Yeah, payment processing is among the many many many industries that ought to be nationalized so they can be administered in a transparent and democratic manner (see also, healthcare education housing electricity internet etc.)
There’s just too much opportunity to use it to manipulate markets and oppress minority viewpoints for it to remain in private hands imo
Basically nothing works if no one cares about their community. One of the reasons Trump is in power right now is because of a deep seated American apathy for, like… everything.
Trump, et. al., are dismantling USPS, but I like USPS. It’s bad that they’re doing that.
It’s easier to start a competing company than it is to start a competing government.
Not when Trump’s government refuses to do anything about all the slapp suits PayPal levies against you for treading on their financial turf.
You need a powerful standing army for the latter,
Corporations, without oversight, just become warlords with their own standing armies. You’re not getting out of this one through the low effort of simply buying a different brand of latte, man, I’m sorry.
The problem is that government even has the power to do those things.
How would you stop them from doing this?
you can’t solve government problems with more government,
Not when you aren’t in power. This is your fundamental flaw: You complain about the world, oh how you have complaints, but you have no will to power, no vision.
Plant a fig tree; it will benefit your grandchildren.
Putting the ridicoulous idea that governments are fair and transparent aside, payment processors need to be international. Otherwise, most countries will not be able to access services because their local payment processor is not supported by smaller websites.
However, the payment processors should be regulated with something similar to net neutrality so they can’t discriminate payments. And EU could probably launch a government run competitor to dilute their duopoly.
Yes, because without one government that was helping them out, punishing their competition and funding them, also making regulations convenient for them, Alphabet, Meta and others would be even more powerful. /s
…those are all corporations. Nationalization would make it a public service, rather than a corporate profit-driven service like how it is now.
You can bet that if libraries, for example, became privatized, we’d quickly see several different library companies pop up, each with their own paid book subscription service with exclusive partnerships with various popular authors, much like we have today with streaming platforms. Conversely, if we were to nationalize those streaming platforms, we’d likely see the service transformed to be more akin to our current library service.
It’s why the rightmost parties generally want to defund many public services and move them to the private sector - it transforms services that we spend money on to benefit the people into services that the people spend money on to benefit corporations.
I don’t believe in nationalization. I only believe in a simple, small and very firmly enforced set of laws.
It’s not about for-profit or not for-profit, it’s about laws being used to force you to pay to a certain kind of businesses. And not to whoever you like.
Because a paid library is kinda fine as a concept. A library has to function, repair chairs, change lightbulbs, pay security guards and, ahem, librarians, pay for new books and electricity and so on.
So - laws forcing you to predictably pay to someone involved in making laws. Copyright laws, surveillance laws, other laws. And the state having its secrets, and doing a lot of that funding and pressure and what not in secret.
And the more complex your set of rules is, the more it turns into “money buys right”, because it turns into a game where the side with more money on lawyers and technical solutions to loopholes wins.
The rightmost parties which want to defund public services are perfectly complemented by the left-center parties which generally want to have unaccountable funding of some public service. It’s not a left\right\yellow\blue issue. It’s an issue of a political system where only those representing some power interest are able to act. Just there are some power interests in replacing a public service with a private monopoly\oligopoly, and some power interests in feeding from the public service itself. I’m pretty certain that, similar to hedge funds, these ultimately end on the same groups of people.
One can even say that this is a market dynamic.
So - the political system is intended to ideally function like a centerpoint, not the milking mechanism described.
The problem is
in a too complex set of laws (honestly I’d suggest a limit on the total amount and a limit on the length of one law, and a referendum week once in 5 years on every law from the list suggested for the next 5 years, dropping all that was before ; when the laws are so complex that you can be right or wrong in any situation depending on being poor or Bezos, it means that the idea of having a specific law for every situation has just failed),
in too many levels of representation allowing power to affect representatives,
in there being no process to at any moment initiate recall of a representative,
in not wide enough participation, it would be best if the majority of population would participate a few times as a representative in various organs, this can be made with making those organs more function-separated and parallel, with bigger amount of places and mandatory rotation, so that one person could become a politician on one subject once for a year or so,
in there being too much professional bureaucratic entities inside the government,
in no nationwide horizontal organizations allowing to 2A through any situation,
in trade unions and consumer associations (there was such a thing too, ye-es) being almost dead.
So just have to fix these 7 points, and life will be better.
