Not really a fan of republicanism. I don’t like the idea that the people we elect can just ignore their constituents, or that those people can then make appointments that are not something the general public want. I do however like the idea of a unicameral legislature. I think our bicameral legislature creates more problems than it solves. On top of the Senate being wildly unequal in its representation.
We need a strict representative democracy, where representatives are legally beholden to act according to the wishes of their constituents. And we need to reform or eliminate positions where unelected persons are appointed without any input from the public. For example, SCOTUS needs to be expanded, given term limits, and the justices need to stand for public election, not appointment by whichever president is in power at the time. Currently, SCOTUS can be entirely stacked and controlled by a given administration, nullifying any semblance of checks and balances, giving functional control of the government to that president long after their term has ended. Further, SCOTUS can simply act of their own will, with literally no recourse for anyone to stop them. Same reforms should apply to all court appointments (federal/circuit/district/etc.)
Abolish the Senate
Abolish the electoral college
Establish ranked choice voting
Term limits top to bottom
Of course, part of this would take constitutional amendment(s), which given our political climate, is functionally impossible, on top of legislation that no one in power would ever be willing to put forward nor support. The people in power aren’t going to willingly surrender any of that power. So I don’t really know how we fix it.
Wish I were nearby! Also 80s/90s kid. Linux nerd, software dev. Love writing, art, music, cooking. I’m in Central FL. Scary af here and makes it really hard.
As someone who enjoyed skateboarding in the 90s, there were very, very, very few women in the scene. There was a skatepark I frequented that would be super packed on the weekends, and I think I only ever saw one or two women in several years time.
Regardless of gender is was an extremely insular scene that was majorly actively hostile to anyone starting out overall. But if you weren’t male, everyone was either gross af trying to hit on you, or they just assumed you were shit and couldn’t be otherwise.
The area I was in, the skate scene also had a large number of Straight Edge folk, who I think were using it as a sort of appeasement tactic, like “Look Police Guy/Parents/School officials, etc, we make sure we’re substance free. We not satanist trying to menaces” but used fucking militant tactics against people in the scene. They were fucking terrifying.
It was so off-putting for me that I completely lost any interest in skateboarding. I didn’t want to be part of a scene that treated people that way.
“We need to return to a time when women had no agency, no real personhood, were essentially slaves in their homes, treated as property, and bore literally all the work of the home and family.”
…
“Wow, this is oppressive.”
These people have no thought that the situation women were in 50+ years ago was forced. They didn’t have a choice. They couldn’t even open a bank account on their own. But want to paint that time as some sort of heyday that we need to return to.
Further, I’m convinced that the tradwife movement isn’t in any way genuine, that it’s entirely white supremacist, patriarchal propaganda. Maybe there’s a handful out there that genuinely want this. But otherwise I think it’s entirely a pushback against modernity, and bigots and white cishet men trying to claw back their cultural hegemony.
I can certainly see why there would be appeal but you need to be very cautious of who you want to be a tradwife to. You create a lot of dependence on your partner, You sacrifice a lot of power, and once you start doing this it becomes increasingly difficult taking it back.
Hear hear.
I’ve seen so many older couples where the woman was 100% dependent on the man. He never allowed her to manage finances, have access to the bank accounts, pay bills, etc. and then after 30-40 years he leaves or dies, and then she’s left without any life experience whatsoever and has no idea how to manage her own life.
Or, he’s abusive, shitty, and terrible, but since she has no agency of her own or any idea of how to have that agency, she’s trapped and can’t even conceive of the idea of leaving him.
“We want to protect our cattle and our ranches,” said Arizona representative Michael Carbone. Speaking at the Hardee County Cattleman’s Arena, DeSantis said that cultivated meat would “wipe the people sitting here out of business,” and that “we will not let that happen,”
Funny* how these chuds all about the “free market” unless their products can’t compete, and they have to have subsidies and monopolies to protect their profits.
And that’s the problem. The average person isn’t looking for it, and will absolutely not see it. As long as it’s good enough, that’s all that matters. A plausible enough video of Joe Biden talking about rounding up Christians into internment camps that gets shared on Facebook, or something like that which panders to right-wing bigotry, is enough to get people going. Even real images and videos that are miscaptioned are enough, and even when a link is there that disproves the caption.
People seriously underestimate just how horrifying the possibilities are with this shit. And as high stakes as this election cycle is, and the state of politics in this country, the tendency for people to latch on to anything that affirms their preexisting ideals creates a fucking minefield
The largest code contributors to Linux are corporate contributions
Regular people who contribute to OSS do so as a passion project, as a hobby, and have other unrelated jobs that pay the bills. Those people still have to make a living, they’re just not doing it from their software contributions. Journalism isn’t a hobby and you can’t work a day job and still be an effective journalist. News orgs don’t come together as hobby projects.
I’m not defending advertising. I hate it and think it’s ruined the web. I’m just addressing the analogy here wrt Linux.
