What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little removed? I'll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and I've been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I am trained in gorilla warfare and I'm the top sniper in the entire US armed forces. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You're fucking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that's just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the United States Marine Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little "clever" comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn't, you didn't, and now you're paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it. You're fucking dead, kiddo.

Yeah, the broader point I'm making is that the federation doesn't solve the entire encompassing system in which this all exists.

Federated projects both have their own problems in those shitty little fiefdoms, as said, and are probably never going to succeed in this broader economic context where huge, profit seeking, venture capital funded market actors are able to spin up a new twitter ripoff in no time at all. This is while similar market actors in the form of spam farms, bot farms, adversarial influencers looking to make a quick buck, and moderators themselves, have incentives to game whatever systems are in place on any platform, not just the large ones. This then increases the strain on smaller projects, and decreases their ability to actually be sustainable long-term, especially in comparison to these huge market actors and their platforms.

The systems that are gamed, in the modern internet, are cordoned off and channeled by a bunch of moderators that we all trust to kind of do the work for the rest of us, apply the rules, use the tools to their discretion. Federation just makes it so you can jump from one moderated section to the other, one administrated section to the other, while on the same "platform". But it doesn't solve the inherent problems at play here, where moderators and higher level administrators are incentivized to make their platforms shittier with the invitation of advertisers, the invitation of more bad faith posters which can increase engagement, the adoption of shorter form, less substantive content, things like that. Those drive up traffic, and make more money, money they can use to then make their platforms "better", or basically, to eat up more of the market share. Eventually you play the short term gains game long enough, and then your platform's growth sputters out, and then venture capital dries up, and then you end up making the moderation more lax as a last resort, and then nazis come flooding in. Then the platform either dies, or mutates into a horrible shambling corpse.

Even if you were to cut out all of that as a possibility, say, by trying to make your stuff copyleft, then you just cut out the route towards short term growth for anyone using your particular platform, and then you'll just get outdone by all of the other market actors which lean into that short term growth, while still filling your platform's niche, while using none of the specific parts of your platform.

It's basically not going to succeed as an approach because it, as we keep learning on the internet over and over and over and over, it exists in a broader material context, the context of the market.

People dislike it because it's not federated, but hot take: federation doesn't solve enshittification. It just devolves everything into little shitty internet fiefdoms. It doesn't do anything to prevent the inherent problems that arise as a result of having everyone freeball a random moderation structure, where they can outsource their agency to some guy they don't know, with the illusion that there's some clear set of rules or useful tools that exist somewhere off in the distance, being used by the "correct" actors and moderators. Which in turn means that everything becomes vulnerable to any abuse of the static, singular, broad rules, inside of these walled gardens that people are basically locked into.

You get bait, you get ragebait, people taking advantage of the singular "algorithms" in order to game the system for maximum attention, and you incentivize that behavior because you make it way too easy to engage in. You get people paying to get on the front page of reddit, and you get eglin air force base being the most reddit addicted town. People think that AI abuse is some recent phenomenon, but it's not, bots have been on the internet forever, and people have been incentivized to engage in bot-like behaviors forever. Eventually you get a huge, hollow system, where everything has the guise of legitimate human interaction at the surface level, but is really just subject to this huge system of incentives and planned interactions which people are made subconscious of.

You'd really need the ability to have account migration for a better decentralized network, and you'd probably actually just need self-hosting for everyone. You'd probably want blocklists to easily propagate around (+2 for bluesky), and you'd probably actually want those to have easily copied and pasted rules that could be shared between users to prevent spam and make it so abuse is less common and easily prevented before it happens.

Which is what the usenet already had/has. It's just that the common consensus (which I believe to be false), is that the usenet is too hard to use, and requires demands too much intellectually from its users. If you decide to take this philosophy to the extreme, you end up with something like tiktok, where the idea is that people use their premade google account, scroll downwards forever, and that's it.

I wouldn't mistake this as being some sort of like, natural occurrence, though, that's an intentional decision, made by businessmen, that want to maximize sales through an in-app store and control a massive cultural space. That's a specific decision that they've made, and they've tuned their platforms to take advantage of people's worst instincts in order to perpetuate that. Often with the assistance and explicit consent of governments which want these platforms to be used to track everything.

