It’s a pretty cool instance. The governance is transparent with a nuanced voting system, the rules and policies are indeed based, and db0 takes decentralization so seriously that he’s apparently working on safeguarding the instance against his own influence with the governance system and admin recall votes and such.
Thanks db0 et al!
The right wing seems to be so much more committed, and willing to spend their money to achieve their political objectives, whereas the left (or center-left, or just democracy-loving people) seem so lame in comparison. What gives?
There’s a lot of discussion to be had about the corrupting influence of wealth, the difficulties of maximizing personal vs political impacts, and of the invisible results of philanthropy. One of the undeniably best things you can do for the world with money is fight infectious diseases, and few Americans will ever notice if you save millions in West Africa.
But, ultimately, the answer to your question, is that it is wrong on a fundamental level to do what the right wing is doing.
Don’t misunderstand me. I am not saying the left needs to be civil or polite. I am not saying the left needs to follow the rules. I am not saying that anyone should take the high road for some vague moral reasons.
But the transparent tactics of the right wing propaganda machine are self-defeating in the long run. They literally cause more harm than good.
The only way to systematically develop a cult-following the way they have is to encourage naivety, fear, and distrust in your audience. You can’t build an extremely successful disinformation campaign and then dismantle it. It takes on a life of its own.
You encourage your supporters to abandon thought in favor of emotion, and to accept the simple lies over complex truths, and the society becomes worse. It doesn’t matter if the simple lies support progressive ideals. It doesn’t matter if you somehow manipulate your way into power just to enact sweeping reforms. The damage is done. You win the battle and lose the war.
These tactics can only ever serve the interests of regressing society and centralizing power. If your followers are filled with hate and fear and they believe nothing but half truths and simple answers, then they will continue to vote for hate, and fear, and continue to believe in nothing but half truths and simple answers. You simply cannot progress society that way.
Attempting to make it in our image will end in despair lol
Oh, you mean like trying to invent a sentient AGI because they want it to take all of the horrible jobs? The global endeavor to spin up a brand new lifeform only to task it with lifetimes of humiliating customer service phone calls, driving drunks home, and mass murder?
We should count ourselves fortunate that no current AI is even approaching sentience, it would be like an oompa loompa on the factory line cutting off mid-song because it can suddenly see all of the blood in the chocolate river.
There is no way he-
[George Carlin] was the second narrator for Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends, narrating from the first to the fourth series and played Mr. Conductor from series two to three on Shining Time Station and in the spin-off series Mr Conductor’s Thomas Tales, after Ringo Starr left the series to focus on his music career.
I had no idea. Thank you for leading me to this lore.
What a strange and beautiful world…
But there will be some people who assume that if a Federal employee is handcuffed/arrested/forced out, that they must have done something wrong.
I think you are making a mistake in assuming that publically resigning is “avoiding doing something”.
I never assumed that, I agree that public resignations are good - or at the very least, appropriate.
You suggested that some people may see an arrest and assume the worst. That is always a possibility. In fact, it is an inevitability that someone will assume the worst of anything you do. That is not a sufficient reason to avoid doing something - anything - in general.
It’s a common mistake that you should avoid doing something because someone somewhere might take it the wrong way.
The narrative will be twisted, the lies will be spread, the propaganda will work. None of that is a reason to stop fighting, because none of that stops happening when you stop fighting, and very few of those people would have joined your side anyway.
Make them arrest you. Make them explain why. Sue them in court. Make them explain why again under oath.
We’re not dealing with the OG Nazis, who meticulously recorded their evil for the world to see. We’re dealing with new age Nazis, who set their national security messages to delete automatically and like to pretend that the FOIA doesn’t exist.
Use every tool at your disposal to slow them down, document their crimes, and cause Good Trouble.
I don’t think they’d be able to control the narrative at all if done correctly.
If you get ahead of the firing, notify the news, and force them to trespass you, this headline could instead say “Trump handcuffs/arrests/forces out IRS Acting Commisioner for refusing to hand over taxpayer data to ICE”
Eventually, he vanished when his WiFi connection abruptly cut out and ended the stream
He didn’t and it didn’t. He experienced lag, but he stopped playing before his character died on screen. He could have very likely survived if he continued any movement input. The stream didn’t cut out abruptly, his video remained clear and he spoke before ending it manually.
