It is useful to have lots of stupid laws. It makes people feel powerless and frustrated. It means the police can always find excuses to persecute you.

The technicalities of the individual laws are not important. It’s the psychological effect of the whole body of laws on a people.

That seems to be normal over in the USA. The authorities are totally willing to do this whenever it suits them. But fortunately they are aware that more people have cameras these days.

The best explanation I have heard:

The USA had developed two new types of bomb, at huge expense and huge effort. Having built them, there was a desire to use both of them before the war ended.

And of course if you learn about Nightingale, you should learn about Semmelweiss too. He is a much more interesting historical hospital manager, and reading about him dispels the other big myth about Nightingale.

privacy has a material cost. physical walls aren’t cheap

I think you are right. Privacy is a commodity. It is a resource that people want, that has cost. So the increasingly wealthy can afford more of it. Yes, this has to be the right explanation.

lack of mixing between classes

Classes have to be separate. If there is too much wealth inequality, vendors want to maximise profit, so they adjust prices to what the wealthiest can afford, so the poor will starve. The poor have to move to poor areas. So in each area inequality is limited. There is a maximum regional inequality, before people starve. Think of gentrification.

The rich also choose to isolate themselves from the poor. I guess that’s to get access to higher quality amenities.

i think a certain amount of what you see is

I guess so. smaller number of rich people = less anonymity for the rich. More ostentatious lifestyles are conspicuous. These go against the general trend of wealth = privacy. I didn’t think of this.

if i were pressured to provide a definition of wealth

This is also a good perspective. Wealth is security. You can buy or accumulate security. Security against nature or people or death. I see now that my privacy argument is just a special case of conventional economic theory. The “security” angle is an equally interesting special case.

Yes. And how consciousness is distinct from intelligence. You can test if someone is intelligent, but can never know if something is conscious.

I guess the signs of consciousness could be

• playing games. Bees play games.
• curiosity about things that aren’t important to any practical task
• making art
• signs of boredom or depression or joy. Goats mourn their dead.

But it must be easy to make an intelligent machine that convincingly mimics consciousness.

Thanks. I have made many feature requests and you always consider them seriously (but usually reject them).

I should do one of those things.

Although there are many flaws, and we do complain, Lemmy is still the best (or least dysfunctional) forum in existence. So yous must be doing something right.

Bitcoin should have led to global currency reform, for a start. That failed. It could still lead to energy reform and other important societal progress. But regulation and other factors are killing it.

In general we are open for constructive feedback

My one big fear right now is that a mod could delete my words, and they would be lost forever.

Sometimes I write long essays here. They are ideas that I think are important and original. I write them so people will be able to read them many years into the future.

It’s important that anything deleted by a mod or an admin can be saved by the creator afterwards.

I’d argue it’s necessary that nothing can ever be fully deleted, if you want people to ever write anything important here.

That’s why historically most of the most important world-change essays were written to newspapers. Once a newspaper is published, it is available forever. It can never be expunged.

That’s the defence of the “slur filter” that everyone can agree on. It’s harmless because it does almost nothing. It has no real benefit or cost.

The people who say it deters fascists - it just doesn’t hold water.#

Ideological freedom encourages nasty people. And restrictions encourage thoughtless people.

You can go on notabug and ignore the crazy psychos and chat with the creative people.

You can go on reddit and find endless people with no independent thought, repeating things and not listening to reach other.

Lemmy is in the middle. But IMO that’s not an objective good thing, it’s a preference.

You have obnoxious people on all sides of the debate, including people who avoid listening to foreign ideas by labeling the other sides.

To be honest, nobody knows how the culture would be different under a different sweet of rules, especially the people who act most confident about it.

I’m always the first to start these threads.

But it’s good to remember, we chose Lemmy over sites like notabug because it works better. Some good decisions by the devs created a good website, enabling good discussions, which you just don’t see elsewhere.

Some things like the “slur filter” seem sketchy, but you have to give the devs the benefit of the doubt. They clearly know a couple of things about forum design.

At the same time, it’s important to talk about this stuff. Better ideas usually come from debate.