They pour money into that system, it's an explicit decision they're making to push that onto people as a result of current economic and political structures, and it's due to those structures that they have that power to be able to do that, and due to those structures that these shit systems succeed, keep being cycled out in boom and bust cycles, over the better systems that people create.

do you not think, that potentially, they just go the indentured servitude route, after holding people for the "crime" of illegal immigration?

There was an absolute mountain of evidence that Trump would be a disaster.

nobody gives a fuck about that. most people aren't clocked into online politics. they just live under one admin where trump benefits from obama's policy, things are squeaky clean for the most part, and then they're chilling, and then they move to living under joe biden where a once in a lifetime (hopefully, haha) pandemic decides to fuck shit up during the transition from one admin to the other, on top of inheriting a much worse economy, and then they attribute that to biden. it's not a super complicated figure, there, and that's all on top of biden just not being a very popular candidate to begin with.

if you actually look at the numbers, then the third party candidates had less of an effect for kamala than the third party candidates for trump did. which makes sense, because RFK, at the least, was campaigning on some sort of dystopian vision of the future that his deluded q-anon supporters actually liked, and he had money. jill stein is just grifting like always, basically, no change there, and no change with the lesser known candidates either, really. the bigger story is that a shit ton of the voters stayed home.

everyone wants to shift blame from the democratic party, which has obviously either mishandled this campaign or intentionally lost as a party of controlled opposition, and shift the blame onto the voters. ah, well, it was latino men's fault for being too socially conservative! ah, it was the third party voters and the leftists! it was the arab americans, who should've voted after we funded the bombs that killed their whole entire family! it was trans people, for just being too weird! those are all legitimate explanations I've heard people bring up, and I'd classify them all as basically the same, because they all equally have no evidence behind them. the real story is that she had low voter turnout. probably because she was associated with the least popular administration in decades, and refused to distinguish herself from that, and on top of that, campaigned with like, liz cheney. the most she did was offer like, tax exemptions for people starting small businesses, and tax exemptions for people who haven't missed their rent a single time in the last kajillion years. it's not rocket science, that's just not really an inspiring campaign. if they had low voter turnout, that's probably why, it's probably not because america is just too racist to vote for a black woman or whatever shit everyone's bloviating about so they can justify the democratic party turning to the right even more.

I dunno, I think it was mostly that they wanted joe to step down later on in order to justify not having a primary, and dispelling a populist candidate, like tim walz may have been, a populist candidate which goes against the interests of the donors, and could've still probably gone through with a ton of funding and a groundswell of support regardless (see: kamala getting 1 billion dollars), from the running. Then, they can run kamala by default, and it doesn't matter whether or not she really wins or loses, as she's still campaigning on basically the platform that the republicans of 2016 were running on. I dunno so much if the time was the problem, other countries have full elections in as much time, I think the real problem was the electoral calculus that runs everything the scenes, as it has always been, and I think a lot of people got their brain cooked by brat summer and coconut memes into believing this was somehow going to be any better than 2016.

Unfortunately, after a year of witnessing their entire ethnicity being written off as an acceptable casualty in the name of international diplomacy and foreign lobbying, they’ve become numb and just stopped caring.

The craziest part of this to me is that this isn't the first time this has happened since it's started like... since the country has been founded. So the fact they're really still willing to engage politically at all is a pretty good testament to their character, I would say.

You eliminate the rural area with 5 minute drives between homes. Japan has a much higher population density more generally, granted, and they do occasionally get older, offset, single homes that are miles from anything else. But they also have extremely rural villages with maybe 2000 people that are still about as rural as you can get and still go in for farming. Many other places (I would say, basically all of them?) do this as well, and not all of them have high population density. I think, almost definitionally, the land use I'm proposing has a higher pop density, but the style of development generally, you'd be hard pressed not to classify it as rural.

