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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • So for the first part, I don’t disagree at all. I just don’t think the logistics or theoretical necessity is a bearing on the symbolic-ness of it. Same for the effectiveness of it. Even if it changed literally nothing and no one would ever know I still wouldn’t shake hands with someone I considered evil.

    I don’t see defining a subset of what you consider evil, like dissemination of hate speech, to be a downside.

    There’s a lot of complex questions around a platform curating ideological content which could possibly make them loose certain platform protections. Right now most platforms are roughly content neutral because it allows them to be viewed as platforms, rather than publishers. This is more a response to the claim that there’s no reason for them not to remove ice. It may or may not be compelling, but it’s a real reason.

    As for the use of the word “service”, sometimes my hands type slower than my brain thinks. My intent was to convey “those who develop and control the mastodon license”. Hopefully my original statement makes more sense in that context.
    Those are the people providing the printing press schematic analog. Obviously an idea can’t support an ideology in that sense.

    I’m not of the opinion either supports them in a way that’s worth getting angry over.
    We also aren’t talking about being angry at ISPs for being willing to deliver packets to and from ice or Nazis, or any of the other entities that do less then the most they could possibly do to distance themselves.


  • ricecake@sh.itjust.workstoFediverse@lemmy.worldBluesky just verified ICE
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    5 days ago

    Says the fact that it’s come up multiple times amongst a wide swath of the open source community, and look about you. Those licenses aren’t used. One or two exist and have a vanishingly small usage level and a couple more I have been “in progress” for years.
    The people who write most of the open source licenses have explanations for why it’s not compatible.

    Group behavior is a collective decision and a reflection of the group.


  • ricecake@sh.itjust.workstoFediverse@lemmy.worldBluesky just verified ICE
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    6 days ago

    No, you’re not understanding what I’m saying. I’m not the person you were replying to.
    Mastodon is a piece of software. It has a license, just like bluesky or any other. You can put a clause in the license saying the software cannot be used for the dissemination of hate speech. The open source community has discussed this and decided it goes against the principles of free software and open source.

    If you’re mad at one and not the other, you’re applying different standards because being part of the fediverse weighs more.

    Personally I hold platforms to a different standard and so I’m neither mad at mastodon nor bluesky. I just think it’s hypocritical to be mad at someone for publishing a fascists letter but not be mad at the person who gave the same fascist a printing press.


  • ricecake@sh.itjust.workstoFediverse@lemmy.worldBluesky just verified ICE
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    6 days ago

    So the mastodon service supports Nazis.

    nobody owns it and anyone can run it

    They could have chosen a license that forbid usage for spreading hate. They put “free software” and “open source” above blocking hate speech.
    They’re providing software to Nazis, and I don’t really see how that makes them better than providing a place to post.


  • It costs a company money to process mail at their place if business. Not like, crazy amounts but someone has to open the box, see what’s in it and figure out why it’s there. It’s probably going to cost them at least $2-$3 in time.

    It’s far from an effective way to cost them money, but it’s $2 more than throwing a book away at your house.



  • Oh, most definitely. And honestly I still think anyone who calls themselves a first amendment auditor is more likely than not a little out of whack with regards to the norms of society and the law.

    I believe every example I’ve seen roughly boils down to:
    “I’m going to stand here and film this elementary school to see if anyone oppresses me by saying I can’t”
    Cop: “everything okay here sir?”.
    "This is public property and I can film here if I want. You have no right to tell me not to!”.
    Cop: “that’s alright, I only asked if everything was okay. We got some reports about strange behavior and that you were making people uncomfortable so I came to check up on things”.
    “Well now you know that everything’s fine, no one has anything to be concerned about because it’s perfectly legal, and you can run along now. Good bye.”.
    Cop: “alright, well it might be nice if you considered moving along, since you’re making people uncomfortable. Just a thought. Bye.”.
    Title: “1st amendment patriot schools cop on meaning of the law”.

    Cops are assholes, but those guys invariably share videos of the least objectionable behavior to illustrate that.


  • Other than the ADA compliance mentioned, there’s also weird property ownership and utility access things that can come up.
    The laws that give them the ability to put sidewalks on your property usually phrase a limit on where they can put it. They can’t just cut a 45° corner off your lawn because it’s easier. If the property that owns that wall technically exists in a funny shape their sketches of the plan could have happily breezed along making a weird gap.
    There could also be a utility junction under that area that they didn’t want to cover.

