Lemmy technically doesn’t hide your likes - the interface might not show you, but all your likes are public in the Fediverse. Kbin, when I used it, would show which users upvoted/downvoted a post. That’s important because it means researchers and OSI people can still do fact finding - Twitter doesn’t like the idea of having to be open even if it’s a requirement (albeit to researchers specifically) in the EU now.

Allow me to gas Finland up a bit more. They’re higher than Germany in terms of innovation (triadic patents per capita), they have semi-democratically owned grocery stores with 90% of the country being a member/co-owner, they have 60% union density and a Ghent system (like Sweden, unlike Norway), their housing prices were among the few in Europe falling - after the government started their Housing First initiative and built social housing for the poor, their education system being so good (despite being relaxed unlike e.g. Singapore) and state-funded instead of private… life is pretty good in Finland.

With this context, it gets more interesting:

On 6 December 2022, the Parliament of Indonesia passed the country’s new criminal code (NCC), outlawing sex and cohabitation outside of marriage. Under the new law, extramarital sex carries a jail sentence of one year, while cohabitation of unmarried couples carries a jail term of six months. In a statement given to Reuters, a spokesperson for the Indonesian justice ministry justified the law on the grounds that it aimed to “protect the institution of marriage and Indonesian values.”

Well, it doesn’t seem to have worked – at least not in the short term. So now they can’t have sex and they’re not marrying either, worst of both worlds. Maybe they also wouldn’t have a prison overcrowding problem if they stopped jailing people for things like these.

My immediate concern with tags is descending into what Twitter has become: hashtags have been meaningless for a long while since there’s too much wrongly tagged stuff, different communities often use the same tag for different things, or there are ten tags all for the same thing. All of which means we’d need some form of moderator role that handles tags, and while I think it’s doable, it might take some trial and error to figure out how exactly we divide tags between moderators, how tags are proposed/created, and how tags are grouped/combined (e.g. food, foods).

I swear the “fuck cars” crew are completely deluded from reality.

I see people say what you’re saying (bus vs car road damage elasticity) in “fuck cars” communities, I don’t really see why you’ve decided to attack them collectively. But it’s a pop-community, they’re going to be wrong every now and then either way, please give them some slack. Their purpose is to make an average person aware of car dependency and that it’s generally a negative thing, so that actual urban planners with technical knowledge have an easier time arguing for and implementing realistic solutions, and they’ll take into account the variables you bring up. Think of “fuck cars” like a form of lobbying except it’s done by common people with good intentions - similar to how Japanese coops lobbied for better food safety standards decades ago - rather than wealthy corporations.

Reminder that US state agencies helped Bolsonaro

In March 2020, the Intercept reported that Brazilian prosecutors had secretly collaborated with the US Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation in a manner “that may have violated international legal treaties and Brazilian law”. The Brazilian Ministry of Justice had not been informed; making this collaboration illegal. They also found that money paid by Brazilian companies in the US were funnelled back into Brazil; chief prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol said he would use part of this sum to set up an “independent fund to fight corruption”. This attempt was then deemed unconstitutional by Brazil’s Supreme Court. It was reported that Mr. Dallagnol had called Lula da Silva’s arrest “a gift from the CIA”. Leslie Backschies, the head of the US FBI’s international corruption unit, alluded to this incident when discussing the sensitivity of anti-corruption investigations in a 2019 interview with AP news saying “We saw presidents toppled in Brazil”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Car_Wash#Leaked_conversations

There hasn’t been any scientific consensus change on whether porn is actually harmful to view for underage viewers, much less how much harm at various ages (i.e. should we lower it from 18, or raise it). Meaning, anyone who outright claims it is, is likely falling for populist rhetoric feeding off our cultural aversion to nudity and sex, not scientific truth.

It gets even worse when you consider how instrumental porn is to us queer folks who often learn more about their sexuality through the medium, esp. when you consider consumption rates of queer folks vs straight folks. Or when you consider the queer folks who use sex work to earn money because they’re treated worse in other jobs simply for being queer.

Let this sink in for a second: it took us less than a decade of anti-porn laws being proposed to being implemented without scientific consensus (in the UK, Germany, the EU now, Canada is currently doing the same…). Meanwhile we dragged our feet for decades on climate change and still are. That alone should make this whole trend smell fishy, like it’s being done with ulterior motives.

Google drank so much capitalist koolaid they thought the company needed internal competition when the main reason they remain so big is because they have big chunks of monopoly power in several key tech fields

What possible use is that?

I’ve noticed “has this sub gotten more right wing recently?” posts reaching the top post of the day in the last 6 months or so. r/norge and r/unitedkingdom being examples. You can automate bots that change a subreddit’s consensus on certain topics by bot-spamming threads pertaining to those topics, especially in the first hour of a thread going up. I don’t know if that’s happening, or if it has more to do with the Reddit protest that saw mods abdicate their positions last June and new mods being responsible for the change… but it could also be a bit of both.

