I got food stamps benefits in the past, that reapplication process was incredibly stressful because something always goes wrong due to bureaucratic fuckups I had no control over, and then I would have to wait on hold on the phone for six hours on a weekday to fix it. Obviously these people know this and want it to be even worse for everyone on the program, fuck them. They know there’s tons of people who qualify who don’t bother because of how confusing and shitty the application is.

I hate the idea of software/hardware that can prove that the user does not have control over it so much

Maybe a little, but I think it fits pretty well, if you look at this from a “fuck copyright” angle. It’s easy to see the problems with what Disney is doing here and in general.

I bet they also hope to ultimately corral all fanart into spaces they directly control.

Even if they are trying to hack me it’s only polite. Plus on the very remote chance they somehow find this and care they would have slightly more info about me.

Tried setting this up, caught a few already

hmmm

Yeah it’s not really good in itself

I have read some articles about this, and I can see how it makes sense in some contexts. Like iirc when this happened to Red Lobster, they were able to make money through a combination of ripping off a certain group of investors, and the significant value of the company’s real estate holdings. That makes sense.

In the case of online magazine equivalents though I really don’t get it. What is there to sell off? Shouldn’t any potential long term profits be priced in at the point they get bought out? If the company has tangible assets like offices, couldn’t they just sell those without firing anyone and have people work from home? The intangible assets are all directly tied to the publication’s reputation and audience, which seems like it would die off fast without anything worthwhile on the site.

In many cases, the best decision for the firm is the one that directly undermines the company it controls.

How though? I don’t doubt this is a real thing, but there isn’t really a satisfying explanation being offered here. What the article is saying sounds like the process is, take profitable business, throw in garbage, somehow more profit. Where’s the money coming from?

I don’t think that’s entirely fair; the Nostr protocol has a modular design philosophy, with most components being optional addons, including the Bitcoin payments stuff. It’s genuinely decentralized and explicitly made to be easy to not use any baggage you don’t like.

It’s unclear from the article if the use of the protocol will also mean overlap with the content and community of Nostr, which is understandable to criticize, but the protocol itself is just another take on decentralized social media that does things differently than activitypub.

How does that work though? At least voting in the Democrat primaries, candidates with sane policies and values can potentially end up the ones on the general ballot. I don’t see that happening in the Republican primaries. And regardless of your registration status regressive Democrat politicians aren’t going to be trying to appeal to you if you have sane political values. Maybe my bad for taking a joke too seriously but doesn’t seem like a rational approach.

But representatives in a democracy can take a smaller percentage from each to pay their key supporters, because their educated, freer citizens are more productive than peasants. For rulers in a democracy, the more productivity the better. Which is why they build universities, and hospitals, and roads, and grant freedoms, not just out of the goodness of their hearts but because it increases citizen productiveness, which increases treasure for the ruler and their key supporters, even when a lower percentage is taken. Democracies are better places to live than dictatorships, not because representatives are better people, but because their needs happen to be aligned with a large portion of the population. The things that make citizens more productive also make their lives better. Representatives want everyone productive, so everyone gets highways. The worst dictators are those whose incentives are aligned with the fewest citizens, those who have the fewest keys to power. This explains why the worst dictatorships have something in common. Gold, or oil, or diamonds, or similar. If the wealth of a nation is mostly dug out of the ground, it’s a terrible place to live because a gold mine can run with dying slaves, and still produce great treasure.

This is the biggest thing that is concerning to me about AI, and more generally the devaluation of labor. If the people have declining productive negotiating power (our skills becoming less relevant to the production of wealth), by these principles it could lead to a devolution away from democracy. This seems to fit with what has been happening in the USA lately.

Terrifying

Take their images, train LoRa, put on Civitai. If it’s of me anyway and they didn’t ask it’s not like they have grounds to complain about it.

This only counts ad revenue from scams other people are running

The FBI really wants people having discussions that are limited to just the headline I guess…

Even if legal attacks don’t work, I’ve noticed a few sites I read articles from have paywalls that are no longer bypassable by archive.is, and so I’m kind of at a loss as to how to link them, except maybe by copying the text myself. But that has a number of disadvantages, such as, copied text is not an authoritative source because most people can’t verify it wasn’t altered. It’s usually not a problem reading it myself because all the text shows up in the rss feed, but what’s lacking is a way to share it.

How many GB per jar?

It’s hard enough just to get people to stop trying to call non-universal, means tested welfare payments UBI, even though it’s only three words and one of them is Universal and that’s what it’s supposed to mean, that everyone gets it.

Honestly I think the best option would be to frame it as massive wealth redistribution, from corporations and the wealthy, to everyone else. Might seem counterintuitive, since to a lot of people that would sound kind of bad, but without being founded in such redistribution there’s no possible way it could actually work and be sustainable. If the idea of UBI gets any traction, I predict the main threat to its success will be “have your cake and eat it too” implementation proposals that can’t actually work because they don’t redistribute wealth, that people will eat up because they don’t understand or believe in economics. So make wealth transfer a core part of the messaging to head that off, and fight the entrenched interests directly.

This doesn’t seem like much of a solution to me, they’re still being raised by people using social media, and will be thrown into it at some point. The obligatory age checks are going to make the surveillance state way worse.