Decidedly mixed and increasingly right-leaning but I’m pleasantly surprised at my own experience having voice chats with diverse people who agree on one thing but disagree on just about everything else.

Tbf the rockets seem to work. Not easy to fake that.

disingenuously points to the indecipherable ToS

The solution I’m most interested in is eliminating the friction to seed/early stage funding coming directly from interested user communities and even better would be to also draw as much of the labor pool as possible from the same group.

I think this eliminates most of the misalignments in stakeholder interest.

We already have equity crowdfunding in the states. We need more innovation in crowdfunding platforms.

Research suggests otherwise.

An independent analysis of 15,000 EV batteries finds that most don’t need to be replaced until they’re well over a decade old.

Most informed comment ITT. Thank you for sharing it.

Not sure who they surveyed. Sure as hell didn’t ask me.

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We have tools both new and old to work collectively against megacorp consolidation and we can do it directly in the market. Here’s what I would love to see more of:

• Equity crowdfunding: Let’s have users/communities/customer bases finance new companies at the seed stage instead of relying almost exclusively on venture/investment banking-backed startups. I believe this greatly reduces the misalignment of stakeholder interests in finance/business even if they otherwise operate as conventional hierarchies. When customers own the business profit is no longer the fixation. It has to be self-sustaining but beyond that the focus can be on the ethical, sustained production and distribution of the good or service itself.

• Buying collectives: Let’s leverage our buying power to receive lower prices and have more say in the ethics of supply chains. This can happen at the individual level and amongst cooperative/independent/small chain retailers. This combined with equity crowdfunding implies an opportunity to work our way up (and down) the supply chain from consumer to retailer to distributors to manufacturer to collaborate with it when necessary compete with incumbents.

• Open Source R&D via Invective Prizes: Ever heard of the X-Prize? Imagine a crowdfunding platform where the crowd determines the goals for projects and contributes to the purse and people/teams compete to solve it. The winning submission open sources their result in exchange for the prize. This gives the crowd an alternative to corporate-funded IP held behind walled gardens purely to extract profit.

• Open, interoperable web infrastructure: Most features of social media platforms could be baked into protocols and made readable by any 3rd party software that chooses to integrate it. The fediverse we’re posting on right now is a great example. We have to have free, open digital communications to have agency as free peoples.

All these options reside naturally in a market-based economy and IMO empower political action while not inherently relying on it. It’s a powerful “yes, and”.