It just seems like this system is capitalism with extra steps, but the extra steps involve replacing the exchange of money with the peddling of influence. The capitalists are replaced by administrators, the hierarchy of wealth is replaced by rank in the decision-making apparatus. I get that it’s supposed to be democratic and protect the interests of the public, but so too is our regulated hybrid public-private system and we see how well that’s going. It also seems like, where our market system began as distributed and decentralized, which was a strength, and began to be ever more concentrated as businesses consolidated and corrupted government, this new system starts consolidated and married to government. A lot of people would say this is too much power in the hands of the state, and ripe for theft by an autocrat. I’m not saying it’s impossible for this to work, but the systems I have seen work best are those where the market does what it does and the government reigns in its worst tendencies when the motive of profit conflicts with the needs of people.

This all sounds philosophical. How does this system actually solve problems in a society where scarcity exists? Do people still have property rights? Who enforces those rights? Who makes the decisions on where scarce resources are allocated? Our current system has answers for all of these questions, it’s just contaminated by the influence of powerful scumbags. The thing is, the powerful scumbags are going to be scumbags in every system, and at least a decentralized market economy limits the ease with which they can exert control.

I want to know where they think this will go, because there is an obvious and looming problem: the content–the library–wasn’t made or at least hosted for free.

Somebody set up a website to host the interactions between people who knew things and people who wanted to learn things. The people exchanging information often got as much as they gave, and the person hosting the forum typically sold ads or information about the people participating in the discussions. The result was a virtuous cycle where content gets made and everyone is happy.

Now all those sites are scraped, and their information is regurgitated by slop bots into a “zero click search” where the creators of the information have no role, the seekers of information never encountered the source, and the hosts never get their slice of the pie. OK, well that works for now, but what about when something new is made and there’s no forum to talk about it because all forums get scraped into the slop machine? How will the slop center learn? Are we supposed to expect the AI companies will spend time meticulously testing how best to DIY a mass spectrometer or whatever?

This is basically it. Classic liberalism is everything from Margaret Thatcher to Bernie Sanders. The MAGA movement has regressed to fascism–a form of corporate authoritatianism.

So are almost all progressives.

You can’t. He’s trying to use liberal as an epithet when he means neoliberal. If we’re being pedantic, liberal refers to the full gamut of people who think there should be an open and free society, which usually includes a market and certain property rights. The conservatives use liberal as an epithet to decry the left and now the left is using it to decry the middle.

It would be funny if it wasn’t being used to convince naive progressives to sit out elections and let fascists seize power because the center left “only” wants 85% of what they want. You’re seeing it really ramp up because the US is closing in on a big election, and convincing dipshits to sit out elections is easier than convincing anyone the right can govern.

They’ve really managed to enshittify the site beyond even what I expected back when the API changes went live. I guess it was expected. First Digg shot itself, now Reddit…

We used to call that “machine learning” but the tech bros developed a god complex.

it’s easy to just completely avoid interacting with LLMs.

I wish that were true. Have you seen reddit lately? Lemmy isn’t immune but I haven’t encountered any obvious bot posts here yet.

History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes.

It seems like we’re plunging into fascism, but maybe this upcoming midterms will (not be rigged and) prove to be an effective backlash to the US’ reactionary coup. What do you figure the odds are we pull out of this and say, “huh actually let’s try that FDR thing instead of this Nazi shit”?

Safe space? I’m an OG internet troll. You suck at this.

Not really. I don’t engage with maga edgelords.

I just don’t see why they had to make X Men woke? Why does everything have to be about a persecuted minority group finding its standing in a society that fears it?

(tee hee)

And also Instagram and whatever other Zuck products are in your life. I’m happy they wasted so many billions of dollars setting of virtual Mii meetings lmao…

Nobody cares. Go back to 4chan.

It’s depressing because too many people have distanced themselves. You were given the gift of self governance and you have a sacred duty to your fellow citizens to engage with democracy to ensure everyone’s rights are protected. Nobody cares if you post political memes, but if you don’t show up to vote once every two years to keep fascists out of power? That’s unacceptable.

Japan is honorary Western.

(So is Korea.)

You could do some OG lithography (the litho in lithography means “stone”) by masking the white or block parts of the QR code and painting on an etchant. I don’t know what the best etchants for stone are, but I imagine HF-containing glass etch would do the trick. (Be very, very careful with HF.)

Instead of making the QR code point to something, you could encode the information directly. A short blurb about a person would fit.

I didn’t say you lived in a metro area. I said those distances and travel times are only realistic in the parts of the US people consider very densely populated.

That’s how the US is in certain metro areas. In the boonies there are hundreds of miles of rural back roads where people drive 60mph during rush hour.