makeasnek

makeasnek , vor 6 Tagen (Bearbeitet vor 6 Tagen)

Cenorship-resistant protocols like ActivityPub (Lemmy, Mastodon), Nostr, Tor, I2P, and freenet solve this.

makeasnek OP , vor 9 Tagen

It's organized by the human rights foundation, which is an intl non-profit organization headquartered in New York. The freedom forum is not only hosted in but also donated to by the City of Oslo. It's all about resisting dictators and autocracy. Ask wikipedia if you doubt

makeasnek OP , vor 9 Tagen (Bearbeitet vor 9 Tagen)

Aah yes, the electronic intifada, such an excellent, neutral source for reporting.

Don’t disclose all their big donors

Peter Thiel is also one of the big donors.

Many orgs don't disclose donors, particularly those working on human rights. Imagine you are a rich person in a dictatorship who wants to improve human rights in your country, do you want your name listed on the donor registry for Amnesty International? Probably not. Amnesty, btw, sponsors the freedom forum as well alongside the city of Oslo. So Either Amnesty is in on this 4D chess you're seeing where the far right is somehow using human rights as a cover to... give us all more privacy or something, or maybe Amnesty did their due diligence and concluded that this org is worth working with.

The article states that "Who is Halvorssen? He is best known as the founder and CEO of the Human Rights Foundation, where he is listed as the lone staff member.", yet their site lists over a dozen people. So that's just a clearly factually inaccurate statement right there, makes me question the validity of the entire thing if they can't get something that simple correct. https://hrf.org/about/team/

"Halvorssen is the scion of an oligarchic Venezuelan family closely linked to the political opposition that formed against recently deceased former President Hugo Chavez"

Hmm.. I wonder if living under an autocrat might have made him care about human rights and free expression.

Believe it or not, people on the "far right" can care about human rights too, and can donate to human rights organizations, and that's ok. I challenge you to find any major human rights or civil liberties organization that doesn't have somebody "far right" or whom you otherwise disagree with strongly. Human rights is an issue that cuts across many different political ideologies. And these organizations can build tools and infrastructure to support human rights all around the globe, and do. We shouldn't be cancelling organizations just because they got money from somebody we disagree with or even detest. What they actually do with that money should be what matters, something your accusations against this org are completely devoid of because they are actually doing good things. What they're actually doing is advancing the cause of human rights globally.

makeasnek , vor 13 Tagen

How to contact your MEP. We beat this bill last time, we can beat it again https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/home

makeasnek OP , vor 14 Tagen

How to contact your MEP. We beat this bill last time, we can beat it again https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/home

makeasnek , vor 20 Tagen

Tariffs and moving away from free trade makes us all poorer. We need EVs to be cheap and abundant now more than ever. People complain it's "uncompetitive" when china subsidizes the shit out of their EV industry, but the US did the exact same thing with "build back better", and the EU got pissed about it. Just as the US has been doing for decades with agriculture and the defense industry.

I agree subsidies are contrary to the best methods of free trade but until we can force countries to stop (and stop doing it ourselves), they are a part of life. Let china win the EV race, we all get cheap abundant EVs, and America can win the space race and we'll all get cheap satellite services, and Europe can win idk whatever it is they're working on over there and we'll all get a bunch of cheap copies of that.

makeasnek , vor 23 Tagen (Bearbeitet vor 23 Tagen)

So let them compete, isn't that the idea? Countries and economies can compete with each other just like companies do. China can subsidize their EVs, America can subsidize its defense industry and corn, Europe can subsidize cheese and wine or whatever it is they make, each country specializes and offers the best product at the cheapest prices for consumers. Or make WTO have more 'stick' and less carrot so we can make countries stop subsidizing their own industries.

Either way, a return to trade tariffs and isolationism doesn't sound great to me. It sounds like everything getting more expensive and less efficient (and therefore, more environmentally wasteful). It also sounds like countries being less dependent on each other, which means less reason to not go to war. We live in a very rare, peaceful time in human history. International trade (and massive technological/scientific breakthroughs) are a major part of that.

makeasnek , vor 23 Tagen (Bearbeitet vor 23 Tagen)

There are two factors at play here which have to meet in the middle: where is the most efficient place to produce the product and what is the most efficient way to ship the product? The answer to the first question is: wherever has local access to the resources (people, iron ore, etc) and energy required and has the scale required to efficiently build those products. The more cars your country produces, the bigger your factories are going to be, and the more efficiently you can make cars. The answer to the second is by sea. Always by sea. Boats are vastly more efficient than rail, truck, anything.

from: https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jzhebc/eli5_why_are_ships_more_efficient_at_transporting/

Container ships are reallyyyy big and reallyyy slow so they experience relatively low drag

Drag on a plane is high, they have two massive jet engines that try to push them through the air burning literal tons of fuel to do so. Obviously not the best if you want to be efficient.