LOL, this is something averaging the classical (as in ideal, never really existing) American Republican ideas and the classical (as in functioning for a few years in early 1920s and late 1980s) Soviet system. Why do they mix so well, LOL.
Because a paid library is kinda fine as a concept. A library has to function, repair chairs, change lightbulbs, pay security guards and, ahem, librarians, pay for new books and electricity and so on.
Yeah, but taxes can pay for all of that. And being able to read, to access the Internet, to do the many other things provided by library services are fundamental to the human experience or to modern society. You shouldn’t be prevented from these because you cannot afford to pay. A paid library is fine as a concept, but only if it doesn’t decrease the availability of free libraries.
And the more complex your set of rules is, the more it turns into “money buys right”
Well, no. Things being at the whim of who has the most money is what turns it into “money buys right”. It doesn’t matter how complicated the rules are, if the rules don’t permit money to play into it. If libraries were paid, that would certainly turn access to reading into a “money buys right” situation.
Simple laws are great, and you should avoid laws that allow loopholes. But sometimes a more complicated law is required because the situation is more complicated.
in too many levels of representation allowing power to affect representatives
Quite the opposite. Give too much power into one central authority and that allows power to affect representatives. More distributed power at the local level, with restrictions on the abuse of that power coming from a higher level, is a much more equitable solution.
in not wide enough participation
This thread is not about any one particular country. In fact, it’s specifically about multinational companies bowing to the pressure of one minor lobbyist. That said, compulsory voting works wonders. We’ve seen it quite clearly here in Australia. Make everyone vote, and surprise surprise, the impact of a loud minority gets drowned out! Combine that with a voting system other than FPTP and you’re well set for a much better democracy.
Politics should not end at the ballot box, however, and getting people more involved in political life in general would be a great thing. Through communicating regularly with representatives. Through joining a union. Through attending protests. Etc. I’m also quite a fan of sortition.
in there being too much professional bureaucratic entities inside the government
We’ve seen first-hand how terrible it is when someone who thinks the government is “too much professional bureaucratic entities” comes into power, in the US. This is absolutely terrible anti-intellectual rubbish.
I don’t much care one way or the other about 3, it’s an insignificant irrelevance. I have no idea what 6 is even supposed to mean. 7 might be the only genuinely fantastic point.
For prices set by whom? A moneymaking machine, see? Unless libraries are nationalized.
But if you intend to nationalize everything, then there should be a damn good plan at basically building a commonly-owned corporation to maintain nationalized services.
A paid library is fine as a concept, but only if it doesn’t decrease the availability of free libraries.
Yeah, except there’s one country where subsidizing paid services with taxes instead of fixing laws has both turned into a moneymaking machine for cronies and didn’t make the services more accessible. The country of origin, well, of all those tech companies.
It doesn’t matter how complicated the rules are, if the rules don’t permit money to play into it.
This is self-contradictory. Unless you forbid lawyers to work for money.
But sometimes a more complicated law is required because the situation is more complicated.
The situation always changes, so laws become more and more complex rapidly with a long tail of legacy that doesn’t solve its initial goals anymore.
So no, this can be solved with starting anew too. Just start anew every 5-10 years. If life requires something specific and the real world situation changes, I think one can wait that long. And this keeps the process simple enough.
And the most important part is that this doesn’t allow malicious parties to carefully build up legal traps over many decades to subvert democracy.
Just clean the house completely once a few years, leaving only the constitutional law. Accumulate political knowledge, not rituals and procedures most people don’t understand, with surprises hidden by crooks.
Like mowing the grass.
Quite the opposite. Give too much power into one central authority and that allows power to affect representatives. More distributed power at the local level, with restrictions on the abuse of that power coming from a higher level, is a much more equitable solution.
This is not exactly what I said. “Too many levels” is when representatives of one level elect other representatives, hierarchically. That shouldn’t happen (the first level might reminisce the buildup of opinions in the society, the following ones degrade to be comprised of the members of the most uniform plurality, not even the majority). I meant exactly more distributed horizontally as an alternative. Functionality-wise too.
That said, compulsory voting works wonders. We’ve seen it quite clearly here in Australia. Make everyone vote, and surprise surprise, the impact of a loud minority gets drowned out! Combine that with a voting system other than FPTP and you’re well set for a much better democracy.
Agreed.
