Readit NewsClarifying I find the furry art weird, and not pornographic. (Weird is fine btw, normal is the worse insult imho)
I think the biggest issue is the damage that the word "Censorship" has taken in the last few years. If I ran a payment processor, the first thing I would do is try to be as neutral as my moral compass allows. The second thing I would do is intentionally stop processing payments on behalf of anyone I was uncomfortable with on a personal level. I dont support a thing, so I wont give material support to a thing. Thats not censorship. Its not censorship when amazon removes a book, or a publisher takes something out of print. If everything is censorship, including freedom of association, nothing is censorship.
I think the best thing that can be done about this problem is to promote and create alternate payment processors. The second best thing is to help these sites accept crypto payments (yes I know the article hung a lantern on that, but still)
While freedom of association is fine on a personal level and maybe for small businesses, big corporation that are monopolies or oligopolies shouldn't have this freedom. They should be regulated and forced to serve everyone otherwise they have the power to exclude some people completely from such services with no alternative. Due to their power, their decisions affect people as if they are government decisions, yet we don't have a say on it like we do with the government so it's even worse than government censorship yet some people justify it because they are "private companies" as if that means something.
cmitsakis commented on Why Is Fertility So Low in High Income Countries? (NBER) nber.org/papers/w33989... · Posted by u/jmsflknr
Although they gave birth to more children before the industrial revolution, most died, so the population was almost constant. If we define "birth rate" as the number of children that survive long enough to have their own children, then I believe birth rate was close to 2 back then. I believe long term the birth rate (according to my definition) always converges to 2 because anything else is not sustainable. Nothing can exponentially increase forever. Maybe the population can exponentially decrease to 0 but it's unlikely because there always be some group that will be willing to have more children for cultural or religious reasons.
The Greeks already figured out thousands of years ago that the best way to implement democracy was via random selection. Yet here we are, everyone believes that 'democracy' necessitates 'voting'; totally ignoring all the issues which come with voting.
The concept of voting, in a nation of hundreds of millions of people, is just dumb. Nobody knows anything about any of the candidates; everything people think they know was told to them by the corporate-controlled media and they only hear about candidates which were covered by the media; basically only candidates chosen by the establishment. It's a joke. People get the privilege of voting for which party will oppress them.
Current democracy is akin to the media making up a story like 'The Wizard of OZ' and then they offer you to vote for either the Lion, the Robot or the Scarecrow. You have no idea who any of these candidates are, you can't even be sure if they actually exist. Everything you know about them could literally have been made up by whoever told the story; and yet, when asked to vote, people are sure they understand what they're doing. They're so sure it's all legit, they'll viciously argue their candidate's position as if they were a family member they knew personally.
Good idea. Random selection is interesting but I don't know if it can work today. A solutions for the issue you mentioned "Nobody knows anything about any of the candidates" is a system that allows people to vote only for people they know personally, and use some algorithm (maybe something like the PageRank algorithm that Google used) that rates each citizen according to the votes they get but also the votes are valued according to the rating of each citizen. That way the rating flows to the people who are really trusted by the people and not the best funded career politicians. Just an idea. maybe there are problems with that too if it can be gamed but it's worth trying.
cmitsakis commented on Twenty Years of TiddlyWiki (2024) tiddlywiki.com/#History%2... · Posted by u/Tomte
This is a great example of a killer app hobbled by the browser’s inability to save local data (to a file, not local storage) without horrid workarounds. I stopped using it because I couldn’t use any of the helpers and eventually lost data.
install rclone and run `rclone serve webdav .` to start a WebDAV server on the directory that contains your tiddlywiki file. easy and never had issues with saving that way.
cmitsakis commented on Why I don't discuss politics with friends shwin.co/blog/why-i-dont-... · Posted by u/shw1n
I agree that "tribalism" exists. I'd add that sometimes political disagreements are actually differences in morality. And there is no way you can persuade someone to change their moral beliefs. Everyone accepts their moral beliefs as "axioms". But I still believe it's worth discussing politics in order to learn what kind of person someone is and their morality.
cmitsakis commented on Why flying insects gather at artificial light nature.com/articles/s4146... · Posted by u/pseudolus
previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35592654 128 comments
> Each contributor licenses you to do everything with this software that would otherwise infringe their copyright in it.
Has a lawyer reviewed this part? It looks too informal and probably opens a million of loopholes or unclear parts that may make users run away.