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
After watching the mess ProPublica stirred up around Thomas, it seems like a reasonable step to take.
Why let PP's allegations go unanswered for perhaps days? Might as well call them out ahead of time.
Firstly, those federal laws apply to lower courts, and cannot legally apply to the Supreme Court without violating constitutional independence of the Court.
Secondly, financial disclosure rules don't apply to every single transaction, and these social trips were not even covered by the rules.
ProPublica's suggestions otherwise are horribly misleading of the public.
It does. However, so many people are not taken in by the yellow journalism of ProPublica that impeachment remains a longshot.
Alito seems to have been doing his job. We can read his opinions for ourselves to see that all of these personal attacks are distractions from the actual job.
We really shouldn't empower sensationalized press outfits to decide our government officials for us.
The problem is, mainstream outfits from NBC through AP have pointed out that this account doesn't even agree with the charges ProPublica was putting out, not to get into whether ProPublica itself has the story correct.
These outfits really need to get their stories straight.
As usual from ProPublica, this is just muckracking. The outfit would do much more good for the public by covering the reasoning in decisions rather than sensationalized personal attacks on members of the court.
Alito pointed out that ProPublica was about to publish yet another misleading article, and it seemed pretty reasonable to want to get ahead of the story.
Just one sample, if Alito came to the same conclusion as almost the entire rest of the court, maybe, just maybe, there was nothing untoward going on here?
@coctaanatis@mstdn.social
It's the same *reason* that the ProPublica attacks are so offbase. They were misinformed about Thomas, and they are misinformed about Alito.
But so long as people keep clicking on their nonsense, they'll keep on publishing it.
They weren't gifts. That was debunked pretty quickly. Not that such debunking really pierces the narrative that people believe when they trust that outfit.
Just because ProPublica was wrong twice doesn't somehow make it right.
I really don't think you understand their arguments if you think this issue would tie them into knots.
Here, I'll link to Bruen if you'd like you read more.
In particular, the operational part isn't the one you quoted, but rather the right itself. What is the right, exactly, that shall not be infringed? We get the don't infringe this, but... don't infringe what?
Thomas writes that a government wanting to regulate must show that what it's infringing upon isn't part of this right, by showing it not to have been part of the right alluded to.
And so, just as Thomas recognizes that the right did not extend to all locations, he'd probably recognize that the right didn't extend to people under the influence of drugs.
Nope. I have no idea what statistical methods Netflix might be applying internally, but I'm definitely pretty skeptical of the right-wing conspiracy.
Yes, I know many people feel that way.
I'd rather have a more functional protocol that better provides features so many are clamoring for, better serving those users, regardless of associations.
Those stories were based on [possibly intentional] misunderstandings of how #Bitcoin works.
It absolutely doesn't take a significant amount of energy to transmit a Bitcoin transaction. The one way hashes involved in signing the message are trivial, which is the whole point of a one way hash.
So those stories would be like computing the energy cost of writing a letter by including the energy used to transport the letter by air across the country for some reason.
But heck, those narratives got clicks, so ::shrug::
Don't overlook the very top, where it says the DAG can waive any of this.
But either way, was he really brandishing? The press release only said owning.
Owning a gun knowing that he wasn't allowed to as he was under the influence of a controlled substance...
Right wingers a probably pretty cool with penalizing drug users.
Personally, I think all too often folks focus on moderation without considering ways of empowering users to create the experiences they want without relying on the work of instance owners, especially considering the complexity of an owner trying to implement moderation that matches different actual wants of users.
Surely there are ways to hand this power to users, to craft their own experiences, especially when it's something like Barcelona.
Have you spent much time actually listening to Federalist Society content?
They're really not the conservative/libertarian monsters that so many articles like to portray them as.
They spend quite a lot of time amplifying voices of those taking exactly anti-conservative/anti-libertarian perspectives, as they seek to promote discourse across aisles and avoid echochambers.
Sounds like it's still useful for you, so not so much garbage?
An issue is that #ActivityPub was more or less designed centralized around instances, for better or worse, so ideas like SSO or other ways of using accounts across instances is a bit incompatible with the underlying technology.
There are ways to kludge it on, but it wasn't designed with that objective.
This is one area in which other systems like #Bluesky might be better, having made their different engineering choices in their cores.
Maybe one way to think about it is that any distributed system is necessarily less efficient, but now costs in terms of computing and storage and network capacity have gone down so far that we are making a transition to a new phase where we can afford that inefficiency.
It used to be that a website could only operate in a very capital intensive form, but it's no longer so capital intensive, so we no longer have to rely on that infrastructure to amass capital to make it work.
Well it's slightly more complicated.
In the Fediverse content doesn't live on just one instance but is instead distributed to different instances that are following the discussion.
However, that content is not distributed to ALL instances, nor are instances required to preserve all of the content that comes in through the fire hose.
So it's kind of in between.
If that instance goes down there will be some content preserved in some other locations.
Definitely Fediverse over ActivityPub.
The former is the platform that they are going to join, while the latter is just the language that makes the platform work.
It's like saying join me at that coffee shop for a chat versus join me to speak some English.
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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