Politics should not end at the ballot box, however, and getting people more involved in political life in general would be a great thing. Through communicating regularly with representatives. Through joining a union. Through attending protests. Etc. I’m also quite a fan of sortition.
Actually necessary. Ballot box is almost a scam by now, since you are offered a limited choice based on limited information and can’t just, say, press “+” and write in your own candidate. Almost the first time I see the word “sortition” used by somebody else on Lemmy.
At some point I thought that it’s good that people not interested can avoid participating, but then realized that this is the simplest way to hijack anything.
We’ve seen first-hand how terrible it is when someone who thinks the government is “too much professional bureaucratic entities” comes into power, in the US. This is absolutely terrible anti-intellectual rubbish.
No. One can have constraints on from whom such organs are formed. Just no bureaucratic institution should be allowed to self-reproduce all by itself and have its secrets. Only that.
I don’t much care one way or the other about 3, it’s an insignificant irrelevance.
Couldn’t be further from truth. So, your representative is supposed to represent you, right? If they don’t do that, what’s better, wait another N years until another vote, or, if they failed notably enough already, call a vote with enough signatures and elect someone better immediately?
This also makes lobbying a far less certain thing, since the person paid might be recalled a few days after. Which is good.
Except there should be some practical limitations to prevent what Stalin did in 20s (pressuring the specific small initial constituency of his key opponents to disrupt their groups ; this was in the Soviet system with a hierarchy of councils electing members to upper councils and so on, so - with not as many levels this isn’t really a vulnerability even).
7 might be the only genuinely fantastic point.
At some point it was normal in western countries, even more than unions. There’s a risk, of course, since, well, customer associations and unions might sometimes press in the opposite directions.
But when actual violence and half-legal pressure are denied by the law and the enforcers, these work just fine.
I think it’s the other way around. See, hosting a service on the Internet carries some obligations.
The state treats them so that those are much easier to fulfill for these platforms.
The state gives them very expensive projects.
The state kills Aaron Schwartz, purely coincidentally also the author of the RSS standard. That thing that comes the closest to a uniform way of aggregating the Web, which would kill a lot of what platforms provide.
The state makes some of their products standard for the state, making those commercial things necessary to interact with the state.
So, the state does a lot to give them that monopoly in the first place.
yes that’s precisely what i implied, because they control it in the first place. companies like amazon are more powerful than nation states, and they exercise that power.
if they make a big mistake or want labour law adjusted, they can get the state to coddle them, because they privately control, say, the entire food supply (ie the means of production) without which the state is meaningless.
this has been the capitalist state’s modus operandi for more than 100-200 years. and the oligarch’s power precede it, they shaped it that way back then.
aaron schwartz was literally just a dude, not remotely comparable to oligarchs.
yes that’s precisely what i implied, because they control it in the first place. companies like amazon are more powerful than nation states, and they exercise that power.
And I’m trying to say that the state helping them was first.
this has been the capitalist state’s modus operandi for more than 100-200 years. and the oligarch’s power precede it, they shaped it that way back then.
Not really. Every month, year, decade is different.
aaron schwartz was literally just a dude, not remotely comparable to oligarchs.
He had the right ideas of how to solve one particular industry which is the spearhead of barbarism. And he somehow committed suicide in jail.
the oligarchy as it currently stands precedes the capitalist state as we know it today. some of them even come from the very same families, like they are fucking kings (they are)
and yes, despite capitalism having changed over time, its basic power structures have remained the same for the last century or more.
and that’s nothing, if you consider feudalism lasted even longer while also changing but keeping more or less the same types of power structures. don’t quote me on feudalism though.
They can do a really shit job of administering payment processes in a transparent and democratic manner before they end up being worse than the status quo where it’s entirely untransparent and undemocratic. Also, governments already have the power to make things they don’t like illegal, so there’s no reason to expect they’d block payments for things they’ve left legal, whereas payment processors currently block plenty of legal things.
So you expect governments like the Trump administration or Saudi Arabia will less likely block porn games than for profit companies?
You do realise this happened because thousands of people called the payment processors to complain about it, which means with thousands of people, you can pressure these companies to change their mind again. Try doing that to your own government, let alone a foreign government.
I agree with your statement, but we are currently seeing politicians actively ignore their constituents wishes on policy.
