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
But the article is talking about US workers, and the US BLS data show a significantly lower percentage of the population working.
Those aren't missing. We know exactly where they are... and they're not going anywhere anytime soon.
volkris
boosted
Last night the 11yo broke down the Google Slides middle school Chatroom for me:
1. At first they used a Google doc but the infinite scroll was too chaotic
2. In the slide deck each new slide is one “post”—some all text, some images, some both—
3. They use slides’ comments feature to “reply” to each other’s “posts”
4. This allows participants to easily flip between posts using the slide thumbnail navigation, so they can find the conversations they care about easily
5. He owns the file & if anyone spams it, deletes other people’s posts, or gets nasty, he can revert the file to its previous save state & remove the spammer’s access
6. He did share the file with me on purpose, I think because he was proud & wanted me to see what he’d made
Essentially they’ve created a chatroom with moderation in Google Slides, so they can get around the school’s ban on platforms like Discord. It’s kind of brilliant
It's not a very good argument for removing fares, though. The removal of fares would do no good outside of the accounting and rhetoric, leaving transit no better off under this argument.
It may be an argument to justify public spending on transit, but it doesn't say much about removing fares, which continue to have some positive impacts, just as do fees for roads.
@undefined @TCatInReality
I linked to the #CitizensUnited ruling above so that you can read directly from the Court that the case wasn't about caps or unlimited spending.
Like I said, there has been *so* much misreporting about this case over the years, leaving people so completely misinformed about what what it was about and what the ruling said.
To quote a one sentence summary from the intro:
"The Government may regulate corporate political speech through disclaimer and disclosure requirements, but it may not suppress that speech altogether."
So the #SCOTUS outright said government may regulate, and it's not about caps but about whether the #speech is to be disallowed completely.
Don't overlook the first half of the quotation that really emphasizes how government proposed to put up roadblocks to people trying trying to engage in the same speech that rich and powerful had either way..
It emphasizes that this wasn't about censorship of ideas but of individuals, which is squarely aimed at the administration's position that it would block speech based on the identity of the speaker.
The CU decision also emphatically and explicitly rejected the idea of completely unrestricted 1A freedom of speech. In the ruling the Court upheld restrictions!
You mischaracterized regulation of sources as regulation of ideas. They are not the same thing at all.
If the administration removes your, personal, ability to express yourself or my ability to listen to you, I would say that in itself is a problem, and that is what the ruling was ruling against.
The government may not censor you, it may not prevent you from speaking because of who you are.
The ruling was a very very clear that government can regulate campaigning in other ways. It just cannot censor based on identity of the speaker, choosing who is and isn't allowed to present their perspectives.
It's funny you say that when I found it striking how he left out that little voting thing that is practiced in the US.
So it was a summary of US Democracy that notably leaves out the Democracy part.
You did not.
You've misunderstood the argument, as it is not what you've framed and then criticized here.
You're fighting a strawman.
You're making a bunch of claims to support a questionable position, but with no particular basis for proving the claims themselves.
This is a silly post.
Yeah and the other part of that story is that when you set the privacy for your post, your instance still sends it to all of those other instances just with a little note saying who it's for, again basically politely requesting that the other instances don't share the post outside of the target recipients.
But same thing, there's no actual way to enforce that, so other instances are completely free to share private posts with everybody.
The system didn't have to be designed to work that way, but it's part of the design where it's not really decentralized but rather centralized among the instances. There's a lot of trust between instances, and I would have preferred to put users at the top of the hierarchy.
Well the way it works is that your instance broadcasts the posts to all of the other instances that it thinks might want to see them, so copies of the post live on all of those other instances, and they are free to do whatever they want with that content.
When you try to delete something your instance sends out a message to all of the other instances requesting politely that they delete from their own storage as well, but there's no way to make sure they actually do.
Basically, everything you post to this platform should be regarded as posting to the public with tags politely requesting privacy. And that might be good enough for most people, but I just want to make sure people are aware of that as they use the platform.
Well keep in mind that there's no way to force the deletion of posts in #Fediverse / #Mastodon either.
I'm always worried that far too few people are aware of that privacy issue.
I'm not sure what you're referring to. You included a link in your post that certainly showed up for me.
@WritingFactory Indeed! The facts are the facts, and you are here saying things that so many of us know to be factually wrong.
It's funny how you don't seem to mind that.
I don't know why you would be so interested in insisting that #Bitcoin isn't a currency, to the point where you would reject objective reality to get to that conclusion, but it seems pretty backwards to me.
So exactly, you say to be a currency it must be a medium of exchange that people accept, and a lot of us have experienced exactly that, trading Bitcoin for goods and services because people accept it.
This is why I mention that the argument has something of a gaslighting feel, as it makes claims that are contradicted by our own experiences.
Many people actually do buy things with Bitcoin. Many do accept Bitcoin as payment for their goods and services. So as for your definition, that sounds like a currency to me.
If you think his speech projected unity then you are very much not engaged with the larger political climate out there.
Biden's speech may have played lip service to unity, but it went out of its way to unnecessarily touch third rails that were obviously going to be divisive, and that word divisive.
Conservative outlets had a field day with the content he put out there in his speech, again unnecessarily, as they used it to show how he was taking positions that were divisive at least and out of touch in their perspectives.
Biden did not have to give the conservatives all of this ammunition. But he did. Presumably his speech writers decided to focus on gaining points with his base instead of avoiding those divisive topics. Given his poll numbers lately that's not surprising.
But yeah, this was not a unifying speech. It could have been, but he chose to go into topics that were going to split voters along party lines.
I'd go the other way with it.
I think a huge problem is liberals who have been refusing, often explicitly, to engage with the extremist arguments and point out why they are wrong. It has created a vacuum that allowed the extremists to grow, that allowed the conspiracy theories to stand without the debunking that they really needed.
It was all so predictable.
As liberals/progressives/democrats chose to exit the fight this was my warning that they were basically indulging crazy conservative conspiracy theories that would only grow in that darkness. And it worked out exactly the way we might have expected it to work out.
Who is proposing any cuts to these programs to be attached to borrowing authority?
It just sounds like such a straw man, such fear mongering, since I don't hear anybody actually proposing such cuts.
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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