Americans may be seeing serious savings in that picture.

I am seeing serious evolutionary pressure on liver genetics.

Meh. As a german, it just doesn’t make me tingle quite like sending tanks to the east.

Why do you believe that?

In February 1993, the University of Minnesota announced that it would charge licensing fees for the use of its implementation of the Gopher server.[11][9] Users became concerned that fees might also be charged for independent implementations.[12][13] Gopher expansion stagnated, to the advantage of the World Wide Web, to which CERN disclaimed ownership.[14] In September 2000, the University of Minnesota re-licensed its Gopher software under the GNU General Public License.[15]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)#Decline

It’s probably not quite right to call it an open source alternative, though. I don’t think that gopher or anything was established in a monopolistic way, but that was before my time. Besides, the internet was all universities back then.

Meh. The guy wanted to integrate micropayments in HTML as soon as it took off. Would you like that better?

To be honest, I wouldn’t have been much impressed by the HTML specifications, either. An open source alternative for gopher? Oh, how cute. Be sure to tell all your geek friends.

That reminds me of an old joke. Life in Soviet Union is not different from USA. For Dollars, you get everything.

Not true. Though the nazis certainly built a lot of additional Autobahnen to prepare for the war, they knew they would start. Fun fact: Wehrmacht logistics largely relied on horse-drawn carriages. The soviets got Studebaker trucks.

Insurance is generally for contingencies that are very rare but ruinously expensive. The average cost per person is low, but the cost to the one it happens to is extreme, like a reverse lottery. So it makes sense for a large group of people to pay a little bit of money each month, to pay for the cost to the one. This is how both health and fire insurance work. (Health care is about more than that but that’s a different and less straight-forward story.) So, anyway, that’s why sane people view it that way.

Historically, the problem with private firefighters was that you had a business that made money when there were major fires. That’s a bad incentive. You get similar bad incentives in health care, too, which is one reason why coverage for some interventions may be denied. Another thing about fires is that they are contagious. They threaten the entire neighborhood. That’s why you have, for example, the CDC in the US. Controlling contagious diseases is not left to private providers.

Believing that animals are just like us s hardly and outlandish belief, on the facts. We’re evolutionarily closely related. We have basically the same skeleton. Skull, spine, rib cage, hips, 4 extremities. Arms and legs go: 1 big bone, 2 smaller bones, and lotsa little bones. It looks to be the same with the brain.

We expect vegans not to blow up slaughterhouses or such. Fair enough. But expecting them to shut up about their beliefs is a bit much, no? Expecting them not to tell people how they feel, not to kiss in public, or hold a pride para… Sorry, wrong prosecuted minority.

I’ve heard these takes about vegans for literal decades now, and not once has an actual vegan popped up to tell me that I’m a murderer.

Ok, so that’s why you’re not making any sense. You have no idea what’s going on.

Look, it’s very simple. Vegans are a small, harmless minority. So some people bully them. Of course, it’s their own fault. They wouldn’t mind them if they weren’t “out and proud”. It’s always the same story. There’s almost no variation.

I thought you were saying that it’s ok to bully them because they believe the wrong thing. That’s what @redisdead is saying. He compares them to “right wing cunts” when they speak their beliefs. Fascis get bashis. Just like vegans, I guess.

Watch the company you keep.

Vegans believe that animals have the same rights to live as humans. A nazi believes that the “others” do not have the same right to live as “his people”.

I don’t think you’ll be able to convince me that these are morally or ethically equivalent positions. But I see the point. They both believe the wrong thing. The out-group sucks. Yes, I know how humans tick.

Ok, I understand. You don’t like them because of their beliefs.

At first, I was confused. Isn’t the fact that you believe something the only justification for saying something? I mean, otherwise you’d be lying. But you’re saying you disagree with the belief in the first place, right?

Well, it’s what they believe. What exactly is the problem there? I have never been called a murderer. There just aren’t that many vegans around. I don’t know in what kind of circles this would be a common occurrence.

They are a small, harmless minority. Isn’t that enough? Maybe it’s made worse by the fact that they are perceived as non-violent and effeminate, because of their strong opposition to suffering, even when the victims are helpless, like animals. There is no personal risk in bullying them. It’s like the hate for environmental activists, trans-women, or liberals in general. I wouldn’t know that vegans aggressively proselytize their life-style if people didn’t aggressively tell me so; something that they share with “the gays”. Of course, people wouldn’t mind if they didn’t shove it in their faces all the time. Where have I heard that before?

I prefer Threads.

You are a very brave person.

Defeatist opinion.

The commercial alternatives hope to make money with every additional user. They use AB testing and statistics to streamline the on-boarding and to increase engagement. The result may not be in the user’s interest (doom-scrolling, ragebait, …) but it works.

For a fediverse instance, any additional user is a cost, not the promise of money. Financially, you wouldn’t want that. Those who fund instances are giving a gift to the world for their own reasons. You can accept the gift or not. Those who keep instances running with donations will usually want to sustain the community of which they are part. They probably don’t want it to change very much.

So, I don’t think matters will change. Partly because the psychological engineering is antithetical to the fediverse ethos (as I see it, in my humble opinion). But mostly because the outcome we see is an inherent result of the incentive structure.

That looks like the St. Petersburg Paradox. Much ink has been spilled over it.

The expected payout is infinite. At any point, the “rational” (profit-maximizing) decision is to keep flipping, since you wager a finite sum of money to win an infinite sum. It’s very counter-intuitive, hence called a paradox.

In reality, a casino has finite money. You can work out how many coin flips it takes to bankrupt it. So you can work out how likely it is to reach that point with a given, finite sum of money. Martingale strategies have already been mentioned.