I will never forget the time I posted a question about why something wasn’t working as I expected, with a minimal example (≈ 10 lines of python, no external libraries) and a description of the expected behaviour and observed behaviour.

The first three-ish replies I got were instant comments that this in fact does work like I would expect, and that the observed behaviour I described wasn’t what the code would produce. A day later, some highly-rated user made a friendly note that I had a typo that just happened to trigger this very unexpected error.

Basically, I was thrashed by the first replies, when the people replying hadn’t even run the code. It felt extremely good to be able to reply to them that they were asshats for saying that the code didn’t do what I said it did when they hadn’t even run it.

here you go

I trusted the upvotes, and dared to click. It’s a safe, informative piece on the topic at hand that I recommend reading.

I try to live by a similar “always try to interpret peoples actions in the most positive possible way”. This means that if someone says something hurtful, they probably didn’t mean it, either something came out wrong or you misinterpreted them. Spend a couple seconds thinking about what they could have meant, and suddenly you’re choosing to interpret them in a way that makes your day better instead of worse.

Same goes for actions. If someone does something you don’t like, you can very often choose to figure out what a good reason for their actions are. Trying my best to think like this has made me a lot happier and more easy-going.

reject all forms of advertising

Yes. If I need something, I’ll go looking for it. If your product is a decent solution to my problem, I’ll find it and buy it when I need it. If you want visibility and/or publicity, you can advertise on your own platform, or do reviews, beta-testing, or press-releases in relevant channels.

There is literally no reason that you should ever shove your product in my face. The people whose job it is to do the shoving should be fired, and replaced by people that actually contribute to solving real problems. We have more than enough of those.

That was really a fantastic read!

tøøthbrush

FFS. its spelled “tuuthbrøsh”

The point was more that a community can enforce that “if they don’t get it, no one will”, which I think would put a lot of companies off from buying.

It wouldn’t help the first few people get their home back, but after a couple rounds, the big corps will see that they end up losing money when the buy properties that are sacked a short time later. If there’s one thing that will make a company change its behaviour, it’s making them lose money through that behaviour.

I thought the same thing at first. However after reading another comment here I realised that a community can essentially sack the property if a huge corp buys it. Not much you can do if everyone around wants you gone so bad they’ll commit arson rather than let you stay.

That was my initial thought as well, but after reading the other comment about how a community essentially sacked a house after the “wrong person” bought it…

The only thing that intimidates soulless corps is the threat of losing money. If it becomes clear to them that whatever they buy at auction will be burned to the ground, they probably won’t be very eager to keep buying.

Once you actively enable a fascist government you are complicit in the crimes it commits.

Nowhere did I state that anyone is guilty by association simply by existing. I said anyone that actively enables a fascist government is complicit, and that laying low, turning a blind eye, or otherwise passively accepting that government doesn’t completely absolve you.

It’s absurd to paint someone with crimes committed before they were born, but it’s even more absurd that you were able to read that out of the comment you replied to.

Applying the same logic to slavery leads you to the conclusion that anyone who actively worked to enable slavery is complicit, and that anyone who silently accepted it is also partially accountable. There is literally nothing in my previous comment that places blame on people either too young, old or incapacitated to have real agency. Even less so unborn people or people resisting a fascist government, either loudly and publicly or silently in private.

Oh, I definitely meant far future. While the differences are far too big today, I can see gradually increasing cooperation between e.g. the EU and African Union at some point culminating in the construction of a governmental body that has some regulatory power over them both.

Once such a body exists, I can imagine that it over time accumulates power, bringing the two unions even closer together. The EU started out as a relatively small organ, and has grown gradually to what it is today over many decades. My point was that if some “global government” ever forms, I think that kind of gradual process is how it will happen. Starting out with trade agreements, and then gradually regulating more aspects of government.

These don’t need to be mutually exclusive though. A lot of the progress in Europe the past 80 years is a result of the improved cooperation brought by the EU.

The EU isn’t like the UN, where everyone is equally represented (sans veto powers), but is a democratically elected super-national body with opposing super-national political factions. I can see a concept like that working on a global scale some time in the (relatively far) future.

I think something like this is the most reasonable, and we’re already closer to it than at any previous point in history. We have the EU, the African Union (AU), and I think there’s a South American union as well (?) there’s also the US, which is a bit between a union and a single state (US states have more autonomy than regional municipalities most other places, but far less than any full-fledged county).

I think that if a “global government” ever develops, it will be due to these unions forming an overarching union. The major hurdle is that we’re a very far way off anybody wanting to concede any governing power to an organisation above the “continental union” level. Even holding the EU together is non-trivial, because a lot of people feel that too much power is concentrated far away in Brussels.

Regarding judicial systems and military forces, the UN has showed that it’s possible to have a kind of global system for this, but it’s still a far stretch from anything that could be called a “global judicial system with enforcement powers”.

The majority of Germans in the late 1930’s weren’t members of the Nazi party either. The majority of Germans in fact claimed being either unaware or opposed to what the Nazi regime did. Did the tell the truth? I’m inclined to believe so. Does being unaware/laying low absolve them of any and all crimes committed by the Nazi government? That’s more of an open question.

Actively voting for a government that commits crimes because you don’t care sufficiently about politics does not absolve you of responsibility for those crimes. Once you actively enable a fascist government you are complicit in the crimes it commits.

The fundamental difference to me, which makes me not see “a website with extensive docs and a download button” as marketing, is whether you need to seek it out or not.

If I need to seek it out myself, it’s not marketing, it’s simply “providing solid information” and “making your product accessible”, which is a whole different ballgame from “shoving your shit into peoples face in the hope that they’ll give you money”.

I think there’s a substantial difference between “supplying information about a product without shoving it in people’s face”, and what most people associate with “marketing”.

If a company putting up neutral, verifiable information about their product on their own webpage where I can find it by searching for something I’m looking for after reflexively scrolling past the ads counts as marketing, then yes, I “fall for marketing” all the time. However, what I typically associate with “marketing” involves me somehow being fed information about a product without seeking it out. Usually when that happens, I’ll actively look somewhere else.

Recalling the videos of a single male lion pretty much ripping apart a pack of hyenas… Tigers are even bigger and stronger than lions, and wolves don’t have anywhere near the bite force of a hyena. I think you’d need a lot more than three.

Ref. the famous Ken Thompson hack. At some point you’re forced to trust someone.

“Not a marketing company” as in their business model is not centred around shoving ads in your face for money is how I read it.

Oh absolutely. As with all other infrastructure, there is a cost to be paid. However, when you look at an average to small river, even routing 10 % of the water via an osmosis plant before passing it to the sea is an absolutely massive volume. There’s also the point that you don’t want to build these things in large, meandering, flat river deltas. You want a large salinity gradient, which means relatively small, fast-running fresh water meeting the ocean more “suddenly” than what you get in a classical river delta is the optimal source here.