Buying what you prefer itself isn’t an issue, but that should be the reason instead of “I need it because X, Y, Z.” Most truck/SUV owners don’t need a truck/SUV, they just want one.

My issue with trucks and SUVs are that they make the road more dangerous, since there’s only so much a car manufacturer can do to protect against a vehicle more than twice as massive. That, and they’re artificially cheap here in the US because of stupid regulations intended for farmers that got applied to them to reduce emissions standards.

Eh, we’ll see how that turns out. If they can release here at the price point they wanted ($25k-ish), I’d probably get one.

That’s what they claim, but their moderation practices feel a lot more on the tankie spectrum than marxist leninist.

Same. I’m looking into an EV, and I just want a simple car that goes and stops when I instruct it to. I don’t need any kind of always-online service, I don’t need cameras, etc, I just need to get to work and back.

Yeah, our VP rides around in a 2-door coupe and he’s very tall, while my coworker (who is shorter) drives a big SUV because “he doesn’t fit in smaller cars.” I’m also tall and drive a Toyota Prius, which is small.

At the end of the day, none of that’s legitimate, it’s just an excuse to buy the car you prefer.

Larger cars should cost more because they take up more space, wear out the roads faster, and impact the environment more.

And if they didn’t source internationally, they’d have to pay local labor prices, so it’s more expensive regardless of the direction they choose to go. If you make imports expensive enough, local goods will become more attractive, sure, but not cheaper.

I look at what services I use and see if I can replace any of them w/ a self-hosted solution. Rinse and repeat.

Looking for more stuff to host will just overcomplicate things. I instead try to look for ways to consolidate services down.

Why? Why would ending protectionism necessarily demand competition?

Right now, corporations get off w/ light fines and their execs don’t face jail time because of the explicit and implied protections in our legal system. Companies can declare bankruptcy without reaching into the pockets of those w/ a significant interest in the company because of financial protections, and prosecutors very rarely pursue criminal charges for something done in a business context. The larger a company is, the less likely it is to fail, but also the less competitive it is, because it can just buy legislators to block competition.

Here’s the current lifecycle of a corporation:

1. small, scrappy startup w/ an innovative idea
2. medium corp that expands its product line to corner a piece of the market
3. large corp that buys out competition and lobbies to raise the barrier to entry
4. mega corp that strategically uses subsidiaries to compartmentalize risk to not suffer consequences for bankruptcy

At step 2, companies are vulnerable to scrappy startups, but by the time they get to step 3, it’s too late to hold them accountable since they can just drown them out w/ negative press, lawsuits regarding regulations (and few consequences for trollish suits), etc.

I believe that if we cut corporate protectionism (say, for anything 2 or above) and hold execs legally liable for harm their products produce, we’ll largely stop the flow from 2 to 3 and largely force those at 3 and 4 to improve their behavior. You wouldn’t get situations like Boeing since the execs responsible would’ve been in jail at the first instance and the rest would follow for subsequent instances.

Our current strategy seems to be to pass regulations to improve the behavior of corporations, but corporations naturally sidestep the law and pay off legislators to make the consequences small. Instead, we should be making it unprofitable for corporations to lobby legislators and hold them accountable w/ law enforcement and the judicial system. Make laws extremely simple so there’s no wiggle room, such as if your product harms someone and you knew enough to have prevented it, you go to jail and need to make full restitution to the injured parties, and anything you earned while working there is available to make that restitution (smaller companies would have protections, but also limitation on how much profit they can pull from the corp).

In short, make it extremely unlikely a company will get powerful enough in the first place. The smaller a corporation is, the more protections it should get, not the reverse.

For example, items listed on Amazon that sell moderately well, Amazon creates knockoffs for. They then sell them at a cheaper price under the “Amazon Basic” name until the original is gone, and then they increase prices. This is what the free market looks like.

I haven’t seen those originals disappear, and I’ve heard a ton of complaints from people about the low quality of many Amazon Basics products. The only ones I’ve personally found value in are their rechargeable batteries (basically rebranded Eneloop) and their mice (backup only, they suck to use), but pretty much everything else has been poor quality.

