Subsidies are an incredible tool when used well, like when they funded a bunch of utility cooperatives that electrified rural US. Maybe you’re asking why we should because propping up the car industry when public transit and bike infrastructure should be subsidized instead, rather than challenging subsidies, though.

My immediate concern with tags is descending into what Twitter has become: hashtags have been meaningless for a long while since there’s too much wrongly tagged stuff, different communities often use the same tag for different things, or there are ten tags all for the same thing. All of which means we’d need some form of moderator role that handles tags, and while I think it’s doable, it might take some trial and error to figure out how exactly we divide tags between moderators, how tags are proposed/created, and how tags are grouped/combined (e.g. food, foods).

This is it, notice how Google Trends[1] shows a rise in “30 year old boomer” not long before “boomer shooter” becomes more commonplace. It’s just the whole applying “boomer” to things like being stuck in their ways or boomer-like behavior, rather than age, that took off a few years back.

[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=boomer shooter,30 year old boomer&hl=en

No surprise that a housing cooperative is doing a 4 day work week. It’s so sad that the 2010s’ political push for more cooperatives died with the change to Kier’s Labour in the UK. We could’ve had far more democratic businesses today that would be more open to trialing 4 day work weeks - actual risk taking, unlike our current dictatorial bosses who have to be dragged into the future while they wait for others to take the risks they’re too cowardly to take.

This is about specific sites’ abnormally high methane pollution, and China is in the data set but does not have as many “super-emitters” according to this. Here’s an example where China’s listed in the linked Sky article:

Coal is also a problem with one facility in Shanxi, China, peaking at around 181 tonnes an hour last February.

However, they go on to rank the countries in the article as such:

Kayrros’s data shows Turkmenistan had higher methane emissions than any other nation, followed by the United States, India, Russia and Pakistan.

So the answer is simply that China, along with the EU, does not have as many “super-emitters” to worry about. Other regions do, and that means they can target those sites specifically to reduce their methane emissions now that the data clearly highlights them.

That’s not what we were talking about here. We were talking about building enough housing to be able to guarantee it for everyone. That’s not rent control, that’s just investing in our housing supply.

The topic of this conversation follows from your statement:

Which is bad for landlords (including the ones that work in legislation)

i.e. landowners and people in power hold sway over the decision making process and are keeping us away from legislation that houses people. Unless I misread you. That’s why I brought up another example.

Rent control doesn’t work, the economists are correct (Who woulda thunk it, but studying the way prices are determined is a valid field of academic study). Or rather it does work for some people but makes life harder for others, and isn’t nearly as good of an approach as people think.

You clearly did not read the link, the person who wrote it is a PhD economist. Also, using one solution as a way to fix housing is naive, when we could (and should be, it’s horribly unaffordable for average people in urban areas, where most people in western countries live, already) be using many, including rent control.

Also economists (who are usually wealthy enough to be able to landlord if they want to do so)… which means they’re financially incentivised to hold right wing economic views like “rent control doesn’t work, 9/10 economists recommend against it!” like it’s a toothpaste advert and economists who challenge that don’t get much spotlight in the mainstream.

“A liberal* is someone who opposes every war except the current war and supports all civil rights movements except the one that’s going on right now.”

* not to be confused with “left wing” as the term is often used in the US

The oil industry is on its death bed so I’m not against what you’re saying, but we’re currently subsidizing the green energy sector (a good thing) with nothing in return (a bad thing).

We should look to how Norway avoided Dutch Disease and taxed the hell out of private oil extraction. They subsidise the discovery (the risky part) and then slap a very heavy tax on the oil those companies then extract and sell, all the while having a national oil company they have to compete with it (crucial to keep oil expertise within the government).

Norway already taxes private wind energy and hydropower, because they know the oil industry will be dethroned by the green energy industry soon and don’t want to simply subsidize their profits. Norway also owns wind energy both domestically and in other countries (hilariously, they own more UK wind energy than the UK government itself does), and massive amounts of their domestic hydropower.

When I was in kbin and could see who voted because voting metadata is visible there, almost always left wing comments (e.g. supportive of trans rights) received downvotes from someone on lemmy.world while the upvotes were from multiple, varied instances. So I’m not sure kbin is the biggest problem unless things have changed since then

“Crazy expensive” doesn’t really matter when you’re a government and can borrow or print to make investments that have investment returns in the form of efficiency gains that go on to improve the economy, much like what corporations do to grow (borrow, reinvest profits gained from growth). There isn’t really any good macroeconomic evidence that inflation is to blame because of said funding strategies, as explained by PhD Joeri Schasfoort in multiple of his videos[1], much to the behest right wing populist politicians who lie about not being able to invest in infrastructure. In the UK, Rishi Sunak is cancelling our HS2 railway falsely citing costs and even sabotaging it by sidestepping the democratically elected House of Commons by selling off gov. owned land so that the incoming Labour government will have a hard time un-cancelling HS2 - even our old conservative Brexit-causing PM David Cameron is criticising it publicly (ex-PMs rarely criticise their own party’s contemporary government).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@MoneyMacro/videos

It’s a little bit more “legal” than decriminalisation in more European countries if you consider paying for membership in a CSC, where the buying is more a service fee than one-to-one sale. They’re also non-profit cooperatives (democratically owned), which is pretty interesting.

