barrbaric [he/him]

Some of us never stopped

It was a thing last… summer? Where reddit announced they were going to start charging for every call a third party program made using the API. This was done with the intent of shutting down 3rd party reddit apps and to get users on the official one so reddit could make more money. However, it also destroyed a bunch of 3rd party tools that mods more or less needed, and which reddit had been promising to implement themselves for years with no progress. There was a brief protest where mods of many subs shut them down (mostly for less than a week, though some are still down IIRC). A bunch of users and moderators left reddit and went to other sites.

I use UBO and have definitely noticed videos stuttering in the last week or two.

Mine are super inconsistent now. Obviously I have uBO, but I can typically watch like 10-ish videos a day before the popups start, at which point I just turn on libredirect.

/tg/ maintains the best pirated TTRPG repositories as far as I’m aware, so there are at least two good things.

Okay here’s my alternate climate plan: we execute the richest person alive, and keep doing this until we get below a net worth of $10M, then we re-evaluate and see if we’ve solved the problem.

to the mods

Companies have no rights unlimited genocide on corporate personhood

Do you have any actual proof that the profit motive has any positive links to innovation, or are you just taking it for granted? The first cell phone was invented in the USSR, and Frederick Banting sold the patent for insulin for $1, to name two counter-examples. What innovations have come from the profit motive?

Likewise, I doubt the claims of market efficiency. 10% of Americans were food insecure in 2021. Hundreds of thousands are homeless. To me, this is a drastic failing of resource allocation in the richest country on earth. When push came to shove during WWII, even the US ran their war industry as a command economy because corporate graft could not be tolerated in an existential crisis. Socialist countries consistently outperform similar capitalist nations; compare Cuba to any other Caribbean nation (or even China to India; while I assume we would disagree about what China’s doing, I think we would agree that it’s more government-directed than US-style “free-market capitalism”).

I’m curious what would justify whether something should be nationalized to you. Surely it’s not just to do with profitability, as you give healthcare as an example. Is it to do with how essential something is? If it’s the latter, then surely that would justify the nationalization of food, decommodification of housing, etc.

To your point of “regulate businesses to ensure good behavior”, surely you must realize the reason we don’t already have those regulations are that private businesses bribe politicians to prevent such regulations.

That’s fine. The government can give subsidies for low income people or subsidize some products directly.

Why should we give money to rich parasites that contribute nothing when we could just nationalize their “business” and run it at a loss? Why must everything have a profit motive?

We must invade Texas to restore the rules-based international order and to bring about freedom and democracy.

Huh, the game isn’t even out yet. 🏴‍☠️ stay winning, I guess.

Given that Israel is militarily occupying and actively colonizing Palestine, I would say that Palestine is unable to exercise its sovereignty. Should it be granted more sovereignty? Yes, but that seems as though it will require either the radical reformation or outright destruction of Israel.

The dispute at this point is over how we define a country, especially because Taiwan clearly falls in a grey area within that definition. I claim that they are fundamentally unable to exercise their sovereignty given they aren’t formally recognized as a country by even their greatest allies and benefactors, thus they fail. You claim that they can fulfill the roles of the state, have a national identity, and have various semantic work-arounds for that fundamental illegitimacy, thus they pass. There’s also the question of the legitimacy of their founding, with me saying that the ROC was originally an oppressive colonial military dictatorship, but then you would say that it’s been long enough and their government has changed enough that it doesn’t matter, then we bicker over what constitutes a democracy.

Ultimately the argument would continue indefinitely and I don’t think there’s much chance either of us would be convinced by the other.

As an aside, the point of the prior comment was that surveys of beliefs can very easily be detached from reality, and so aren’t good evidence for claims.

In practice, Taiwan is not internationally recognized as a country. It doesn’t get to participate in many important international bodies like the UN or WHO, for instance. I get your implied point that this doesn’t mean much because it really only matters on the diplomatic level, and true enough a lot of that works out to semantics, such as their having “Economic, Trade, and Cultural Offices” instead of formal embassies despite them doing largely the same thing.

70% of US adults believe in angels, but that doesn’t make it true. No countries with any actual amount of power on the global stage recognize the ROC (see the US’ One China Policy), which means that regardless of whatever views people claim to have when surveyed, Taiwan is de facto part of the PRC.

Taiwan only exists because it served, and continues to serve, US interests as a staging point for military operations against China. A war over Taiwan would absolutely see the US using Taiwan as a proxy, much as they are currently using Ukraine against Russia.