in reality. Yeah they can pass laws all day long, and they can devote more and more resources into trying to execute those laws, and yet governments cannot in reality perfectly implement law.
A government can outlaw anything, but that doesn't mean it's going to stop.
How's that war on drugs going?
And so capitalism will remain no matter what government thinks of it, just like drug use.
Government can try to suppress it if it wants, but capitalism is so natural, so tied into the human experience, it will exist regardless of what a government official signs into law.
And really that emphasizes my point. That a government might choose to oppose and crack down on capitalism just highlights that capitalism exists outside of government. For government to have to oppose it means that it must exist without government in the first place, separate from government.
Just like drug use 🙂
@dashrandom but that's simply not true
Capitalism will exist regardless of government. Government has no say over whether capitalism exists.
Capitalism is such a natural human institution that it has the same status as, say, language.
People will talk to each other regardless of what government thinks about it. Capitalism is such a fundamental element of life that we neither need government permission nor care what government thinks about it.
Humans do capitalism because capitalism is in our incentives. We don't ask permission from government to do capitalism.
@WarnerCrocker Oh, I think recent events show very clearly that a lot of people who have been running and even getting elected have absolutely no idea how to work the system.
We are electing morons. We are actively going to the polls and actively casting votes for morons.
We are actually electing people who don't know how to work the system, and that's actually a problem!
We should stop. We should stop getting in our cars or on the public transport or whatever, stop taking time out of our day, stop showing our voter registration cards and going through all the extra effort it takes to vote for idiots.
We are doing that. We should stop doing that.
@WarnerCrocker stop reelecting politicians who have failed us.
The thing is, it's not that we roll the dice and take a chance on a politician. It's that so often we elect a politician, see that they screw up, and then we affirmatively reelect them to continue screwing up.
We should stop.
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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