Things need to be paid for, but why does that mechanism need to be baked into the platform?

Imagine I’m the best, most engaging poster and commenter on Lemmy. Everyone loves my posts and comments, shares them, quotes them, and responds to them endlessly. (Maybe in this scenario everyone has brain damage for some reason, and this allowed me to become the top Lemmy user.)

If I’m in that position, what’s stopping me from just putting a little blurb at the bottom of each comment saying, “this post is brought to you by Carls Jr.” or whoever wants to sponsor my comments. If people for some reason loved my posts and comments enough, I could find sponsors and just put those sponsorships right in whatever comment or post I make. Lemmy doesn’t need to be involved. They don’t need to go out of their way to recommend my posts either. If they’re good enough, then they can be spread naturally by people sharing and engaging with them.

It makes sense for platforms to provider revenue to creators, but only if the platform has substantial ad revenue. YouTube pays its creators, but it also brings in billions of ad revenue. I don’t think most Lemmy servers even have ads.

Anyone interested in the real story here needs to read the Erin Reed article on this. https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/the-new-mccarthyism-lgbtq-purges

This story isn’t being covered well by the mainstream press. They’ve always tended to “both sides” trans issues, and here they’re simply accepting fascist talking points at face value. What’s really happening is that there was a chat group provided by the NSA to employees specifically to discuss trans-related issues. They have groups like this to support the needs of all sorts of demographic groups. The trans group, unsurprisingly, sometimes contained discussions of trans issues like surgery, hormones, etc. Fascists like Gabbard consider trans people to be pornographic for simply existing. A trans person walking down the street is pornographic to her. Any discussion of any of the realities of trans existence is considered elicit and pornographic to them.

This is actually part of Project 2025’s explicitly stated plan to imprison and eventually exterminate the trans population. When people use the phrase “trans genocide,” this is exactly what they’re talking about. The goal has always been to define trans people as pornographic, to make trans people being in the presence of minors a sex offense. And they also wish to make sex offenses against children punishable by the death penalty.

That is what these people are for. That is what they believe. Unfortunately, the main stream media is ignorant, complicit, or both. They simply accept the framing that any discussion of trans people or their issues is “explicit,” and they repeat fascist talking points without thought or criticism.

Yeah, mutual aid works on the local level or in insular communities like long-term discord groups with a tight group of regular members. With community mutual aid, I’m generally in favor of just taking people at their word. If they say they need help, give them help. No need to interrogate them like the food stamp office will. You prevent people from abusing the system by simply not granting endless requests from the same person. Or if someone needs severe aid, at that point you can start actually verifying their story, helping them access government benefits, helping them find employment, etc.

But that kind of open approach works for in-person aid. It doesn’t work for anonymous online aid, where someone can use bots to spin up hundreds of convincing profiles each begging for money.

I just don’t think mutual aid works well in an online context. The only online context it works in is among communities like small discord groups where people know each other for years. But on a lemmy or mastadon-type service? Mutual aid is impractical. Any people asking for aid should be directed to local groups that can help them in person.

Yeah, it’s definitely something that would need to be experimented with locally first. I mainly like the idea because it removes the ability for the most depraved and power-hungry people to achieve high office with any frequency. The real problem with power is that it attracts evil people like moths to a flame. They seek power for its own sake. Not because they have a vision of how to improve the world, or because they want to help people. They simply want power over other human beings. I’m firmly convinced that any presidential candidate for instance is almost certainly almost demonically evil. You simply don’t get to that level of power and influence, in our current system, without leaving a whole bunch of bodies along the side of the road on your path to the top. You have to cheat, betray, lie, and stab people in the back. You have to abandon your closest supporters in the name of political expediency. You have to hide your real beliefs lest you angering the wrong people. Our existing system just selects for the most dishonest and evil sociopaths among us. The higher the level of government, the more depraved and evil you can expect the politicians to be.

Sortition solves this problem entirely. I like the idea of maybe just using it to select 3 candidates. That way the voters can hopefully prevent the real crazies from winning office, if one happens to have their lot drawn. Just by voting, you probably can’t weed out a power monger that happens to get picked randomly for a presidential candidate slot. But you can at least prevent the legitimately crazy person whose campaign platform is just, “I’m going to launch all the nukes the minute after I get sworn into office.”

But with sortition, you prevent the worst of the worst from ever getting into the halls of power. Look like someone as sociopath and conniving as a Mitch McConnell. That man should have never been let anywhere near high office. But he wormed his way to the top. With sortitition, the only way he would ever see office is if he managed to win a million:one odds lottery first.

I think that generally, most people are good people. And yes, as you alluded to, they likely will need to rely heavily on expert opinions. But elected leaders already do that. But most people do want to seek compromise and work for the greater good.

As a plus, this would completely kill political parties as we currently know them. You don’t need the party to win election. And if each representative only serves a single term, there’s really nothing to be gained by sticking to a persistent political alliance like a party. Better for representatives to just form ad hoc coalitions as they go through their terms.

I say we do a zero-representation system. No one gets elected. No kings either. Government posts are filled by sortition.

No one who most desperately wants power should have it. Solve this problem by filling offices through a lottery. I’m in the US, and I personally think we would be doing a hell of a lot better with a Congress made from 535 randomly selected Americans than the 535 we have up there right now. Or maybe some sort of hybrid system, where you get to choose between a few randomly selected candidates.

I think it’s time to unreunite Germany.

Huh. Learn something new every day.

I mean…I don’t think any naval ship manufactured after 1870 has much to fear from cannon balls.

That does not make any sense at all. If you can melt through an artillery shell’s wall, you trigger the explosives inside it. The shells end up exploding miles away from your ship’s hull. Maybe you’ll end up with some inert metal fragments falling down on your ship’s deck, but it’s not going to do any damage except maybe minor injuries to unarmored personnel standing on the deck.

I’m not sure. Assumedly, the same way it would protect itself against ballistic missiles.

It has been suggested before that we might one day see a return of the battleships. The one technology that might allow it is truly effective rail gun technology. I remember seeing a story years ago speculating that such a ship parked of the coast of North Korea might be able to lodge shells anywhere onto the Korean Peninsula from well offshore.

Missiles are always likely to have their advantages, including range and maneuverability. But the potential advantage of railguns is a very cheap cost per shot. And instead of a ship’s hold full of explosive-stuffed missiles, your ship has a reactor, a bank of capacitors, and a whole bunch of shells that are little more than big slugs of inert metal.

This article for example suggests a potential railgun range of 200 km.

Us truly mastering railguns is one of the few scenarios that we might actually see a return of the old battleships. Except instead of artillery shells, they’ll be lobbing railgun slugs. And instead of being protected by foot-thick steel armor, they’ll be protected by a porcupine lattice of laser defense systems.

I don’t know. Can the laser shoot artillery shells out of the air?