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2012
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2 yr. ago

  • And the reason sexual things had to be filtered was that they are harmful and skew kids' perception of healthy sexuality.

    Gambling wasn't considered healthy even where and when marrying a toddler was normal. After all, a traumatized person with unhealthy sexuality does generally understand they are traumatized, a person taught that addiction is normal - not.

  • Yeah, an oracle for the masses is something very convenient.

    Just remind me, who had the power - Alexander or his fortunetellers? Caesar or his fortunetellers? Or whether Delphi oracle ever managed to turn the religious part into power?

    BTW - I understand how such ideas can be out of sincere desire to help humanity. Magic thinking is natural, and some perception of the world is natural, and evolution is just not fast enough for the technical developments we have.

    And what I'd want in the future to account for that (sort of a panopticon, not because I'm an exhibitionist, but because you can't make a subset of society always tracked and visible without making everyone always tracked and visible ; and lack of banking privacy, for example, in Scandinavian countries doesn't seem to hurt them that much) might well be worse than what they want. A bit like Zamyatin's book.

    It's just that "might" doesn't negate the fact that they are already doing a few very bad things, like genocide. Perhaps their mitigation is just not worth such sacrifices. Perhaps mine is better then.

  • Yes, it's also a bit of an equalizer in terms of electronics production, if it becomes cheaper. One of my pipe dreams for the future is that such happens and makes it a bit more decentralized.

  • Cheap gold could have a good effect on analog electronics, including the hobbyist kind.

    I'm sometimes thinking that not everything needs a computer. If it does, many things are fine with a MC.

    And not just analog electronics honestly, hobbyist computing in the ancient sense, of making hobbyist computers and using them, might have a small rebirth.

    And mass-produced electronics would too become a fair bit cheaper to produce if gold were more widely available. Longevity, reliability. Maybe touchscreens' economical advantage over physical buttons would be reduced even.

  • Humans sometimes run out of things to want.

  • There is that.

    American democrats, though, irritated me more until I've started noticing Republicans. They have that "parties switched in 1960s" myth (only parties' ideas on race switched, while the main ideology of the democratic party is not too different from "progressives" of 1890s, those guys who advocated for prophylactic lynchings ; and it's the same about Republicans, whose "anti-racist" ideas were just as Christian fundamentalism based as their today's projects), and also the "popular party" myth (while even in appearances being something to the top of which only people born with a silver spoon in mouth can get).

    At the same time the "free speech" stuff over there seems to mostly be about "they in their totalitarian countries (or pockets of society dominated by the other party) are lied by their propaganda media, and we here are free and are told the truth".

    Not sure it's entertaining, it looks depressing. But I haven't lived in the US.

  • Israel has, compared to US, still cheaper human resources and probably no issue with security-minded limitations on technology transfer or whatever.

  • Yes. I personally haven't bought Intel since they've shown themselves, or MS. And now I won't buy NVidia (I have a good cheap GPU from them, though ; and they make FreeBSD drivers ; it's unfortunate).

    I do use a PDA with Android with Google services.

  • That's just not true. People (including competent enough) are well willing to make the society worse for everyone if they are going to be gentry. That's been this way for all of human history, thinking otherwise is that new thing of the 90s, when American exceptionalism has been expanded into "post-Cold-War globalist" world exceptionalism, similarly to how Judaism expanded into Christianity.

  • I would also bet that when the landscape decentralizes there will be a lot more cp, revenge and peep-videos and other illegal shit in the mix that will get through through the cracks since massive established sites had to actually fear shutdown and losing all revenue unless they had robust gatekeeping mechanisms.

    There are technical solutions for p2p sharing with moderation. Not to prevent bad people from sharing their stuff, but to keep spaces clean for those who don't want to see it.

    This is also true for communication, which is why Fediverse is not good enough. Hosted servers should be an optional part of the infrastructure, and the data (users, communities, posts ...) shouldn't be connected to them. Like with torrents you can host a torrent tracker, and you can host a BTDHT node, and you can automatically download and seed rare torrents, and none of this is connected to whatever people hosting major trackers decide.

    NOSTR gets that part right, but the user experience its authors imagine is not for me.

    EDIT: Forgot my main point - my main point is that you might find yourself in a whitelisted Internet where such decentralized solutions won't be available. They'll be detected, they'll be illegal and punishable by fines.

  • It's not "support", it's already been done in practice.

    What they are finishing right now is the convenient way. To surveil 97% instead of 94%. And to make it official to reduce expenses.

    And sorry, but "moderate leftists" are those who made it happen, first dreaming how on big centrally moderated platforms the "bad" speech and people will be censored (how irritating it was that in the free Web those people could write whatever they wanted) and theirs won't be, and propaganda won't flourish, and after that dreaming how they can demand loudly enough that the platforms would work for them and not for themselves.

