Tons of people use VPNs for region restricted services like Netflix
I was going to criticize your choice of units there, but after thinking about it some I decided this was probably correct and that my criticisms were in the wrong. Touche, you win again.
If I were a media corporation, I would make a post like this to dissuade people from using a VPN
There’s no need. They’re using one of a half-dozen obscure commercial services that mapped out all the exit point IP addresses and have blocked them half a decade ago.
Clemens benefited from being popular long before the advent of Poe’s Law. If he were alive today, they’d be posting meme pictures with his face photoshopped to be 50% of its original size and making fun of the fact that he wasn’t married until age 35.
Sarcasm is only recognized within in-groups. The modern world is far too large for any in-group to span even some large chunk of that.
Afaik most people just use them for torrents.
It’s the only thing they could be useful for. While obviously commercial services are insufficient protection against state-level actors if you were Alquaeda (does anyone believe that the US intelligence agencies don’t have undersea fiber taps everywhere?), it’s even insufficient for the purposes of run-of-the-mill whackjobs making bomb threats. A few years ago some jackass was doing those to get out of final exams at some US university. The FBI got him within a half-hour.
How is that possible if these places “don’t keep logs”?
So, even routine criminal activities can’t be safely conducted via commercial VPN.
Privacy nutcases are shit out of luck too. Ever tried to access your bank account with VPN? They go absolutely apeshit if their shitty GeoIP library thinks you’re trying to look at it from Romania. Same with Facebook. Google’s barely usable, unless you like putting in a captcha every 10 seconds.
Still useful for torrents, but that could change. We’re less than 5 years away from either legislation forcing VPNs to do the sort of tracking the copyright maximalists would love, or these commercial VPN services voluntarily doing so. Basically, by the time the hoi polloi became aware that VPNs were useful, that was already turning out to no longer be true.
They likely would not only choose to act differently based on lessons learned, but they would have to.
Why? Why would they have to act differently? What would force this to be so? What if, for instance, they considered that the projected failure of their state 100 years after the founding to just be the price of utopia, and did everything the same way? What if they considered it a fluke, some extremely slight random chance that toppled their government? Like, I dunno, the misspoken utterings of a dumbass East German propaganda minister who should have kept his mouth shut or better yet “lost his job” a year prior?
There’s no reason to suppose they’d have to do things differently. It might even be unreasonable to think they would, given human nature and our propensity for trying the same thing over and over, hoping that it will work “this time”.
Didn’t the fall of USSR teach us anything?
That wasn’t true Marxism. We can know whether or not it’s true Marxism by whether it works or not, and since it didn’t work, obviously it wasn’t true Marxism.
will they do anything different than the dictators of the soviet union?
The saintly leaders of the Soviet Union were not dictators, but merely custodians of the people’s own will.
another mass murder seems to be perfectly fine!
Do not believe the western propaganda. The places he supposedly committed mass murder in do not even exist in reality. Go check a Russian map. This never-never land called Ukraine isn’t even real, but a fiction of western imperialists dreamt up to slander the great Russian people and by extension Marxism (or possibly vice versa).
It doesn’t leave it up the capitalists to “do the right thing”. My god, we’d be extinct as a species were that the case.
It leaves it up to them to be greedy. Which I’m sure you’ll agree is something they’re at least passingly competent at. Why is greed important here? Because if there is a shortage, greedy people can earn obscene profits providing the goods in shortage. The more goods they have, the more than obscenely earn. If they don’t have enough, they are compelled to get more… as efficiently as possible.
This mechanism isn’t without its bizarre failure modes. Take fishing, for instance. As some fish or another becomes rarer, its scarcity causes prices to rise… so instead of doing the right thing and letting populations recover, the temptation becomes ever more irresistible. Don’t let capitalism get anywhere near wildlife preservation, or if you do, study the implications (and perverse incentives) carefully first.
There is a conflict of interest between making profits and providing necessities.