Since people don’t like hearing what I’m saying I’ll reference the situation
Mitch McConnell is actively going against his former constituents and telling Repub reps to go against their constituents over Medicare/Medicaid. Saying “They’ll get over it.”
Several states voted to uphold abortion rights only to have their elected officials ignore them and ban those rights.
If a human is involved in any capacity, fallibility is built in. We may not like it, but it’s a fact.
Your government representative only has a voice in the government, but they don’t control it. Calling for profit companies en masse pushes your message directly to the people in charge who are scared of losing profits over this.
Tell me, when has calling your representatives ever resulted in a change in government policy within a reasonable time span? How often does a government do a major change in policy without you needing to vote someone out first?
That sounds wonderful to me, I just want that mass of righteous people to write down all of their ideas so future generations can continue their work even after the fervor has died down. I call those ideas laws and regulations and the ongoing spirit of that mass of righteous people a government, but I’m not too attached to semantics.
Well then, I guess you actually don’t care that porn games are being removed from the stores right now because having the government be in charge will require you guys decades before such decisions can be overturned, just like how long the fight for free healthcare and sane gun control is taking in the US.
Maybe some governments are more receptive to their citizens plea than the US government, but most governments are definitely still in the pocket of people with big money.
Why should it be easy? Do you only do things that are easy? Was World War II easy?
Your forefathers spent months, years, working on projects some of them didn’t even live to see completed. You want your activism to be easy? This is pathetic.
Of what use are you to humanity if the only victories you’ll reach for are ones doable over a saturday? Whose grandchildren should even bother to remember your name?
When we win this one back, I think VISA should restrict you specifically from buying any porn games.
At the moment, they’re already at risk of being removed by the government, who can make them illegal, and simultaneously at risk of being removed by payment processors, who can prevent the stores from operating. It makes no difference to the government whether they’re also the payment processor. They could remove them anyway. Having two entities with unilateral power to remove something can’t be worse than just having one of them.
The US goverment can’t make porn illegal in another country. A US owned payment processor can force other stores in other countries that uses their service to save money to ban porn as well. You’re just advocating for giving governments of wealthier countries more control over smaller ones. I say no thanks to that nightmare scenario.
Why don’t you prove your government can do their job and prevent payment processors from being such massive monopolies and maybe I’d trust that they won’t immediately abuse their power.
Why would a government just block payments for something it doesn’t like instead of, you know, making it illegal, which it already can do. I doesn’t need to block my payment to the heroin store, because the heroin store isn’t legally allowed to operate.
Because they can’t make it illegal in another country. I’m sure plenty of countries would just use US or China owned payment processors rather than spending money to set up their own. This would just give them more control over other countries than they already have now.
I think it is possible to have a government that functions in this way on a long term basis. I don’t think the same can be said of for profit companies.
A for profit company can be replaced with another and is more easily affected by boycotts. A goverment is neither easily replaced or influenced by people from other countries.
Until they monopolize their industry, which is something they’re always going to be trying to do by their very nature as for profits and which has already essentially happened here
A government can be influenced if it is transparent and democratic, which can be ensured if they’ve got good bylaws that are being scrupulously enforced. Like, if you have decisionmakers a) accountable to free and fair elections (whether they’re elected directly or appointed by elected people) holding b) regular and public meetings where c) outside organizations can raise disputes and get them decided under d) neutral procedures that are published in advance and that every party has equal opportunity to understand and take advantage of, and e) if those decisions and the reasoning behind them are also published and cited as precedent to be reinforced or overturned in subsequent decisions, then I really think the rest takes care of itself.
And I think we had a lot of this figured out when we got done fighting totalitarian regimes in the 1940s and turned around and passed the Administrative Procedure Act, but conservatives keep adding loopholes and trying to drag all of us back to feudalism and monarchies.
So you admitted that people have succeeded in adding loopholes to the US government that makes all your argument no longer true, and you think they still should be allowed handle payment processing? To me it just sounds like you’re arguing for transferring the power from one corruptible party (for-profit payment company) to another one (the government).
It would be easier for the government to actually regulate payment processors so they don’t become so big that they can influence online stores that use them than preventing people in governments from turning corrupt and misusing the control over payment processes. Even then, the US government has failed to do the former, so how do we expect them to do the latter?
Yeah, payment processing is among the many many many industries that ought to be nationalized so they can be administered in a transparent and democratic manner (see also, healthcare education housing electricity internet etc.)