    I perfectly remember how people loving Steinbeck and expressing anarchist views would look at me like at an enemy for saying that Facebook, Twitter etc are bad and a trap, and such hierarchical systems can't be good. That arrogant obnoxious "see, in the real society we collectively press for our rights and the rules are made and obeyed", yes, I've met fools who told me things like that. Where's your society now, bitch.

  • As usual, it's the implementation that matters.

    Someone jumped at me for comparing EU and MAGA to Stalin's and Hitler's regimes, quote, "arguing in newspapers whose worker class has been liberated more". Like they are not equal at all and all such.

  • There's such a thing as botulism ; so - once the toxin causing it has formed, it doesn't matter that you kill the bacteria that produced it with boiling the water. The toxin itself survives much harsher conditions.

    I think it's not the only danger which you haven't considered here.

  • I was kinda agreeing with you, just clarifying on one nuance

  • Well, this reads ... I dunno. Conspiracy-minded at best, I've read plenty of such and most was likely fake.

    To make it clear, I don't consider deregulation something bad, when done as part of a system where it makes sense.

    Otherwise it's like paying people for work - labor should be paid for, not paying is cheating, you need work done for you, all these are true, except when it's a gypsy fortuneteller saying you have to pay lots and lots of money not previously agreed upon for lifting a curse, then you probably shouldn't pay that person.

    When deregulation is done only partially and without "releasing" any of the political power held by private parties, just removing obligations accompanying it - then something is wrong.

  • Yeah, of course, it's different, our social justice struggle against hate speech and responsible media versus their fascist propaganda metastases and oligarchy-owned media.

    No need to think, just call whoever laughs at you delusional.

  • Alternatives are not so hard, if you allow everyone to exchange and use every currency. Then, well, you need to pay someone selling in currency A - you pay your B's to buy some A's and you pay with them.

    But there are lots of limitations on banking, some in good faith, and some to prevent mobility and make everything tracked. Possibility to track means possibility to decide who gets to do what.

    I think that's why gold standard was dropped in the first place. When all money is guaranteed with gold, and gold (still does) buy money, you do have a universal currency hard to track.

    With decentralized electronic currencies the problem is - you need consensus. There's no way around it at all. You can devise something to separate one consensus into a tree of subspaces, to make it more efficient in case an operation with a coin "123456" depends only on operations with coins from "123*" subspace, or something like that. Partitioned system. So then you don't need consensus on subspaces untouched by your operation. But you still can't have such an offline currency, because that depends on the finite amount of gold, while with electronic currencies double spending exists.

    And I don't know if it's possible to make such an electronic currency anonymous for outside spectators. Zero-knowledge and other buzzwords are good, but I don't know how one can do this.

  • At this point this starts to mildly reminisce Stalin's USSR and Hitler's German Reich arguing in newspapers whose worker class has been liberated more.

  • Soviet elites' idea of power meant that.

    USSR in late 1980s sort of "resurrected" the Soviet system as something kinda democratic (well, democratic centralism is not exactly that, but decisions were made, and many true words were said, and the resulting course of action those elites didn't like), so those elites (Yeltsin was a Politburo member, a reminder) just decided to flip the board.

    But yeah, I definitely think there's a connection.

    And while considering them all-powerful may be wrong, Soviet propaganda had more levels than people thought. The fact that the narrative of many of those dissidents then is now similar to the narrative of ex-Soviet elites and their allies speaks for itself.

    The "visible" propaganda had different layers for kolkhozniks and for factory workers and for engineers and for artists. Everyone thought they could read between the lines, but that was too just a layer.

    After USSR "collapsed", plenty of sects and ideologies emerged, and mostly those too were defined by Soviet propaganda - from political (sincere, not like those participating in the election, but like Limonov people and Makashov people and anarchists and communists, all of them) to esoteric (I don't even want to list all of that), and of course the church.

    And now the Russian population is slowly transitioning from intoxication with that cocktail right to dissociation like with PTSD.

    So why did they decide to flip the board?

    Because only fools think that covert and conspiracy-minded and backstage and back alley actions are more true and sincere, or even stupider - advantageous for the weaker side. That's exactly where smoke and mirrors work flourishes. The truest thing Soviet people had was the common public "official" set of institutions and rules, no matter how disgusting it was. By flipping the board they removed it, and the masses had no common point of reality anymore.

    So, why did I write this - yes. I think that's what these people are doing in the USA, except the many-layered genius-class propaganda system is not existent there, but a few companies have been working hard for 20 years to create some kind of replacement.