There is very little conflict there. You make x profits if you sell y goods. If you sell 100y goods, you make 100x profits. And so on. Sometimes it’s not even linear, so the larger you scale the more you profit per unit.
This is why even the poor in such countries are often obese. Capitalism could be said to over-provide more often than it under-provides.
I think it’s a more fundamental economic behavior. Humans are pretty good at teasing out the truth about shortages, anecdotal/gossip communication exchange ferrets it out. Then people do what people do during a shortage… they hoard. It’d be dumb not to hoard. But collectively, that means the shortage is exacerbated not reduced.
The correct solution isn’t “abolish capitalism”, it’s “abolish shortages”. Capitalism is pretty good at doing the latter, given a chance. The tricky part is when the product is food, as economies can’t really wait on the sort of turnaround time it requires.
It’s important to keep in mind that USSR never had a chance to develop peacefully.
This isn’t about assigning blame, not for me. Yes, they did get a shit deal. Hobbled at first by the sort of royalty/nobility like out of some fucked up fairy tale right until and even into the 20th century, then almost nonstop warfare. For all the lack of fighting, even the cold war was nearly as bad.
Though I am not generally sympathetic to communism, I wince to think what might have happen if they had no developed nuclear weapons. But that cost dearly.
They had a shit hand.
If USSR could’ve devoted all the effort that was put into keeping up with the west militarily into domestic development, amazing things could’ve been achieved.
Possibly. Or they could have squandered it. Even if a person accepts that communism and marxism is a legitimate political ideology and in the right circumstances can flourish, it can also fail… and fail without any deliberate sabotage or harsh misfortune.
The funny thought is that, had they succeeded peacefully, that might have been most threatening of all.
Russia’s problem has never been “figuring out how”. It is a nation full of world-class scientists and geniuses.
Russia’s problem (and the USSR before it) has always been to manufacture goods in the quantity and quality needed for mass produced consumer goods and a robust economy. They’ve never seemed to be able to do that.
The good news is that one problem solves the other. Who will be able to afford to fly on jets they can’t maintain when their economy finishes imploding?
US geopolitical position is being eroded,
So are mountains. I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting for those or US geopolitics to be ground down to sand grains though.
And it isn’t even clear what, when that day comes, you will have won. Woohoo, the US is weak, the US isn’t in charge! Yay! There is no more USSR in such a picture, it lost first. If you’re expecting some resurgence of communism at that point, I think you will be disappointed. It makes it sound like you were always more against something than for something.
I mean, what do you have? China? I think the “People’s” army showed how much for the people it was back in 1989. Cuba? Castro croaked. So have all the true believers. It’s probably the closest to being the last real holdout.
US could expect the same kind of economic bullying directed against it that it’s been using to attack its enemies.
It could. I don’t find this prediction implausible. Given what you know about China, does that make you happy somehow? It’s about as communist as the Russian Federation is, though I guess that’s easier to pretend untrue, given that the regime change was a little quieter.
If true socialism/marxism/communism did try to rise up somewhere near China, how do you think they’d react to it? Seems to be that they are at least as much your enemy as mine. I don’t suggest that makes us friends, but in other threads you don’t seem dumb or delusional… China’s bad for pretty much everyone who’s not a billionaire or high-ranking in the party.
innocence cannot be assumed and must be proven.
If a criminal goes to trial, he may well have to prove innocence, because (despite this being acknowledged as wrong and unjust), if he fails to do so he may be found guilty.
And punished.
Who will punish the US? It does not need to prove innocence, because you, and I, and everyone else has no leverage over it.
The truth of the matter is, on this one topic, hardly no one seriously believes that they were engineering biological weapons 250 miles away from the Russian border for shits and giggles. Those who are pro-Russian or at least anti-US would do well to focus on more credible propaganda. This stuff doesn’t pass the smell test. This allegation can be dismissed without comment, and that is what their response has been.
What is it trying to hide when the US Embassy in Ukraine deleted all relevant documents on its website?
