JVT038

JVT038, 10 months ago

Wait is this real?

JVT038, 10 months ago

Wow, really interesting post, thanks for this OP.

Some thoughts:

• According to one of your comments, the LVT won’t be passed on to the renters, because the supply of land doesn’t change and the land owner is already charging the maximum price the market can bear. This would be true in theory, but we’re talking about an essential good here. Land is something people will eventually need, otherwise they’ll be homeless. This is also called an ‘inelastic’ product, because the demand for the product won’t change a lot if the prices change. The same applies for food; if a piece of bread costs $1, maybe there is a demand of 10 million in a country, and if the same piece of bread is suddenly $10,000, the demand stays the same, because people will starve without it.
• In the original post, you say that you want to tax unproductive ways of earning money (such as owning land). What about financial securities? Things such as shares (as long as they’re not bought from the company directly), bonds, stock dividends, etc. Maybe also tax stock buybacks, as they’re often (ab)used to create artificial scarcity and increase the stock value (aka increasing profits for shareholders).
• with ‘negative externalities’ do you mean everything that has a negative external impact? Obviously carbon emission is an example, but what about something like smoking? When people smoke, they have a higher chance of getting lung cancer, therefore putting a higher burden on our healthcare system and additionally potentially negatively influencing others who have accidentally inhaled the smoke caused by the smoker. Would you tax this?
• Would you also tax owners of cars that use petrol / diesel instead of electricity? They also produce carbon emissions. A negative thing is that logistics can become very expensive with such a tax and additionally lots of people use the car to do something productive (such as going to work or school), in which case their productivity is kind of taxed, because their productivity is producing co2 emissions.
• Getting rid of income taxes obviously increases the amount of money people can spend, which will probably increase the demand for goods. When demand increases, but the supply doesn’t, there will be a higher inflation, which will negatively impact people who have less money (or are dependent on government welfare and are unemployed).

Now that I have typed all of this, I feel like a lot of these points can be solved by government spending (for example, provide people with free public transport, so they no longer have to use the car to get to work, increase the unemployment benefits based on the inflation index), but I’m still commenting this lol

Edit: BTW, the constitutions are generally written by rich men. So it’s not really surprising to see how the system that they have designed are beneficial towards the rich. I mean, the idea that I can have $10, invest it, wait for a while, and suddenly have $20 without actually putting in any effort is kinda dystopian to think about, because it favours the rich by having exponential growth of capital.

JVT038, 10 months ago

Inflation occurs when the value of goods increase. This can mainly be caused by two things: An increase in consumption or an increase of production costs, which causes the vendor to increase prices in order to maintain profits.

Deflation would occur when the opposite happens, aka when the value of goods decrease. This can be caused by things such as new technological improvements (old hardware has become cheaper, because new hardware has been released and the older hardware is no longer state-of-the-art), a reduction in consumption or a reduction in production costs. Perhaps I’ve missed a few cases, but these are the main things I can currently think of.

Anyway, while deflation is generally useful for consumers (they have to pay less), it’s not very good for borrowers. Let’s take a mortgage for a house, for example. You want to buy a house for €200k and have a mortgage of €200k that will cover the house. If something bad happens to you financially (for example, you lose your job), you may end up in a situation where you’ll no longer be able to pay off your mortgage. Shit happens right? Usually, the bank would take control of your house, sell your house for €200k and use the revenue from the house to pay off your mortgage.

However, if deflation has occurred and your house is no longer worth €200k, but €150k, you still have €50k to pay off to your bank, after the bank has sold your house. Simultaneously, you’re unemployed, so how are you going to do that? If you declare bankruptcy, you will no longer have to pay off your debts and the bank has lost €50k.

Besides this, deflation can also be a symptom of something worse happening, such as high unemployment rates and a decrease in consumption, for example. When more people get unemployed, people will spend less, which reduces demand, which leads to a decrease of prices.

JVT038, 10 months ago

Yup, and in the Netherlands the main train company is planning to make it even more expensive on purpose, in order to discourage people from taking the train.

JVT038, 10 months ago

My ELI5 version:

Basically, the ‘Web Environment Integrity’ proposal is a new technique that verifies whether a visitor of a website is actually a human or a bot.

Currently, there are captchas where you need to select all the crosswalks, cars, bicycles, etc. which checks whether you’re a bot, but this can sometimes be bypassed by the bots themselves.

This new ‘Web Environment Integrity’ thing goes as follows:

1. You visit a website
2. Website wants to know whether you’re a human or a bot.
3. Your browser (or the ‘client’) will send request an ‘environment attestation’ from an ‘attester’. This means that your browser (such as Firefox or Chrome) will request approval from some third-party (like Google or something) and the third-party (which is referred to as ‘attester’) will send your browser a message, which basically says ‘This user is a bot’ or ‘This user is a human being’.
4. Your browser receives this message and will then send it to the website, together with the ‘attester public key’. The ‘attester public key’ can be used by the website to verify whether the attester (a.k.a. the third-party checking whether you’re a human or not) is trustworthy and will then check whether the attester says that you’re a human or not.