There’s just too much opportunity to use it to manipulate markets and oppress minority viewpoints for it to remain in private hands imo
So you want Trump and MAGA politicians to be able to deny your payments instead?
The problem with “just let the government do it” is when the government is run by people like this.
So don’t let them.
Basically nothing works if no one cares about their community. One of the reasons Trump is in power right now is because of a deep seated American apathy for, like… everything.
Trump, et. al., are dismantling USPS, but I like USPS. It’s bad that they’re doing that.
How naive can you be? You think your vote matters here?
When every single district has been gerrymandered to death for 100 years, nobody’s vote really matters anymore.
Your cynicism can’t defeat me, man. I am God’s holy warrior. I crush weak pessimism like yours beneath the weight of my iron will.
How is it you think private companies will be more easily coercible when Trump’s cronies are the private sector?
Rofl. Your god can eat a dick. I’ve seen exactly what your god does.
It’s easier to start a competing company than it is to start a competing government.
You need a powerful standing army for the latter, and standing armies are part of why we’re in the trouble we’re in.
Not when Trump’s government refuses to do anything about all the slapp suits PayPal levies against you for treading on their financial turf.
Corporations, without oversight, just become warlords with their own standing armies. You’re not getting out of this one through the low effort of simply buying a different brand of latte, man, I’m sorry.
The problem is that government even has the power to do those things.
And to paraphrase you, you can’t solve government problems with more government, I’m sorry, man.
How would you stop them from doing this?
Not when you aren’t in power. This is your fundamental flaw: You complain about the world, oh how you have complaints, but you have no will to power, no vision.
Plant a fig tree; it will benefit your grandchildren.
To me it’s insane that food also isn’t on that list. Anything that isn’t a luxury can’t be trusted to be handled by capitalism.
Putting the ridicoulous idea that governments are fair and transparent aside, payment processors need to be international. Otherwise, most countries will not be able to access services because their local payment processor is not supported by smaller websites.
However, the payment processors should be regulated with something similar to net neutrality so they can’t discriminate payments. And EU could probably launch a government run competitor to dilute their duopoly.
Really the only time they should be even allowed to discriminate on payment is when it is suspected to be part of a crime.
Well, yes. I just did not consider them to be the ones discriminating if it is against the law, but the government.
Power finds a way, so I wouldn’t hope for nationalization itself to be anything good.
power already did find a way, its called privatization.
Yes, because without one government that was helping them out, punishing their competition and funding them, also making regulations convenient for them, Alphabet, Meta and others would be even more powerful. /s
…those are all corporations. Nationalization would make it a public service, rather than a corporate profit-driven service like how it is now.
You can bet that if libraries, for example, became privatized, we’d quickly see several different library companies pop up, each with their own paid book subscription service with exclusive partnerships with various popular authors, much like we have today with streaming platforms. Conversely, if we were to nationalize those streaming platforms, we’d likely see the service transformed to be more akin to our current library service.
It’s why the rightmost parties generally want to defund many public services and move them to the private sector - it transforms services that we spend money on to benefit the people into services that the people spend money on to benefit corporations.
I don’t believe in nationalization. I only believe in a simple, small and very firmly enforced set of laws.
It’s not about for-profit or not for-profit, it’s about laws being used to force you to pay to a certain kind of businesses. And not to whoever you like.
Because a paid library is kinda fine as a concept. A library has to function, repair chairs, change lightbulbs, pay security guards and, ahem, librarians, pay for new books and electricity and so on.
So - laws forcing you to predictably pay to someone involved in making laws. Copyright laws, surveillance laws, other laws. And the state having its secrets, and doing a lot of that funding and pressure and what not in secret.
And the more complex your set of rules is, the more it turns into “money buys right”, because it turns into a game where the side with more money on lawyers and technical solutions to loopholes wins.
The rightmost parties which want to defund public services are perfectly complemented by the left-center parties which generally want to have unaccountable funding of some public service. It’s not a left\right\yellow\blue issue. It’s an issue of a political system where only those representing some power interest are able to act. Just there are some power interests in replacing a public service with a private monopoly\oligopoly, and some power interests in feeding from the public service itself. I’m pretty certain that, similar to hedge funds, these ultimately end on the same groups of people.
One can even say that this is a market dynamic.