Your other questions are legitimate, but does this one even need to be asked? The same thing they always delete/shred/burn when an embassy is about to (or has the potential to) fall into foreign hands… the identity of CIA agents and assets. It’s not exactly a secret that this is the point of it.
“Assets” not necessarily being spies, sometimes these are people who once talked to an agent (even unwittingly). And, it’s even possible to intelligently speculate on why that’s sensitive… if you know who they’ve talked to, you can make smart guesses why they were talking to them. Wouldn’t want the Russians to know who they were interested in.
If the US wants to prove its innocence
But it doesn’t. There are two explanations, and I won’t give an opinion on which is worse. The first is that it’s not innocent. The second is that even though it is innocent of the specific allegations, it has (and has had) the attitude that it doesn’t need to prove anything to anyone. Which is factually true, because there exist few mechanisms to hold the government of the US to account.
It’s unclear to me how the man could ever have broken any US law. Apparently he’s never stepped foot on US soil and is not a US citizen. These two things together make it extremely challenging to engage in espionage against the US.
Did he, or did he not infiltrate some computer system owned by the US government/military? Best I’ve heard is someone “sent him files”. That’s not illegal. He had no legal obligation to be loyal to the United States, so anything treason-like is out of the question.
So, they target the webbed-feet genes that only Russians have? And like, they’re unable to clandestinely take gene samples from Russians living elsewhere and send those Fedex overnight to a more secure geographic location outside of taxi cab range from Moscow?
Suspicion is always warranted, for all players. Especially the US. It should be smart suspicion though.
Hell, I personally suspect the US of dabbling in bioweapons. I’d be surprised if they weren’t. Operating through cutouts, and in secure locations though. The Russian claims are infantile (well, unless they turn out to be true somehow, and the US is dumber than I figured them for… it’s hard to discount). You’ll never go wrong accusing them of cheating, even of brazenly cheating… but to accuse them of doing it stupidly is another thing altogether.
I was under the impression that the US (even its military) funded epidemiological research in just about every country on planet Earth. Ostensibly to protect its own troops against weaponized diseases. It’s not exactly a secret.
What’s interesting to me is the implication that had they subverted some of that research towards offensive ends, that they weren’t smart enough to move it elsewhere. Leaving it sitting right outside the border of Russia seems… I dunno, moronic?
I’m not saying that such a misstep being moronic means that they wouldn’t do it, because sometimes the US military seems to be full of outright bumblefuckery. But still.
Also, pot kettle black black black.
if you simply replace it with local imperialism and capitalism.
True. However, that simply isn’t the case here. We can know, with certainty, that Putin is a secret communist trying to rebuild the glory that is the USSR. We can know this because we want it to be true, and wanting it to be true makes it true (when it’s a good thing).
Soviet scientists like Lysenko proved this in the 20th century.
Can’t really treat all those poor Russian cannon fodder conscripts for acute cases of death.
What death? Only a few have died. The glorious Russian Army is too powerful for anyone to assault them. Like their forebears, they are gigantic superhuman soldiers, sent out on a mission to bitсhslap Nazis. Like Zelensky, the biggest Nazi of them all.
They are so awesome, that they though “Why waste the fuel and further harm climate?” and just started pushing their tanks onwards. Could you push a 60 ton tank? But they do it as if it were nothing!
The evil Ukrainian regime of Ultra-Nazis used starving people as human shields for their bioweapons factory?
Those poor Russians who had to target it, knowing that they’d also be taking innocent lives… so horrible. Putin’s awesome veteran medical coverage will provide the necessary therapy, I think.
That’s perhaps true. But if it is, then you’re right back to being confused as to why he bothered to invade, seeing as he could’ve just sat there and waited for them to separate.
There’s that point in time where the flat-earthers run their properly designed experiment, say to themselves “Gee, that’s funny, it’s almost like the Earth is round”… and 3 seconds later “Naaah! That’s crazy, must be something wrong with our setup”.
You’re experiencing that moment in time, that slight little split second.
