What stops someone from adding a watermark to an actually photographed (carefully framed?) picture to discredit it? There is no certainty either way, just suggestions from someone else about what the truth might be.
Please don't export US labour and safety standards. The amount of paid time off is hard to argue is not unethical, the conflation of vacation time and sick time clearly is unethical, the amount of parental leave (especially maternity) is a crime against humanity. The firing procedures are also something you'd expect to read about in a history book besides a picture of a child visibly yearning for the coal mines, contracts with a mutual resignation period giving both parties adequate time to transition is a bare minimum. And that is just the tip of the iceberg. Please please America spend serious efforts developing your labour standards to a humane level instead of exporting them.
Yes, the traditional Christian understanding of usury is right about what's wrong, but wrong about what's right. Debt based and fiat currencies in general were able to expand the money supply to allow for more vigorous growth. Gold and silver were really the only other conceivable alternatives and there was never enough of it to match the productive economy, especially after the industrial revolution. I do think that the horrors of gold-backed money are oversold: the US expanded more quickly in the late 1800s under a gold backed currency with almost no immigration, but that shows that other factors (e.g. industrialization) are sometimes more important.
The thing to get your head around is: who gets the new money? My preferred system (social credit) says everyone gets a citizens dividend, rather than banks claiming surplus value via compounding (read: exponential) interest.
A lot of the local newspapers have abandoned third party comments systems and gone for only allowing comments under full verified name (often using the national id system). The result is that only the trolls and and generic perspectives anyone could have reasoned their way to possibly existing in less than 5 minutes remain. The ones willing to provide entertainment in the form of vigorously refuting the more extreme viewpoints are gone, because who wants to needlessly antagonize the likely crazy, and the interesting tangents are also mostly gone.
If you want to use social media to chill out with your friends, real name mandates for writing can work, at least as long as the content is not too publicly accessible. But if you want to have more interesting conversations than the ones you can have in the local park where you need to watch out for not publicly denouncing the sport favoured by your peers and neighbours in favour of something locally exotic, real name by default will more or less wipe them out.
As for proof of humanness it sounds interesting, but I think it's insufficient. Much like I dislike promotions of interests which are not my own as much when they are done by a human handing out fliers vs a poster showing the same advertisement, I don't think that the sender of the message being a paid or otherwise recruited human is going to make the desirable difference on social media either, even if they're known to be human.
What's really needed is a signal that the content is the persons genuine personal input, and comes without an ulterior agenda. And if such a signal can exist I'd very much like to be able to use it when navigating the physical world as well.
I use at least 4 different devices on a daily basis, sometimes more. Forfeiting access to things deemed not for children, or I want connected to my ID like banking or prescription renewal, on any one of them because my id can only be on one device, is not an acceptable solution. My phone and gaming machine need equal access to content some would object to others (especially children) interacting with, while my personal and work laptops have hard needs for me being able to prove my identity. And backup devices should any one of the systems I rely on fail need to be able to come up and running in no more time than it takes to get a replacement from the store.
> I've never understood why so many people still chain their identities to physical SIM or even eSIMs. It's so fragile.
Living in a place where getting a replacement sim is gated behind obtaining an id from the police tied to your national id number, I wish there were other identity systems which were as robust. Much easier to get back to normal operations when the id device becomes damaged or lost with a physical sim you can shove into a cheap replacement device, than relying on backup services you need one of your digital id devices to access in the first place, especially if they're all lost at the same time in a house fire or something. The police will presumably get all my photo backups and savings if they ask nicely anyways, so the big threat to the single point of failure doesn't have a great marginal impact, while I dread the possibility of having to recover the accounts I can't get back through the local legal system given the poor 2fa recovery ecosystem.
>Much easier to get back to normal operations when the id device becomes damaged or lost with a physical sim you can shove into a cheap replacement device
If the device can get damaged or lost, then the SIM can too. To buy a physical SIM or rent a virtual number online, in most jurisdictions you need to provide ID docs these days, so nothing is changed there.
Wouldn't easy and accessible self-hosting be a major privacy win if that's your primary concern? Sounds much more private to run a Minecraft and Mumble server on an old laptop in a friend group than paying a commercial entity like a hosting provider to know about it and have a back door.
Easy and accessible self hosting isn't the primary concern.
It's much more private and secure to run that Minecraft or Mumble server on an encrypted overlay network like via headscale + tailscale rather than exposing both services directly to the entire planet.
But again, the primary concern was only ever address space.
What I tried to express was privacy being the primary concern. The easy and accessible self-hosting on old hardware would be the uses of a home network beyond superficialities like consumption and commerce. Privacy wise headscale as a solution is still not quite there, because it either necessitates an additional third party to host the headscale server and know about all my friends, or jank like dynDNS.
The additional security gained by getting everyone involved to set up and configure separate VPNs for different community utilities is not worth it.
My impression was that that taboo first got a firm foothold a couple of hundred years later, after the second world war showed what industrialised genocide looks like. How could the fundamental equality of all humans otherwise have been accepted as true and taboo to talk about at the same time as women being denied suffrage until the early 19-hundreds, or eugenics being openly discussed well into the 1930ies?
We’ve known since Socrates that writing instead of speaking eroded thinking. We seriously need to stop putting packaging, especially writing, on a pedestal. Instead we should put what little lifetime we have in sum towards focusing on what’s actually important: the ideas and concepts themselves.
One can argue that the tax revenue losses would be uncomfortably noticeable without the interests extracted from the investments of the oil and gas money. However I’d say it’s more about Norways position on new cars being a luxury good and taxed as so. Which meant that the Norwegian government could make buying electric cars cost half as much as the alternative over night, simply by dropping retail taxes on them to zero. Add another subsidy in the form of reduced annual ownership taxes, and buying unused (electric) cars suddenly became obtainable to a large group. Not to mention simply a stupidly good deal for those without special needs, like living/operating in the less dense areas to the north where the sun doesn’t shine half a year at a time (and the temperatures follow accordingly).
You should be able to reproduce it most places though. Just declare new non-electric vehicles a luxury only for the rich and set taxes on new cars to 100%+. (Be sure to define businesses as rich and have popular agreement that they’re unviable if not.) Sell it to current owners as a massive boost to the used price they can get. Then drop the taxes on electric vehicles. After the transition to all new sales being electric, reintroduce the luxury taxation on all vehicles like what Norways government is currently doing, and you’ll get a small boost to the nations finances if you didn’t originally have it.