People are the important thing, not companies

Agreed. I do think that employee owned companies are the ideal, but they’re not the only way for a company to be structured.

How people choose to organize themselves is their business, the government shouldn’t be picking and choosing structures it prefers. However, we’ve pretty much done that w/ the legal structures around corporations.

My solution here is to tear down the existing corporate structures and only have some kind of legal protection for sufficiently small orgs. For example, if your org has 50 employees and makes under 50M/year in revenue, you can apply for federal asset protection in exchange for submitting to regular audits. You would be disqualified from those protections if your net worth is above some amount, if you own a substantial stake in some number of companies, etc. The intention would be to give small companies some amount of protection so people actually want to start them, and once you start seeing success, then you’re expected to buy your own private insurance or whatever and do your due diligence to make sure your operations don’t harm others.

I would also like to see civil lawsuits be dramatically reduced in favor of actual criminal prosecutions. So if you’re being discriminated against or harassed at your job, you would go to the police and they would investigate and potentially arrest your employer, instead of going to a lawyer to seek a settlement from the company. The former gets results, the latter is a high enough barrier that most don’t bother.

Improving the lives of people should be the end goal, not profit.

Neither should be the end goal, the goal should be leaving people alone so they can pursue happiness on their own. The government shouldn’t protect me from making poor choices, and it shouldn’t prevent me from getting rich, it should prevent me from being taken advantage of and ensure I have whatever basic necessities I need to pursue happiness on my own.

I think we need some form of government, but I think that form needs to be very focused on providing limited, high quality services. Instead of welfare and retirement programs, just give poor people cash, whether young or old. Instead of complicated IP protections, let the courts deal with the general idea of “fraud” and “theft.” Instead of laws that say behavior must be within certain guidelines, prosecute actual harm (e.g. no tickets for “speeding,” but prosecute “reckless driving” heavily, as in actually endangering others). The government should only step in when absolutely necessary, and otherwise leave people alone.

In all honesty, the role of a legislator should be very boring, most days they should do absolutely nothing. We don’t need full-time representatives, we should have regular people that assemble whenever something truly important comes up, like maybe a few times per year or so. If the legislature doesn’t have enough power to favor or disfavor a given corporation (i.e. it doesn’t consider enough bills to matter), the corporation won’t bother lobbying them.

I think that sort of approach can self-correct and result in bad corporations failing and good corporations succeeding, because the financial and practical risk of bad behavior is high enough to discourage it.

Obviously, I haven’t dealt in specifics at all and I represented it in fairly extreme language to make a point. The idea I’m trying to convey is that I think less is more absolutely applies to the government, and we should strive to simplify it to where it’s transparent enough that the average person actually understands what government does.

If it’s an anti-Musk or anti-Trump post on Lemmy, you’re not going to get much proof. But in this case, it looks like someone posted decent souces. From this one posted below:

if you swap “who do you” for “who should one” you can get a very different result.

But in general, just remember that Lemmy is anti-Musk, anti-Trump, and anti-AI and doesn’t need much to jump on the bandwagon.

At least in the past, Grok was one of the more balanced LLMs, so it would be a strange departure for it to suddenly become very biased. So my initial reaction is suspicion that someone is just messing up with it to make Musk and X look bad.

I strongly dislike Musk, but I dislike misinformation even more, regardless of the source or if it aligns with my personal opinions.

It’s Debian based:

The 64-bit version is built directly from Debian for the arm64 platform, while the 32-bit version is derived from Raspbian, a customized Debian variant created in 2012 for the original Raspberry Pi.

That’s not happening.

Sweet, now you can buy a big mac or a happy meal! Not both though…

The history of terms isn’t particularly relevant, though it is interesting. For example, “libertarianism” largely came from socialism, and “liberalism” largely meant “small government,” whereas today libertarianism is pretty close to what liberalism used to mean, and “liberals” are in favor of large government.

