• 28 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • Not sure if sarcastic or I didn’t make my point well enough. Just in case I’ll expand. The bad thing is that the system necessitates ever increasing profits. It’s not the individuals. If Zuck fucks off to paradise Zuck Prime would take over the social media market and keep finding ways to grow profits year-on-year. The problem with ever increasing profit is this profit comes from the wages and time of people one way or another, leaving less for other social things like paying to meet friends, a partner, having and raising children. Multiply this process to most firms in most markets and you’ll soon see that this leads to social instability, unrest, crisis, and worse. Like it’s happened in the past in different places around the world. Today in the US, Big Tech does it, Big Ag does it, Big Grocer does it, Big Insurance does it, Big Landlord does it, Big Pharma does it, Big Entertainment does it, and increasingly larger proportion of the population gets squeezed out of time and money… for the basics or luxuries like friends and partners. And they’re not gonna take it laying down. Electing Trump was one salvo, even if counterproductive.

    Yes this is how things are supposed to work in the system but my point is that it’s a) driven by the system, not individuals, and b) the consequences are unsustainable.






  • We can’t stop sovereign countries from banning services. We can however have external Fediverse services not comply with cutting off access to users from those sovereign countries, leaving it up them to ensure their citizens don’t have access. Since we’re not making off of doing business in those countries we can ignore non-legal requests instead of voluntarily complying. Then some of the more technical people in such places could use the existing tools for blocking circumvention in order to access the Fediverse if they really want to.


  • Apart from running many instances which keeps copies of other communities which happens automatically when a user on an instance subscribes to a community; organize larger instances into well funded non-profits that can weather attacks. Lemmy.ca, sh.itjust.works and Lemmy.world already have non-profits formed. An example of what this could look like is the Wikimedia Foundation. Obviously won’t be as wealthy at least not in the short term.













  • Right, for profit companies famously have a history of just handing themselves over to totalitarian regimes.

    There are Western for-profit companies who have Chinese subsidiaries developing and selling products in China. They make profits on those sales and hand them over to their shareholders in the West and in China. The Chinese government fully allows this so for-profit companies regularly do it. And yes the Chinese state often is a direct or indirect shareholder. But so could be Berkshire Hathaway. It’s not about handing over the ability to profit. It is about making profit. Also, Western for-profit companies often sell themselves to Chinese firms. E.g. Smithfield Foods, Syngenta and many others.

    China has no successful companies that aren’t approved, controlled and often subsidized by the party.

    That’s an interesting assertion. As far as I’m aware it’s typically the other way around. The companies that grow to be large enough or strategic enough give partial ownership to the government. Of course the government subsidizes important industries like every competent state does, but that doesn’t mean it owns every company it subsidizes. There’s no point in owning small fish. Some of those that grow even have foreign ownership. For example BYD has Berkshire Hathaway and BlackRock as some of its major shareholders.

    So in the case of NVIDIA, it’s entirely plausible for the company to move operations in say Shenzhen, retaining most of its current ownership, perhaps giving some ownership to a Chinese state company. The profits keep flowing to BlackRock, Vanguard, Fidelity and Jensen Huang. Pretty sure they’ll approve it if it means more future profits compared to staying in the US and being unable to sell to China and others. For example if Trump decides that both EU and China are bad hombres and forbids AI chip sales to them, while the US economy tanks, decreasing the domestic sales.