Isn’t that a prerequisite for enshitification? Publicly-traded companies are required (by law, I think) to maximize profits for their shareholders, even if that means utterly ruining their original product (Reddit, Boeing, etc.), yes? What do you think?
Meta, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon all need to be broken up into a thousand different companies, same as we did with AT&T.
And unlike with AT&T, after divestiture there needs to be an order in place that perpetually prevents the divested companies from ever merging or buying each other up. At this point AT&T has almost completely re-formed from the companies it was broken into, and that should never have been allowed.
And for fucks sake we need to make the fine for white collar crime that extends state lines to necessitate the forfeiture of the entire C-suite’s and board of directors assets, both domestically and internationally, upon threat of seal team 6. Empty their bank accounts and leave them with nothing
Absolutely this. We need to abolish corporate personhood, and hold company leadership directly responsible for the company’s behavior. Since it is the people who are doing these things. The “company” isn’t some autonomous entity that has a will of its own. People drive it, and those people should be held accountable.
Gods yes. It basically steamrolls everything and you end up with two situations: people who knowingly game the algorithm for malicious intent and pollute search engines and media platforms, or you have people who are earnestly playing to the algorithm to help their “content” get noticed because that’s the only way it will get noticed. It creates this homogeneous landscape where everything looks the same, everyone’s doing and posting the same things, everyone is chasing trends and virality, and no one is doing anything interesting or creative anymore because novel ideas that aren’t SEO’d to death don’t get noticed.
So what we end up with is our current situation: a toxic landscape of “influencers”, “content creators”, content farms, ad farms, bots, etc. polluting everything, and people with genuine passion and interesting ideas getting buried under a sea of engagement bait, rage-bait, and disguised ads.
while websites just repeating the search phrase over and over with no answer in sight are at the top
A decade or so ago, this was a really bad problem, especially with sites like Experts Exchange et al. Content farms just grabbing your query and puking back to you. Or, sites that would take a thread on one forum, and then replicate it across 10 other sites as though they’re different forums, but it’s the exact same posts. But it’s gotten so, so, so much worse in the last year or so. Google searches these days are like wading through a septic tank trying to find a microgram of gold.
I really wish for a day when exploring one’s gender and sexuality isn’t seen as aberrant or deviant or “sinful”. People need to feel comfortable to find out what’s right for them, who they are, without judgement. We see so much bullshit scaremongering about detransitioning as though it validates the fact that being trans isn’t real, and that’s not the case. Someone exploring, trying a change, and realizing that’s not the right thing is fine! Of course what isn’t fine is how many people detransition due to social pressure. If your entire family disowns you, you lose your job, etc., then that’s really fucking hard to bear, and no one should have to go through that.
Can the United States apply consistent standards to pro-Palestine protesters as it does to protecting speech in favor of our country’s violence? No, it doesn’t seem like we can.
Can the United States apply consistent standards to pro-Palestine protesters as it does to protecting speech in favor of our country’s violence? No, it doesn’t seem like we can.
2020 made that loud and clear. The people in power got fucking terrified at the idea that people might be reaching a critical mass of actually making substantive changes, and they violently and rapidly cracked down on it. They’re not going to let that happen again. Our government and our institutions since then have proven time and time again that they will burn this country to the ground before the will of the people is heard or respected.
I would also add our Individualistic and Puritanical culture to the mix of causes. We’re told all of your problems are 100% in your control, and that if you’re not working 100% of the time that you’re a worthless piece of shit that doesn’t deserve to live, that no structural issues exist, that there’s nothing you can’t 100% overcome with enough individual determination. It’s so unbelievably toxic and unhealthy, and causes people to not only not have sympathy or empathy for others, but to see empathy as a negative trait, as a weakness.
That’s such a meaningless sentiment. Sure, I can try to “feel positive” about my ability to navigate or overcome systemic issues, but that doesn’t make it so that I actually can. This is just “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” thinking with a toxic positivity veneer.
I absolutely agree we need this. But the problem stated in the article
The complex web of human interactions that thrived on the internet’s initial technological diversity is now corralled into globe-spanning data-extraction engines making huge fortunes for a tiny few.
is the crux of it all, and without violence or extreme governmental measures forcibly breaking up big tech companies, the banning of selling personal data, etc. (all of which would also require violence because our government absolutely will not do these things) this simply isn’t going to be fixed. Politely asking billionaires to give up their captive revenue streams, and the power they wield with their platforms, will never produce results. And “well, what if we all just delete Instagram/Facebook/et al?” isn’t an answer either. “Content creators” are tied to these platforms for their own revenue streams and livelihoods, and they’re not going to give that up either. And for the most part, a large part of the population simply does not care enough.
The rise of smartphones in the late 2000’s really heralded the beginning of this downfall. There are walled gardens to be found all up and down the pipeline: the phone OEM, the OS devs, the apps and their platforms, the app stores, the service providers, etc. And you now have a device in your pocket that has always on internet connection either through wifi or cellular, a GPS radio, accelerometers, cameras, microphones, NFC, bluetooth, and all of these way to track literally everything about your life: everywhere you go, every app you use, every website you visit, listen to everything you say, and watch everything you do. And because it’s all so convenient, we willingly allowed ourselves to accept this unprecedented level of invasiveness and control.
