Notices by volkris@qoto.org, page 2

@BeAware again, that’s not how this platform works.

Behind the scenes, it doesn’t matter if you make your posts followers only or not, the way this platform is engineered behind the scenes, the content goes to people who aren’t followers.

Maybe it will only be shown to followers. Or maybe not. You have no way to know. That’s just how this platform is programmed.

Again to be clear what I’m saying is, you need to be aware that if you make your posts followers only, they will still be subject to going to people who aren’t followers.

This is a design choice that the programmers made, that I disagree with, but you need to know that it is happening.

@BeAware but it’s not though!

Scrapers are very much able to scrape your content, and everybody needs to be aware of that as they post on here.

People are posting content here left and right and saying they love to do it because it’s safe from the big corporations or whatever, and I would be absolutely amazed if those exact businesses aren’t having a field day vacuuming it all up.

This is why it’s so important to me to spread the word about how insecure this platform is, for better or worse. There are trade-offs, and I’m comfortable with them, but there’s a lot of people who don’t know the risks they’re taking here.

@BeAware this is an ax I grind because people need to be aware:

NO, there is no way to make your posts private so that there’s no way for anyone to see them without your permission.

Anyone posting to Fediverse need to be aware that by virtue of how this thing is engineered, there is absolutely no guarantee of such privacy.

A lot of people are posting things they think are private when they’re not, and I find that hugely problematic.

@BeAware just view it as a language that you might not be fluent in.

Don’t feel dumb, just feel like it’s another language that you get rusty from not using!

@Rasta

Well, I’d grind my own ax some more here :)

The job of Congress is for 530+ individual members to show up and represent concerns of their own voters and build compromise and consensus about what the US government should be doing, whatever concerns those may be.

BUT all too often people are ignoring their own representatives and voting for people who are doing the opposite of what they’d have them do.

Whether voters want their congressperson to be talking about infrastructure or books, well it’s up to them, but they need to make sure their empowered person is doing what they want.

The job of Congress is to represent the concerns of the country, whether those are my concerns or your concerns or not.

@Free_Press

@sj_zero but in the end, no matter how or why a representative votes the way he might, his voters that probably reelected him are affirming that yes, he did right, he deserves to go back and keep doing what he’s doing.

We must not get lost in the drama to the point that we forget that we vote for our reps. We empower whatever it is they’re doing.

@Rasta @Free_Press

@freemo you’re leaning heavily into a strawman argument here, a very common one.

A vote is an expression of a stance. What you’re proposing is that we should take various stances and just funnel them all into one stance that will in many cases be completely opposite to the voters’ own positions.

For example, I won’t vote for either Biden or Trump because I believe both parties need to nominate better candidates. They must if they want my vote. So many others share my position.

We hope that the parties, particularly the losing party, will take that position to heart in the future.

BUT as different people will frame our position as support for either candidate, instead of rejection for both, is to get our position exactly backwards AND miss the call to change, to put forward a better nominee.

The strawman argument of voting for something instead of rejection substitutes what we actually believe for something completely backwards of what we believe, missing the call for a solution in the process.

@hornblower

@icedquinn that’s a realization that I wish more people would come to.

Not only do so many protests seem pointless in the first place, but so many are counterproductive, actually hurting their own causes by pissing off people they inconvenience.

All too often protests are just parties full of people who don’t realize the negative impacts they’re having.

It’s pointless at best.

@dashrandom assume? No. I’m emphatic about it!

Yes, capitalism is default human behavior, and we can see that evidenced around us every single day.

Heck, at the moment you’re investing time typing your message. You’re spending resources on that project in hopes of some return on your investment in time, typing into some device that you invested into in the past, all with trade involved, all looking for increased value to come out in the end.

You’ve invested your capital in hopes of future gain.

That’s capitalism for you, the default human behavior.

Did you ask permission to write your comment? Were you forced to make it? Unlikely. And yet, even such force would be overriding the capitalistic default.

@freemo @avlcharlie @mapto

@freemo it's not factually true that people will always give everything they own to live even one more day suffer free.

I know plenty of counter examples personally, and they show up everywhere from politicians engaging in rhetoric about people choosing to forego prescription refills through public policy complaints about folks taking risks with regard to mask mandates.

So no, in reality we see that people DO make exactly those choices in very capitalistic ways.

@dashrandom @avlcharlie @mapto

@freemo if you go with the definition that a free market must be devoid of influence then there cannot be any market, ever, regardless of government since all markets function in the context of influence.

If you go with your definition, then markets cannot ever exist regardless of government.

It’s a useless definition.

@dashrandom @avlcharlie @mapto

@freemo but that there would indeed be a market proves my point.

You say the market may not exist if if governments pass laws, and yet, there it is.

The rest gets into rabbitholes of what constitutes market freedom. I’d say that markets always react to influences, and government influence is not particularly different from any other.

A market will react to the influences of weather or tech advancement or government dictat or a viral video. No market is free from influence; that’s in fact the value of markets, the ability to respond to those influences.

I’d say the critical freedom is the ability of the participant to choose whether or not to accept a transaction, no matter the source of influences going into the transaction.

But at the end of the day, capitalism exists regardless of governments, requiring neither support nor sanction from government.

@dashrandom @avlcharlie @mapto

@freemo you talk about governments passing laws, and that’s exactly it: governments are extremely limited in what they can do in reality. Yeah they can pass laws all day long, and they can devote more and more resources into trying to execute those laws, and yet governments cannot in reality perfectly implement law.

A government can outlaw anything, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to stop.

How’s that war on drugs going?

And so capitalism will remain no matter what government thinks of it, just like drug use.

Government can try to suppress it if it wants, but capitalism is so natural, so tied into the human experience, it will exist regardless of what a government official signs into law.

And really that emphasizes my point. That a government might choose to oppose and crack down on capitalism just highlights that capitalism exists outside of government. For government to have to oppose it means that it must exist without government in the first place, separate from government.

Just like drug use 🙂

@dashrandom @avlcharlie @mapto

@WarnerCrocker stop reelecting politicians who have failed us.

The thing is, it’s not that we roll the dice and take a chance on a politician. It’s that so often we elect a politician, see that they screw up, and then we affirmatively reelect them to continue screwing up.

We should stop.

@WarnerCrocker It’s up to all of us.

If we decide differently, things will be different.

We should not accept disempowerment.

@WarnerCrocker Well like so many topics it comes from all of us, we need more education in the general population so that we can stop reelecting the same officials who keep failing us and demand better.

I suggest we educate all of us better.

So, you know, no, there’s no optimism that things are going to get better any time soon 🙂

@WarnerCrocker It’s the difference between could versus will.

Yes, that political option is on the table. No, there’s no realistic chance that the politicians that we have elected will take that option.

@WarnerCrocker Well of course it has a lot to do with politics since political decisions impacted the money supply which impacted the prices charged for that money.

@freemo I wouldn't say it's a property of governments any more than having secretaries operate Windows PCs is.

If that's really what you consider a property of governments, then I don't see what the value of emphasizing that property is.

@freemo capitalism isn't a property of a government.

It's not only entirely possible for it to exist outside of any government context, but it's bound to exist there, given human nature and interests.

@dashrandom @avlcharlie @mapto