Notices by Strypey (strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz), page 58

@jcbrand the countries with the strongest and most consistent economic growth *and* best standards of living are also those with least inequality of both income and wealth, like the Scandanavian social democracies. Overall global poverty has reduced because the BRICS block either abandoned "market-driven"monetarist policy in the early 2000s, or like China, never went there. State-regulated mixed economy policy has reduced poverty in those highly-populated countries. (2/2)
@Wolf480pl

@jcbrand
Fact is that
>worldwide extreme poverty has gone down by ~60%, not up

.. has nothing to do with capitalism in general, or "market-based reforms" in particular. Look at the so-called "Asian Tigers" and Latin American countries. Their economies all had a brief boost after being "structurally adjusted" by the IMF and then tanked. The #GFC was the same inherent flaws playing out in the industrialized countries, leading to massive increases in poverty. (1/2)
@Wolf480pl

@RandomDamage you have drifted a long way from the topic. The biocidal nature of radioactive waste is well known. If you want to make the extraordinary claim that it isn't, let's see some evidence. Same with the absurd claim that wind power kills people.
@Wolf480pl

@macgirvin this is both disingenuous and unnecessarily adversarial. You said there are RSS feeds in Zap that can be followed. The UI suggestion is to provide a 'follow' button that facilitates users doing so. Please explain how this superficial UI change would destroy your network security, but following the feeds using more awkward means would not. Again, to be clear, we're talking about *one-way* public traffic out of Zot, so spam is irrelevant to this discussion.

@vik what's the polar opposite of refreshing? This kind of fatalistic cynicism is that times 1000 ;)

@Wolf480pl it's in the audio. The text there is just the cliff notes.

"The most problematic aspect of Facebook’s power is Mark’s unilateral control over speech. There is no precedent for his ability to monitor, organize and even censor the conversations of two billion people."
- #ChrisHughes

Exactly. Which is why the 'it's only censorship when the goverment does it' line doesn't hold water. FB is now the world's biggest unelected government.

Correction, FB acquired *Instagram*. SnapChat is not part of the FB empire (yet ;)

For "market-based accountability" to work, a minimum condition is that users have to be able to vote with their feet, and take their data and "social graph" (social network of "friends" and "followers") to another platform. It works best, as with email providers and cell phone carriers, if users can move to (or try out) another platform, while still being able to communicate and share with their friends on the old platform. Even the #fediverse only does the second one, not the first. (2/2)

But I'm not sure Hughes fully understands the problem either. Using anti-trust action to break FB into 5 smaller companies, is like breaking a cancerous tumour into 5 smaller ones. Before long, one would become dominant and either re-merge with the others, as FB has with acquisitions like SnapChat, WhatsApp, Oculus Rift. Or drive them out of business, the same way it did with Orkut, Friendster, Bebo, MySpace, G+, and dozens of others. (1/2)

@alcinnz yeah, that seems to happen every time I post a link to a blog piece here. I'm wondering it it's a #SlashdotEffect? I really need to pull finger and follow Sean's example with #WeDistribute. Get the #Disintermedia blog onto a self-hosted platform that serves directly to the #fediverse.

Make no mistake, FB and the rest of the corporate tech giants will do their best to make any internet rules - national or international - work in their favour, and make life hard for smaller players. Just as they have with the #EUCopyrightDirective. But it's also an opportunity for tech activists and civil society groups to do the opposite, and get rules on things like #Dataportability in #OpenFormats, that empower users to transition from the#DataFarms to community-scale #EthicalTech platforms.

#RogerMcNamee makes some good points about the carefully crafted gaps in FB's regulation proposals:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/02/mark-zuckerberg-fix-the-internet

... but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. The internet is a global medium, like the telephone or postal networks. It does make sense to have international treaties on user rights and internet regulation, so the operators of every website, big or small, can follow one clear set of rules that apply in every jurisdiction where the net can be accessed.