planish

A central database would be just a list of all the land and who owns it.

Right now, the deed system is a bunch of deeds that say "remember when I got this land, on page 302 of book 75 in the county recorder's office? Well now Jimantha owns it actually, since they bought it from me for ten dollars and a peppercorn.". This is great for accountability: it lets you trace ownership history and provides a piece of evidence to substantiate every transfer, and so helps you answer inconvenient questions like "why should you own that house when it was my grandmother's house and I want to own it?". It also lets you roll transfers back if they are found to be fraudulent, and neatly captures how all current ownership is contingent on the theft of the whole place from any disposessed original inhabitants.

This is also basically how ownership works in many current blockchain systems: you select something you own based on the transaction that gave you ownership, and then you say who should own it now in a signed message.

But the blockchain systems verify signatures cryptographically, whereas the county recorder verifies the authority to transfer stuff on the "you think someone would just tell lies? On the Internet?" principle. And the centralized database doesn't even keep the transfers around for review, it just has the database operator in charge of who owns any given thing at the moment.

Would you rather walk up to a grumpy person with a shotgun and demand that they move out while brandishing a printout of an SQLite database recently recovered after the ransomware attack at the county administrative building? Or with a deed with their spouse's signature on it?

Then the problem is to make the deeds more machine-readable, and to get better at not putting in deeds from people who have no business writing to that part of the ledger, for which pieces of blockchain technology might be useful.

I don't think a person selling an app is capitalism. There's no means of production, there's no apparent attempt to appropriate and profit from stuff that rightly belongs to the people who actually made it. Unless Sync is actually written by a bunch of people who are not getting ownership of the project?

There's a difference between "unpolished" and "can't keep what posts ought to be on the page straight". Like Ruby on Rails can get that right 100% of the time out of the box before you write any code, I don't know how Lemmy's web UI manages to do it wrong.

There's plenty of reasons not to try and keep things private! It is a lot easier for comments on Lemmy, for example, to be public, rather than trying to make the discussion threads private among some set of authorized participants.

And if I am rating movies on Netflix, I really do want them to take my ratings and put them in a big machine learning pile to try and find me better movies. That's the point of rating the things.

But there's a big difference between me actually sharing information with people so they can do good, and people trying to collect information about me without my permission so that they can make money, or, worse, try to manipulate me later.

And even if the data is not in itself all that worthy of secrecy, and I might be willing to share it, someone else deciding for me that they get to follow me around and see what I am up to or what I like, without actually asking or without genuinely expecting that I might say no, is... not how consent works.

Also, some of the point of this is that one cannot in fact genuinely ignore advertisements. At the very least they constitute a cognitive load, where it is harder to do or see things because the advertisements are in the way. They can also hammer brand names and desired associations into people's heads, to ensure that most people know that e.g. X Brand Soda is the "luxury" soda. And of course in aggregate they cause people to buy things. Each person might choose to buy the thing of their own apparently free will, but running the ad will cause more people to make that decision than would otherwise.

Where they are most dangerous is when advertisements try and create problems, rather than just offering products. A sign that says "We sell Coke" is fine. Three commercials a day asking if you are guilty of "old-shoeing", the social faux pas of having old shoes, look at this man being laughed at for it, etc. are dangerous, even if they never try to sell a product.

These kinds of marketing campaigns are that much more effective if they can be targeted at the people who are the easiest to convince that made up problems are real. And while one's general personality is not exactly a secret, we also don't want scammers like this going around making lists of the particularly gullible.

What does it even mean to be "against NATO"? Is it, like, saying "the NATO alliance ought to disband because the terms of the alliance are bad for my country actually"? Is it like "I hope NATO countries lose all their wars"? Or like "NATO is a dangerous thing to exist because it allows an invasion of Country X, which is likely to happen, to result in a global thermonuclear war"?

A bunch of countries could be arming Ukraine without the sort of all-for-one, one-for-all terms of NATO specifically that make it likely to figure prominently in any explanation for why we have all died of nuclear weapons.

That is itself a political belief, though. You cannot in fact have any sort of community without answering political questions about how that community should work. You could say that no external political questions should be discussed in the community, but:

1. Enforcing that could cast a bigger shadow over the community than the political arguments did.
2. It amounts to saying that the external political situation is acceptable, or at least relatively safe to ignore.

This is what is known as the "Chewbacca Offense"

Keep your enemies close. Like Hitler, whom one keeps in one's car.

I'm not sure it's feasible to try and compare the two in an objective way. It's easy to know which oppressive empire one personally prefers, but trying to actually reach consensus on which was better or worse using some kind of convincing evidence would be so complicated that it would probably amount to a waste of everyone's time.

My view of the socialist position on China is that it is not "the Chinese state is good", but rather "stop being mean to Chinese people".

China is an empire, and socialists hate empires. But the US is also an empire (in that there's a core that gets all the good stuff and a periphery that gets the good stuff extracted from it, which for the US is often places not technically in the country but in practice obligated to listen to it). So when the US comes in all scandalized and decides that what we really need to do to save people from the Chinese empire is to make sure that US companies don't lose market share in GPU computing, and can manufacture solar panels at competitive prices, and that people get their short videos from Instagram Reels and not TikTok, the socialists are very suspicious. The net result looks a lot more like imperial protectionism and/or racism than a coherent anti-imperial program.

I'm not sure why this ends up as a socialist talking point? Maybe because the nonsense of the policies seems obvious? Maybe because it seems like warmongering and wars are terrible and so it must be stopped at once? Maybe just to get a break from telling people that they should probably make sure people have houses?

Defederating instances on ideological grounds isn't a bad idea IMHO, and I can see why people might not want their feeds to end up full of people who just sort of assume that what we're here to do is use facts and logic to destroy western propaganda, with the goal of bringing about the downfall of the International Monetary Fund. That sounds like an extremely tiring project to be involved in; you wouldn't want to hang out with somebody who does that in every thread.

But I think it's important for the reason here to be that Hexbear is embarking on a project of ideological warfare. Not that the community consensus there is that the IMF is a bad idea. A load of communists is probably fine, while a load of evangelical communists determined to exactly follow the letter of every rule while maximizing the amount that they can evangelize is probably not fine.

You could try Google. Most big email and calendar apps will support their nonstandard login flow.