Reddit is one of the few remaining platforms where reach is determined democratically. You demean that populous by calling it the singular "reddit", as if it's a single hive mind. But you'll probably get your way, I imagine the billionaire censorship campaign will come for it too eventually. Then you'll only ever get to hear thoughts you agree with, glorious day ey?
Reddit is the most censored platform out there… posts and users that are not aligned with subreddit mods get banned or deleted prolifically. Subreddits that do not align similarly soon find themselves banned
Idk if many people remember how Reddit was when it started, its whole draw was that it was a bunch of relatively intelligent/friendly western internet people who liked to kinda role play as a hive mind.
I wouldn't call it the most censored platform, but it still has vestiges of its old self, particularly with respect to philosophy and politics.
Subreddits get banned for egregious shit. Reddit stays on the side of letting subs up, rather than banning.
Reddit has made it harder for mods to find out which subs you are active in, so that you can’t be banned for activity in subs that are in cold wars with each other.
Let's be honest, like for national assemblies, lots of members of the parliament are quite dumb.
I think most of them will not even look at the biggest part of the laws they are supposed to vote. They will vote for whatever they are told to vote for by the party or carefully crafted lobbying.
For something like chat control, you don't see it but there are probably a dozen lobbyist that went to see them in turn, feeding lies and propaganda that they will not challenge because they have other "important" political subjects they are busy looking at.
The commission is leading the game with lots of tricks like what was done here to get what they want in the end.
Just look at the fact that very very few of member even realized or complained to have been played fool by the last vote.
And I mean that it is wonderful already that some many members did the right choice (and I hope because they understood the issue and not because they were told to vote this), but it is crazy that so many still voted in favor.
And who knows, maybe a lot of them didn't even understand the question and were thinking that the "no" was "no to chat control", but here it goes back to my initial point that they are dumb enough to be easily manipulated by the commission members.
That's not great context: China and India have huge populations, it's expected that they should be at the top.
Better context can be found here[1] (countries by emission per capita). It's still not great because it shows a lot of small countries at the top. For example: Palau is the first, but it has a population of a few thousand people, so their emissions are a rounding error when compared to other countries.
Per capita isn't the useful metric in this regard for the reason Palau illustrates. The climate cares about volume.
Per capita emissions is a way to assign relative sin by those who feel guilty about living large.
Bill Gates today, "This is a chance to refocus on the metric that should count even more than emissions and temperature change: improving lives. Our chief goal should be to prevent suffering, particularly for those in the toughest conditions who live in the world’s poorest countries. The biggest problems are poverty and disease, just as they always have been. Understanding this will let us focus our limited resources on interventions that will have the greatest impact for the most vulnerable people.”
You can do taxes for free most of the time. Millions of us do every year, and the IRS estimates that 70% of tax payers could file for free.
> Why must every service and thing in the US must be a private profit making thing?
It isn't. There are roughly 2 million nonprofits. "Nonprofit organizations play a significant role in the US economy. In 2022, there were 1.97 million nonprofits operating in the US"
And there are endless government programs and millions of government employees. The federal government alone spends over $6 trillion of our money, and money we don't have, per year, and most of it is on mandatory social programs.
"About 60% of all federal spending is categorized as mandatory spending — which amounted to $3.8 trillion last year. This spending is essentially on autopilot because it funds programs whose eligibility rules and benefit formulas are set in law. This consists mostly of programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and Veterans care."
Sadly shows China going up, sharply until 2011, then more modestly. The latest 2023 data shows 8t/capita where the EU average is about 6 (not every EU country is rich, but sounds like that ought to be enough for a decent lifestyle) and US 14
Canada. But there aren't that many of us, and the absolute number and political units also matter if you care about warming as a practical problem. There are two interesting things about per capita CO2eq in this graph.
1. China is still trending up and the US is still trending down. It's dangerous to make straight-line projections but they are on trend to meet at some point.
2. The US per capita emissions appear to be on a steady downward trend since 1850. This is even more obvious if you discount the anomalous periods of the civil war and the Great Depression. You have to admit, that's something that demands unpacking.
Edit: Looks like Mongolia, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE have the honour of being at the top actually. Might not be a comprehensive list.
> The US per capita emissions appear to be on a steady downward trend since 1850. You have to admit, that's something that demands unpacking.
Indeed, because it's extremely wrong. In 1850 the US emitted 0.84 tons per capita. In 2023 it emitted around 14 tons. That is down from around 21 tons in 2000.
Yeah, there's no way that the US would have less emissions dating back from 1850. That's the beginnings of the large scale Industrial Revolution in the US.
They could support a stablecoin like USDC and start pushing people to that. No censorship and lower fees. Valve broke ground with Steam, they could do it again.
The problem with that is that you usually end up using traditional payment rails (e.g. a Visa debit card) to "invisibly" buy the stablecoin and then you're subject to their rules and fees again.
Early crypto believer here. My first purchase of Bitcoin was at $0.23. I've been through the ups and downs, used the proceeds to buy physical assets over the years (land, and one vehicle), and lost interest in the "community" shortly after Ethereum gained initial popularity. I still hold some crypto, mostly Bitcoin but also Ethereum, Monero, and a handful of altcoins that don't amount to enough to bother withdrawing.
