Given all the Threads discussion there is one short thing I need to say.
The simplest tech-world thing I learned from the whole Meta in Myanmar project is that Meta is WAY more callous, deceptive, and incompetent with the life-or-death things that matter the most than even most of their critics understand.
They build all kinds of safety capacity but the human-value-extraction machine at Meta’s core will always outrun it because the company is led by people with nothing at all where their ethics should be.
I was very careful in the series to try to keep my feelings largely to one side, but these people have so much very real blood on their hands and I think the whole grotesque organization is deeply, meaningfully unholy and I think no one should fuck with it ever at all.
@kissane And yet so many folks are taking a wait and see approach, rather than understanding that coexistence is a pretty terrible bargain to take with Meta. All the available data and zero understanding (pretty much the human condition in 2023).
@kissane The most scary part is that Meta’s participation to basically exciting genocide in Myanmar has been basic knowledge, for years and years.
The only echo of that I hear in tech talk today is when politicians say they ”don’t want to repeat the mistakes made with social media” on AI legislation.
But I’m afraid they will. And why? Because we humans want to create ”god” for ourselves. We want there to be an ”infallible” machine to judge us. And meta took that role, gladly.
@gimulnautti@kissane I think at the heart of this discussion, is a deliberate ignorance of the harms tech can do and is doing right now.
It's the same impulse as folks saying they don't want to talk about politics, because then they'd have to wrestle with the philosophical implications of those choices.
The discourse around weither or not instances federate with threads is another symptom of this.
All that people can do, is choose according to what they want their networks to be.
@gimulnautti@kissane Folks on here need to accept that there probably will be a split. It's not the first time and not will it be the last time.
Some of the folks on your socials will not want to mix. Defederation is part of the design.
It's not censorship. It's showing a boundary, and some of us would like you to respect our boundaries, when we say we don't want to federate with threads.
@kissane yes to all of this. I don’t know anyone who claims to be on Threads, but I know a lot of the Twitter leftists just slid on over to fucking instagram of all places. Bugs bunny “no” dot jpg.
@donkeyherder Yeah, I've seen that too. It's frustrating, because you can't even look at their posts without allowing Zuck to put a surveillance cookie on your computer/phone. Never! @kissane
@kissane we have TWO friends who were, a couple years apart, hired to senior roles at Facebook allegedly for the purpose of building a better culture around ethics
both left in distress after only a short while, declaring it impossible to fix that company
This corporate callousness is a direct result of the debt-based monetary system of the entire world, and of the specially constructed debt hypothecation system in the USA. As the monetary systems have grown less diffuse and more centralized the callousness has increased.
For many centuries, the central tenet of fascism has been a mandatory tax on all property of the poor, and requirement to pay the tax in a monetary unit controlled by the rulers. Nobody actually owns their home. They rent it from the state and must pay the ad valorem and land tax, or be forcibly ejected. This tenet of tax fascism holds true in feudalism and market economies, and under socialism. If the monetary unit is not a currency, then the monetary unit is the productive labor of the serf. By taxing homestead real estate and employee wages, all serfs are forced to participate in the economic and tax structure by running an endless rat race to keep from having their homestead confiscated by the state. Abolition of the homestead real estate tax on any primary domicile up to 40-80 acres, depending on annual precipitation, and abolition of the income tax on EMPLOYEE wages (not officer or executive), would liberate hundreds of millions of souls from the rat race. If you don't work in the job and pay the taxes, the fascist courts take your home and render you homeless. This is a crime against humanity and nobody is speaking out against it.
This property tax and income tax system is the FOUNDATION of Western imperial fascism. All political movements will fail and will only increase the reach of fascism into every aspect of human life. As economies grow more centrally planned and monopolistic, the control over everyday activities grows increasingly centralized.
If you are not moving to abolish the tax on homesteads in your country, you are hacking at the branches of evil rather than at the root. A people secure in their property and homes and wages are a free people. A people insecure in these are slaves.
It is very simple. A tax and money system based upon debt or hypothecation of property to debt will always wax more and more fascist. This is the story of human history and everyone is ignoring it at their peril. Many people praise the idea of taxing their neighbors to pay for public schools, where their children will learn to be obedient serfs and work endlessly to pay their taxes.
Certain people leverage themselves into this system through corporations, and in order to prevent themselves from ever being the poor downtrodden, they run roughshod over all the poor downtrodden. They get addicted to the status, and envision themselves having a superior rationale due to their success. To keep themselves on top, they feel motivated to keep pushing everyone else down in a relentless struggle for mastery over the serfs in the poor and middle classes.
Laws and policies and "programs" can not, do not, never have, and never will end these problems of corporatocracy. Simply by abolishing the tax on homestead real estate, and abolishing the income tax on wages, the entire economy is forced to undergo a metamorphosis away from debt and rent seeking, to actual productivity. A people secure in their homes are not forced to work their fingers to the bone in an economic rat race. They have the time preference to make more beneficial decisions regarding work and career because they don't have the stress of homelessness or bankruptcy always looming on the horizon. Your rulers want this shadow cast on you and they have engineered the tax laws for this very purpose. Of course they give pretexts and justifications and subterfuges, but the end result was the real intention, as in the maxim, "Outward actions indicate inward intent."
No one wants to hear this. They are happy to tax their neighbors to death as long as they feel it serves their social agenda. We can signal about how bad the corporations are, or as a people we can admit how bad we are for enlisting the guns of government to rob our neighbors of their wages and homes under the unjust property and income tax schemes.
Corporations are the only entities that should pay income tax. No flesh and blood human being with the status of EMPLOYEE should be taxed on their wages for hire. The power to tax is the power to destroy, and much destruction it does. Countless Americans are dragged out of their homes by county sheriffs while their homes are repossessed or auctioned off for back taxes. This is the heart of ryot tenure, which is old-world fascism. This abomination does not belong in America. It really does not belong anywhere in the world. But the rulers and their dependents love to have it so.
That is well and good. It is easy to hate the big man. It is harder to love the little man. If we hate the fat cat while continuing to abuse the runt of the litter, are we any better than the fat cat? If we excoriate the rich while only giving lip service to the poor, wouldn't such hypocrisy make us Pharisees at heart?
I do agree on a host of limitations upon billionaire involvement in politics and bureaucracy, such as abolishing campaign contributions to lobby groups and PACs completely and requiring candidates to spend their own money for advertising, and placing caps on how much money TOTAL can be received by any candidate for office.
I also think people should keep their hands out of their poor neighbors' pockets by abolishing the income tax on employee wages and the property tax on primary dwellings.
Then the taxes can be excised from commerce between corporations, freight bills, imposts and duties. This would fundamentally alter both the economic and monetary system in favor of the have nots without a pile of even more abuse-prone laws and bureaucracy.
Corporations are creatures of the state and they should be taxed. All real estate held by all associations, corporations, and entities should also be taxed. This includes any non-domicile real estate held by religious corporations, churches, mosques, temples, etc. International and interstate non-profits should be abolished or taxed at a double or triple rate compared to those operating only within a domicile zone. Non-profit entities should be prohibited from operating outside the area of their domicile unless there is a compelling public interest approved by the legislature on a case-by-case basis. This would do away with many abusive tax shelter foundations and require the rich to put a big cut of that money to work in the economy instead of squandering it away in paper rents and interest-bearing schemes subsidized by the government through bank bailouts.
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