I don’t even know why. I get that you’re a Marxist, and if this were 1970-something and we were talking about the USSR, it’d be one thing. The loyalty would make sense. But Putin’s not even close to that. He’s working from a playbook written by that neo-fascist Dugin. It’s pretty fucking bizarre.
You don’t have to accept that the USA and Europe are good guys (hell, even I don’t believe that myself). Just know that some fights are between two or more sets of comparably bad guys.
This really has war propaganda vibes. Either you are with us, or against us.
Could it be any other way? Groups/movements/ideologies that aren’t like this have lower survival odds. Thus evolution weeds them out. Self-awareness being the most limited resource in the universe, those same people are quite certain they’re in the right about it, too…
I solved homelessness about 6 years ago. Turns out it was a math problem. I have no idea who to talk to about actually implementing the solution.
If we constrain the problem to the North American mainland (Hawaii is a little bizarre) or perhaps to continental Europe, then the true problem of homelessness is a game theory issue. There are multiple jurisdictions, often of many different political flavors. Some are hostile to the homeless, and merely want the problem to go away, but others are sympathetic. Occasionally they are wealthy too. Why do these jurisdictions not solve homelessness locally?
Because even if they manage to figure out the exact formula for fixing homelessness, instead of reducing the number of homeless in their locality, they increase it. Paradoxically. The homeless aren’t chained to the ground where they’re currently at… if they heard of a magical place giving out homes to the homeless, they’d go there. They’d hitchhike or panhandle for bus (trains in Europe?) fare, or if they had no other choice they’d walk for 4 weeks.
And so the small city that solves homelessness for its population of 150 homeless now has 5000.
Budgets being what they are, a city that afforded the solution for 150 can’t hope to afford the same solution for 5000. And if somehow they could, then next month they’d have another 10,000.
For that matter, nearby cities would notice too… and they’d be buying bus tickets for their own homeless.
Human beings aren’t stupid. Every politician and officeholder out there understands this intuitively. The few that don’t understand it intuitively will eventually see it in action and then come to understand it. And because of this, they refrain from doing anything that gets the homeless off the street in any significant way. So even in Democratic Party bastions on the west coast like San Francisco, you see them doing absolutely nothing to fix this. Only lip service and the “we’re pretending to be trying things” approach that we’ve had for decades.
This is a sort of “meta problem”. If you could somehow make it so that a city or a county or a small village only had to fix the problem for those homeless which are their responsibility, so that more didn’t arrive to overwhelm budgets, then at least in some places homelessness would be fixed. And the places that aren’t sympathetic might do so for practical reasons (it’s far cheaper) having seen that it can be fixed.
And it turns out that fixing this meta problem almost sounds dumb. It’s a simple administrative policy, essentially free (I mean, you can count the fractional salaries of the people who’d implement the policy, but they’re already on the payroll in most municipal governments), and ethical. It doesn’t involve shoveling the homeless into furnaces. Just some social work, paperwork, and rules that say whether or not the city is itself responsible for any particular individual (and when they’re not, the social workers are still completing paperwork that proves another city/county/whatever is actually responsible).
All those horror stories you hear about the mayor’s office buying one-way tickets and sending them out of town to anywhere else… you’ve read of them, haven’t you? When a journalist tries to call them to account on it, and they make excuses about “but he really was from this place far away, and we were just sending him home”… this policy, these rules, would give away those lies.
If there were just one city or town somewhere that was willing to adopt this policy, it might force nearby cities and towns to adopt the same policy defensively. And when they did, more might follow.
These people who genuinely desire to remain homeless do so because for several million years it has been an effective social strategy/adaptation for primates. It’s a low percentage strategy, but one that was, until relatively modern times, a viable one.
In North America (post-colonization), you’d have the tales of mountain men who were alone for months or years at a time, only to occasionally wander into civilization. The assumption was that they were out there building log cabins (and in some cases they were), but others were just wanderers who sought out primitive shelter, or none at all. Pre-colonization likely saw similar, those who lived solitary lives away from the native civilizations and settlements.