The solution here is to orient the land use radially. Also probably to use less land generally, but that's a separate issue. Most land use in america looks like having 20 different farms, that are each like 3 or 4 miles across, sometimes with multiple plots, with each house being positioned as far away from the other houses as possible, usually somewhere along the edge of a plot, and then running roads out to each of them, sometimes dirt roads, sometimes paved, usually some combination of the two for higher use vs lower use vs private.

Instead of that, you do what people have been doing for centuries. You clump the 20 different houses together in one contiguous strip that's placed along some sort of rail line or higher traffic road, and then you disconnect all the plots of land from the particular houses. Ownership doesn't necessarily have to correlate with one plot of land vs another. Then you gain all of the benefits that entails, and if everything is laid out sensibly, then you're only about 3 miles from your specific plot. Utilities become cheaper to maintain, emergencies like fires, medical problems, natural disasters, become much easier to deal with, you can start building some actual infrastructure, like, say, a rail line.

That becomes much easier to justify if you only gotta send that shit to like one concentration of 20 or 30 or houses instead of sending it to those 20 or 30 houses individually, most especially if that line is just passing through before heading somewhere else, which should generally be the case. Maintenance of that rail line also becomes less problematic compared to that of a road if we're considering that this rural area is probably mostly going to be farmland that demands larger industrial equipment shipments, and is going to be shipping back and forth things like grain, bulk goods which would do much better to be shipped by train compared to most other forms of transit. Slap that together with a multi-daily passenger rail line that passes through it as a stop and you're pretty much set.

Sturdy trees are good in the city, since they are low upkeep and very good for air quality and shade.

Sturdy trees WOULD be good for the city, yeah. Unfortunately we've decided to, in basically every major city (at least here in NA and I suspect other places), plant non-native trees that have low survival rates and are basically all male. Being male, they tend to also shit pollen basically everywhere. I'd imagine you could deal with the fruit falling to the ground in a number of ways, as well. Could put some canopy underneath the fruiting trees, as to collect the fruit more easily, you could just pay people to come and collect enough of the fruit for use in things like applesauce that the rest of the fruit really presents no issue as far as just sort of rotting and draining into the ground. You could set up a bunch of easy disposal compost boxes every couple feet, so you can just sweep all the fruit up and throw it into that.

I suspect a larger problem would probably be that inside of the city the fruit would be exposed to more than an acceptable amount of brake dust, including that which drains into the planter box, and would maybe not get enough light, but I think those are generally problems we should be solving anyways since they don't disappear just because we decide not to plant fruit trees. Brake dust on the fruit or carcinogens inside the fruit means that those things are also going to be going into your lungs.

It's fucking so obvious that it boggles my mind that people are still gunning for him and buttigieg and shapiro. They are all power-hungry neoliberal freaks, I don't understand how this is really in contention at this point. Basically the only thing she can do on the campaign trail is talk, and appoint a rather meaningless VP slot to show her allegiance to some kind of politics that actually gets people out and voting. If she chooses some moderate scumbag because they're in a swing state, that's like the fastest way for her to piss away all the good will she's built up so far. It's crazy, I don't understand it.

I mean we do have a pretty good indication of a quite large impending factor which may cause a lot of them to collapse in the coming years, and which could collectively be attributed to them pretty well, especially within the last 50 years.

So if we can elect like, any old fuck now, can't we just go even older and elect the corpse of mao or something? cause that's kinda the only way I see rent, and rent specifically, becoming a non-issue in the near future. This is like one of the main issues which is directly symptomatic of capitalism, and which keeps capitalism as a system directly propped up. I don't really see any long term solution to it that doesn't involve a lot of no longer having capitalism. Other capitalist countries still have this problem. It's only like, china and the former soviet union and apparently barcelona with superblocks which are still gonna be subject to market demands and rates, it's only those countries which are going to be constructing such an excess of housing that a good amount of it can remain empty, which is also the case here as well but with the caveat that we still have massive amounts of homelessness and the empty housing is basically just to increase demand on top of straight up not having enough housing even were we to construct mass housing projects.

I dunno, this is a pretty good encapsulation of why we are specifically incredibly fucked and how this incrementalism isn't going to work at all to address our current issues. We're cooked, lads. Get the titanic band to start playing the song or whatever.