Lemmy technically doesn’t hide your likes - the interface might not show you, but all your likes are public in the Fediverse. Kbin, when I used it, would show which users upvoted/downvoted a post. That’s important because it means researchers and OSI people can still do fact finding - Twitter doesn’t like the idea of having to be open even if it’s a requirement (albeit to researchers specifically) in the EU now.

Under the (currently dominant) credit theory of money, the implication is that billionaires owe the government a lot of money… and it’s time to pay up.

Subsidies are an incredible tool when used well, like when they funded a bunch of utility cooperatives that electrified rural US. Maybe you’re asking why we should because propping up the car industry when public transit and bike infrastructure should be subsidized instead, rather than challenging subsidies, though.

But don’t services like Discord forbid third party clients?

Me waiting for inflation to slowly increase Discord’s yearly revenue until it tips into the legally defined Gatekeeper™ status under the EU Digital Markets Act so they’d be playing with fire if they banned people for using interoperability apps.

Bidenomics is a mixture of things, but key among them is the recognition that MMT is already reality and doubling down on it to fund productive industries. Basically, government debt is not the same as household debt and strategic yet liberal usage of government debt can be very positive for an economy. MMT economists have made some pretty significant ‘discoveries’ that you can now find in the CORE macroeconomics textbooks in universities all over the world.

when we added socialist elements to capitalism (eg. social security, free healthcare, free education and so on) it didnt stop being capitalism.

This is a very black and white view of things, though. Norway is seen as capitalist, yet 2/3rds of Norway’s GDP is driven by its public sector, the government owns 30% of the domestic stock market, they have a massive government wealth fund that makes returns in hundreds of billions of dollars annually which they could singlehandedly fund UBI with, they apply Georgist taxes to natural resources (oil, hydro, aquafarms) to collectivize profits made off public land, 60% union density, 20% of housing is collectively owned (housing coops)…

Like, at what point do we call a country “socialist”?

(Not to call the US socialist, but Bidenomics might lean like 1% in that direction, and that’s my point - it’s going in a socialist direction if very slowly, and if we can maintain it)

IP is not a universal, objectively good thing. There are plenty of people who disagree with either a) how awful IP law is currently, or b) the mere existence of IP. You don’t even have to be a socialist like China supposedly is (although many would call it state capitalist) to be against IP, plenty of social democrats and libertarians are against it.

Intellectual Property is just a more abstract form of private ownership that wealthy people use to take advantage of us. Remember when they refused to give up COVID vaccine IP? They literally can’t sacrifice profits even during an insane pandemic that’s taking millions of lives. Remember when Canada, Sweden were kind of OK with piracy and then US politicians/lobbyists entered their country to ensure they would be cracking down on piracy? As a European I’m not happy that yet another form of welfare transfers (which piracy de facto is) was taken away just because the US isn’t content with being the wealthiest country on the planet - they need to maintain or even grow their obscene wealth.

Honestly, I could not give a rat’s ass about China “stealing” IP from literally the country that owns 30% of the world’s household wealth. More countries should follow suit so that we can break free from private IP holders delaying human technological and scientific progress.

My immediate concern with tags is descending into what Twitter has become: hashtags have been meaningless for a long while since there’s too much wrongly tagged stuff, different communities often use the same tag for different things, or there are ten tags all for the same thing. All of which means we’d need some form of moderator role that handles tags, and while I think it’s doable, it might take some trial and error to figure out how exactly we divide tags between moderators, how tags are proposed/created, and how tags are grouped/combined (e.g. food, foods).

I swear the “fuck cars” crew are completely deluded from reality.

I see people say what you’re saying (bus vs car road damage elasticity) in “fuck cars” communities, I don’t really see why you’ve decided to attack them collectively. But it’s a pop-community, they’re going to be wrong every now and then either way, please give them some slack. Their purpose is to make an average person aware of car dependency and that it’s generally a negative thing, so that actual urban planners with technical knowledge have an easier time arguing for and implementing realistic solutions, and they’ll take into account the variables you bring up. Think of “fuck cars” like a form of lobbying except it’s done by common people with good intentions - similar to how Japanese coops lobbied for better food safety standards decades ago - rather than wealthy corporations.

Google drank so much capitalist koolaid they thought the company needed internal competition when the main reason they remain so big is because they have big chunks of monopoly power in several key tech fields

What possible use is that?

I’ve noticed “has this sub gotten more right wing recently?” posts reaching the top post of the day in the last 6 months or so. r/norge and r/unitedkingdom being examples. You can automate bots that change a subreddit’s consensus on certain topics by bot-spamming threads pertaining to those topics, especially in the first hour of a thread going up. I don’t know if that’s happening, or if it has more to do with the Reddit protest that saw mods abdicate their positions last June and new mods being responsible for the change… but it could also be a bit of both.