There are more than a few European myths dating back to ancient Greece and earlier that sound eerily similar. Brutally monstrous men out by themselves somewhere, until a hero wanders through and attacks, slaying them and putting an end to their savagery. Kind of makes you wonder what the other guy’s perspective was before he took a bronze sword through his throat.
As modern civilization has expanded, there are fewer places for such people to be. We’ve sort of “encroached on their habitat”.
But evolution isn’t nearly quick enough to eliminate the personality traits that make this lifestyle appealing to some.
Is it a problem that needs to be solved? For any given homeless population, maybe 1% are like this.
If you or anyone else were to solve homelessness to 99%… you’d rightly be a hero. And the tiny remainder, you could leave them alone the way they’d want.
Likely though, quite a few who have this attitude didn’t daydream as a child of becoming a hobo and riding the rails. They only discovered this after inadvertently becoming homeless. So, if you were to reduce homelessness in general, you’d see even fewer of these people (they just don’t get the chance to discover they like it). How many fewer I can’t even speculate on, but it should be significant.
While I think every person has the right to live their own life the way they see fit, homelessness often has negatives to the people that aren’t homeless.
While true, it’s sort of moot. The people in San Francisco who are complaining about homelessness and its ill effects aren’t complaining about the effects of 3 homeless people throughout the entire city. They’re complaining about 20,000 homeless.
If it were reduced to 3 (or even only to 300), then chances are they might not even notice enough to complain. The people who desire to remain homeless, whatever their actual numbers, can’t rise high enough for this to be a concern.
I ask these questions in good faith and I hope you also do the same.
It’s a problem I think about extensively. I hope I’ve provided some insight.
Is it ever true that an “invader gains nothing”? Or are you just (strangely) saying that there is more to lose than to gain?
Everyone on reddit is ranting about how it will be another Afghanistan… but what if it were merely another Chechnya? If Putin believes it to be that, he might well decide to invade/annex.
Do you not recommend the norm Reddit has adopted of placing rules on the sidebars?
On the subject of reddit, I recommend burning it to the ground and salting the earth so that nothing ever grows there again.
Or the norm to have “Terms of Service” you, as a user, must abide by to use the service?
“Terms of service” is laughable as a legal concept. If your service remains open to the person, they can use it. If you don’t want it to remain open, take technological measures to keep them out. If you’re unable or unwilling to do that, tough shit.
I think OP is putting the cart before the horse, and being a busybody. This is because he wants his forum to be full of people who are ready to discuss what he wants to discuss, but never stops to wonder if no one wants to do that (or, at least, the people he imagines as participating that they do not want to do that). So he crafts all these rules in his head, before anyone has even started to violate them. And he’s sort of cutting his nose off to spite his face, because there are almost certainly potential conversations on those subjects that he would want to read, to be part of, that he just doesn’t have the imagination to see right now. Even if he could prevent them, he’d be hurting himself.
But more likely, he’s just chasing away people he’d otherwise like to not chase away, because though he would certainly tell them they were welcome if he could know them first, they see those rules and feel uneasy about them despite the fact they would feel no impulse to violate them. You have to really wonder what goes through a rules-nazi’s head sometimes, even if it is uncouth to say aloud that you wonder what goes through their heads.
And given that forums are all about attracting a critical mass of people, such a policy just undermines that requirement. The network effect is a removed.
I see your point regarding the clustering of email addresses around a few big players. I agree that is a reality. But what does “meaningful” mean here? Is it not meaningful for me to have the option to not use surveillance capitalist email services?
Go spin up an email server. It’s easy, it’s like a one-liner using docker.
You’re not allowed to meaningfully participate in email. You’re automatically blackholed out of the system. You can consume email, provided by some other company. They won’t even charge you really (just force shitty ads on you, that they won’t even try very hard to keep you from blocking!).
This is a system you are not allowed to participate in. And, if we’re talking Lemmy-like forums on the fediverse, some day that will be the case too. If we go down that route.
