the practice many browsers have adopted of truncating URLs in the address bar to the hostname is emblematic of the decline and commercially driven infantilization of the web.
understanding URLs — their roles and the ways and whys of how they are constructed — was an elementary skill of the original view-source web.
hiding complete URLs encourages people to become ignorant consumers of mysterious information services, rather than informed participants in a public forum.
"copyright is alienable, which means you can bargain it away…corporations love copyright, because it means that they can force people who have less power…to sign away their copyrights. This is how we got to a place where, after 40 years of expanding copyright…we have an entertainment sector that's larger and more profitable than ever, even as creative workers' share of the revenues their copyrights generate has fallen, both proportionally and in real terms." @pluralistichttps://pluralistic.net/2023/09/25/deep-scrape/#steering-with-the-windshield-wipers
Netanyahu is a great case study in how right-wing policy can yield political success for some time while sewing the seeds of deep catastrophe that emerge from problems right-wing leadership seeks to deny or suppress or oppress rather than address.
A present-day coalition can be bought from the proceeds of dispossessing the less favored and eating what ought to seed corn for a better future.
“Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s anti-immigrant National Rally party, argues that true exile ‘is not to be banished from your country, but to live in it and no longer recognize it.’”
my dear Marine, that is not exile. that is called getting old, and disagreeable as it can be, it’s what awaits all of us, if we are lucky.
the people who crush the university student protests will always be on the wrong side of history. it will become a settled matter twenty to thirty years later, when the former students are the ones writing the history.
right-wing politicians have this trick of governing badly, then using the catastrophes that result to do what they always wanted to do but could not have done absent the grave crises they cause and do not let go to waste.
to promote peace need not imply a demand that any side capitulate.
there are other means of contesting outcomes than armed conflict.
peace requires only mutual acceptance of alternative forums under which the conflict might continue, under less negative-sum terms. it need not imply acceptance of a final outcome.
"What we can do is simple: Start writing stuff again. And recording stuff. And filming stuff. And put it out in public - not on the corporate social media, but in your own blog, in your own web page, on Mastodon, on Peertube and wherever; put it where anybody can find it and react to it and link to it." @jannemhttps://janneinosaka.blogspot.com/2024/01/the-web-is-broken.html ht @uastronomer@mike
i’d support a law that made it impossible for tiktok to operate as it does, as long as it was equitable and made it impossible for facebook, instagram, twitter, and youtube to operate as they do. i trust the Chinese Communist Party to act in the US public interest about as much as i trust Elon Musk to.
“the monopolist is like a politician who wins power – whether through greatness or by deceit – and then gerrymanders their district so that they can do anything and gain re-election. Even the noblest politician, shorn of accountability, will be hard pressed to avoid yielding to temptation.” @pluralistichttps://pluralistic.net/2024/05/18/market-discipline/
“it…is self-defeating and unnecessary to argue that we want the government to override the market. The issue is not whether the government will override the market, the issue is how the government will structure the market. The right wants to structure the market so all the money goes to its billionaire backers. Progressives want to structure the market so that the benefits of growth are broadly shared.” @DeanBaker13https://cepr.net/team-billionaire-is-winning-they-have-us-cursing-at-markets/ ht @MikeBon
On the one hand, one should not brook, or worse succumb to, weak conspiracy theories that amount mostly to Roschach tests of the conspiracists' priors and prejudices.
On the other hand, we must not let the awfulness of a lot of conspiracism trick us into defending institutions that in fact are broken, corrupt, and often predatory.
it would be better if, when people advocate for a right, they explicitly describe the obligation on the part of others that would be its dual.
health care is a right, i say. it’s dual is not that doctors are slaves obligated to provide health care for free, but that states are obligated to fund doctors and other providers to ensure health care for all.
every meaningful rights assertion carries as its dual some other party’s obligation.
i’ve got to admit, Elise Stefanik performed an unintentionally brilliant act of partisan politics when she got the Presidents of Penn and Harvard fired, encouraging their colleagues to jump straight to the kind of repressive overreaction that is a match to the kerosene mix of student idealism and narcissism.
now the Democratic coalition is bitterly divided, and the most salient issues are public disorder and student entitlement, both of which strongly favor Republicans.
a reality that socialist or progressive protestors must take into account is that disorder on the streets always works to the political advantage of fascists, who credibly promise order at all costs even while they cynically ensure protest becomes disorderly.
it’s not fair, but it is reality. in the ecstasy of genuine righteousness one may not give a fuck, but then a morning after comes.
For learning about products, Mastodon "word of mouth" seems very definitely superior to search and reviews in the usual (far from credible) places.
Asking about travel laptop backpacks, I learned about, got feedback on the following brands that did not appear prominently when Googling (or Kagi-ing or Amazon-ing) laptop backpacks generically:
Jandd
Nomatic
Osprey
Quechua
Rickshaw
Tom Bihn
Tatonka
Also Targus, which does show up more easily. Plus, I got a kind offer of an extra!
@trochee it’s weird how instantly we’ve transitioned from Google organizing the whole world’s information to a kind of premodern only word-of-mouth can be trusted.