So - the political system is intended to ideally function like a centerpoint, not the milking mechanism described.
The problem is
in a too complex set of laws (honestly I’d suggest a limit on the total amount and a limit on the length of one law, and a referendum week once in 5 years on every law from the list suggested for the next 5 years, dropping all that was before ; when the laws are so complex that you can be right or wrong in any situation depending on being poor or Bezos, it means that the idea of having a specific law for every situation has just failed),
in too many levels of representation allowing power to affect representatives,
in there being no process to at any moment initiate recall of a representative,
in not wide enough participation, it would be best if the majority of population would participate a few times as a representative in various organs, this can be made with making those organs more function-separated and parallel, with bigger amount of places and mandatory rotation, so that one person could become a politician on one subject once for a year or so,
in there being too much professional bureaucratic entities inside the government,
in no nationwide horizontal organizations allowing to 2A through any situation,
in trade unions and consumer associations (there was such a thing too, ye-es) being almost dead.
So just have to fix these 7 points, and life will be better.
LOL, this is something averaging the classical (as in ideal, never really existing) American Republican ideas and the classical (as in functioning for a few years in early 1920s and late 1980s) Soviet system. Why do they mix so well, LOL.
Yeah, but taxes can pay for all of that. And being able to read, to access the Internet, to do the many other things provided by library services are fundamental to the human experience or to modern society. You shouldn’t be prevented from these because you cannot afford to pay. A paid library is fine as a concept, but only if it doesn’t decrease the availability of free libraries.
Well, no. Things being at the whim of who has the most money is what turns it into “money buys right”. It doesn’t matter how complicated the rules are, if the rules don’t permit money to play into it. If libraries were paid, that would certainly turn access to reading into a “money buys right” situation.
Simple laws are great, and you should avoid laws that allow loopholes. But sometimes a more complicated law is required because the situation is more complicated.
Quite the opposite. Give too much power into one central authority and that allows power to affect representatives. More distributed power at the local level, with restrictions on the abuse of that power coming from a higher level, is a much more equitable solution.
This thread is not about any one particular country. In fact, it’s specifically about multinational companies bowing to the pressure of one minor lobbyist. That said, compulsory voting works wonders. We’ve seen it quite clearly here in Australia. Make everyone vote, and surprise surprise, the impact of a loud minority gets drowned out! Combine that with a voting system other than FPTP and you’re well set for a much better democracy.
Politics should not end at the ballot box, however, and getting people more involved in political life in general would be a great thing. Through communicating regularly with representatives. Through joining a union. Through attending protests. Etc. I’m also quite a fan of sortition.
We’ve seen first-hand how terrible it is when someone who thinks the government is “too much professional bureaucratic entities” comes into power, in the US. This is absolutely terrible anti-intellectual rubbish.
I don’t much care one way or the other about 3, it’s an insignificant irrelevance. I have no idea what 6 is even supposed to mean. 7 might be the only genuinely fantastic point.
For prices set by whom? A moneymaking machine, see? Unless libraries are nationalized.
But if you intend to nationalize everything, then there should be a damn good plan at basically building a commonly-owned corporation to maintain nationalized services.
Yeah, except there’s one country where subsidizing paid services with taxes instead of fixing laws has both turned into a moneymaking machine for cronies and didn’t make the services more accessible. The country of origin, well, of all those tech companies.
This is self-contradictory. Unless you forbid lawyers to work for money.
The situation always changes, so laws become more and more complex rapidly with a long tail of legacy that doesn’t solve its initial goals anymore.
So no, this can be solved with starting anew too. Just start anew every 5-10 years. If life requires something specific and the real world situation changes, I think one can wait that long. And this keeps the process simple enough.
And the most important part is that this doesn’t allow malicious parties to carefully build up legal traps over many decades to subvert democracy.
Just clean the house completely once a few years, leaving only the constitutional law. Accumulate political knowledge, not rituals and procedures most people don’t understand, with surprises hidden by crooks.
Like mowing the grass.
This is not exactly what I said. “Too many levels” is when representatives of one level elect other representatives, hierarchically. That shouldn’t happen (the first level might reminisce the buildup of opinions in the society, the following ones degrade to be comprised of the members of the most uniform plurality, not even the majority). I meant exactly more distributed horizontally as an alternative. Functionality-wise too.
Agreed.