    I don’t think there was a tree because you don’t see the mound or divot that you usually see if there was a tree somewhere, at least one big enough to warrant that much of a sidewalk swerve.


  • The US has done many horrible things, but that’s an awful list to go by. It mixes US involvement in the Philippines and the nightmare that was with “Israel killed someone and it’s likely the US was aware”, NATO involvement in Bosnia, and the US usage of radio and press releases to influence world opinion in its favor.
    Specific incidents in Bosnia? Certainly. But on the face of it, the US joining with other nations to intervene in an ethnically driven civil war isn’t an attrocity. The US being aware of an Israeli operation isn’t a US attrocity. Propaganda isn’t an attrocity.
    Hell, one entry literally seemed to be “American soldiers reported a South Korean war crime through appropriate channels, and this didn’t change US foreign policy”

    Mixing actual attrocities in with the benign or unrelated things just dilutes the actual attrocities, particularly when the preamble says to play up to emotional outrage.


  • Problem with that line of thinking is that it presumes they won’t do those things anyway. If they want just cause, they just declare it. If anyone to the left in any way does anything, it’s a seditious partisan act by the extreme left and very likely a justifiable use for the insurrection act.

    Concerning ourselves with how they’ll take things is putting our actions under their review. Preemptively bending to their will before they even express it out of fear of how they might react.

    If they’re going to call you radical and extreme, you may as well enjoy the benefits rather than try to appease them.


  • Why do you think violence would accelerate things? They don’t need the violence to be real to react to it, so if it would accelerate things for them they would just do it. Likewise, protest or strikes aren’t going to magically be treated as peaceful. They’ll just call it an insurrection regardless. . It’s why a lot of people hesitate to act. There’s a big difference between a protest where your local police department might use tear gas if you stick around after they tell you to leave and a protest where the president is encouraging random nut jobs to hit you with a car, has encouraged your police department to shoot you, and is sending the national guard to shoot you.







  • So, my intent is not to turn this into the misery Olympics or anything, so I’m just going to clarify a few points and say that the main thrust of my message was the end: if people are telling you what they can and can’t afford in a country you’re less familiar with, it’s probably better to assume they know their own economy better than you do, rather than deciding a nation of hundreds of millions of people are financially over cautious.

    The $1000 figure is for all of the US, regardless of if it’s high income low cost of living or anything else, and refers to money that can be deposited in savings at the end of the month.
    For example, the UK has this figure at roughly $1100 USD.

    The city I live in has remarkably close to twice the expenses as yours. In the US a car isn’t optional unless you live in the biggest if cities though. It would take four hours for me to walk to my doctor’s office, and longer by bus, but there’s only four bus visits per day at the office. A fair bit of the roadway lacks sidewalks. Either way a doctor’s visit means taking a day off work if you don’t have a car.

    The 25% rate isn’t poverty rate, it’s more a measure of financial safety margin. You can be well above the poverty line and still have zero net income, it just means you can’t tolerate changes in income or expenses without things becoming extremely problematic. Our poverty level is based on an idealized measure of food costs nationwide and does a poor job measuring things. It was originally put together before we had great knowledge of what contributed to poverty, and it’s been a political tool used as a lever to justify cutting assistance programs for a long time, so changing it has been difficult.

    I think you got my description backwards. There’s an amount I pay no matter what, and a point after which I pay nothing (with caveats). So the most I pay is that $11k number, unless the insurance company decides a procedure was unnecessary or the provider was unsupported (if you end up in the hospital you might not be able to choose your doctors, and some of them might not be covered by your insurance, which you’ll find out later. Aforementioned baby delivery cost $650,000 . I paid $6,500. Then I got billed for another $12,000 and change because of stuff like the insurance company deciding some tests were unnecessary and not working with some of the nurses.). My insurance situation is pretty good though, since a lot of people have significantly less at a higher cost.

    it sounds like you’re probably better off with any odd job in Europe if you put it that way

    That is in many ways true. America has a higher cap on income but Europe generally has a better safety net. I’m fortunate to have ended up in a low cost of living area with a high salary job, so I’m currently better off where I am, but as children and myself get older, a social safety net that means my retirement isn’t at the whims of the stock market and an education system that won’t potentially put my children in debt for life has an increasingly large appeal.