Here’s what I mean by each term:

• socialism - “Democratic ownership of the means of production,” as in, the government runs the economy
• Democratic socialism - large central government with a lot of subsidised services, like healthcare; the means of production are private owned, but heavily taxed
• libertarianism - “subscribes to the non-aggression principle, emphasizes radical individual freedoms and minimal taxation” - government services should be minimized to prevent top down abuse
• communism - the end goal of socialism, which is a stateless society where people share what they produce so everyone has enough (from each according to his ability, to each according to his need)

I think socialism as defined above is unworkable because bureaucrats will abuse their power, communism is unworkable because people are selfish, and Democratic socialism is tricky because a large state tends to restrict the freedoms of its people. That’s why I align with libertarianism, but am on the left end where I believe there should be wealth redistribution through something like UBI (I prefer Negative Income Tax), so you get most of the benefits of socialism (everyone gets what they need) without most of the bureaucracy (no application process other than tax return).

The SOC also isn’t fully open, so you won’t get top tier performance with a purely FOSS stack. I push the limits on mine (Retropie mostly), so using their OS is the better bet (I use the one shipped by Retropie, which is super old).

I actually kinda hate the Raspberry Pi because of how closed it is. It’s gotten a bit better over the years, but the Pi 5 took a big step back. But unfortunately, its competitors aren’t much better, so I still use my RPis, but I probably won’t buy more.

I’m also not a fan of Debian in general, so if I switched, I would probably use openSUSE or Arch instead (I tried Arch, but it had issues syncing to disk after updates; they fixed that, but it shows that other distros will be a bit wonky). Raspbian works, so I stick with it.

anarchist

I have serious practical concerns with anarchism, but that is certainly the ideal.

I started life as a conservative, mostly because I bought into the lie that they actually wanted smaller government. Ron Paul got me excited because he actually wanted smaller government, but seeing him get trashed by the establishment pushed me out. Around that time I found Penn Jillette (libertarian anarchist), and he really resonated with me.

I dislike the Libertarian Party, but I have liked individuals within it, and that generally seems the most likely party to actually make a difference (i.e. get on a debate stage so people can hear a different perspective). My ballot is all over the place though, with a mixture of Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, and sometimes a random third party if the candidate is good.

But yeah, I just want to be left alone, and if we need a government (I think we do), it should be limited to protecting us from each other and ensuring everyone has the necessities. Other than that, business should be largely unrestrained and unprotected (limited liability should end after a certain size, execs should be arrested if they break the law, etc), and there should be strong support from government to protect privacy. Consumer protections should largely be unnecessary if the market is sufficiently competitive, and ending protectionism should provide that, but consumer protections should be provided by the AG leading lawsuits against companies.

I think “classical liberal” is the better term for me, but “libertarian” gets the message across pretty well, and I identify with the NAP underpinnings of the ideology. I’m registered with the party to increase the stats of third parties to hopefully encourage electoral reform (end FPTP), not because I think they’re great.

Agreed 100%. People also use “Nazi” way too liberally, and it’s really off-putting and cheapens the term for actual Nazis.

And there’s only so much nuance I’m going to put into a comment, but for “tankie,” I generally mean those who support authoritarian regimes because they stand up to the US, not because of their actual ideology. Supporting China, Russia, and NK in the same breath is nonsensical, especially since only one of those is actually somewhat communist and one is explicitly not. I get it, there are a lot of reasons to dislike the US, but that doesn’t make Russia and NK “good.”

And yeah, online discourse sucks, probably because we self-organize into echo chambers. Reddit was less bad when I joined, but pretty much any reasonably popular SM is problematic now.

The API changes were the last straw for me too, but I had been searching for a while because it felt very much like an echo-chamber. Lemmy does too, but at least the API is open.

Then maybe I’ll try it sometime. I don’t like base building (feels like crafting), but exploration can be fun. But it’s pretty far down my list.

Yup.

That’s like 4.5 years of labor for $100k!