Actually necessary. Ballot box is almost a scam by now, since you are offered a limited choice based on limited information and can’t just, say, press “+” and write in your own candidate. Almost the first time I see the word “sortition” used by somebody else on Lemmy.
At some point I thought that it’s good that people not interested can avoid participating, but then realized that this is the simplest way to hijack anything.
No. One can have constraints on from whom such organs are formed. Just no bureaucratic institution should be allowed to self-reproduce all by itself and have its secrets. Only that.
Couldn’t be further from truth. So, your representative is supposed to represent you, right? If they don’t do that, what’s better, wait another N years until another vote, or, if they failed notably enough already, call a vote with enough signatures and elect someone better immediately?
This also makes lobbying a far less certain thing, since the person paid might be recalled a few days after. Which is good.
Except there should be some practical limitations to prevent what Stalin did in 20s (pressuring the specific small initial constituency of his key opponents to disrupt their groups ; this was in the Soviet system with a hierarchy of councils electing members to upper councils and so on, so - with not as many levels this isn’t really a vulnerability even).
At some point it was normal in western countries, even more than unions. There’s a risk, of course, since, well, customer associations and unions might sometimes press in the opposite directions.
But when actual violence and half-legal pressure are denied by the law and the enforcers, these work just fine.
its almost like their monopoly on the means of production made them powerful and they used that power to control the state. 🤔
I think it’s the other way around. See, hosting a service on the Internet carries some obligations.
The state treats them so that those are much easier to fulfill for these platforms.
The state gives them very expensive projects.
The state kills Aaron Schwartz, purely coincidentally also the author of the RSS standard. That thing that comes the closest to a uniform way of aggregating the Web, which would kill a lot of what platforms provide.
The state makes some of their products standard for the state, making those commercial things necessary to interact with the state.
So, the state does a lot to give them that monopoly in the first place.
yes that’s precisely what i implied, because they control it in the first place. companies like amazon are more powerful than nation states, and they exercise that power.
if they make a big mistake or want labour law adjusted, they can get the state to coddle them, because they privately control, say, the entire food supply (ie the means of production) without which the state is meaningless.
this has been the capitalist state’s modus operandi for more than 100-200 years. and the oligarch’s power precede it, they shaped it that way back then.
aaron schwartz was literally just a dude, not remotely comparable to oligarchs.
And I’m trying to say that the state helping them was first.
Not really. Every month, year, decade is different.
He had the right ideas of how to solve one particular industry which is the spearhead of barbarism. And he somehow committed suicide in jail.
the oligarchy as it currently stands precedes the capitalist state as we know it today. some of them even come from the very same families, like they are fucking kings (they are)
and yes, despite capitalism having changed over time, its basic power structures have remained the same for the last century or more.
and that’s nothing, if you consider feudalism lasted even longer while also changing but keeping more or less the same types of power structures. don’t quote me on feudalism though.
Do you really think most governments will administer payment processes in a transparent and democratic manner?
They can do a really shit job of administering payment processes in a transparent and democratic manner before they end up being worse than the status quo where it’s entirely untransparent and undemocratic. Also, governments already have the power to make things they don’t like illegal, so there’s no reason to expect they’d block payments for things they’ve left legal, whereas payment processors currently block plenty of legal things.
So you expect governments like the Trump administration or Saudi Arabia will less likely block porn games than for profit companies?
You do realise this happened because thousands of people called the payment processors to complain about it, which means with thousands of people, you can pressure these companies to change their mind again. Try doing that to your own government, let alone a foreign government.
That’s literally what calling your government representatives is. You’re supposed to be able to pressure your representative to represent you.
I agree with your statement, but we are currently seeing politicians actively ignore their constituents wishes on policy.
Since people don’t like hearing what I’m saying I’ll reference the situation
Mitch McConnell is actively going against his former constituents and telling Repub reps to go against their constituents over Medicare/Medicaid. Saying “They’ll get over it.”
Several states voted to uphold abortion rights only to have their elected officials ignore them and ban those rights.
If a human is involved in any capacity, fallibility is built in. We may not like it, but it’s a fact.
Your government representative only has a voice in the government, but they don’t control it. Calling for profit companies en masse pushes your message directly to the people in charge who are scared of losing profits over this.
Tell me, when has calling your representatives ever resulted in a change in government policy within a reasonable time span? How often does a government do a major change in policy without you needing to vote someone out first?
