Lemmy technically doesn’t hide your likes - the interface might not show you, but all your likes are public in the Fediverse. Kbin, when I used it, would show which users upvoted/downvoted a post. That’s important because it means researchers and OSI people can still do fact finding - Twitter doesn’t like the idea of having to be open even if it’s a requirement (albeit to researchers specifically) in the EU now.

Allow me to gas Finland up a bit more. They’re higher than Germany in terms of innovation (triadic patents per capita), they have semi-democratically owned grocery stores with 90% of the country being a member/co-owner, they have 60% union density and a Ghent system (like Sweden, unlike Norway), their housing prices were among the few in Europe falling - after the government started their Housing First initiative and built social housing for the poor, their education system being so good (despite being relaxed unlike e.g. Singapore) and state-funded instead of private… life is pretty good in Finland.

It’s a good reminder that collective/democratic bargaining works. It’s about time we bring back unions and cooperatives.

Under the (currently dominant) credit theory of money, the implication is that billionaires owe the government a lot of money… and it’s time to pay up.

But don’t services like Discord forbid third party clients?

Me waiting for inflation to slowly increase Discord’s yearly revenue until it tips into the legally defined Gatekeeper™ status under the EU Digital Markets Act so they’d be playing with fire if they banned people for using interoperability apps.

This is funny when you just look at your profile’s first page and see you’ve made comments like these:

I hate this rhetoric. It implies that this a refular occurence. It is just a man hating comment. If this is happening to you frequently, maybe you are the problem. I am tired of being assumed an asshole just because I am a man. It is sexist. Plain and simple.

So you deny “unproblematic” women regularly experiencing unsafe behavior from men who are entitled and you’re also denying people’s gender identity - otherwise, why would it be a waste of time for a woman’s fight for her right to access women’s spaces? So you’re hateful towards people you perceive to be “men” while complaining about “man haters” elsewhere. Logical inconsistencies in favor of hate is a hallmark sign of right wing extremist views.

With this context, it gets more interesting:

On 6 December 2022, the Parliament of Indonesia passed the country’s new criminal code (NCC), outlawing sex and cohabitation outside of marriage. Under the new law, extramarital sex carries a jail sentence of one year, while cohabitation of unmarried couples carries a jail term of six months. In a statement given to Reuters, a spokesperson for the Indonesian justice ministry justified the law on the grounds that it aimed to “protect the institution of marriage and Indonesian values.”

Well, it doesn’t seem to have worked – at least not in the short term. So now they can’t have sex and they’re not marrying either, worst of both worlds. Maybe they also wouldn’t have a prison overcrowding problem if they stopped jailing people for things like these.

This world’s pretty fucked up. I remember being disillusioned of socialism back in the day (still am) but shit like this makes me wish there was some magical better system than our shitty capitalism.

I mean there is something better than “shitty capitalism”. You can call it what you want, market socialism, social democracy, cool capitalism, but look to Norway for a pretty good example of what we could have:

2/3rd of Norway’s GDP is driven by the public sector, most of the hydropower is owned socially, trains are socially owned, 20% of housing is socially owned through housing coops, gigantic social wealth fund that could singlehandedly fund UBI from like half the returns it makes every year, they have almost 60% union density without a Ghent system like Sweden and Finland, very low income inequality, low on the hours worked per week by country list, high GDP per hour worked… I could go on.

And there’s more cool stuff like that in other countries around Europe too, Vienna’s approach to social housing, Italian and Spanish worker cooperatives, most of the electricity companies in Denmark being socially owned through cooperatives, 90% of Finland being a member in their grocery coops… like, there are so many examples of good things spread out everywhere - we just need the political will to do them more.

What’s your source there? I ask because I was curious and found the exact opposite (but I’ve not done any in-depth dive into this topic):

The scientists found no evidence that frequent ejaculations mark an increased risk of prostate cancer. In fact, the reverse was true: High ejaculation frequency was linked to a decreased risk. Compared to men who reported 4–7 ejaculations per month across their lifetimes, men who ejaculated 21 or more times a month enjoyed a 31% lower risk of prostate cancer. And the results held up to rigorous statistical evaluation even after other lifestyle factors and the frequency of PSA testing were taken into account.

https://www.health.harvard.edu/mens-health/ejaculation_frequency_and_prostate_cancer

Freedom feels good and just so happens to, for the most part bring nations socially

This part I’d agree with

and economically, closer to the US

This part, much less so. The US has a pretty bad history of overthrowing democratically elected leaders and replacing them with US business friendly politicians, whether through hijacking the legal process as with delaying President Lula, or by backing a coup as with Pinochet.

Given the context of this conversation, I should probably note that I don’t support China taking over Taiwan, or meddling with our elections to sow instability either. I’m just challenging the point that the US is friendly to democracy - which has also had bad influence on European democracy (where I am).

(the UK hasn’t got free speech as an enshrined right)

In practice, does the US?