Although the Nordics which are usually pretty progressive, have not even decriminalised recreational use yet - so they’re definitely being weirdly conservative about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabis_Social_Club

How many takes do you think each of them needed before they all managed to look at the camera while talking, read the script appropriately, and move their head and hands enthusiastically?

Looking at their Github, I mostly see Apache 2.0, which is a bad sign. But this whole thing seems like an advert for their product anyway, so it’s likely a nothingburger and won’t make a dent in the current Mastodon software’s dominance.

Most people I see (in various forums) focus on the sexism part of this. It’s bad, but I think it’s worth highlighting the way Madison says they misled her and started controlling her digital side gigs outside of LTT, and just how bad working there was. Here are a few of the things she mentioned, but I recommend reading the full thread:

I had asked and been told during my interviews that I would be allowed to monetize my YouTube channel and be allowed to join Floatplane in exchange for shutting down my Patreon. ONCE I moved [from Arizona to to Vancouver] I was presented with an entirely new contract/handbook that I was not told existed.

Work from Home was a whole issue. If you took 3 minutes to answer a personal email, you could get in trouble. (happened to me) There is a system of micro-managing and a level of distrust because the amount of content they have to push out daily is so insane, no one gets a break.

I remember getting told off for taking my sick days, as in the days you’re entitled to. This no days off, “grindset” culminated in the real moment I realized I had to leave.

They also forced me to have them as my representation if I wanted to take any sponsors for my Twitch or YouTube channels. Originally I had been told, just make sure you okay things by us for non-compete issues. Then that changed when I moved to take the job.

I honestly think the only way Linus can redeem himself at this point (for me personally), is if he made the company into some sort of multi-stakeholder worker cooperative where the workers have an actual chunk of democratic say over the direction of the company. This is how it’s done across Europe already via works councils, e.g. in Norway 33% of the board (leadership) is represented by workers, while in other European countries it goes all the way up to 50%. It’s been made very clear that the current leadership are incompetent and need to actually listen to their workers.

It really makes the argument that CEOs and managers couldn’t be elected really weak. They’d probably be far more competent if they were chosen by workers once a year or so.

It gets worse since a lot of old people vote for heavy conservative parties

This is shifting in (at least) three countries - Norwegian, British, and American millennials aren’t turning to vote for the right wing parties, instead are keeping their trend of voting left. Other countries like Italy have the opposite problem, where even younger voters are starting to vote for the right wing parties. It’s kind of tangential but I think it’s good to point out that we’re seeing exceptions to this rule.

I get where you’re coming from, but I don’t think even more private property is the answer here. This is ultimately a question of economics - we don’t like that a) we’re being put out of jobs, and b) it’s being done without our consent / anything in return. These are problems that we can address without throwing even more monopolosation power into the equation, which is what IP is all about - giving artists a monopoly over their own content, which mostly benefits large media corporations, not independent artists.

I’d much rather we tackled the problem of automation taking our jobs in a more heads on manner via something like UBI or negative income taxes, rather than a one-off solution like even more copyright that only really serves to slow this inevitability down. You can regulate AI in as many ways as you want, but that’s adding a ton of meaningless friction to getting stuff done (e.g. you’d have to prove your art wasn’t made by AI somehow) when the much easier and more effective solution is something like UBI.

The consent question is something that needs a bit more of a radical solution - like democratising work, something that Finland has done to their grocery stores, the biggest grocery chains are democratically owned and run by the members (consumer coops). We’ll probably get to something like that on a large scale… eventually - but I think it’s probably a bigger hurdle than UBI. Then you’d be able to vote on what ways an organisation operates, including if or how it builds AI data sets.

I sympathize with artists who might lose their income if AI becomes big, as an artist it’s something that worries me too, but I don’t think applying copyright to data sets is a long term good thing. Think about it, if copyright applies to AI data sets all that does is one thing: kill open source AI image generation. It’ll just be a small thorn in the sides of corporations that want to use AI before eventually turning them into monopolies over the largest, most useful AI data sets in the world while no one else can afford to replicate that. They’ll just pay us artists peanuts if anything at all, and use large platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Artstation, and others who can change the terms of service to say any artist allows their uploaded art to be used for AI training - with an opt out hidden deep in the preferences if we’re lucky. And if you want access to those data sources and licenses, you’ll have to pay the platform something average people can’t afford.

Thanks for pointing out the difference in Germany with respect to copyright and author ownership/rights! That’s really interesting, and the foundation could be used to extend rights for artists vs the power corporations have over their works - e.g. no license exclusivity as that seems to go against the spirit of the law.