That sounds wonderful to me, I just want that mass of righteous people to write down all of their ideas so future generations can continue their work even after the fervor has died down. I call those ideas laws and regulations and the ongoing spirit of that mass of righteous people a government, but I’m not too attached to semantics.
Well then, I guess you actually don’t care that porn games are being removed from the stores right now because having the government be in charge will require you guys decades before such decisions can be overturned, just like how long the fight for free healthcare and sane gun control is taking in the US.
Maybe some governments are more receptive to their citizens plea than the US government, but most governments are definitely still in the pocket of people with big money.
Jesus christ.
Okay, buddy, I’m giving you homework: you need to attend 10 city halls and 5 protests by the end of this year.
Tell me when you guys finally get free healthcare and sane gun control laws.
How about something simpler, then? Get back to me when you guys finally stop funding Israel’s genocide.
Even easier? Get your government to stop vetoing any UN resolution for a ceasefire in Palestine.
Show me how easy it is to change your government’s mind. I’ll wait.
Why should it be easy? Do you only do things that are easy? Was World War II easy?
Your forefathers spent months, years, working on projects some of them didn’t even live to see completed. You want your activism to be easy? This is pathetic.
Of what use are you to humanity if the only victories you’ll reach for are ones doable over a saturday? Whose grandchildren should even bother to remember your name?
When we win this one back, I think VISA should restrict you specifically from buying any porn games.
At the moment, they’re already at risk of being removed by the government, who can make them illegal, and simultaneously at risk of being removed by payment processors, who can prevent the stores from operating. It makes no difference to the government whether they’re also the payment processor. They could remove them anyway. Having two entities with unilateral power to remove something can’t be worse than just having one of them.
The US goverment can’t make porn illegal in another country. A US owned payment processor can force other stores in other countries that uses their service to save money to ban porn as well. You’re just advocating for giving governments of wealthier countries more control over smaller ones. I say no thanks to that nightmare scenario.
Why don’t you prove your government can do their job and prevent payment processors from being such massive monopolies and maybe I’d trust that they won’t immediately abuse their power.
A lot of governments already do. The credit card duopoly is the reason the US decided to come after Brazil’s solution.
Why would a government just block payments for something it doesn’t like instead of, you know, making it illegal, which it already can do. I doesn’t need to block my payment to the heroin store, because the heroin store isn’t legally allowed to operate.
Because they can’t make it illegal in another country. I’m sure plenty of countries would just use US or China owned payment processors rather than spending money to set up their own. This would just give them more control over other countries than they already have now.
I think it is possible to have a government that functions in this way on a long term basis. I don’t think the same can be said of for profit companies.
A for profit company can be replaced with another and is more easily affected by boycotts. A goverment is neither easily replaced or influenced by people from other countries.
Until they monopolize their industry, which is something they’re always going to be trying to do by their very nature as for profits and which has already essentially happened here
A government can be influenced if it is transparent and democratic, which can be ensured if they’ve got good bylaws that are being scrupulously enforced. Like, if you have decisionmakers a) accountable to free and fair elections (whether they’re elected directly or appointed by elected people) holding b) regular and public meetings where c) outside organizations can raise disputes and get them decided under d) neutral procedures that are published in advance and that every party has equal opportunity to understand and take advantage of, and e) if those decisions and the reasoning behind them are also published and cited as precedent to be reinforced or overturned in subsequent decisions, then I really think the rest takes care of itself.
And I think we had a lot of this figured out when we got done fighting totalitarian regimes in the 1940s and turned around and passed the Administrative Procedure Act, but conservatives keep adding loopholes and trying to drag all of us back to feudalism and monarchies.
So you admitted that people have succeeded in adding loopholes to the US government that makes all your argument no longer true, and you think they still should be allowed handle payment processing? To me it just sounds like you’re arguing for transferring the power from one corruptible party (for-profit payment company) to another one (the government).
It would be easier for the government to actually regulate payment processors so they don’t become so big that they can influence online stores that use them than preventing people in governments from turning corrupt and misusing the control over payment processes. Even then, the US government has failed to do the former, so how do we expect them to do the latter?
Is the private sector currently doing that?
It’ll end up like the shit we’ve got going on now with. ICE being given access to Medicaid and tax records in order to deport more people.
What is stopping the government from just commandeering PayPal’s records?