baltakatei

Session, an Australian fork of Signal with onion routing and no phone number requirement, seems promising.

For an academic text on this subject with footnotes, I recommend Chokepoint Capitalism (2022) by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow. It calls what you describe “moat buulding” and an “anti-competitive flywheel”.

The US didn’t even get the excuse of being forced to pay obscenely high war reparations to justify their fascism. Instead, it’s dissatisfaction with inflation which, in turn, is the predictable combination of the exponential depletion of scarce resources (real estate, water) and the consolidation of property into the hands of an ultra wealthy minority. If one must frame the emergence of fascism in a “war” context, then the cause is plutocrat beligerantes strategically fighting a social class war while most of everyone else think it’s a culture war.

(Via Masto)

Every story needs an Arthur Dent to ask dumb questions for the audience. It gives the author an excuse to worldbuild without pontificating. So, on the bright side, maybe our crumbling civilization has a lot of authors collaborating with mind-bogglingly panoply audiences, each of which needs their own lovable idiot hero to be a character in our world.

Fixed: Matt Gaetz, former Trump AG pick, had sex with raped an underage girl while in Congress, House Ethics report says

A minor cannot consent.

“ ‘Private property is the smallest unit of warfare’ - The Environmental Rescue Team Handbook”

— Annalee Newitz, The Terraformers (2023), chapter 15

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Amazon Prime is meant to invoke the sunk cost fallacy in your mind. Why shop around when you’ve already sunk over 100 USD per year into “free” shipping? This mental bias towards shopping with Amazon is the cost and is part of an overall anti-competitive strategy. See “The making of Amazon Prime, the internet’s most successful and devastating membership program”. Jeff Bezos has been explicitly anti-competitive on this point:

“I want to draw a moat around our best customers.”

You don’t leave a moated walled garden unless the Lord who maintains the moat permits you. And even then, they’ll strip you of your DRM’d digital goods (TV shows, movies, audiobooks, ebooks) as soon as you cross the drawbridge. The strongest supporters of Amazon are the ones who have thousands of USD of such digital goods locked up with them since they can’t leave without being stripped of things they bought.

Amazon replacements:

• Audiobooks: Libro.fm (no DRM)
• eBooks: eBooks.com (specifically, their DRM-free section)
• Shopping: basically any major online retailer’s website
• Electronics: System76 (for gaming machines), ThinkPenguin (for FOSS machines)
• Groceries: your local grocer, lol.

As for video streaming, it’s going to take a breakup of the Big Tech monopolies via revival of anti-trust laws to fix that. Hear the first chapter of The Internet Con (skip to 2m5s) by Cory Doctorow for more on that.

Can we have space settlement without the war and genocide? It’s not like killing Indians and robbing trains is a fundamental requirement.

I’m pretty sure fanfics have that territory covered. 🐍🐍🧶

Keyboards were so nice when you wanted to accurately input characters without putting your faith in auto-correct. God help you if you need to input something not in its dictionary like someone’s name.

Also, ISO 8601 has some handy rules for expressing time lengths and periodicities.

Week numbers are convenient for projects in which key delivery dates are often expressed in his many weeks out they are.

I am fond of a partial shuffle algorithm I wrote in Bash for my music playlists that often preserves neighbors of the input list in the output list.

• Blue: input sequence.
• Red: complete shuffle.
• Green: partial shuffle.

The result is like skipping through my media library in order but occasionally randomly enabling shuffle to jump to a new place. Since the input list clumps albums together and since albums often have a similar vibe, if I want several similar songs of a particular feel to play one after another, I just have to manually advance through the outputted playlist until I hit a song that has what I’m looking for; then I can let the playlist continue automatically since each subsequent song is likely to be similar to the previous song (until another random jump occurs).

I would argue the original theft was when the publisher coerced creators to sign away their copyright power due to the monopoly the publisher has on the market: i.e. if you don’t sign your rights away, you can’t play.

In theory, creators could punish publishers by going on strike, but publishers abuse copyright law to remove potential competitors striking creators might flee to. The DMCA’s overly broad application of DRM that also prevents creators from freeing their content from publishers also inhibits competition by increasing switching costs for customers who build up a library or DRM’s content that they cannot transfer to another publisher.

Breaking up monopolies by restoring anti-trust law to a pre-Reagan state would prevent the original coersion-theft of rights from creators since creators could reassign copyright from misbehaving publishers, enabling customers to transfer their purchased libraries to another publisher.

Gross.

Jannondorf

Shin Sekai Yori is an light novel / anime about what happens when these thoughts have power and how a society might develop to control the destructive consequences of said thoughts.