corbulo

Its all too common for states to have soft free speech. I wonder why Indians haven't pushed more for nailing that down.

You're absolutely correct. Curation is the ethical answer, not censorship. Gigantic difference.

>No matter how critically I approach it, I will not be able derive objective truth from biased and fuzzy information.

That will always be true no matter the source. There are no truth fairies. There limits of mediums (TV vs Article vs Book vs Movie vs Stream vs etc.) before you even get to individual biases.

It is. See Philip II of Macedon vs Athens.

It's not true today because of how OP the US is in geography+natural resources, but also from alliances like NATO. Without NATO European states would be getting flipped one by one (as seen by what happens to states not in it). Rome also benefitted from her geography immensely. Same for the Swiss.

Isolated democracies are really vulnerable to outside manipulation. Philip II was famous for buying off all the Athenian actors+politicians who love to hang out with his courtiers. The story of Demosthenes is a Cassandra-style tragedy.

Federalism was a giant patch that massively increased the robustness of democracies/republics.

Democracies cannot function if the people are shielded from all the evil things that necessitate thinking critically. Bad information is a fact of life, not social media.

The only way you get someone to think critically is putting them in a situation where they have to. If you constantly censor and baby them, they won't make better decisions they will make worse ones.

The idea that censorship has to happen in order to protect democracy really fulfills horseshoe theory.

Ill admit I don't know a ton about India's constitution. Do they have freedom of speech? How is it phrased?

I stopped caring about DDG once they announced search blacklisting about the Ukraine war. Once a search engine crosses that line its over, why wouldn't they apply it to anything else they feel similarly about? You're not gonna compete with google by trying to become them.

The format of the fediverse is anti-virality and anti-discovery. It's also anti-index. It's a joke that anyone thinks it could ever compete with Twitter. It's not for a lack of interest or advertising.

"see the murderer wasn't random therefore we were right nananabooboo SF isn't a total crime infested dystopia" Is really weird spin on a murder story. What is wrong with people?

Does anyone notice how insane spinning a story that hard from a prominent news org is? The line between NYTimes and a long overwrought reddit post is blurring

Respectfully, meme magic says otherwise

There's an adjustment period to understand each boards specific signal:noise. You can't just walk in and find Aristotle and Kant figuring shit out.

Each board has its ridiculous bullshit, groupthink, absurd extremists, edgelords, etc. once you know how to parse that you can quickly navigate to quality posts.

Each board of course has different signal:noise though, somewhere like /lit/ is probably 1:20 whereas /pol/ is probably 1:500-1/1000. But the quality posts are totally different from what you'll find anywhere else. Different users and audience.

US Politics revolves around being the underdog. If you're state affiliated you can't pitch yourself as the plucky underdog trying to change the world.

Thats why NPR would rather leave twitter than live with the label.

AI in that capacity will be functioning as a highly competent secretary. Not necessarily revolutionary except for the latency between request for information and fulfillment.

Its about the same?

No city is immune to it of course, particularly today.

EVs don't help global emissions. They centralize them to power plants and mining. Its debatable whether its net better than ICE for global emissions.

No city symbolizes that more than SF, followed by LA

Loneliness today is frequently a consequence of overstimulation and total withdrawal from our local environments, so even when we stop there's no social infrastructure to find comfort in.

Busyness 'yesterday' would be in such a state of stimulation you would have no time to involve yourself in your local environment as you usually do.

Basically, we've inverted our social time to be default overstim & withdrawn instead of default understim and present.

The extroverts are advised by introverts, however.

That's simply untrue. What today we refer to as misinformation and conspiracy theory was just rumors from the traveling merchant.

The most obvious examples of this is in ancient history how few political issues were actually campaigned on compared to today. Today every politician needs a public stance on hundreds of issues. Do you think that applied in ancient Rome or the various city states in Greece? People didn't care as much. There was less exposure to information, less granularity, and less individual empowerment.

Often times what separated politicians wasn't even the issues, it was their client base and direct familial connections. Issues were a secondary consideration.

Today, it doesn't matter what connections you have if you have the 'wrong' stances, even if trivial in fact (they don't have to actually believe or pursue them in office outside of token gestures) the performative dance politicians have to go through today is strikingly different than any time before. Thats directly because of homogenization of thought and how intensely voters value it.

Todays threshold for lonely is yesterdays busy.

How far back do you have to go in time to get to people actually having time to themselves and walk (15+min) to get most places?

Idiosyncratism is increasingly rarer today than it used to be. There are so many pressures to homogenize almost anything you can think of to an intensely neurotic degree.

The best thing you can do to separate yourself from the pack is to find solitude and develop that distinctive perspective on your passion that you can wholly claim as your own and (hopefully) not futile.

Lockdowns were already a test of exactly what you're saying here.

When almost no one had to work economics became ridiculous, people were paying $40 for a $15 meal to be delivered to them, fiscal policy became clinically insane, tech stocks minted a new bubble. Are you proposing that bubble should be more permanent? The real economics of 'figure it out or lose your lunch' is much better policing than 'figure it out or go back to UBI'.

Burning an entire generation so the next one will be better isn't good policy.

Are we moving from denial to bargaining now?

How long until acceptance of what was once one of the most beautiful cities on earth becoming a cyberpunk opium den? You people are doing your city such a disservice. Fix it sooner, not later.

Complaining about people who are saying its broken is the opposite of fixing it.

The reason why Twitter is interesting is precisely because it reached that critical mass where everyone jumps in. It's a terrible social media site without it.

There's always value to niche forums, but that was my point from the beginning. The value is driven down by its audience, which is seemingly mostly obsessivists, contrarians, and creeps with genuine interesting content silo'd off somewhere.

Both are informed by their general audience. Mastodon has yet to make a big splash outside of highly insulated niche and/or politically charged circles.

Mastodon simply can't reach the heights that Twitter can currently, its userbase is unlikely to be helpful to that end, as are its anti-indexing/search policies, which also make it a haven for many deeply unsavory activities.

I dunno. Mastodon is having a veganism-style social effect from what i've observed. There are some networks that are very interesting there (such as the infosec ones) but its mostly contrarians and obsessivism for whatever the corpo zeitgeist is that given moment.

Twitter is the only social media site every news org can't shut the fuck up about. That alone makes it not niche and beyond the influence reach of all the others; which in turn invites more interesting people, sources, conversation, public debate, and muckraking.

SV Cyberpunk dystopia edition will be fascinating to watch from the outside.

The same place where stuff comes from, duh!

>Something not being easily available makes it more attractive and makes people more curious about it. Such is human psychology.

Can you cite a period when drug enforcement was more successful causing increased consumption?

>Again, if there's demand, there will be supply, regardless of legality. And since there will be supply of addictive substances either way, it makes sense to legalize them. The legalization will remove the criminal element from the cost, making it significantly cheaper, and would also ensure high quality/purity.

What do you think of the results in places that have attempted various versions of this? SF, Denver, parts of Canada, they all meet a similar result. Do you think the British were the good guys in the Opium Wars?

Does supply play a role in addiction? Opportunity?