People have freedom. This includes the freedom to run a Lemmy instance that they own, on hardware they own, and administrate it however they see fit.

I would say it is extremely natural to get a fairly diverse array of different ways to run things, depending on the opinions and feelings of each individual owner.

Being private individuals operating their own private property for whatever reason they feel like, (usually nerdy tech reasons in our case) none of them are under any requirement to be nice or accepting of anyone. It is 100% their choice to operate however they see fit, within the laws of their own country. (which can be anywhere on Earth that has internet)

It is odd to me that people feel they should have some sort of right to go onto someone else’s property and say whatever they feel like. That’s just not how anything works anywhere. You are on their digital property by open invitation, and that invitation can be revoked at any time they feel like.

I would overall dislike giving him one. However, I would honor his wishes to the extent that I would offer a compromise and offer to get him one by a certain not-too-distant birthday if he meets a set of conditions for getting good grades, or some other beneficial goal. He’s just getting to that age where he deserves some give-and-take.

Even then, though, I would let him know there will be limitations on its usage, such as no going to bed with it. (no cell phone starting an hour before bed time or something, it goes into some drawer in the common spaces of the house, maybe no cell phone during meals) Because of your compromise and deal, you should have enough leverage that he will not be too upset about comparatively minor restrictions like this.

The compromise won’t make either of you completely happy, but that can be a lesson in and of itself. For your part, I would try to look for silver linings, like despite cell phones being linked to certain negative health outcomes, these can be mitigated, and with information technology progressing so rapidly, there are potentially benefits to learning how to navigate it fluently at a young age.

or maybe “national security adviser,”

lol

Just fyi, the Israelis use their own Merkava main battle tanks, not the Abrams. If I remember right, it’s more heavily armored, with a shorter cruising range.

Heresy in the 17th century actually wasn’t as big a deal as it was in the past. This was a couple centuries after the Protestant Reformation shattered the Catholic hold on Europe, leading to decades of war in which millions died, eventually resulting in the shitloads-of-denominations we see today, where almost all of them are “heretics” of some sort to all the other ones. I mean, modern day Mormonism isn’t really even a monotheistic religion anymore. This all has its roots in the breaking of Catholic domination back in the early 1500s.

Digital feudalism… I suppose that does make it easier to call up large armies of peasant levies when you need to wage an information war.

Also just fear of going out of business by alienating any potential customers. When your revenues have been steadily dropping for decades now and it’s starting to look like you’re going the way of Kodak, it becomes more tempting to pander to the middle and try to avoid pissing as many people off as possible. This in turn means you can’t speak the truth anymore.

lol I would absolutely check out this community. Idea is brilliant, honestly.

That’s a region. It’s also not what you said, you said rust bowl. You know bowls and belts are different things, right? Belts hold your pants up, bowls are dishes you eat food out of.

You read too much bullshit. The US is the second-largest manufacturer on the planet, after China. We have quite a lot of industry still. Nor was “rust bowl” ever a term, which you’d know if you were an American.

If Russian production is so plentiful, where are all the T-90s? Seems to me a major producer of materiel wouldn’t be needing to field its T-64’s in a modern conflict.

… remember the Rust Bowl? lol You should do your homework a little better.

Now I will agree that it takes years, absolutely. Not decades though, which is what you said earlier. Also, fortunately, the process of scaling up armaments production was already started, about two years ago.

Scratch? No, not even close. A reduction and an elimination are not the same thing.

Decade? Probably not, unless you’re trying to spin up domestic production from nothing.

Few years maybe. Depends who you buy them from and how developed their industry is. S Korea does a lot of artillery production. US has its fair share if you want jets. Everyone’s got small arms, trucks, stuff like that.

You see, weapons do not grow on trees. Instead, you need to allocate resources, to either construct them yourself, or purchase them from other people who do. This is usually done with money.

Hm. That’s a good question. It’d be up to that specific instance owner to take action, which not all would. Though even without an applicable rule, I think the transparency alone would cut down on the behavior more than people think.

The thing about any stalking and revenge downvotes is that everybody would be able to immediately see exactly what was happening, due to the added transparency. Rules could very easily be made against this. So, when I see this argument it strikes me as a bit of a red herring.

What I think is really going on, is some people want to be able to stalk and downvote bomb without being recognized, which the current system allows.

… how many quail eggs are needed to make a decent sized omelet anyway? A dozen?

Old news, but still very cool.

Pretty much summed it up.

I think they’re just reading the room. If he goes full-on authoritarian, do your shareholders benefit more from you getting in his way or licking his boots?

His first term there was a sense that he might shake things up, but they would eventually return to some semblance of balance of power. This second term, people still wonder deep down whether Trump might try to pull a S Korean style martial law declaration at some point, and perhaps meet greater success.