Or we can just implement a wealth tax like any reasonable nation.

Yeah, the problem here is the implementation: you and I and most people here would benefit a little from a higher tax on billionaires, enough to motivate us to send a letter to our Congressional representatives and send a few bucks to whichever campaigning politicians promise to do it.

Billionaires, in the meantime, stand to lose millions, or even tens of millions of dollars. Enough that it makes sense for them to start PACs, schmooze, and even bribe the Congressional representatives who’d be in charge of raising taxes. So even though there are hundreds of them and millions of us, they have greater means and motivation.

Unless I’m mistaken, a regent is someone appointed to rule temporarily, e.g., if the rightful king or queen is still a child, a regent can be appointed to rule until they grow up.

Maybe a non-binary ruler can be “Emperox”?

I’m pretty sure I saw that headline, with X = Obama or Elizabeth Warren or someone. Then it got shot down because… Idunno, they probably would have blown it all on rent and food and car repairs instead of Job Creation.

Some years ago, employees sued Amazon because the company had a lengthy security scan when people left, to prevent theft. Apparently it could take half an hour to go through, and they argued that this was unpaid overtime.

They lost, which seems like bullshit: as far as I can tell, the sane way to look at it is, if you’re obligated to do what the company tells you and go where the company says, then you’re on the job and should be paid for it. Once you’re out the door, you can choose whether you want to go home or go to a bar or just sit on the sidewalk; you’re not on the clock and you’re not getting paid.

If the company wants you to work 8 hours in the warehouse, then spend half an hour in the security scan, then you’re doing company business for 8.5 hours.

Yeah, there’s a lot to be said for letting the hosting be done by people who know what they’re doing.

How can something sarong feel so right?

Minix.

But then I wised up and switched to FreeBSD.

This was what made me push my mom to go out and get a smartphone to replace her old flip phone. (That, and the fact that she had no idea how to send or receive text messages, or check voice mail.)

It’s right there in Matthew 15:

22 A Canaanite woman from that vicinity came to him, crying out, “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me! My daughter is demon-possessed and suffering terribly.” 23 Jesus did not answer a word. So his disciples came to him and urged him, “Send her away, for she keeps crying out after us.” 24 He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”

People act as though Jesus was a paragon of virtue, but even according to the Bible, he could be a right bastard sometimes.

In fairness, it’s pretty smart, IMHO: one of the big difficulties in getting a social site started is getting a critical mass of people together to sustain conversation. Facebook already has plenty of Instagram users, so giving them all access to Threads seems like a pretty good way to bootstrap Threads.

Then there’s the cloud: “Oh, crap. I have a typo in a config file. I guess I’ll destroy the machine and set up a whole new one!”

The algorithm decides what you read and how you engage, even if it’s negative content or something bad for your mental health.

This may be the wrong place to post this, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while. “Algorithm” isn’t a dirty word. And in fact, IMHO Mastodon could benefit from a few alternatives to its most-recent-first algorithm.

For instance, I might want to see posts by emergency services in my area first, followed by posts by friends, and posts by a bot that posts a cat picture every minute further down. Or someone might be going off on a rant, and I’d like to turn their firehose of posts down to a trickle for a few hours. Or maybe I’d like Mastodon to just stop showing me anything after a few hours of activity, to encourage me to take a break.

The reason Twitter’s, Facebook’s, algorithms are evil is that they encourage you to do things you wouldn’t want to do, and because they show you content you don’t want. Not because they’re algorithms.

In a perfect world, every user on every instance would be able to choose how posts are presented. But that may be too computationally expensive, especially for large instances, especially when you start trying to figure out things like the mood of a post. But maybe each instance could decide which algorithm it wants to use, and user can migrate from one instance to another, depending whether they like how things are presented.