Drag on a train scales with the weight of the train. A long heavy train will have more rolling resistance that sucks away energy from it. You can't scale this down without going through and making your wheels harder so they deform less, but you already have steel wheels on steel rails so you're not going to get much better.

Drag on a ship scales with the surface area of the ship that is touching the water, putting more weight on a ship causes a bit more of the surface to touch the water, but not very much. Moving an empty ship is going to use a surprisingly large amount of fuel because the drag is pretty similar, but your fuel consumption isn't going to go up linearly with load like it would for a train.

Consider something like a Maersk Triple E, it carries over 18,000 20 foot containers. It can get them up to 23 knots (26 mph) but generally runs at 16 knots for efficiency and does this with just 80,000 HP of engine capacity. Those 18,000 containers would turn into a train 68 miles long! With 140,000 tons available for cargo, that's just 0.57 HP/ton at full speed, and significantly less at the lower cruising speed(where the ship is built to be efficient). Trains will generally run around 1 HP/ton so this big ass cargo ship is using half to a third as much power to move its cargo.

The downside of this is that it takes 6-8 weeks for a ship to go from China to California, but the upside is that it did that with a crew of just 13 and just had a big diesel running in its happy spot the whole time.

makeasnek , vor 26 Tagen (Bearbeitet vor 26 Tagen)

Inflation is caused by inflationary currency. Any other inflation caused by supply chain issues, corporate greed, lack of market competition, etc is just added on top of that. Fiat inflationary currency is a rather new invention in terms of the human timeline. They aim for 2-3% inflation in "good years". Central banks are not to be trusted.

Think of it: in the last 50 years, everything has gotten cheaper to produce thanks to increasing mechanization, outsourcing to cheap labor/low regulation countries, and extremely efficient supply chains. Yet so many things "costs more" than it did 50 years ago. Even basics like bread. How is that the case? Shouldn't it cost less? Where is that "extra efficiency" going if not to lower prices? The answer: bread is the same value it's always been, the money has gotten less valuable. This is how they keep working class people running on a treadmill, never able to achieve economic mobility.

Inflationary currency devalues the currency you worked hard to earn by increasing the supply. It hits the middle class the worst because they have more of their net wealth in cash, often in the form of emergency funds, savings, and putting together enough money for a down payment on a home. Rich people have their money in assets which aren't harmed by currency inflation. Poor people live hand to mouth. If you want to identify the causes of increasing wealth disparity, the inability of people to save money is a major one.

makeasnek OP , vor 29 Tagen

It's always the same bullshit when they want to take away your rights:

• "Protect the children"
• "Foreign influence" or "spies"
• "Misinformation"
• "Stop Terrorism"

makeasnek OP , vor 29 Tagen (Bearbeitet vor 29 Tagen)

They'll start by saying lemmy is spreading "disinformation" or "foreign influence" or "harming children" or whatever their excuse of the day is. Then legislate lemmy apps out of the app stores and go after lemmy server operators or users.

Not saying lemmy couldn't survive as a network, the point of the meme is the dangerous precedent set when people support things like a TikTok ban and say the government should be able to regulate speech or access to speech in that manner. The government shouldn't be able to tell you what you can say or think, who you share those thoughts with, or what media you consume. It's a human right to think and speak and be able to listen to others speak. And unfortunately, for different reasons, both the left and right are cheering on its erosion.

makeasnek OP , vor 29 Tagen

True. Impossible to fully censor. Easy to "censor enough", force out of app stores, and deem illegal while being cheered on by the left and right because they both somehow think it's in their interests, having abandoned the idea of free speech somewhere along in their ideological trajectory. Just like with TikTok ban or the Digital Services Act.

makeasnek OP , vor 29 Tagen (Bearbeitet vor 29 Tagen)

Look, I get it, I wouldn't give a shit if TikTok imploded tomorrow and went out of business. I don't use it. Actually, I would cheer on TikTok's implosion. It's a cesspool. However:

"First they came for the xxx and I didn't care because I didn't use or like xxx"...."and then they came for me or the thing I liked or used there was nobody left to defend me"

makeasnek , vor 29 Tagen (Bearbeitet vor 29 Tagen)

The government controls it and they use it to gradually decrease the portion of supply your hard-earned money represents. They aim for 2-3% inflation in a "good year". That's the nice countries, ask any Argentinean how they feel about who controls that money printer. Monetary inflation mostly impacts the poor and middle class who have more of their net wealth in cash whereas rich people have their money safely stored in assets like stocks or land. So the government controls the money printer.