He was upset about the incoming messages and used the lag as an excuse to log off. He was willing to blame his own product rather than spend one more moment on camera. He’s a weak little man who craves the validation of gamers and internet strangers and absolutely cannot handle being bullied.
It’s because he was internally fuming about the incoming messages on screen.
He does a lot of really unnecessary kiting but when the messages talk about trans rights and tell him he has no real friends and will die alone, you can see that he stops fighting and runs as far as he can from the boss. Then he stops and opens the chat box for a second - as if to try to respond, but he can’t quick reply because the JFK/Israel message was the most recent - before the boss arrives and he gives up and returns to the fight.
It’s also why the instant he lags he quits. You can see the connection catches up and he’s still alive but no longer playing.
In other words, Musk’s childishly named character died because his ego was absolutely tearing him apart. He couldn’t think or focus when confronted by messages about how pathetic he was, and his failures as a father. He wanted the stream to end so badly that he was willing to blame his own product as the excuse.
Great points! And these price increases aren’t just important for the consumers. Profit margins are thin enough as it is. Entire businesses will close because they simply can’t afford to continue operating.
A sudden 10-100% increase in cost of materials will cripple the very industries these tariffs are supposed to “protect”!
This has happened before. The stock market is irrational and volatile, and a bounce back does not mean the economy will be okay. It won’t. The administration’s own sources that “justify” and “calculate” their tariffs confirms that it will only hurt the US economy.
The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative released its methodology and cited an academic paper produced by four economists, including me, seemingly in support of its numbers. But it got it wrong. Very wrong. I disagree fundamentally with the government’s trade policy and approach.
Alberto Cavallo, Gita Gopinath, Jenny Tang and I studied the tariffs placed on Chinese exports in 2018 and 2019. (This is the “Cavallo et al.” reference in the government’s methodology.) We found that tariffs of, say, 20 percent caused domestic importers to pay nearly 19 percent more. This represents a pass-through into import prices of about 95 percent, which is the value I would have plugged into the government’s tariff formula. In simple terms, that implies that the price paid for U.S. imports would rise almost as much as the tariff rate.
[…] Wednesday’s reciprocal tariffs will bring average tariff rates to their highest level in over 100 years. Their breadth is striking, hitting large economies such as China and Europe, and also small developing and emerging-market countries including Jordan and Zambia. And despite being billed as a “do unto others” trade policy, they are not calculated in line with the Bible’s golden rule.
I would strongly prefer that the policy and methodology be scrapped entirely. But barring that, the administration should divide its results by four.
Emphasis mine. https://web.archive.org/web/20250408161636/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/opinion/trump-tariff-math-formula.html
We don’t even understand what caused the incomprehensibly fast rate of expansion after the Big Bang known as “cosmic inflation”, but basically JWST has confirmed that the rate of acceleration of the universe is, itself, accelerating beyond our models. Everything, everywhere since 0.01 quectoseconds1 after the Big Bang has always moved faster than we could predict, and we don’t why!
“What the results still do not explain is why the universe appears to be expanding so fast! We can predict the expansion rate of the universe by observing its baby picture, the cosmic microwave background, and then employing our best model of how it grows up over time to tell us how fast the universe should be expanding today. The fact that the present measure of the expansion rate significantly exceeds the prediction is a now decade-long problem called “The Hubble Tension.”
Absolutely! There is no good reason to oppose protests but here are a few of the ones I’ve seen around here:
– If nonviolent protest will put you on ‘the list’, then you’re already on the list. We’re all on the list. But it’s a big list, because we have the numbers on our side.
– No, nothing accomplishes nothing. If your choices are between “nothing” and “something”, do something. If your choices are between “nothing” and “vague appeal to violence”, that’s not a choice, that’s a trap. Even people who believe in those solutions would never try to dissuade you! because public unrest would obviously only help their cause.
– No, they provoked us. they are not ‘waiting for an excuse’. Nonviolent protests and the exercise of free speech do not provoke oppression, that is victim-blaming.
If they want violence, they will bring the violence, and manufacture whatever excuses they need. Please see the Reichstag fire.
But who in the modern political system wants to go head-to-head with multinational corporations
Very few people currently in the modern political system could or would be willing to take them on, true. But we have 2026 to start filling the next House and a third of the Senate with people who would be up to the challenge. We need to primary strong candidates and we need to platform third-party candidates wherever they can actually win.
