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
@napocornejo what people have been misunderstanding is that the US is emphatically not the president. The whole system is set up so that the president is limited in his ability to make unilateral decisions.
Folks trusting presidents weren't trusting the US, and when those presidents broke their promises, that wasn't the US breaking promises.
That's why treaties are so important, and lately so overlooked.
@cobblefresh hey, don't let US voters off the hook: we chose this choice!
We get to choose our candidates, and we chose these two for some reason.
@kkarhan @micchiato@mastodon.social
@realcaseyrollins it's better to read the charges directly from court documents since the normal media tends to misreport what's actually going on.
Here's a link.
https://www.nycourts.gov/LegacyPDFS/press/PDFs/People-v-DonaldTrump2-15-24Decision.pdf
@dangillmor the answer is clear, though: so many folks using #Twitter are able to look past those naive, reductionist perspectives that obsess over Musk and instead consider the broader picture of how use of Twitter benefits their enterprises.
It's a cut of the nose to spite the face situation to give up the benefits of using a platform just because you have a personal issue with the personality associated with it.
@hyolo right! Capitalism is so fundamental to the human condition that we engage in it even when we don't think, explicitly, that this is capitalism we're doing.
We naturally invest resources for later payoff and make trades based on our interests even when we're not laying out spreadsheets to calculate cost/benefit analyses.
@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
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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