My hot take take: Crypto still fills a valuable role, and will still "take over" the global financial system both at the individual and institutional level. Whether that's Bitcoin, another coin, or something new created by the institutions themselves is yet to be seen.
You're right that it's "tainted", of course. That's why I think we're in a (hopefully) long slump in adoption. I think that will rapidly change if and when the US Dollar loses its place as the world's reserve currency.
At some point there will be a war or significant political disruption. A large part of the world will want to divest itself of dollars, and none of the state-backed alternatives will be stable enough for their needs. That's when we'll see a shift to crypto - first some international institutions that do business across ideological borders, then the rest of the internationals, then individuals.
Unless and until that happens, things will continue to slowly grow. The boom/bust cycle will keep going, getting longer and lower magnitude over time. There's still money to be made in speculation, but that's not what interests me :)
> At some point there will be a war or significant political disruption. A large part of the world will want to divest itself of dollars, and none of the state-backed alternatives will be stable enough for their needs. That's when we'll see a shift to crypto - first some international institutions that do business across ideological borders, then the rest of the internationals, then individuals.
Sorry how would crypto end up more stable than any candidates for a reserve currency? The only thing even remotely stable in the crypto world are stablecoins which... are pegged to the dollar (the actual reserve currency) which is already unstable in your scenario.
X is still ground zero for news, and it saved free speech. In the fullness of time and distance it will be viewed by historians as one of the most important events in history.
Your post gets shadow banned for the word cisgender on X... the only speech it saved was low effort trolling, misinformation and hate speech. Musk's version of free speech is just changing the dials on the moderation machines to boost speech he prefers and shadow ban speech his doesn't.
Oh, the irony of all of these "free speech" defenders celebrating their "right" to be offensive online, when the OG free speech (1st Amendment) is actively being attacked and dismantled by a regime that they likely worship.
Their viewpoints border on religious zealotry and it's pointless to try and reason with them.
At this point in time, if someone is still hailing Musk as a champion of free speech, I can't see any other explanation than that they're ideologically a nazi themselves. The guy outed himself several times as a nazi, doing salutes on national TV, twitting anti-semitic bullshit, and now tweaking their AI to promote a new holocaust and glorify Hitler. There comes a time when you have to call out nazism for what it is.
Yes, it did. Every large platform including Twitter was censoring its users due to state pressure. Even Facebook has since admitted that they were told to censor information that was true, and they knew to be true.
They don't just censor, they limit organic influences. Your content won't get displayed more than n times, so you can't get more popular than n views, unless the system selects you as today's lottery winner, in which case it will be (reported as)viewed trillion times.
The only defense against this is the fact that Twitter users know system too well for this to be not immediately obvious.
> the report shows X’s dedication to content moderation by suspending millions of accounts and removing harmful posts, which could potentially help rebuild trust among users concerned with safety and dangerous behavior. On the other hand, this increased moderation contradicts Musk’s earlier promise of promoting free speech, something he has been very vocal about, potentially alienating users who see X becoming more restrictive.
You mean the story about Hunter Biden's laptop? That story? About Hunter Biden supposedly selling access to the president?
I find it odd now that Trump is in office and has the entirety of the government to investigate corruption in the executive office he's suddenly gone silent about that.
I guess that means that the executive office is now free of any taint of corruption!
Biden issued a full and unconditional pardon for his son for any crimes during a 10 year period 2014-2024. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3dx9n3m9y2o
He later pardoned other family members and political allies.
That was disappointing but understandable, considering who was following him into office.
The Hunter Biden corruption story was true in the sense it was old school genteel corruption that virtually everybody in politics does: trade on their connections with promise of getting deals done and/or a veneer of legitimacy. It's a problem worthy of scrutiny but only if it is done across party lines.
But this misses the entire point: the whole part about the Hunter Biden laptop story was to paint Joe Biden as crooked and was being done solely as negative campaigning. That's it, and it is self evident in how the story dropped once it was no longer useful for that means.
But the millions of Americans who were outraged by this supposed corruption are just fine with it when it's done by their Dear Leader.
That in a nutshell summarizes the "values" of the modern American conservative movement.
There was also AFAIK never any real evidence Hunter actually succeeded in doing anything of actual value for his clients. He was definitely going around representing that he could influence or get people meetings with his dad but there was never an actual tat from the Joe Biden side.
This is correct, as it's clear that if they had the goods they would have trumpeted the fact. But that didn't matter, it was simply the story itself that mattered (as the intended audience wants to be told what to think).
Again, that's not behavior that should be acceptable but it's SOP in politics by default.
What continues to blow my mind is that if "their guys" are corrupt they're totally fine with it. In my world, no corruption is acceptable corruption, regardless of who's doing it.
Because the new administration promised an unhinged DOJ. Biden was already vindicated in these pardons once Trump dropped legitimate charges against Eric Adams to try and further his political agenda. That and arresting judges, starting political witch hunts, etc...
It's not a boogeyman and there are many liberals who have been raising the alarm for years about the dangerously illiberal and authoritarian nature of this new religion.
Not just PG, also Sam Harris, Bill Maher, JK Rowling, Richard Dawkins, and millions of lesser known liberals. Most of whom were and are still too afraid to say anything.
