@tillshadeisgone@are0h My understanding is that there is literally no moderation on Bluesky? That their "solution" is simply to filter out stuff the end user doesn't want to see, but to host anything and allow anyone to post?
@ntnsndr I say "without directly interacting" because it's not that hard for me to negotiate an arrangement with a person I am talking to directly without using money. I can build a website for a friend or community member in exchange for any good or service, or just for goodwill or an unspecified favor in the future. But once I need to work with a landlord or other entity outside the community that can't or won't operate at a personal level, I can't just say "my friend owes me a favor".
@shauna@ntnsndr@Matt_Noyes@GuerillaOntologist Yeah, what kind of power? And is it power you could wield without it corrupting you? Police and military power, to jail and kill opponents? Amassing private luxury to distribute to cronies? Such power is effective in blocking popular change, but it can't help us.
What is money good for? Helping people cooperate across time and space without directly interacting. Doing that without money is hard, but saving the planet with money may be impossible.
Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of the French, was once defeated by an army of tame bunny rabbits. He was forced to flee the scene, his dignity in tatters. ("The Campaigns of Napoleon" by David G. Chandler, pp. 593-594)
@evan I said qualified yes because sanctions are often ineffective.
For example, Kamil Galeev complains that sanctions against Russia have failed to target high-tech CNC manufacturing machines and similar items that can only be purchased from and maintained by the West. Without continuing active support from Western companies, his thesis is that Russia's ability to fight would collapse. https://kamilkazani.substack.com/p/why-is-russia-winning
I would support well-designed sanctions, not fake sanctions.
@ultranurd According to Wikipedia, in 2022 cars killed 42,795 Americans on public roads. That's an undercount, since I also care about deaths in private parking lots and driveways, but whatever. Divide by 52 weeks in a year, that's ~833 deaths each week. So less than COVID. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year
This might be a good pitch for urbanists who are horrified by traffic violence, but your average American also ignores car deaths, so maybe that won't help motivate action or introspection for them.
But let's take the official CDC figures at face value. Can we contextualize this? What else kills Americans at the rate of something like 1,000 deaths every week, more or less? I have trouble wrapping my head around it, and I'm sure I'm not alone.
@jalefkowit Damn, I'm not sure why this one hits me hard.
I guess because this is a lower death rate than earlier in the pandemic, but it still surpasses the casualty rates for a war that had mass movements protesting to end the death and killing, and our entire culture at the time was defined by it. We don't have the same scale of art and media against covid, not to mention the lack of organizing.
The Vietnam War was a defining event in my father's life. I guess COVID-19 will be one for me.
@ariadne If you want a really different future, imagine that Free Jobs came out as trans relatively early, say the year 2000, and not long after that also came out as a furry. RMS comes around to support her; he publishes rants in favor of trans and furry rights, instead of arguing for sexual assault & child abuse.
The GNU project becomes an early center of trans and furry culture, and as we know these subcultures are the cutting edge of tech, GNU sees a renaissance and free software explodes.
@ariadne Imagine if he had a best friend who was Steve Jobs to his Woz. Nothing else about RMS changes, but his charismatic buddy has a very similar vision of the future that he's able to sell to both corporations and RMS.
It's nice to imagine that other things could have been different. Maybe RMS would have focused on coding instead of evangelism, confident that Free Jobs would carry the day and RMS could focus on the GNU operating system.
@evan Modern American telecoms aren't much more trustworthy than the NSA itself.
I approve of the general goal of giving people fedi accounts by default, but there has to be an entity that sucks less that could provide accounts, that isn't just an oligopoly I use only because there's no real alternative. What about the postal service, or libraries?
@evan I simply mean that Russia attempting to destroy Ukraine doesn't mean that all Russians want to kill or absorb Ukrainians, for example.
I feel this is especially important in the case of Palestine, where it does not seem entirely correct to say that Palestine invaded Israel and murdered and kidnapped people.
@evan It's possible that Hamas wants to wipe out Israel, just as Putin wants to wipe out Ukraine, and we have evidence that this is the case.
One important difference is the power dynamics. Russia is a nuclear power and Ukraine is not. Israel is a nuclear power and Hamas is not. There is no realistic scenario where Hamas has the ability to destroy Israel, but the Israeli gov't & military seem intent on wiping out Palestine.
And please let us remember to distinguish the gov't from the people.
@onepict@smallcircles Sadly, @strypey has this backwards. Masks, boosters, and other public health measures are how we get to go about our normal activities without interruption.
Instead, bands I want to see cancel tour dates because the band is sick. Friends I want to see are either temporarily unavailable because they have COVID, indefinitely unavailable because they have long COVID, or dead like my grandma who died with COVID. Each infection rolls the dice for new variants that kill & maim.
@technomancy@alienghic Fossil fuels aren't the friend of every state. For example, island nations are in danger of being completely submerged by rising sea levels. What if they provided letters of marque to privateers to attack fossil fuel infrastructure?
This sounds unlikely, but nations can start doing unusual things when faced with extinction.
@feditips OK, I think I'm starting to understand. So I am seeing this boost because I follow the #philly hashtag, but users on my server who don't subscribe to the hashtag won't get a notification about the boost?
With a traditional relay, what would happen if I subscribed to the Philly hashtag, and someone on another server posted about it? Would it just appear in my Home feed, without any sign that it came from a relay? How do traditional relays make servers notice posts?
@feditips Thank you for your help! I guess I could have filed a bug.
I just don't quite understand how relays in general work or how FediBuzz works in particular. Are people on other servers that use FediBuzz seeing any posts from the relay as boosts from FediBuzz? Are all relays like that?
@feditips I'm slightly confused as to how the FediBuzz relay(s) work. I subscribed our server to the "philly" tag, and then made a post using the philly tag. My own post was then boosted into my timeline by FediBuzz.
I don't think normal relays work this way, do they? Why is FediBuzz boosting stuff? Seems a little noisy.