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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Maybe not overnight, but all friends begin as strangers.

    The issue with the US isn’t exactly Trump himself, it’s that nearly half of American voters endorse him and that there’s a line of vying inheritors for his brand of politics forming.

    Trade, foreign, and domestic policy in the US can now be reasonably assumed to turn on a dime every few years, and that’s exposure to risk that nobody wants to deal with.

    Even within the four years, we’re like three months in and the man is rapidly changing his mind on the fundamentals of international relationships. Whether he’s manipulating markets, trying to force capitulation somehow, or something else is irrelevant - other countries are more stable and those relationships can provide what’s needed.


  • It’s an effective two-party system with unfair weighting utterly colonised by some of the most well-invested in propaganda efforts in the world.

    People who report that they’re Republicans very frequently flit wildly on whether the country’s on a good economic trajectory based on whether Republicans are empowered, seemingly completely independent of any other metric.






  • Not necessarily? You’d retain first-to-market advantages, particularly where implementation is capital-heavy - and if that’s not enough you could consider an alternative approach to rewarding innovation such as having a payout or other advantage for individuals or entities which undertake significant research and development to emerge with an innovative product.

    I think the idea that nobody would commit to developing anything in the absence of intellectual property law is also maybe a bit too cynical? People regularly do invest resources into developing things for the public domain.

    At the very least, innovations developed with a significant amount of public funding - such as those which emerge from research universities with public funding or collaborative public-private endeavours at e.g. pharmaceutical companies - should be placed into the public domain for everybody to benefit from, and the copyright period should be substantially reduced to something more like five years.







  • I would say that for an action to be considered censorship in the strictest sense, it would need to be the suppression of information as imposed and enforced by a monopolistic authority.

    If the State were to declare a book banned, that would be censorship because the State establishes itself as the single totalising authority over the people in the territory it governs. Should you contravene that ruling and possess the material in question, you’re opening yourself up to the threat of violence until you start respecting it. You’re not able to opt-out, the single authority imposes itself and its ruling on you.

    Meanwhile, on federated social media there are many concurrently operating instances with different rulesets and federations. If the instance you’re part of decides to defederate with another, then you can move to another instance which continues to federate with the defederated instance in question if you’re unhappy with the decision. You’re able to opt-out of that ruling without consequence.

    Plus, even if you decide not to move instance, the content hosted by the defederated instance will still be available through the instance itself.

    Defederation doesn’t meaningfully suppress information, whereas censorship does.