In the EU they’re getting a digital euro which allows them to avoid bowing down to Paypal, Payoneer, and all the services interlinked with them (e.g. Patreon) - the ancillary services can even offer digital euro payouts instead, too. So as long as what you’re doing is legal, you can break the Paypal/Payoneer terms of service as much as you want and avoid their privately enforced authoritarianism that goes beyond the scope of the law for whatever reason. So those problems are being solved as we speak, depending on where you live.

Kind of, the central government did this in response to Mayor of London Sadiq Khan:

In December 2023, Gove used his powers to “call in” Khan’s rejection of the project, overturning the Mayor’s rejection and turning the final decision to DLUHC ministers.

But the project did withdraw anyway:

However, in January 2024, MSG wrote to the Planning Inspectorate officially withdrawing its plans for the project.

I suspect it has more to do with London being left by advertisers right now. A few years back the tube had all the advert slots filled, always. Today, the advert slots are usually half filled and it’s been like that for years. I expected it to change after COVID lockdowns ended, but it has persisted all the way until now.

It makes me wonder if these anti-porn laws are happening because queer people seem to be more likely to watch porn[1], and because of that, conservatives are looking at it as a causal thing rather than a correlative thing. If porn does help with getting to terms with your sexuality, then these laws should be worrying to the queer community. What conservatives may be doing here is trying to statistically decrease the amount of queer people in society, as getting rid of porn may reduce the amount of people who are aware of their own bisexuality, and those people may never engage with and/or have as much empathy for the queer community as a result.

[1] https://www.thepinknews.com/2019/02/28/more-porn-watch-more-likely-bisexual/

There are also valid reasons for disabled people to be against SUVs, and the abundance of cars in general: pollution creates disabilities, and so much pollution comes from car tyres. I know, because I have a disability that’s associated with said pollution, and I wouldn’t wish this on anyone else so I really hope we can replace car use with less polluting methods as soon as possible. And then there’s the more physical way: cars crashing into people also creates disabilities. If you’re disabled, you’re probably more likely to have sympathy for all the other disabilities that cars contribute to creating, and would prefer if SUVs and cars were replaced by other methods.

Why you acting like we can only do one of these things?

I’m not, please don’t assume that. It sounds like we’re in agreement here, so I’m not debating you, but rather adding to your post, I suppose. It sounded like you wanted to extend the conversation towards solutions to the housing crisis in general.

How do you define ‘corporate’ ownership? If you can own 100 properties as an individual, does that count as ‘corporate’? If it doesn’t, that seems like an easy loophole. If the intent is to ban large quantities of homes owned by single entities, then doing it by quantity sounds more sensible.

That might redistribute old homes, but it doesn’t necessarily solve the drip feeding of new homes that we have going on right now. For example, the UK used to build 250k+ houses every year during the 1950-1980s period. 50% of that was government built council houses for those in need. It’s estimated that we need to build 250k more homes than we currently do in the UK, and the private housing industry has not done its part.

Meanwhile Meta takes great pains to remove any glimpse of an erogenous zone like the most deranged Christian fundamentalist

I felt this a year ago when I got measles and all the medical staff I talked to were pretty surprised. Parents didn’t give me the vaccine as a child, but I got vaccinated as soon as I could afterwards. The weirdest part is I work from home and don’t leave my home too often, which means I was either really unlucky, or it was already pretty widespread in the UK then.

I’m starting to think the term “piracy” is morally neutral. The act can be either positive or negative depending on the context. Unfortunately, the law does not seem to flow from morality, or even the consent of the supposed victims of this piracy.

The morals of piracy also depend on the economic system you’re under. If you have UBI, the “support artists” argument is far less strong, because we’re all paying taxes to support the UBI system that enables people to become skilled artists without worrying about starving or homelessness - as has already happened to a lesser degree before our welfare systems were kneecapped over the last 4 decades.

But that’s just the art angle, a tonne of the early-stage (i.e. risky and expensive) scientific advancements had significant sums of government funding poured into them, yet corporations keep the rights to the inventions they derive from our government funded research. We’re paying for a lot of this stuff, so maybe we should stop pretending that someone else ‘owns’ these abstract idea implementations and come up with a better system.

Selling sex to kids is just as exploitive and repugnant.

Why are we nuking implied nudity entirely off a website to solve a different problem, i.e. kids having access to their parents’ credit cards?

A lot of which were good mods too. I’ve noticed a lot more racism and otherwise right wing posting being left alone/unmoderated since the protest, in the subs I used to browse actively - nowadays I just check in with them every now and then without an account and the intentional or not lack of moderation is making me want to stop doing even that.