Let’s skip the “I have no basic survival skills” part (also skipping disease) and assume we find a nearby group of humans. If you approach first contact carefully they’d probably let you live with them in exchange for labor, giving you time to learn the language.

I think I have enough ambient exposure to modern technology that I could contribute at least 3-4 major innovations to my group over a couple decades. The challenge would be conveying and implementing ideas more than remembering them. You’re not going to get back to modern standards of living in your remaining time traveled years no matter how much you remember, but what little you can impart to others would earn your keep.

I don’t know what all the innovations would be, but germ theory and pasteurization come to mind.

Yes, that’s kind of what I was getting at - having this cloud browser thing would be significantly worse for privacy than even a smart phone.

Setting aside the financial management of the church, it’s one of the largest organizations in the world which tells people what the purpose of life is. Its members believe the person they’re selecting has authority from God to say what actions are right and wrong.

While I don’t personally believe that, hard not to see it’s a position of significant power and people have an interest in knowing or influencing the outcome.

Can you share what your reasons are for considering a dumb phone?

For me I’m probably not actually going to get one, but have idly thought about it. If I were to get one it would be to free me from the attention sink of web browsing and apps. So I don’t find it appealing to consider a dumb phone that still has web browsing but using some sort of work around.

No. Stop being a dick

Yeah, it says they’re charging him with something that has a max sentence of five years, seems like it would be a lot heavier if they could show he was planning to take action.

The only way to confirm these results is expose a different random region to radiation and see what they get horny for

Obligatory fuck musk.

Reading the article, sounds like the government was like “hey this rebate program is about to run out of money” so Tesla is saying they rushed to submit various sales they had already made, but hadn’t submitted yet.

I bet regulators would like to take a closer look at the itemized list for funny business.

Even if what Tesla says is true, that’s a pretty sloppy way to run a business.

Tangentially, I’m curious why the government would structure a rebate program this way. Technically the rebate is for customers, not the dealer. But the way it works is the dealer gives a lower price to the customer, then collects the rebate to make up for the discount. If it’s possible for the money in the rebate program to run out, then doesn’t it seem obvious that some percentage of dealers will be left on the hook for rebates they extended on behalf of the government but won’t be reimbursed?

Sure you can. I think it’s wrong to murder people for no reason. I say something like “government should avoid baseless murder.” Maybe I’m offending people who have deeply held pro murder beliefs, but I’m right and they’re wrong.

I’m making a joke here, but to illustrate the principle that just because a country has some tradition or practice doesn’t mean it can’t be criticized. There is such a thing as objective reality.

And of course we have to recognize that we ourselves can be mistaken about the truth so it’s smart to practice a degree of humility and introspection when it comes to people we disagree with. Even so, I’m pretty comfortable saying that laws which imprison people for criticizing a king are counterproductive and harmful to a society.

The reason why free speech is a good idea is because it makes error correction possible. People come at subjects from all different angles, and inevitably someone will misjudge a subject, while a person approaching from another angle has an insight that would be helpful. In other words, people make mistakes, and if it’s illegal to point out a mistake it’s unlikely to be corrected. I don’t follow the Thai monarchy but I’m sure it’s made mistakes, and it should be legal to say so.

Overthrow oligarchy

Sure, we’re in agreement as far as that goes. My point was just the commenter above me was indicating it should be common knowledge that Tesla self driving hits motorcycles more than other self driving cars. And whether their comment was about this or some other subject, I think it’s counterproductive to be like “everyone knows that.”

It’s helpful to remember that not everyone has seen the same stories you have. If we want something to change, like regulators not allowing dangerous products, then raising public awareness is important. Expressing surprise that not everyone knows about something can be counterproductive.

Going beyond that, wouldn’t the new information here be the statistics?

Oh yeah, Cherry Springs State Park in Pennsylvania is cool. Probably not “worth traveling there from some other state before leaving the country” cool, but cool. https://maps.app.goo.gl/SQp261ecxj7exAJy8

I don’t think there’s a lot of those around here. Kind of off-putting because I knew it would be bad, and now have to live it.

Who are you addressing here

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to argue centralization is a naturally occurring phenomenon. It’s everywhere. The U.S. left Afghanistan and was replaced by a different centralized entity. One could argue how decentralized those “tribes” were, but regardless, after the U.S. departure they recreated a similar structure.

Complexity comes hand in hand with size. The OP is a chart of the different email providers. Can an individual run their own email server? Yes. And doesn’t it get more difficult after a certain number of users and require hiring specialists? Yes. But still, such large services exist, and a majority of users turn to them.

If the fediverse lives there will always be small servers, but we can expect to see really big ones. If we don’t want them to be corporate recreations of gmail and yahoo and hotmail I’d argue we should figure out a platform co-op/worker co-op model, including the necessary funding and specialists.

My argument isn’t about the fediverse specifically. It’s that centralization is a naturally occurring phenomenon, and the lack of friction resulting from centralization can make it more competitive.

What is the reason the cost per user of hosting a Lemmy server goes up after a few thousand users? If it were say, you need more expensive hardware, that doesn’t necessarily disprove my argument. Just because a bigger investment is needed doesn’t mean it’s not cheaper per user or not more competitive. Just that you or I don’t have the capital, or that we might see centralization bad because we have bad experiences with centralized entities.

Also just because something is more competitive doesn’t mean it’s morally or aesthetically more desirable. The specialized army fed and trained by an empire overruns the brave and happy tribe of hunter gatherers.

What I’m saying is since we know the phenomenon of centralization occurs, we should try to subvert it as much as possible by introducing democratic structures.

We should have large semi-centralized services. But they should be democratically controlled.

Do you ever think about why cities form? Rural life has a lot of appealing characteristics, plus it’s the starting state of the world. Cities form because there is an advantage to size, proximity and specialization. If we had a new planet and completely evenly distributed the population across its land, we’d very quickly form cities regardless.

It’s the same with centralized services. It takes a lot of special knowledge and equipment to run an email service. The average Lemmy user may have those resources, but even here, how many of us run our own email servers?

It costs less per person in resources to add more users after the first one. So there’s an incentive to aggregate users together. And once you have a certain number of users, maybe you figure out some way to fund your operation, and you can pay more people to add features/capabilities. Soon your entity not only has more users, it’s more appealing than a plan vanilla email service, and you get even more users. You’re doing it cheaper and better than the DIYers.

I think centralization and size are naturally occurring. We should think about ways to exist and benefit from them, so something like Gmail but run as a worker cooperative.

This headline reads like a threat