Categories of speech that are given lesser or no protection by the First Amendment (and therefore may be restricted) include obscenity, fraud, child pornography, speech integral to illegal conduct, speech that incites imminent lawless action, speech that violates intellectual property law, true threats, false statements of fact, and commercial speech such as advertising. Defamation that causes harm to reputation is a tort and also a category which is not protected as free speech.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exceptions

It seems to me there are a lot of exceptions to free speech in the land of free speech. I wouldn’t see any harm in adding hate speech to the list given how large it already is.

e.g. passing a nearly-identical law copying Thailand about the royal family and putting in prison anyone who calls Prince Andrew a pedophile.

That seems more of a problem with flawed democracy or autocracies, than to do with free speech. Any awful thing could become law under a flawed democracy/autocracy. The UK has plenty of undemocratic elements and they’re abused to pass horrible laws right now, and we need to fix those elements - the laws are just the end result.

radical feminism

Right wing feminism is a more apt way to describe it, I believe. Some would argue excluding people isn’t feminist at all, but we can at least clarify that it’s the right wing of feminism that focuses on things like excluding trans people and sex workers.

A lot of astroturfing bots are also really mad about it as you can see with the tens of “I’m going to use this to report Humza Yousaf for anti-white racism” highest top-level comments you can see in UK subreddits right now.

Bidenomics is a mixture of things, but key among them is the recognition that MMT is already reality and doubling down on it to fund productive industries. Basically, government debt is not the same as household debt and strategic yet liberal usage of government debt can be very positive for an economy. MMT economists have made some pretty significant ‘discoveries’ that you can now find in the CORE macroeconomics textbooks in universities all over the world.

when we added socialist elements to capitalism (eg. social security, free healthcare, free education and so on) it didnt stop being capitalism.

This is a very black and white view of things, though. Norway is seen as capitalist, yet 2/3rds of Norway’s GDP is driven by its public sector, the government owns 30% of the domestic stock market, they have a massive government wealth fund that makes returns in hundreds of billions of dollars annually which they could singlehandedly fund UBI with, they apply Georgist taxes to natural resources (oil, hydro, aquafarms) to collectivize profits made off public land, 60% union density, 20% of housing is collectively owned (housing coops)…

Like, at what point do we call a country “socialist”?

(Not to call the US socialist, but Bidenomics might lean like 1% in that direction, and that’s my point - it’s going in a socialist direction if very slowly, and if we can maintain it)

IP is not a universal, objectively good thing. There are plenty of people who disagree with either a) how awful IP law is currently, or b) the mere existence of IP. You don’t even have to be a socialist like China supposedly is (although many would call it state capitalist) to be against IP, plenty of social democrats and libertarians are against it.

Intellectual Property is just a more abstract form of private ownership that wealthy people use to take advantage of us. Remember when they refused to give up COVID vaccine IP? They literally can’t sacrifice profits even during an insane pandemic that’s taking millions of lives. Remember when Canada, Sweden were kind of OK with piracy and then US politicians/lobbyists entered their country to ensure they would be cracking down on piracy? As a European I’m not happy that yet another form of welfare transfers (which piracy de facto is) was taken away just because the US isn’t content with being the wealthiest country on the planet - they need to maintain or even grow their obscene wealth.

Honestly, I could not give a rat’s ass about China “stealing” IP from literally the country that owns 30% of the world’s household wealth. More countries should follow suit so that we can break free from private IP holders delaying human technological and scientific progress.

My immediate concern with tags is descending into what Twitter has become: hashtags have been meaningless for a long while since there’s too much wrongly tagged stuff, different communities often use the same tag for different things, or there are ten tags all for the same thing. All of which means we’d need some form of moderator role that handles tags, and while I think it’s doable, it might take some trial and error to figure out how exactly we divide tags between moderators, how tags are proposed/created, and how tags are grouped/combined (e.g. food, foods).

Also @fedia.io, not sure what’s going down on that instance but the several unhinged comments I’ve seen today all came from there. Maybe it’s just a coincidence.

So not only will you be able to get it, the people who get it to you can’t be big corporate shitheels.

Cannabis Social Clubs have existed in Europe for a while under a legal gray area, e.g. in Spain. I imagine that’s why Germany went with a non-profit cooperative model instead of the US’ (recent) for-profit corporate approach. Although Canada’s approach of a state monopoly is similar to what Norway does with alcohol, which is another way to socialize the profits of drugs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabis_Social_Club

I swear the “fuck cars” crew are completely deluded from reality.

I see people say what you’re saying (bus vs car road damage elasticity) in “fuck cars” communities, I don’t really see why you’ve decided to attack them collectively. But it’s a pop-community, they’re going to be wrong every now and then either way, please give them some slack. Their purpose is to make an average person aware of car dependency and that it’s generally a negative thing, so that actual urban planners with technical knowledge have an easier time arguing for and implementing realistic solutions, and they’ll take into account the variables you bring up. Think of “fuck cars” like a form of lobbying except it’s done by common people with good intentions - similar to how Japanese coops lobbied for better food safety standards decades ago - rather than wealthy corporations.