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shorts are not my cup of tea. Pretty sure shorts have a negative impact on peoples attention span. I’d still be happy to see people watch their shorts on the Fediverse rather than at tiktok/yt. Of course, but still…

Been playing some Xonotic recently. Good times with FOSS.

Maybe billionaires should be filmed and streamed continuously, since their behavior has such a big impact on the world. If they don’t like it maybe we shouldn’t allow them to control such incredible assets. I’m sure billionaires have nothing sketchy to hide, right? What we will see is probably how they are hard working people who are not at all detached from normal folks. Right?

I learned that just now.

recently been finding it a lot easier to find my stuff on Soulseek rather than torrent sites.

I just use RSS feeds to follow YT-channels. It’s doesn’t seem any less convenient than a YT account.

Can’t be that much work, can it?

This is wonderful, I’ve been struggling with piped for some time now, it’s always asking me to sign in to confirm that I’m not a bot. Also it’s showing me videos in very low quality and often it stops loading halfway through the video. With this I get to see good quality videos once more, without unwanted pauses and without financing yt in any way. Great!

But ads are not functioning, they are destructive. They are by no means cheap either, people are paying through being manipulated and we are paying collectively for the damage it’s doing to our world. We’d be much better of if we had only direct payments. Direct artist payments will always be the more effective and efficient financing structure because then we pay just for the creative output, not all the unrelated economic parasitic activities.

The solution is very simple and there is nothing that inflation can do about it: we don’t watch ads, we pay creators that we want to support, and if from these donations a creator doesn’t earn enough money he has two options: 1. One has an intrinsic drive to create and publish so he does so through other means, for instance by working a part time job. If this sounds unreasonable then let us not forget that already most of all human creativity is financed exactly like this, it is only the exception that is financially lucrative. 2. One chooses not to create (or in a less costly manner). You could think of this as a sad outcome, but you’d be better off concluding that this creative output wasn’t so important to anyone, not to the creator nor to the public. This means we’d be left with the better and more intrinsically motivated creative content.

So let’s not justify ads, but let’s reject them in the most radical ways we can.

Ads exist because people want to make money. So these bad actors go out and look for places where people like to spend their time, and they poison these places with their money-hungry practices. In the process they destroy the innocence of all these manifestations of human creativity, and manipulate people into buying shit they don’t actually need, effectively destroying the planet through overconsumption. That’s not even mentioning that ad-companies put us on a path towards a mass-surveillance society, just because big-data leads to more effective ads. I can’t help but see ads as a destructive force of evil in our world. I like human creativity in it’s many forms, and I’m all in favor of rewarding creators to a certain extent, but using ads seems to be the worst possible method of doing so.

(not intending to criticize your comments, just spreading the anti-ad gospel ;-)

I would love for this to become successful! I am assuming it’s not in any great state yet, but the decentralized future is waiting for us !

Open source government, eh? Don’t know if this would work completely but I like the direction.

That was an interesting read. Thanks. Do you study economics as part of an education? Or did you just dive in to it out of personal interest?

Thanks for the elaborate response. To me the ‘taxes don’t pay for public infrastructure’ seems bizarre. Are you saying public infrastructure shouldn’t have to be payed for by taxpayers, or that it isn’t payed for by taxpayers? I can understand you making a point about the first given your MMT explanation, but taxpayer money IS actually being used for all sorts of public infrastructure, isn’t it? A government could use money creation for every project, but they don’t, they also collect taxes…

I would also worry that the risks of (hyper)inflation are being downplayed in this theory. But too be fair I’m not an economist, nor do I have knowledge about MMT, so I’m really not the person to refute any of this. It’s interesting and I’ll look in to it with an open mind. Thanks

There is a lot wrong with what you’re saying. Taxes don’t remove money from the economy, because it all goes back into the economy. Tax money is most definitely used for all sorts of things including for infrastructure. A government can’t responsibly create endless amounts of money. The amount of debt a country can have should be related to the size of the economy. Where you’re right is that taxes are a way of redistributing money in order to influence society in all sorts of ways. Which can be good or bad.

Europe is voting this weekend. If you care about copyright reform, you should consider voting for the European Pirate Party. IA is probably in the wrong here, legally. But many would argue it’s morally right to have free access to information. Sure, shadow libraries are popping up everywhere and we have access to more information than ever before, but if we really want access for everyone, we need different copyright laws, and for that we need politicians.

That makes sense. But what about big ongoing projects/ Couldn’t they easily migrate to a FOSS service? I’d imagine people will look out for them specifically no matter where they’re hosted.

I never said I don’t mind them, and I also never said I’d join them. I’m just suggesting we keep the conversation going and settle things with words rather than violence. It’s difficult to have a conversation when you are unable to understand a point someone is making. Not saying you should agree at all. It’s fair to have a difference of opinion. But you just misrepresent what I’m saying, that doesn’t really lead to an interesting conversation in my opinion, so I’m out.

You literally talk in your other reply about how you’ll join them

you did actually tell me in your comment that you don’t really mind nazis as long as they’re not being violent towards you.

This is becoming quite bizarre. Reading back my comments I don’t even know which line you are misinterpreting cause I don’t think I’ve said anything that even comes close to your accusations. Of course I’m not advocating to join nazi’s. I think you’d be better of sticking to what people actually say, or else every online conversation is going to derail as much as this one apparently already did.

You don’t have any sort of morality or ideology underlying your objection

You make a lot of assumptions