And further - the establishment of a single, fediverse-wide account for each user would make it far too easy for those so inclined to silence anyone they wanted merely by banning their one and only account.

It’s not a matter of how ones profile would be accessed, but how it would be created in the first place snd how it would be managed.

Necessarily, those who implement the creation of accounts have control over how they’re created, who is allowed to create them and how they will be handled after creation.

Any scheme to establish one “central” (your own term) account for the entire fediverse will necessarily be managed by one “central” service, which means one “central” authority over account creation and management

Decentralization is a feature - not a bug.

So can we assume it smells like some combination of stale bronzer, McDonalds, flop sweat and ass?

I get the impression that when he says “find your own way out,” he actually means “stop caring.”

And this is why SUDDENLY IRAN!

For some reason, he seems extra butthurt about getting caught lying this time.

Black Hole Sun.

It’s a tedious, grating and ridiculously repetitive dirge.

“The mob” and not the studies dating back well over 100 years pointing out the undeniable link between asbestos and lung disease.

I could go out right now and find the most drug-addled junkie living in a cardboard box under an overpass, and he’d be a better president than Trump.

Probably smell better too…

Setting aside the veritable TITAN-loads of shady shit Palsntir is up to, it’s also worth noting that Reddit’s policy changes have made it clear that providing a platform for the spread of disinformation is a central part of its current business model, so I’d assume that not only is Palantir using it for that purpose, but that they are far from alone.

It’s not theft if you voluntarily pay it.

If it’s taken from you against your will though, it actually is theft. It’s just that that fact discommodes a number of people by cutting to the heart of the nature of governance, so we’re conditioned to pretend that it’s not true.

Here’s something beyond that to think about - a significant number of the things a government does are actially things that would be, in any other context, crimes. In fact, that’s arguably the exact nature of a government - it’s an organization that claims the right to act in ways that are criminal if done by anyone else in any other context.

Theft is the most common one, and in fact theft of the wealth of (some portion of) the people in a given area is the thing that allows for all of the rest. Governments also regularly engage in kidnapping, extortion and murder. That’s what you would be charged with if you, respectively, took people by force and held them against their wills, or demanded payment from people in exchange for allowing them to do something, or killed people or directed someone else to kill them. But governments alone claim the right to do all of those things.

Also, there are a bunch of lesser “crimes” that aren’t necssarily crimes in and of themselves, but that the government makes into crimes specifically to create that situation in which they’re the only ones with the right to do something that’s otherwise a crime - running a lottery, selling restricted products like pharmaceutical drugs, printing money, etc.

And in fact, if we were to make just the small change to holding that it’s the case that if an act is a crime when someone else does it, it’s also a crime when a government does it, governments would immediately be without either power or purpose. That’s how central committing acts that are otherwise crimes is to their entire identity and purpose.

And more to think on - this is a problem because try as they might for millennia now, nobody has been able to work out a way to establish foundational legitimacy for government. Ultimately the nominal legitimacy of each and every government relies on some combination of laws it has established itself and simple force - there is no external, objective thing on which a government’s nominal legitimacy rests.

So what we really have are organizations that cannot establish any sort of objective legitimacy engaging in acts that would be crimes if done by anyone else.

Let that sink in.

Okay - let’s imagine that by this time tomorrow, you successfully eliminate every single billionaire and corporation that’s a contributor to climate change.

What happens next? Do you actually think the climate is just going to spring back to what it was? If so, you’re in for a rude awakening.

Climate change is a done deal already. It has far too much inertia - even a dramatic change is only going to make a notable difference somewhere far down the line.

So entirely regardless of whether and to how much of an extent we might be able to enact societal or political change, we’re going to have to cope with some fairly significant climate change. And that, I believe, is where people should be putting most of their focus.

That’s not to say that I disagree with you fundamentally. In fact there are very few solutions to the problem of the outsized influence of a relative few wealthy scumbags of which I wouldn’t approve, or even willingly take part. But at this point, that’s more just (well deserved) vengeance - it’s not going to make a dramatic difference in the climate change that is already in process. It’s already too late for that.

Yes. Long past time in fact.

People have been focused on political solutions far too much - “too much” not least because in so many cases, the final arbiters of which, if any, political solutions get adopted are a relative handful of fabulously wealthy psychopaths who are going to oppose anything that undermines their privilege, entirely regardless of the long-term consequences.

So understand - because of their control, political solutions for the most part are not going to happen. It doesn’t matter how important they might be, because the systems are not rational - they’re warped to the service of the privileged few.

So it’s going to come down to individual action primarily.

Note though that that doesn’t necessarily mean entirely self-serving action. Quite the opposite in fact - individuals will need to focus on what they can do, as individuals, to at least ease the hardship not only for themselves but for their fellow humans.

And at some point, quite likely, we’ll even be able to rely on governments to fulfill their responsibilities. For the immediate future though, that’s too often not the case, and we as a species need to come to terms with that and act accordingly.

Funny how you changed the topic from an arm of the corporate media haranguing people to volunteer to people freely choosing to volunteer…

Why should ordinary people already burdened with responsibilities donate their precious time and energy just so that some rich fucks can hang on to even more of the wealth they neither need nor deserve?

Volunteering and child-rearing doesn’t really build a mansion or yacht now does it?

How much volunteer work is necessary only because the agencies that should have and would have done those things have been shut down to fund tax cuts for the rich?

Or even more directly because the problems being addressed are a direct consequence of government policies instituted solely to benefit a handful of wealthy donors?

You should work more so that the 1% can buy more mansions and bigger yachts.

Duh.

“I’m sorry ma’am, but could you explain your interest in the sex life of a 14 year old?”

Radioland Murders (1994)

A frenetic comedy mystery set during the debut live broadcast of a radio station in 1939. More than anything else, it’s a terrific exercise in film and sound editing, as the programs and musical numbers being performed on stage intertwine with the action backstage. It can be sort of difficult to appreciate if you’re fixated on having a single, steadily unfolding narrative, since it constantly jumps around between different characters and different settings, but if you just relax and let it wash over you, you’ll discover that it is a single, steadily unfolding narrative - it was just assembled from a whole bunch of separate but oddly interlocking pieces.

That’d be about par for the course. When too much attention is focused on their abject evil in Gaza, one of their strategies is to suddenly go stir the shit in Iran or Lebanon or Syria and get attention focused there instead.