Vinegar

joined 1 year ago
[–] Vinegar@kbin.social 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

It's good that this discussion keeps coming up; federated instances are not meant to get so large. Once communities become too large they lose cohesion and culture, invariably they eventually sacrifice users' well-being for practical purposes like funding, and at that point they become no better than the platforms they replaced. The cycle of exploitation continues.

There are communities online that have preserved their community culture and have not resorted to unethical practices to maintain themselves for more than 20 years, they are always smaller more intentional communities that value quality interactions over quantity of users. Given all the evidence showing how mentally and socially harmful large centralized platforms are - should we really aspire to recreate those unhealthy spaces in the fediverse?

The fediverse is an opportunity to take things a different direction, a direction in which smaller more cohesive communities share with each other without any one community dominating and suffocating the others. Federation is a fundamentally different model that challenges the centralizing paradigm "growth is good".

[–] Vinegar@kbin.social 116 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

The 9to5 article is poorly written. In the first paragraph 9to5 says a new window system is "scheduled to replace" the current one, but this is not true. The cited blog post explicitly says "There’s no timeline or roadmap at this stage". The Gnome developers are merely experimenting with a new window management system and at this early stage it's impossible to know what the finished product may look like if these experiments go anywhere at all.

Here's a link to the original blog post where Gnome developer Tobias Bernard explains their dissatisfaction with existing window management systems and discusses the techinical challeneges developers face.

[–] Vinegar@kbin.social 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Until humanity is mature enough to stop exploiting, poisoing, and destroying everything in our path it seems best that we quarantine on Earth imo. There is so much possibility down here as soon as we stop trying to run away from home and we bloom where we're planted instead.

[–] Vinegar@kbin.social 50 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Police spend most of their time on routine traffic stops, and routine traffic stops could be eliminated by transit and walkable infrastructure. It's almost like it's a racket...

[–] Vinegar@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

In the US it is normal and expected to eat meat and animal products 3-5 times per day with every meal and snack. If popular culture can shift to consuming meat and animal products 3-5 times per week that would be an ~80% reduction with minimal sacrifice.

These days it's not the tremendous change it used to be - there are at least a dozen brands of vegan meat replacements for sausages, chicken, roasts, burgers, etc. It's fairly easy to find vegan pastries, cakes, cookies, ice creams, etc. It is not as if people will need to suddenly start eating salad for every meal, if we only eat meat once per day that alone is a massive and achievable change.

Vegans today sacrifice less than ever before, and we have all those who went vegan decades ago (the hard way!) to thank for that.

[–] Vinegar@kbin.social 37 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

All too often I think the discussion misses the fact that there is no alternative to driving for the vast majority of US citizens. Busses, trains, walking, biking, etc are not viable options because US infrastructure & city planning overwhelmingly neglects everything but the automobile.

It is supposedly a personal moral failing every time someone drives too old, too tired, or too impaired, but if trains, busses, & walking were the default ways to get around then this chronic societal problem would diminish dramatically. Incompetent driving is rooted in systemic failures, not personal moral ones.

[–] Vinegar@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Whithout hope there is no hope.

[–] Vinegar@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Just chiming in to reaffirm what everyone else has said: KDE Neon is specifically built be the best KDE distro. The development branch is what KDE devs use to build & test all their software, so no distro is designed to work better with KDE software than KDE Neon.

[–] Vinegar@kbin.social 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

If you earn 45000€ or more per year (post-tax) you are in the 1%. (According to this)

€45,000/yr is in top 1% globally, but not the top 1% for the EU. Either way, the article is discussing a tax on wealth, not income. Even if €45,000/yr was in the top 1% income for the EU, someone making that salary is extremely unlikely to have accumulated enough assets to place them in the top 1% for wealth.

[–] Vinegar@kbin.social 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This is an old argument that's long dead. The bottom line is it's a big deal to uproot your entire life / entire company just to exploit tax loopholes, and the use of tax havens is already so common place that it is unlikely to be exacerbated by additional scrutiny.

The book Taxing the Rich: A History of Fiscal Fairness in the United States and Europe talks a lot on this topic. The authors Kenneth Scheve and David Stasavage defend progressive taxation, and state that the only historically-successful argument for raising taxes on the ultra wealthy has been "conscription of wealth" - The working class were conscripted to fight and die in war while the propertied class were not, so the property of the ultra wealthy was taxed very highly (conscripted) for war efforts.

Today, the world faces numerous crisis, and it is the lower class that will work the hardest and be forced to suffer the most while resolving them. It seems reasonable to me that the wealth of the upper class should likewise be put to use solving these crisis rather than exacerbating them. That's a conscription of wealth I can get behind.

[–] Vinegar@kbin.social 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I expect to see further erosion of Net Neutrality if big tech firms are required to pay for internet infrastructure. I have no love for big tech, but if they are required to pay for infrastructure, then how long until smaller companies and hosts are required to pay? The Biden administration seems to agree: "[it] is difficult to understand how a system of mandatory payments imposed on only a subset of content providers could be enforced without undermining net neutrality." I have no love for ISPs either - ISPs should be run as public utilities, not as for-profit private corporate conglomerates.

As others have already pointed out the US government (and Comcast, Verizon, & Century Link customers) have been defrauded by the major telecom companies for nearly 30 years worth at least $400 billion dollars (data from 2014, the current total is likely over $700 billion). They've been pocketing obscene amounts of money instead of investing in infrastructure for decades, at this point additional infrastructure should be publicly funded, owned & operated and the telecommunications companies should be forced to sell the internet infrastructure to local public utilities.

The Irregulators are a group of experts who have been fighting this fraud since 1999, and they have a couple books about this:

view more: ‹ prev next ›