volkris @volkris@qoto.org

@mildpeach what law was that?

@BlueWaveSurfer@universeodon.com

@mhjohnson I really always want to emphasize that the politicians and others have been lying to us for so long when they treat social security as something that is guaranteed.

If we can be honest about it and point out that social security is just another federal program that can be ended literally any day then maybe people would look into it more closely to make sure it is solvent.

So here's a chance for me to shout it out 🙂

Social security in the US is just another federal program with no guarantee that it will exist tomorrow. So push your representatives to have a solid plan for going forward with it, if you want it to go forward.

@Nazareno yep.

And that's why we need to be so worried about propaganda and getting solid information out to the whole world.

A whole lot of groups have incentives to set up these dominoes, and once they fall it could be bad.

We really need to push journalists to do better.

@Nazareno but it's not clear what the solution is to this.

It's hard to break through when propaganda has so infiltrated people who seek out bias confirmation.

@magitweeter keep in mind that the tenant is also imposing the terms of the rental agreement on the landlord.

The tenant demands everything from access through maintenance as per the rental agreement.

So it's funny to talk about the difference between selling the house versus renting when as a renter, the rental agreement gives me control over the landlord that I would not have if I had just outright bought the house.

If I buy my house then I am responsible for fixing all the things, and that's a trade-off that I might not be willing to make. So long as I continue to rent I can order the landlord to fix things as per the rental agreement.

So there's a difference, but it's a different set. Goes both ways. Both the landlord and the renter give up control upon the sale. That's not necessarily good for either of them, which is why we have rentals in the first place.

@Vincarsi

@resuna That's a shame because it seems like you had at least an interest in discussing this.

Really it comes down to whether you value voters or political parties as the core element of the political system.

If you really just want a third party for some reason, then sure, we can talk about ways to generate and safeguard a third party even though that is bad for voters under the US voting system, but we need to be clear about that being the goal.

My goal is to improve democracy and improve the representation for voters, and I don't care about whether there's a third party or not when that doesn't benefit voters.

If your goal is just to have a third party for some reason, fine. That's not my cause, but everyone has their own values.

@cinnarose @1dalm @brianklaas

@Wraithe

Well I'm not disagreeing with you, but there is the dimension of the story that they are claiming to be decentralized to some level, and a fundamental part of decentralization is that things like moderation and reporting are also decentralized, so technically that shouldn't be a problem for them.

However, to your point, it might remain a PR issue for them that they might not know how to deal with, as none of us know how to deal with it. Even this platform doesn't really know how to do with it.

To put it a different way, technically, they are probably pretty prepared for the moderation issues because technically there's not that much of an issue in a decentralized system.

But PR wise, yeah I can imagine them having some real behind the scenes trouble dealing with the question.

@marqle

@magitweeter Right, and when a landlord agrees to let a tenant live in his house he gives up control as per the rental agreement.

So this is exactly an illustration of how hoarding is undermined in our society. The landlord declines to hoard control as he gives up control to his tenant.

@Vincarsi

@trans_caracal I love that I asked whether you are informed, and your reply is basically leaning really hard into ignorance, proudly sharing that you don't know this background.

I don't know whether I am sorry or not that you haven't had that breadth of experience, but if you had more experience in this topic then you might have a different opinion.

Ignorance is bliss, as they say. Confirmation bias is warm and fluffy. The real world is more complicated and has sharp points.

I'd encourage you to expand your worldview, but you do you.

@MisuseCase Hey, you know what? There are more important things in the world than me.

No idea why you want to talk about me. I'm not that interesting.

@Wraithe that may be.

My speculation is that the platform just isn't written well enough and they're worried about the servers bogging down unless they can rewrite the programs to deal with more people.

But I don't think there's a way for us to know what the issue is at this point.

@marqle

@magitweeter as you said, the tenant gets the ability to accept the terms as written by the landlord or to refuse them.

The landlord doesn't have the ability to set terms for other people.

In this case, the other people have the ability to accept the terms or not.

At this point you are so far away from the topic of wealthy people hoarding. Now you're down to arguing about the details of contractual negotiations, and really, I think that shows just how tenuous the original argument was.

Yeah, wealthy people hoard things! How do you know? Because a tenant has the ability to accept the offer made by a landlord.

I think it's just really striking how far from the original argument you're going now.

Far from hoarding wealth, you're talking about whether a landlord is going to fix a dryer when it breaks.

@Vincarsi

@DrALJONES if the hospital is being used as a military base, as claimed, it's not a war crime to attack it.

This is a really important point to discourage militaries from using places like hospitals as military installations, as that endangeres patients, as we are seeing right now.

It's not a deliberate war crime if the accusations are true.

@Wraithe Yeah, in my opinion at least the thing has been in invite only beta mode for a surprisingly long time at this point

I'm interested in it, but boy they really need to get going.

@marqle

@magitweeter I don't know what you're talking about.

Most rental agreements involve tenants paying rent in exchange for the landlord giving up his ability to do things like evicting them.

@Vincarsi

@resuna this has nothing to do with any other country, as other countries have different voting systems and different cultures and different representative systems. So comparing to another country is apples and oranges. There's no point to it.

But, ABSOLUTELY the two party system allows people to choose the lesser of two evils. The problem is that having more parties than that undermines that ability.

Given the US propensity for first past the post voting, additional parties mean that voters are disempowered from voting for the lesser of two evils. At that point, they're likely to vote for the greatest of three evils.

And that's a step backwards.

Again, the reason we have two parties is to solve the problem of the voting system, to avoid wasted ballots.

Voters organize themselves into two parties because the voting system sucks. With more than two parties, we still have the sucky voting system, but we no longer can mitigate its problems.

Of course, this only matters if you care about voters.
If you only care about parties then ok.

@cinnarose @1dalm @brianklaas

@magitweeter but I think that ends up being theory that runs into a brick wall of reality.

The landlord has to relinquish control of the property when renting it to a person. When I sign a rental agreement, the landlord agrees that I get control as per the agreement.

I get to walk in and out of the front door as I wish, cook food, sleep, do all of those things as per the agreement that the landlord has signed on to.

So I don't think it's realistic to frame this as the landlord being in control when the whole realistic situation. Here is the landlord giving up control.

And this is so core to what I'm trying to say: you talk about hoarding wealth when in reality our societies encourage people to give up wealth.

If you want to define wealth as something like control, I think that's unusual way to define it, but even then, when we look at the real world we see the opposite of hoarding, we see landlords giving up their control to their tenants.

@Vincarsi

@marqle well BlueSky is just a fundamentally different platform that doesn't use the same model as ActivityPub with its focus on instances above all, so it's really apples and oranges.

It's like saying this electric car isn't going to run on gasoline. They're just fundamentally different.

It might be that the BlueSky system is better. We will see once it is more finalized.

@Wraithe

@cowanon what?

@trans_caracal have you never heard that phrase used as an explicit demand that Jews be killed?

Because I sure have.

Your statement comes across as akin to those saying swastikas don't necessarily represent bad things because the symbol predated certain bad things.

Yes, maybe there are multiple ways to interpret the phrase, but just keep in mind that the phrase has represented explicit genocidal hate speech quite often.