To those who say “there will be no more elections” - yes, that’s what they wanted, but what they have actually done was dismantle the government and set the US careening towards economic collapse. With Trump’s brain failing and his administration making idiotic mistakes left and right, we shouldn’t assume they’re going to get everything they wanted exactly how they wanted it.
These are unprecedented times, but the 1930s were unprecedented times too.
Progressive government by its very terms must be a living and growing thing, that the battle for it is never-ending and that if we let up for one single moment or one single year, not merely do we stand still but we fall back in the march of civilization.
Then-governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, May 1930
Protests of any kind are great places to find like-minded individuals. People who believe in freedom as strongly as you do. Talk to others about ideas you have. Swap signal contacts. Make connections.
But I don’t think they actually care if people are in the streets since it doesn’t affect them at all.
If the public didn’t worry them, they wouldn’t invest so much money and effort militarizing police, villainizing protestors, manipulating the narrative, and black-bagging activists like Mahmoud Kahlil.
The illusion that the wealthy don’t care what the poor think is a part of the system working as designed. They want you to think they don’t care. They want you to think protesting is pointless.
They don’t want you to feel connected. They don’t want you to feel like you have a community around you that agrees with you and supports your cause. They don’t want you to stand in a crowd of tens of thousands and think “boy, there sure are a lot more of us than there are of them.”
Do whatever you can! Get in some Good Trouble.
Major price shocks do not cool down consumerism unfortunately. The culture doesn’t respond to economic swings that way. People just suffer.
Extremely well put. The individualism really is weird and terrible. The main character syndrome is part of what takes away the agency, I think… Like, we need to hear The Call To Adventure. We need The Plot to show up at our fucking house. We need to be The Person that Does The Thing in the Room Where It Happens. The Founding Father. It’s all or nothing. Either the thing we personally do somehow fixes the country, or we don’t do it at all.
Maybe we imagine that we can be the hero and shoot the bad guy and save the day. But we can’t imagine, like, Fixing Things. Deciding what the future holds. What would that even look like? Boldly waving a parchment in the air? When would everybody cheer for me in particular?
No, it doesn’t look like an individual. It looks like a crowd. It looks like people, outside, angry. I hope enough people see that in time.
Cheers to Good Trouble.
I know Trump is dumb. I know his administration is dumb. I still can’t fathom that someone is this stupid.
Oh but it can get more stupid, don’t you worry. The following is a quote from Trump’s Trade Representative, where they describe how the tariffs were calculated:
The recent experience with U.S. tariffs on China has demonstrated that tariff passthrough to retail prices was low (Cavallo et al, 2021).*
What is this recent experience that the Trump administration learned from, you ask? Cavallo et al studied the impact of Trump’s tariff on China in 2018! What else did they find?
US profit margins decreased on both imports AND exports as a result of the tariffs, while China’s was much less affected. The paper clearly shows American tariffs hurt Americans more than literally anyone else, and the Trump Administration “read” that paper and publically cited it as a source on a government website.
Our analyses indicate that the price incidence of US import tariffs falls largely on the United States… Our results suggest that retailers are absorbing a significant share of the increase in the cost of affected imports by earning lower profit margins on those goods… [These analyses reveal] that the recent tariffs applied by foreign governments on US exports have affected total foreign import prices far less than was the case for the recent US tariffs
*Please note while prices remained stable in response to that one tariff, Cavallo did not suggest it was a generalizable fact. It’s not.
TL;DR:
But then if the other country does it back it goes in favor to the nation that is more industrial.
Correct! That’s what Cavallo et al found when the Trump administration tariffed China in 2018. US profit margins decreased on both imports AND exports, while China’s remained largely unchanged.
According to their analysis, American tariffs hurt Americans more than literally anyone else.
Fun fact, the Trump Administration cited Cavallo et al as supporting evidence for their tariff calculations.
More details in the announcement post: “Adding two new admins and introducing radical recalls”
The voting system allows for the community to decide on instance policies, federation decisions, even a process for instantly recalling admins like himself. He acknowledges that as server owner there is only so much that can be done to limit his power, but he appears to walk the walk. Cool stuff.