The people who have that kind of power will not give it up willingly. And our government is too invested and has its fingers too far into all of it to do anything about it. I truly do not believe we’ll see something come along the way FB killed MySpace. Nothing is going to do that to Meta now. They’re too big and have too much power. There’s no market solution. There’s no regulatory will.
Nothing short of violence would ever be able to fix this. And I don’t see any kind of critical mass on the part of average folk to rise up against big tech to fight back, no matter how much information you show them, or how much you explain the dire need.
Of course, the biggest barrier to bike or e-bike adoption is street safety. But the best way to build a constituency for bikeable streets is to flood the zone with bikes, creating a virtuous cycle where more cyclists vividly justify the need for better bike infrastructure. That’s what New York City, Washington, D.C., Chicago, and San Francisco have done through their popular bikeshare programs. Scooter share services have had a similar, albeit somewhat lesser, effect in smaller cities across the country.
Yes, safety is the main issue. Even if someone gave me an ebike for free, I wouldn’t use it where I live. There are almost no bike lanes where I live, and the ones that do exist are on roads where vehicle speeds are 45-65 MPH, the lanes are extremely narrow, the lanes are not protected, and most drivers treat the lanes like turn lanes. A former coworker of mine was previously a pro cyclist, and would ride to work everyday. But after some serious close calls he ended up giving it up and going back to driving because the area here is so extremely hostile and dangerous for cyclists (and pedestrians). There’s nowhere in at least a 50 mile radius of where I live where I would ever feel safe as a cyclist. And farther out from that it’s extremely rural, so cycling isn’t viable transportation anyway.
Bike and scooter shares flooding the streets are the opposite of helpful. People just drop them anywhere, block sidewalks, clutter street corners, etc. They’re a menace that does nothing to promote safer infrastructure.
“Question every narrative, but don’t question these things. Don’t show bias, but here are your biases.” These chuds don’t even hear themselves. They just want to see Arya(n) ramble on about great replacement theory or trans women in bathrooms. They don’t think their bile is hate speech because they think they’re on the side of “facts” and everyone else is an idiot who refuses to see reality. It’s giving strong “I’m not a bigot, “<” minority “>” really is like that. It’s science” vibes.
We Need to Fight for a Democratic Republic Again (www.dsausa.org)
🏳️⚧️ trans girl in southeast Louisiana looking to make friends (fedia.io)
Hi, I'm Emma (she/her)....
Decades of documenting US skateboard culture from a woman’s perspective (www.huckmag.com)
A “Tradwife” Discovers the Anti-Feminist Lifestyle Is Miserable and Oppressive (www.currentaffairs.org)
A horrendous alt-right influencer who encouraged “traditional” gender roles realized that practicing what she preached made her feel enslaved.
The Ban on “Lab-Grown” Meat is Both Reprehensible and Stupid (www.currentaffairs.org)
Mandating that animals should suffer is cruel and benefits no one, except the ranchers whose profits Florida is trying to protect.
Camping (beehaw.org)
Microsoft’s VASA-1 can deepfake a person with one photo and one audio track (arstechnica.com)
Major U.S. newspapers sue OpenAI, Microsoft for copyright infringement (www.axios.com)
It’s the End of the Web as We Know It (www.theatlantic.com)
Does enshitification happen because companies are publicly-traded?
Isn’t that a prerequisite for enshitification? Publicly-traded companies are required (by law, I think) to maximize profits for their shareholders, even if that means utterly ruining their original product (Reddit, Boeing, etc.), yes? What do you think?
Substack Competitor Ghost Announces ActivityPub Integration (wedistribute.org)
AI Is Poisoning Reddit to Promote Products and Game Google With 'Parasite SEO' (www.404media.co)
Detransition is Gender Liberation, Too - Here's to never being satisfied and forever changing. (drdevonprice.substack.com)
Palestine Protests are a Test of Whether This is a Free Country (www.currentaffairs.org)
Can the United States apply consistent standards to pro-Palestine protesters as it does to protecting speech in favor of our country’s violence? No, it doesn’t seem like we can.
Laziness Does Not Exist (drdevonprice.substack.com)
We Need To Rewild The Internet (www.noemamag.com)
Colorado is offering $450 e-bike subsidies. Other states should follow suit (www.fastcompany.com)
Why is using disposable pens still common practice?
Why not buy one decent pen “shell” and then just buy the plastic tube with the tip and the ink afterwards?...
Someone got Gab's AI chatbot to show its instructions (mbin.grits.dev)
Credit to @bontchev
German state gov. ditching Windows for Linux, 30K workers migrating (arstechnica.com)
‘Outdated and misleading’: is it time to reassess the very concept of money? (www.theguardian.com)