Could you explain how the Fediverse could arrive at an ‘endgame’ where it “isn’t an open system where anyone can connect anymore[, where] only gigantic companies are allowed to participate on a meaningful level”?
If I have to draw a picture, I suppose. 5 or 10 years from now (or fewer, or more), you’d have alt-righters connecting more than more instances to the fediverse. As has already happened. But instead of just a few of these, hundreds and single-digit thousands of them. Some would automate that process so that every ijit clicking on a link on Stormfront would spin up a docker image or something like that with zero effort. At some point, it becomes impossible to sniff all of them out as quickly as they come online, until one day those in charge of the largest, oldest instances just decide enough is enough, and new instances are blackholed entirely.
And sure, you can log on to those instances, and still do toots and make comments, but now you’re not really participating, you’re just consuming.
Same happened with email. Not even sure when that happened, I think the 1990s… my technical hobbyist skills weren’t quite up to it to have done that back when it was still possible, and so I’m unsure of the exact date.
You might even like this outcome. It really depends on how well you identify with the dominant faction, though if I had my guess it will be some hybrid of the typical corporate actors and the large non-profits that share their culture. Good luck.
Your logical flaw was of analogy.
There’s no analogy. An analogy likens one thing to another. We’re discussing the principle of freedom of speech, in relation to what you believe to be a government-only prohibition against suppressing that.
I pointed out another example of the same thing. A principle that you probably think is sacrosanct, but if the “it only applies to the government” rule is used upon it, should seem suspicious.
You can’t really argue with it that way though, can you? It’d be a fucked up world if it only-and-strictly applied to the government, so non-government entities went out and violated it constantly.
I guess you really do have to say “nyuh uh!” and think you have one over on me.
Currently in the US, freedom of speech has an undisputed legal definition.
In the US, freedom of speech and all your other liberties are defined by case law. Constantly evolving, always in flux. Gargantuan in size (Westlaw’s case law database might be as large as 35Tbytes) To say that it has an “undisputed legal definition” is to not understand our legal system even slightly. If it were undisputed, why would there be court cases about it all the time? Why would judges need to rule on those and settle those disputes?
Update the defining legal document. When you are successful, you will have been right all along.
I’ve read this 4 times. I’m not sure what it is you’re trying to say, I think you might have lost the plot.
Make whatever assumptions about me help you make sense of your world. It says way more about you than it
The “I’m rubber you’re glue” rebuttal?
What you’re trying to implement are effective house rules
Which should be besides the point.
You’re focused on his intentions. We should be focused on his results. Or, even more so, on the aggregate results of many people doing the same thing he will do.
If you focus only on the intentions, bad things will happen and you will all be confused as to why the world became a worse place than it was previously. Intentions don’t count for shit. And if you focus only on a single instance, you will be confused by all the emergent phenomena that just aren’t recognizable until you’ve scaled this up x1000.
Without simple rules like that,
Haha. “Simple rules”. I think they’re part of the definition itself of emergent phenomena.
Hate would be for example, slandering others, w
I get it that this is your definition. But it’s defective and misrepresentative. Still, I replied with your definition in mind.
under limitations of free speech
Freedom of speech as a concept has no limits, and at least within US law, has no limits there either. You have to go back to quotes taken out of context from ancient Supreme Court rulings that have effectively been overturned (and were later retracted by the justice quoted) to think otherwise.
The trouble of course if you just don’t like freedom of speech. But the public is enamored with it and they romanticize it, so you can’t publicly be honest about not liking it. Thus the mental gymnastics that there are “limitations”.
because causes hate and the repercussions that comes with it, as you say, lychings etc.
The opposite is true. The lynchings happen when no one can talk about it. When you shut up people who were only ever going to mouth off, you inevitably spur some to take it farther and to venture into action.
But that takes a few years, and in the meantime you can pretend that you’ve “cleaned up hatred”.
Where is the guy with the spear supposed to leave to, to let that poor little medved alone? They can’t pick up the borders of Ukraine and drag them off to the Iberian peninsula.