    San Diego is a very high cost of living area. $100,000 would be a modest income there that would get you a minimal comfortable life. Like, $3,000 a month for a 1 bedroom apartment.
    San Diego is also one of the safest cities in the US. Fun fact: while confirming that I found out I live in one of the more dangerous cities in the country. So that’s fun.
    So yeah, San Diego is gonna give you more wealthy people with higher costs of living and very low crime. Factor that in to your assessments.

    Housing economics are very disparate between countries. You can’t directly compare them easily. A two story house is basic construction here, they tend to avoid building anything smaller because it’s not significantly cheaper to build or sell. Our houses are built with different objectives so they tend to be cheaper to make taller, and it’s just expected that it’ll get replaced in 50 or 60 years.
    The person you talked to in San Diego was likely renting a house, which is often cheaper than an apartment. That fits with the price you mentioned.


  • understand this as over half Americans make less than 1400€ a month. I assume you were exaggerating a bit

    After expenses and taxes the average American household brings in under $1000 dollars a month. It varies by region since cost of living and wages vary significantly. 25% of Americans have no net income after expenses, and 1/3 have a net worth of $0 or less. In euros that’s less than €800 a month.

    Essential goods usually refers to medical expenses, but it’s also used to refer to food, rent and utilities. Even if you’re employed and have insurance medical costs can be high.
    I’m not in a bad situation at all, I’m actually in a very good one, and I pay about $400 a month for insurance and have a yearly cap of $6500 in costs, not counting medicine or the actual cost of insurance (so I’ll pay at least $4800, and at most $11,300+the cost of medicine+the cost of anything the insurance company thinks I didn’t need after the fact. ). I’ve hit the max for the past two years, once because baby and again because baby got a nasty cough and they spent a little being observed for safety.

    My example was not homeless people. That’s what happens if you become elderly and have financial difficulties earlier in life here. A lot of Americans simply can’t afford to stop working, ever. I don’t remember a time I haven’t seen at least a person who should definitely be retired doing menial labor, and wheelchair and oxygen is common enough that it’s not really not worthy.

    Besides, I know many people doing odd jobs and working a couple days a week. Working this way allows them to safely rent a house, to have food and extra money for diversion as well as saving up for times in which there may be no available jobs. Most of them can probably go on one year without working with the minimal savings they have.

    That is not how it is in America. Housing, food and recreation on a part time job is actually a laughable fantasy, and that’s before you add “having savings”.

    America’s economic disparity and lack of social safety net makes risk taking exceptionally dangerous.

    You seem like a worldly and well traveled person. Use that experience to understand that there’s a rational reason Americans tend to be risk adverse in this regard. We either actually can’t afford it, or we can’t afford it without a shocking risk.


  • Most of the country is not New York, and transportation is more expensive. Basing travel costs off of the cost at a major transit hub isn’t representative.

    France requires you to file your visa applications before travel. If you show up on a travel visa and then apply for long term residency they’ll reject it because you didn’t follow the rules.
    A residency visa requires €1400 a month in income, so good luck getting residency with €1000 cash. Particularly when a significant portion of Americans don’t have that to begin with.

    No one said you had to be rich to leave America and move to France, just that it’s not available to most Americans.

    I don’t see how losing one year of income could noticeably ruin your life

    Says the person who is obviously not American.
    https://www.norc.org/research/library/most-working-americans-would-face-economic-hardship-if-they-miss.html Remember that we don’t have a social safety system here like most countries do. Being unemployed means you don’t get medical treatment , and even if you’re employed the costs can be devastating in their own right. You can end up homeless, where housing assistance can have a wait list of more than a year, if it even exists. Same for food assistance. The only medical care you’re entitled to is that the ER must do the minimum necessary to stabilize a life threatening condition.
    That’s what’s looming over Americans when we weigh taking financial risks. Loosing a month of income can create an unrecoverable financial burden.

    That’s what I mean when I say most Americans can’t afford to fail at something like that. They may be able to afford to do it, and it might work out, but if it doesn’t the consequences are crippling.

    How often do you see an elderly person in a wheelchair with an oxygen tank doing menial labor at a supermarket or hardware store?