Notices by craignicol (craignicol@glasgow.social)

OK, who had the return of The British Empire because everyone is afraid of Americans on their 2025 bingo card?

https://mstdn.ca/@soc_i_ety/114078291164177560

@MikeElgan Musk is fond of his mental models, especially the "everyone who argues against me with facts is retarded" and "if they keep talking I'll need to shut them up" models

When Chile fell to a dictator, a group of workers thousands of miles away realised they could dramatically impair his attacks on the populace by refusing to fix the planes he was using.

Today, it's not planes, but there's still a lot of workers needing to maintain the infrastructure.

Nae Pasaran - Wikipedia
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nae_Pasaran

Why is anyone surprised that Zuckerberg, whose first success was a site to rate the hotness of women who hadn't given their consent, and later used his site to experiment with people's emotions, is a right wing arsehole?

@dalias @mekkaokereke I know people who had temporary bans from Facebook for unknown reasons but got reinstated and are still there. I don't see why that behaviour wouldn't be replicated here. If moderation isn't something you think about much, why would it matter to you if it was a faceless AI or a faceless minimum wage worker (or volunteer) that's deleted that one message in support of Harris?

@dalias @mekkaokereke people accept instances with barely any moderation (well, a lot of instances defederate them, but they remain popular) and I'm sure threads will stay. It's not something I'll be comfortable with, but it's a trade-off people who don't feel threatened here might accept.

@mekkaokereke I suspect there's more than one startup who will offer AI moderation as one of the three - there must be enough public social media data to train a decent spam filter.

Mastodon/ActivityPub extensions for common platforms so anyone with an existing community can extend it into the Fedi without new hardware

A Mastodon fork optimised for shared hosting so a small admin team can run hundreds of instances on a handful of servers

@AnarchoNinaWrites elections are necessary but not sufficient for democracy. Without an informed populace organising and agitating for better policies, politicians will happily take the money and dig our graves.

@quinn is there a QAnon conspiracy about him yet?

@adriano @mekkaokereke I suspect a lot of countries will follow Italy's lead, without seeing where it got them.

@adriano @mekkaokereke and a big sexism too, IIRC. Wasn't that Burlusconi's time?

@mekkaokereke you can see just how low Italy's birth rate is here. Like Japan, the birth rate is well below the replacement level, so the population is shrinking leaving a shrinking younger population to look after a growing older population. I can see this happening in the USA too, but that's going to put a lot more pressure on an already fragile white male population, which is not going to help the numbers in the graphs you presented.

@ben_lings @mekkaokereke I took extended paternity before it came in, but that took a lot of planning, and a bit of luck that it crossed Christmas and a reset of annual leave at new year. I'm sure that played a big part in bonding, so I'm glad the new dads have greater access to that valuable opportunity.

@mekkaokereke interestingly, Sweden's male suicide rate is comparable to USA, but Germany, Denmark, Norway and UK are much lower https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/suicide-rate-by-country

@mekkaokereke there's definitely a stronger gender balance in Scandinavia and it's spread to some places in Europe, but certainly not places like Italy, which has a dramatically low birth rate partially because women just won't (see also the 4b appropriation in USA, but Italy's objection is more individual than organised)

@mekkaokereke UK feels like it's stuck between Europe and US on this (like many other things). Definitely feels like a generational shift, my parents generation would definitely be the US way, the generations after me are generally the European way in the majority, and Gen X me still feels like I stick out like a sore thumb because I'm the only dad in the mums group - even though I meet other dads at the school.

@mekkaokereke I wonder if that's a result of Black men traditionally having many more female role models than White men? So strength and success are not seen as purely male attributes? There's plenty of white women who were written out of history in favour of their husbands or colleagues.

@AnarchoNinaWrites they want to change facts to fit their beliefs instead of the other day round.

@AnarchoNinaWrites which is depressing because what does it matter if you're bankrupt in a post-scarcity world? They're only hiding into the myth because it gives them power. And they'd rather have power in a dead world than life in a fair world.

@AnarchoNinaWrites of course. They can control the supply of fossil fuels. If they can't control the supply, the capitalist mythos crumbles to dust. And even if most of us switch to less and less, burning fuel is what keeps their wealth high. In the yachts and the private jets, and the war machinery. It's a self-preserving myth

And if that lie is exposed, everything is up for grabs, and the hierarchy cannot be sustained.