I hope this clears things up and if I misinterpreted the GitHub explainer, please correct me.

The reason people (rightfully) worry about this, is because it gives attesters A LOT of power. If Google decides they don’t like you, they won’t tell the website that you’re a human. Or maybe, if Google doesn’t like the website you’re trying to visit, they won’t even cooperate with attesting. Lots of things can go wrong here.

JVT038, 10 months ago

I’ve been degoogled for a little bit over a year now and here’s what I use (disclaimer: I own a NAS / homserver, so I got a little bit more options than most people would).

• Android OS: /e/OS
• Browser: Firefox and Bromite
• Maps: Organic Maps
• Play Store: F-Droid (droidify client in my case) and App Lounge.
• YouTube: Libretube (privacy-friendly YouTube client)
• Translation: DeepL
• Movies, TV Shows, Music: self-hosted Jellyfin
• Automatic backup of my images and videos: self-hosted Immich
• VPN server: self-hosted Wireguard server
• Document management: self-hosted Nextcloud Office + LibreOffice on my PC
• E-Mail service: ProtonMail (self-hosting this is a pain in the ass, so I’ll just leave it to experts)
• Search engine: DuckDuckGo

Check out !selfhosted for tons of stuff on self-hosting services and https://www.privacyguides.org/en/ for a lot of other good alternatives.

JVT038, 10 months ago

A server is nothing more than a computer that is always running 24/7.

The server (or actually, computer) can do a lot of different things, such as simply storing a lot of files, streaming these files, download other files, etc.

Besides that, the server can run programs like Lemmy and because the server is generally 24/7, the Lemmy program will also be accessible 24/7.

Edit with an analogy: A server is similar to a literal restaurant-server. People can request data (such as a file) from a server and the server will serve that file to the people who requested it. Just like how people order food from the server in a restaurant, people ‘order’ data (such as a file or image) from the server.

JVT038, 10 months ago

Is this exclusive to acronyms related to self hosting or also just general acronyms, such as TMI, PLS, YSK, TIL, etc.

JVT038, 10 months ago

Ah ok. Well anyway, maybe add protocols such as HTTP, HTTPS, TCP, UDP, SMTP, IMAP, POP3, SSL, VPN, Git, TLS, SQL.

JVT038, 10 months ago

Hmm, but why would a farmer provide food to people without getting anything in return? This is, assuming everyone is selfish, which is the core assumption of capitalism.

JVT038, 10 months ago

Well I mean, most of the liberal and classical economists generally try to predict the behaviors of consumers, which lead to assumptions such as “People will generally be selfish”.

JVT038, 10 months ago

someone without the mental illness of greed will eventually replace the farmer.

This would result into some kind of farm run by the community, which means that volunteers are working on the farm, providing free food to everyone. However, this begs the question if the food produced by inexperienced volunteers with good intentions is sufficient to feed an entire village, town, city or a country.

EDIT: I would like to add that I’m definitely not opposing this kind of farm and I’m very much aware of the major flaws in capitalism.

JVT038, 10 months ago

I’m no professional historian or anything, but as far as I know, back in prehistoric era hunters & gatherers used to share basically everything with each other without anything in return.

When the people stopped moving around and settled at one place to farm land, the first agricultural society was founded, where people didn’t use money but goods (such as food itself) as a currency to trade with each other.

Once again, I’m not a professional historian, just a guy who read some books, so feel free to correct me.

JVT038, 10 months ago

Just finished playing Horizon: Zero Dawn and this is honestly so true lol. Despite it, it’s still a good game with an intriguing storyline imo

JVT038, 10 months ago

Ik hoop dat de kerncentrales er komen. En alvast voor de mensen die denken dat het te lang duurt:

“Het beste moment om een kerncentrale te bouwen was 10 jaar geleden. Het tweede beste moment om er een te bouwen is nu.” -een random guy

JVT038, 10 months ago

Yeah, but Fairphone decided to make their own drivers after Qualcomm stopped with supporting the chips.

JVT038, 10 months ago

The Fairphone 2 actually had 7 years of security updates before the support was withdrawn, so it’s pretty likely the Fairphone 3 will last at least 7 years, maybe even longer.

JVT038, 10 months ago

They actually made a custom operating system, because Qualcomm dropped support for the SoC. Source: www.fairphone.com/en/2021/…/android9-fairphone2/

They did it twice; once for the upgrade to Android 9 (took 18 months) and once for the upgrade to android 10 (took 10 months)

JVT038, 10 months ago

This differs per server. Some servers have more bandwidth and have better speed, while other servers have worse speeds.