Thinking about the theory in TECHNOFEUDALISM: WHAT KILLED CAPITALISM by @VaroufakisDE and the narrative structure of THE BEZZLE by @pluralistic it occurs to me that we are now living through an epoch that I’m thinking to call The Ultimate Bezzle: the interval of time between when the neofeudalists have reduced the capitalists into vassalage, but the capitalists do not yet recognize it.
Also, just for kicks, check out this piece from the Carnegie Endowment that I randomly found when I went looking for a good explanation of the term “bezzle” — turns out to be a flying anvil of cluefulness, and I strongly recommend it.
I’d be more sympathetic to arguments for making bridges out of fedspace opt-out rather than opt-in if they didn’t dismiss entirely the problem of how the bridge acts as a proxy in any and all moderation disputes between instances in each bridged network, and that’s not a role I want filled by some random techbro with a stack he’s desperately trying to find a way to monetize.
Seriously people. Stop huffing the paint thinner. Some random tech-dude sees a place to build a bridge where a bridge doesn’t currently exist, and the first question to ask them is about how they are thinking about the opportunity to charge a toll for crossing it. When the answer comes back “you’re already crossing it now, and I’m not even thinking yet about how to charge you for it,” the first thing to do is destroy the bridge.
One of the things that happens to you after you watch enough of your family and loved ones descend into dementia is you start to lose your patience for the popular view that the body is a vehicle for the brain and the brain is a physical container for an immaterial mind. That is just quite obviously Not How Anything Works.
And you start looking at problems like pollution and the climate calamity and biodiversity collapse and thinking about how there are definitely certain people who should never ever again feel safe appearing in public without a phalanx of bodyguards.
@janxdevil Lightsail with a static IP and Route53 have worked well for me, assuming you don’t mind patronizing AWS. Domain registration and obtaining an SSL cert are easy, and there are machine images for Wordpress, Ghost, Joomla, and Drupal if you want a click-to-install CMS. Also inexpensive.
We (@alerima and me) took a hike in Big Basin earlier this year, and we saw this in person. The park is not what it used to be, but the sight of all those burned coastal redwoods covered in little fuzzy shoots was a hopeful moment for us. A sign that the park could one day recover.
Seriously considering doing something radical to my physical appearance so that I don’t look on first glance like a Nazi mass shooter suspect. Need to figure out what viable options I might have. One option is to just stop wearing pants.
Today I’m feeling especially demoralized about the state of politics, at all levels: local, state, national and global.
The impression I have is that a certain similarity can be observed in the dysfunctions at every level: an absolute refusal even to consider the possibility of long-term consequences of policy choices.
It’s like the entire world of human politics at every level has adopted the axiomatic view that the long-term future simply does not exist and therefore any reasoning that accounts for it is obviously invalid.
I simply don’t know how to live in a world where that’s the dominant mode of thinking. And today I’m despairing more than usual about it.
Clearly it’s a world where billionaires have arranged everything to suit their own preferences for thinking about the long-term future, which is to say not at all. At a basic level, billionaires understand they have no real control over what happens to their vast wealth after they die. All their efforts at shaping their legacies are dependent on unreliable systems they cannot totally control in life much less after death. So they’re organizing around simply denying the importance of having a legacy at all. Allowing billionaires even to exist was our greatest mistake. I used to think it was the hydrogen bomb and the fossil fuel refinery. Nope. Those were just consequences of allowing billionaires.
So my employers are hiring a lot. And now that I’m a manager, we need to find somebody to take over my coding responsibilities. You know, so I can spend most of time doing manager things instead of half of it, with the other half devoted to coding on something that needs a full time engineer leading it.
Are you, or is someone you know, a giant TCP/IP nerd like me, with a mastery of C++-14 and software architecture? If so, then send me a PM and I’ll hook you up with our recruiter. Employer is in Foster City, CA and we’re on a hybrid schedule 3-day in and 2-day at home.
Welp, my DD-WRT router is no longer staying up for more than 100 days at a time, so I guess after eight years it’s time to look for a replacement that supports more recent firmware.
Here is a thing I hope #mastodon instance administrators will consider doing in response to the new #Threads app from #Meta: pay very close attention to account migration.
Don’t enable account migration to Threads on any instance at which accounts are unable to migrate from Threads. I think a quid pro quo on this point is absolutely necessary.
Don’t let Threads take accounts unless they let people come back if they don’t want to be there anymore.