Unless you use Bitcoin. Then the protocol (nobody) controls it. And it's controlled to never make more than 21 million BTC. No person, even if they had a trillion dollars, even if they bought every Bitcoin in existence, even if they had 1000 guys with AKs, no person could make Bitcoin print an extra BTC it wasn't intended to print. Or spend money that they didn't have the private key for. That's a money printer I can trust. It's faithfully done this for 15 years without a single hour of downtime, bank holiday, or being hacked and has a market cap that places it in the top 20 countries by GDP all while experiencing continual growth and adoption. But it's a fad right? That has no purpose? A scam? And on year 16 you'll finally be proven right?

makeasnek , vor 29 Tagen (Bearbeitet vor 29 Tagen)

Not really, and miners have fantastic financial incentive to remain honest. It's not altruism. In terms of the attack you are talking about (51% attack) Nobody can amass that much computing power and certainly not quietly, good luck acquiring enough ASICs to do it, let alone enough energy. You'd need your own fab for them which means designing your own ASICs (specialized devices for mining which are orders of magnitude more efficient than regular computers) or stealing designs for them. You're already into the billions of dollars right there with having your own fab. You can't buy even half of the processing power you'd need on the open market. A 51% attack is absolutely insanely expensive to do and logistically impossible at this point. And even if they could, the absolute best they can do is temporarily delay transactions or do a double-spend (spend the same BTC twice). They can't spend money they don't have the key for and they can't print extra Bitcoin as all other nodes would reject those transactions as invalid. Doing a double-spend makes no sense because the only benefit of doing so is getting something else in exchange for that BTC. If I'm going to trade say.. 1 billion dollars of oil for your BTC, I'm gonna wait for a few blocks of confirmation, even assuming I could transfer that much value that quickly. And whatever you trade has to be more valuable than the cost of a 51% attack which is probably north of a trillion dollars at this point depending on how you do the math. Plus, you know, the legal/extralegal/diplomatic/etc consequences of your actions depending on what you did the attack for.

The attack isn't a one time thing, your delay only works if you keep attacking. The second you stop, the chain reverse to the "true main chain". A 51% attack has never happened successfully against Bitcoin and never will at this point. Even at the nation-state scale, Bitcoin is tied in enough to international markets at this point that attacking it could easily cause an international bank run/financial collapse and massive diplomatic problems. And all you'd prove is that you wasted an inconceivably large amount of money to attack a system that picked back up right where it started a few minuted, hours, or days later. Because unless you intend to continue your attack and energy use forever, that's exactly what would happen. Meanwhile, you've pissed off every voter, hedge fund, state retirement fund, business, bank, national treasury, international organization, charity, and legislator who has any sort of exposure to Bitcoin.

Some back of the napkin math for anybody interested https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/18salm9/the_economics_of_a_hypothetical_51_attack_on/

makeasnek , vor 4 Monaten

25 years of inflationary currency constantly losing value and bank bailouts. No thanks.

makeasnek , vor 4 Monaten

K it solves this problem but hold onto your constantly devaluing fiat is you prefer. Your Euro's portion of the supply decreases every year. Your BTC's portion of the total supply stays the same every year. Your euro or BTC's value may change relative to other things, but since the Euro central bank targets an inflation rate of 2%, it's designed to lose at least that much value each year. And y'know, in recent years, has lost a lot more. Fractional reserve banking ensures there will need to be bank bailouts sometimes because banks are 'too big to fail'. You will pay for those with the value of your Euro while the rich people who own banks don't. Money printing doesn't hurt them, their wealth is tied up in assets, not cash. Money printing hurts poor and middle class, who have the greatest portion of their wealth in money. Bitcoin solves all of this. It solved it over a decade ago.

Most cryptos are scams. Bitcoin has kept to its original economic policy and enabled sending transactions across the globe 24/7 365 for 15 years without a single hour of downtime or hack. You can send transactions in less than a second for pennies in fees to anybody on planet earth with a cell phone and a halfway reliable internet connection. It has a market cap of 850 billion dollars, that's bigger than sweden's GDP. It does this for less than 1% of global electricity usage, mostly from renewables.

Bitcoin and crypto are not the same. This will be the year Bitcoin is finally dead though, right? Finally all those users moving trillions of dollars a year in value I mean crypto bros will get whats coming to them and the entire Bitcoin ecosystem will disappear overnight because it was based around nothing but hype.

makeasnek OP , vor 8 Monaten

It can be you. It doesn't have to be Big Corps or Government. It can be federated instances, it can be self-ownership of data, it can be E2E encrypted.