Notices by Matt Wilcox (mattwilcox@mstdn.social)

@tyil @graphicore @lgm @halla @celesteh @federicomena @doctormo Oh I agree with you. But persuading others to change viewpoints isn’t achieved through only one method, and to me it seemed unlikely head on challenges were going to work here. So; I took the other tactic. If people can be persuaded to change their choices for personal impact reasons, it’s a start that may soften them to consider the _actual_ reasons.

@tyil @graphicore @lgm @halla @celesteh @federicomena @doctormo Or to put it another way; arguing people into other viewpoints isn’t a one step process. Often by arguing you just reinforce their position if they’re emotionally attached to it. So, you have to find a way to achieve the practical thing first (end an undesirable action) and then work on persuading them to your side. Not try pounding a nail harder.

@graphicore @lgm @halla @celesteh @federicomena @doctormo More practically and usefully: Why put yourself in the situation of “picking a side” on a clearly controversial issue, where multiple orgs have seen enough to officially cut ties, when there are surely many other people who could enjoy a spotlight and benefit the actual topic - without the risk? Why choose to do this? Pragmatically, does the move make sense?

Have people over 45 realised how bat-shit-insane phone calls are yet?

“It’s perfectly normal that anyone at any time can interrupt my life with absolutely no context and has to be engaged with exactly then and at no other time”

Have they realised that “why don’t people call my business if they’ve been on the website” is because entire generations of people *hate phone calls*? It’s the most hostile form of communication?

No joke; you won’t get my business if I have to call you. Or you call me.

@fae2535 Because that's how federation works. Your own server may not have seen all the responses from other servers yet. It's a technical limitation of not being a centralised service.

@fae2535 No worries. It's one of those quirks of the platform - it's not obvious why it'd be that way.

Mastodon isn't "one giant thing" like Twitter. When you post, it takes time for other servers to know about it. Same for replies to posts. Not all servers know about each other, so replies from one of those places might be missing for you - unless you go to the same server as the person who's post you're looking at.

TLDR: A nerdy weirdness of the system.

```Threads and Instagram users will no longer be able to opt out of being shown political content from people they do not follow, parent company Meta has announced.

The firm says its part of its reorientation towards "free expression"```

It's not free expression if it's forced on you, you transparently evil dipshits.

"Free expression" means you're able to say things that aren't illegal (like hate speech is), not that people have to listen.

@feld Lets not blame users for not using archaic methods of navigating the web, when browser vendors have changed what a URL bar does and thereby encouraged exactly this sort of use. Most kids have no friggin' idea about typing "http", or adding a ".com". Nor would they ever need to know.

@tk@bbs.kawa-kun.com @hertg

@feld (But this sort of thing is exactly why I argued that full URLs should always be shown, and the address bar shouldn't do double duty as a search input... but we lost that war long long long ago) @hertg

How do we know the world's going through a cost-of-energy crisis? Oh, well this small-time woodworker from the UK with 14k subscribers has one video with almost half a million views. About turning coffee and sawdust waste into fuel for heating. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrUE1Hs82iQ

If you want a gauge of how fucked western society has become by handing power to less-and-less qualified people with less and less oversight and less and less compassion...

This was all avoidable. Technically.

And this is why I have my heirarchy of educational needs. The things I believe should be taught *at school*.

1. Compassion.
Miss this, you'll fuck up everything because your aim and your contexts will be bad.

2. Critical thinking.
So you can establish cause, consequence, and probabilities.

3. Trust and Bias.
So you apply 2 to people. Because as someone good at 1 you don't want to be manipulated by people good at 2 who can't grok 1. Sociopaths exist.

All the other stuff? Less important.

Louder, for people not getting it:

Fascism is the inevitable result of a society with large imbalances of personal security. Which in a capitalist society means large imbalances of wealth.

If your society allows some people to be mega secure and untouchable, while also allowing large portions of it to feel very insecure... you will become a fascist society, eventually.

Do not allow this. Do not allow excessive wealth stratification. It. will. Destroy. Your. Civilisation.

Fascism is inevitable if the wider people feel poorer and less secure than they want to be. People like that seek to blame others, and that leads to fascism.

To defeat fascism, you tax the rich and spend it on the poor. You eliminate billionaires.

That's the only mechanism that will reliably work over periods of time.

EU; change tactics. Stop walking the USA/UK path. Raise taxes on the rich, spend on your public services. Watch the fascists power vanish.

@bastianallgeier As someone in the UK who’s on the other side of that absolute ruination. Hold what you have tight.

How times change.

Used to be if you wanted to search for how to do a thing in just JS you couldn't find anything because all results were jQuery.

Then it was because all results are React.

Now it's made-up code generated by an AI, powered by tossing a childs-weight of CO2 into the atmosphere - that also doesn't work.

Truly, the progress we make is astounding.

You may not be aware of the economics of Mastodon if you're used to Twitter, or Insta, or Facebook.

Please - go look at the /about page for whatever server you're on, and see who's running it and now to contribute, financially.

You are not the product on Mastdon. Your information is not being sold to other companies or advertisers. So your activity here *costs the person running your service money*. It's often a person, not company.

If you value Mastodon, and you can, please cover your cost.

Hey, those of you on mstdn.social - @stux runs this server and it's literally just him. You may not see his Announcements.

He's short a few hundred euro's on the server bills this month.

Please - contribute to help cover your costs.

This is not a big company service. It's not a Twitter or Facebook. It's costing a person money for you to use.

Please - pay some money to cover your costs. It's the fair thing to do.

Thank you.

Info on how to donate: https://mstdn.social/about

“Well what about XyZ?”

Did I stutter? *all* citizens. You all pay taxes, you all live together, choices made by gov effect all of you. So you all get a say. Automatically. Nothing should make any persons voice not count. Yes that includes criminals. ALL get a vote.

For a self proclaimed world leading democracy, so many of the systems in play seem very far removed from that bold claim and much more “keep the current rich white guys in power” encoded in the system as a whole.

Do Americans realise how absolutely insane the very concept of “purging a voter registration list” is? You have to *register to vote*? What are you even talking about?

Are you a citizen? Then you should automatically get a vote. There isn’t anything to administer. You live there. The government serves you; not you it. Voting isn’t supposed to be a privilege, or reward.

The obvious abuse vector that any system other than “all citizens vote” becomes is astounding.

Imagine if all the collective money spent of “self driving cars” had been spent on public transport.

As in, not cars - which are ultimately bad solutions for most of the world - but punctual and pervasive clean-energy public trams, trains, and buses.

It’d have cost less and been far more useful for far more people. Including non-drivers. And actually be here. Today. Working.