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Our intrepid explorer makes a safe return! (Sunday Calvin and Hobbes - Sept. 17, 2023)
(media.kbin.social)
I don’t thinks that’s accurate, Kbin has only co-existed for a few Lemmy versions. I’ve been on Kbin before the initial wave of new users, when the site had about 200 users, federation was fine. You may be thinking of when federation was deliberately broken by Ernest with the entire fediverse for about a week when he had to enable Cloudflare DDOS protection during the first surge of signups.
The specific issue here was highlighted by a Kbin user several days ago. They monitored the traffic back and forth and saw that inbound Kbin-bot requests were denied by Lemmy.ml after the latest upgrade. At the time of that post, Lemmy.world did not have the issues and it had not upgraded yet. I’m not sure if that issue has since been fixed in the code or not.
Bear with me here, I’m thinking about all this as a thought experiment…please don’t jump on me all at once :)
I don’t disagree with you, there is a difference in utility, however what would you say to someone who has two homes? Say a vacation home on a lake? This wasn’t uncommon for persons of older generations (before shit got expensive). Because while two homes may not seem egregious to citizens of highly developed countries, it is, relatively speaking, a true extreme luxury in many parts of the world, perhaps even obscene if you consider those who live in shanty towns or those who are homeless.
And what about extra cars? Or any other luxury for that matter? Anything that explains why those in less developed countries see middle-class individuals in developed countries as “rich”?
Now these are nothing in comparison to the several orders of magnitude greater that a billion dollars is, but take them as the best examples I can think of off the too of my head lol.
Remember marginal utility is relative. My point is that, who decides what defines excess to the point where you’d make the argument you just made? where is the line? Certainly billionaires qualify, but how many millions does one need to hit that threshold? And who makes that determination? The individual with the extreme wealth will have warped perceptions (“It’s one banana, Michael. What could it cost, $10?”), so then it must be the non-wealthy who have insight, if any, or is it all relative?
I’m not trying to defend or apologise for the ultra-rich, but I think about these things in the sense of: what would I do if I won the mega-millions? Or had some secret unknown relative bestow obscene wealth on me? Never in a million years of course, but I’m the kind of person who likes to have positions that don’t change situationally, I’d like to be confident enough of my beliefs that I’d know what I’d do if the situation were reversed.
Anyway, thanks for coming to my Ted Talk lol. Again please don’t think i’m trying troll or something, this is a philosophical question for me.