Better BlueSky than Twitter, but I hope everyone understands by now that there’s literally no reason to take a business’s word for anything unless they somehow have legally obligated themselves to doing that thing forever. Otherwise you can only trust them to keep doing it for as long as it’s worth it from an economic perspective. I’m not saying that it can’t ever happen that a business acts out of pure goodwill, but only a fool would count on it.

“…are you really asking me that while you’re smoking a cigarette? I don’t think you need to worry about me…”

it could mean a lot of things, such as widespread civil disobedience. It’s also not necessarily asking anybody to do anything right now, but to be open to the idea of organized direct action. The real point I’m trying to make is when a person says “you go first” reactively in response to any call to action, they actually become part of the problem that needs to be overcome.

so like I’ve spent a lot of time studying history and revolutions and political movements, so personally when I see somebody say something as vague as “we should do something about this ourselves instead of expecting other people to” it’s very hard for me to assume that they must be talking specifically about violently overthrowing the government.

I honestly don’t understand how you can read what I’m saying and think that I must be specifically talking about people martyring themselves or violent political revolutions and I would really appreciate it if you could just take my words for granted without making broader inferences about them.

if you want things to change, first you have to find a way to be able to confidently say “I’m ready for things to change”. Then, you have to help other people find a way to say it too. And when there’s finally enough people, nobody has to “go first”.

Opinion: trying to teach tens of millions of people enough basic statistics and economics so that they understand that Joe Biden wasn’t actually as bad as they think is not actually a serious strategy for defeating conservative populism in elections

It’s called selling out. I doubt they have any illusions about the future of these platforms, they just don’t care as long as they can cash out.

I agree that Donald Trump is much worse for the situation in Palestine and that it was a mistake for anybody to sit out because of what’s happening. But I think it also needs to be said that the Democrats didn’t really offer any alternative besides plausible deniability, and so it seems strange to me to pin the responsibility on the disengaged

She’s actually the techbro mage

I notice a book on dash. I wonder if it’s the dash that is the default shell on Debian. I always had a historical curiosity about the original author of the shell that would become dash, Kenneth Almquist. It’s just such a ubiquitous piece of software and yet there’s basically no information about the person who wrote it. All I’ve ever been able to find is his original Usenet post announcing his Almquist Shell. I think it would be cool if somehow in her world, the techno mage is the one who figures out what happened to Kenneth Almquist, who somehow winds up playing a role in her journey.

When you organize a nonprofit, you dedicate it to the public benefit. it’s not supposed to ever have owners, everything it does it supposed to be for me and you. as far as I’m concerned, this is a multi billion dollar larceny against the general public and we really need better laws that preserve our nonprofit institutions. Just even trying to plan this out is a crime against humanity

why do you think the Mozilla corporation losing 86% of their revenue wouldn’t hurt the Firefox browser?

I didn’t do a good job in my messaging, I was agitated. but really I was just trying to say these things

1. The global banking system represents a far bigger fish to fry, maybe like 100 to 1000 times bigger (it’s quite difficult to assess, but the total wealth held by private banks is frequently estimated to be in the hundreds of trillions of dollars. Compare this to the total value of literally all cryptocurrency)

2. I probably see a dozen posts that are just writing the same criticisms of “cryptocurrency” over and over again without ever actually addressing why people are drawn to it in the first place, for every one post that’s complaining about banks. despite the fact that banks have screwed over orders of magnitude more people than any crypto bro could ever dream of

3. When you don’t actually clearly spell out the problems that drew those people in in the first place, and at the very least empathize with them explicitly, all you do is alienate those people and you don’t actually get them to stop using cryptocurrency

I don’t understand why I wrote that either looking back at your comment. I apologize for it.

as for a common ground: I feel like you’re saying these things because you think that I believe that this person doesn’t feel that way. The truth is I would be surprised if they didn’t feel that way, for all of the reasons you’re saying. I’m literally just saying that nothing they write establishes with 100% certainty how they feel about the global financial system. Like you literally can only conclude that if you’re willing to make assumptions about what it must mean to post this in solarpunk, what it must mean to be critical of billionaires etc.

And you also need to consider that not everyone even understands all of those things. people come here from all sorts of corners of this little fediverse, you need to consider how they’ll perceive this too if you actually want to steer people away from it. Would they be wrong for failing to connect all those dots if they were never exposed to them before?

Thank you for sharing this.

it’s a shame that you can’t share how something makes you feel alienated without people inferring that it must mean you disagree with the essence of what the person is saying. It’s even more of a shame because all of us sharing this feeling of alienation should only service making the messaging better in the future.

OK so you think that anybody who wants people to criticize the global financial system earnestly is doing PR work for cryptocurrency? Seriously? Please tell me I am misunderstanding you.

They don’t have to believe that we’re currently living in such a situation to believe that it would be bad whether crypto put us in it or not. I think you’re making more assumptions about their beliefs than you’re stating, here.

I never said how they felt about the current situation. I literally said I can’t conclude from their words. and you can’t as evidenced by the fact that you’re telling me all of the possibilities right now.

because the ultimate powers over currencies are governments rather than corporations.

And I honestly think this is an extremely naïve thing to believe.

And lastly I’m not gonna engage with literally anything that takes for granted the idea that I support cryptocurrency because it isn’t true, so let me just make it really clear: I do not support cryptocurrency

How do you figure I’m “going to bat” for cryptocurrency?