Overly-teleological modernist framing has hopelessly fucked up tech discourse. Too much declaring things the future and hoping people will just believe you.
If MS didn’t do it, someone else would have and it would have become the trend anyway. The problem isn’t the particular sins of a specific company (though to be clear, MS is heinous), the problem is the profit motive.
The issue is partly that, over time, private entities are going to price gouge or take similar measures (see: “enshittification”) in order to keep growing as profit falls over time. That’s just how the profit motive works, it eventually optimizes everything for profit, not just what you are comfortable with having turned into a vehicle aimed solely at making money.
So yes, this and many other important things should be treated as public goods.
Sorry, are we talking about Chomsky suggesting that Ukrainians being left alive would be a good thing? Because that got him in some headlines but it’s still not remotely what he is best known for.
I honestly thought OP was an edit to make the paw pads glow, but I see from your video that it’s because that’s the contact area. Thanks for sharing it!
China is not perfect on the matter of right-to-housing, but it is very good. Everyone has a right to have some kind of housing unit, though they don’t necessarily (and in fact, I think usually don’t) “own” it and family homes are counted if the kid isn’t formally disowned. A very large number of the homeless population in China are “itinerant homeless,” those who do have a family home but have moved elsewhere and aren’t paying rent for an apartment (usually due to poverty, and therefore may live on the street) in order to try to get a job in the city with which to support themselves and possibly the rest of their family, who are usually back home in some rural area. This is very different from what homelessness typically looks like in the US, though it happens here too.
If a child is not formally disowned but is nonetheless forced out by their family, then it’s effectively a matter of child abuse to be handled by the appropriate government organization once it is discovered/reported, and either the family recants or they formally disown the child. If they are formally disowned, they are entitled to shelter.
Though not the same system by any means, I think the DPRK’s law on this subject is similar, though it’s much easier for poor families (and kids therein) to fall through the cracks, meaning that you are more likely* to find a homeless queer kid there as a consequence.
Like climate change, this mostly is not an intellectual question. Good answers in theory don’t matter if you have a reactionary political establishment that refuses to implement it.
Let us look at a specific example. A claim like “There’s cultural genocide of Uyghurs in Xinjiang” is simply unreal to most Westerners, close to pure gibberish. The words really refer to existing entities and geographies, but Westerners aren’t familiar with them. The actual content of the utterance as it spills out is no more complex or nuanced than “China Bad,” and the elementary mistakes people make when they write out statements of “solidarity” make that much clear. This is not a complaint that these people have not studied China enough — there’s no reason to expect them to study China, and retrospectively I think to some extent it was a mistake to personally have spent so much time trying to teach them. It’s instead an acknowledgment that they are eagerly wielding the accusation like a club, that they are in reality unconcerned with its truth-content, because it serves a social purpose.
What is this social purpose? Westerners want to believe that other places are worse off, exactly how Americans and Canadians perennially flatter themselves by attacking each others’ decaying health-care systems, or how a divorcee might fantasize that their ex-lover’s blooming love-life is secretly miserable. This kind of “crab mentality” is actually a sophisticated coping mechanism suitable for an environment in which no other course of action seems viable. Cognitive dissonance, the kind that eventually spurs one into becoming intolerant of the status quo and into action, is initially unpleasant and scary for everybody. In this way, we can begin to understand the benefit that “victims” of propaganda derive from carelessly “spreading awareness.” Their efforts feed an ambient propaganda haze of controversy and scandal and wariness that suffocates any painful optimism (or jealousy) and ensuing sense of duty one might otherwise feel from a casual glance at the amazing things happening elsewhere. People aren’t “falling” for atrocity propaganda; they’re eagerly seeking it out, like a soothing balm.
The common socialist position is that term limits are anti-democratic not just because they keep people from voting for who they want to but, more significantly, it tilts the scales in favor of structures that do not have term limits. In the US, for example, elections are essentially completely controlled by private companies from the media to the National Conventions, and term limits check the power of popular candidates (and therefore popular sentiment) versus capital, which does not expire in 8 years.
Thoughts on Post-Open Source? (www.theregister.com)
TLDR: Companies should be required to pay developers for any open source software they use....
He'll go down in history (startrek.website)
I remember getting a PS3 just to avoid this back then (lemmy.zip)
He did though. (mander.xyz)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Venter?wprov=sfla1
Ðððð (mander.xyz)
Cat sith (files.mastodonapp.uk)
Why not? (media.mas.to)
Age Combat 🤡 (lemmy.ml)
deleted_by_moderator
fuck it (mander.xyz)
Technically it's always the first in China until they get removed from the movie (startrek.website)
‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says the Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens (lemmy.ml)
Does it not pierce thine very heart? (startrek.website)
Don't ask (lemmy.zip)
fixed cyberghost's "meme" (thelemmy.club)
Lemmy might, MIGHT have a small bias towards the left (lemm.ee)
Lemmy since the reddit collapse (lemmy.ml)