In the EU they’re getting a digital euro which allows them to avoid bowing down to Paypal, Payoneer, and all the services interlinked with them (e.g. Patreon) - the ancillary services can even offer digital euro payouts instead, too. So as long as what you’re doing is legal, you can break the Paypal/Payoneer terms of service as much as you want and avoid their privately enforced authoritarianism that goes beyond the scope of the law for whatever reason. So those problems are being solved as we speak, depending on where you live.

Kind of, the central government did this in response to Mayor of London Sadiq Khan:

In December 2023, Gove used his powers to “call in” Khan’s rejection of the project, overturning the Mayor’s rejection and turning the final decision to DLUHC ministers.

But the project did withdraw anyway:

However, in January 2024, MSG wrote to the Planning Inspectorate officially withdrawing its plans for the project.

I suspect it has more to do with London being left by advertisers right now. A few years back the tube had all the advert slots filled, always. Today, the advert slots are usually half filled and it’s been like that for years. I expected it to change after COVID lockdowns ended, but it has persisted all the way until now.

It makes me wonder if these anti-porn laws are happening because queer people seem to be more likely to watch porn[1], and because of that, conservatives are looking at it as a causal thing rather than a correlative thing. If porn does help with getting to terms with your sexuality, then these laws should be worrying to the queer community. What conservatives may be doing here is trying to statistically decrease the amount of queer people in society, as getting rid of porn may reduce the amount of people who are aware of their own bisexuality, and those people may never engage with and/or have as much empathy for the queer community as a result.

[1] https://www.thepinknews.com/2019/02/28/more-porn-watch-more-likely-bisexual/

For the record, government debt isn’t bad. What is bad, is how that debt is used. If you use it to fund productivity boosting infrastructure projects, then it pays for itself. If you use it to invest in successful companies in return for shares then it pays for itself… unlike when Tesla got a $400 million gov. loan and gave nothing in return - which meant tax payers had to take the hit when Solyndra (which got money from the same scheme) bankrupted itself into the toilet, tax payers took all the risk and got shafted both when a company failed and when one succeeded.

The Norwegian government, for example, owns 30% of the domestic stock market. One of many strategies the US government should probably be looking to if they want a healthier way to invest in companies.

Using debt to back tax cuts on the other hand, like Trump did according to this article, is an awful strategy.

John-Burn Murdoch wrote an article about this (you may have to access it via Google or an Archive, I believe FT has a soft paywall), but this graph from the article is basically the tl;dr. The same applies to a couple of other wealthy nations, but I only remember Norway (I think he posted an addendum to the article on Twitter), but it’s certainly not the trend in every country in the “west”.

Meanwhile Meta takes great pains to remove any glimpse of an erogenous zone like the most deranged Christian fundamentalist

I realize a lot of Republicans don’t give a shit about consent, but most of the rest of us do

I’m pretty sure the core goal of right wingers in their respective domains is preventing us from gaining the ability to consent to more stuff - or in their more extreme, for taking away our ability to consent to things - so yeah you’re right about that. Democracy is a system of consent, and our progress towards that was being challenged during the Enlightenment. Today, for example, many right wing economists are against democratically elected managers/bosses, unions, democratic government owned enterprises, government welfare safety nets for the vulnerable, housing cooperatives as a solution to the housing crisis, the list goes on. The pattern being that all of those increase the average person’s ability to consent to more stuff by leveling power asymmetries.

I’m starting to think the term “piracy” is morally neutral. The act can be either positive or negative depending on the context. Unfortunately, the law does not seem to flow from morality, or even the consent of the supposed victims of this piracy.

The morals of piracy also depend on the economic system you’re under. If you have UBI, the “support artists” argument is far less strong, because we’re all paying taxes to support the UBI system that enables people to become skilled artists without worrying about starving or homelessness - as has already happened to a lesser degree before our welfare systems were kneecapped over the last 4 decades.

But that’s just the art angle, a tonne of the early-stage (i.e. risky and expensive) scientific advancements had significant sums of government funding poured into them, yet corporations keep the rights to the inventions they derive from our government funded research. We’re paying for a lot of this stuff, so maybe we should stop pretending that someone else ‘owns’ these abstract idea implementations and come up with a better system.

Selling sex to kids is just as exploitive and repugnant.

Why are we nuking implied nudity entirely off a website to solve a different problem, i.e. kids having access to their parents’ credit cards?