The USA was designed for minority rule since forever.

Peaceful contact with aliens would tell us something fundamental about the nature of ethics and the universe.

Advanced aliens do not need any material resources or real estate from humanity. We can already interpolate that from existing science. So that is not the reason why there are here. And we know they haven’t exterminated us already centuries ago.

Instead it would tell that we share some fundamental values like curiosity and diversity with alien species - as long as they evolved through natural selection and had to raise and teach and love their children. As long as they had to find productive ways to work together as a people.

We would realize that we are not alone and that we are being judged. That we can’t just endlessly bulldoze the galaxy and that there are limits to acceptable behavior. Because there is always someone more powerful that could smash us, but they already didn’t. That certain ethical ideals are fundamental properties emerging from the universe itself.

It would be a powerful counter to the current nihilistic materialism, that we need to start working to improve our culture.

Yeah the book has an amazing depiction of a truly alien mind that is fundamentally different because of how it functions.

True. I think about it now as a kind of physics problem. You have political energy measured in dollars on each side. Volunteers to help bring the political message across for free can be converted into dollars too. There are a lot of people concerned or outright scared out of their minds about environmental concerns like climate change. One sight has multiple orders of magnitude more political energy to spend. For example on counter measures, or boosting extreme vegan voices to cause disruption, advertising or media stories or think tanks or lobbyists. And the “technology” to manage this political energy is rapidly advancing too. So no amount of “this is the right / wrong choice” argument is going to change anything. There is only power.

You’d need to grow the third party / greens by having them become a viable party in local elections and state elections first. The greens have failed to do that. Which means they have no chance except to spoil the election.

I think it’s a problem with VPNs

Yeah. I mean theoretically you could use all the other nodes, similar to Tor or I2P to relay and temporarily store chat messages and room states. I mean that is basically those networks except maybe you route a package multiple ways and mark them for late delivery. And you measure the speed and latency of nodes so better connected nodes get more workload and act as temporary floating servers. All via DHT.

Then theoretically there should be no performance difference between server based and P2P chats. But it’s even more complicated. I don’t even need a chat like that, really not at all. But I think it should exist already.

There is Tox which is P2P and encrypted and basically does this, but it’s not that popular.

Basically with P2P things get complicated still having fixed rooms that you can find in a list or send offline messages, presumably using other nodes as temporary relays.

This uses free VPNs? And even port forwarding?

What I think is missing is a kind of signed database version control system. So you make a list of data (maybe just a markdown table) and you sign it wiht a private key and put that in a DHT / distributed hashtable. Then people can use that and you can update the database / list. People can also fork this list, add their own stuff and distribute it as their own and signed with their own private key. And you could have pull requests and merge back good additions. All without requiring proper servers but possibly benefiting from being hosted on a seedbox.

And of course a simple client to find and view such lists.

Ideally you’d have some template that describes typical metadata for a kind of distribute movie database, but also books, subtitles, songs, albums, articles, scientific papers, fonts. But you can also fork the templates and extend them. So you might have a perfectly legit open source database of movies with links to what legit streaming service is selling it, and then an extra template that extends that with magnet releases.

I have never seen something like this though, my puny brain has trouble imagining the technical hurdles. Maybe this could just be done with a simple version control system client. I think torrent V2 also has some extensions that allow update-able torrents (which some FUD confused with this being the default). Or maybe it’s that proper web pages allow people to make money through advertising.

Hmm, sounds like the P2P version has been paused for the forseeable future:

https://arewep2pyet.com
https://matrix.org/blog/2020/06/02/introducing-p2p-matrix
https://matrix.org/blog/2023/09/matrix-2-0

Good argument but if the guy uploading it would be in another country this law couldn’t be enforced. Basically it’s an unenforceable standard. To insist on enforcing it could lead to draconian measures.

The article mentions upload filters but that then again create a large burden. This burden requires more work or more money. Which leads to a centralization or monopolization of the internet. Which would be in the interest of social media corporation who can shoulder the burden.

In the future the ethical issues of porn could be solved by investing in and creating a near perfect AI porn model that can serve all our degenerate needs WITHOUT requiring humans to take their clothes off. Basically ethically sourced synthetic “vegan” porn that is created for your on demand in your own home. And then you can ban all the real porn because the demand for it will plummet. Of course there will still be people who get off on the abuse instead of on the fantasy.

Ironically, someone have a non-paywall link?

There is no socialism on social media

Ah normal people. My apologies

No I don’t use facebook or twitter. But it’s more for personal disgust than for morals. Nothing you or I or ten thousand lemmings do or not do will change the rising domination of social media on our civilization. Same as our individual choices won’t impact climate change. It’s the same illusion that only serves to prevent actual action against a serious threat. Not even thinking or talking about possible solutions. Corporate control of the means of communication is amoral, and accepting it is problematic.

Maybe I’m wrong and network effects can be overcome through a well crafted alternative like mastadon. But capital translates into power for marketing, development, articles and regulation or even legislation.

Normal people have friends and family and would like to use social media to stay in touch with them. There are network effects that make it practically impossible to switch. This is not something that can be done with the power of love and well informed agent in the marketplace.

One solution would be to nationalize facebook and other social media and turn them into public utility coops that are run democratically by giving the workers that work there a vote for who and how they should be managed. And give the users a vote.

Everything else is just fantasy. Facebook is forever. You’d need many billions in marketing and advertising to get enough people to switch. And then it will be the same shit.

Unless of course Elon Musk buys facebook, then it will be trash in less than a year.

See here The Google antitrust ruling could be an existential threat to the future of Firefox | Financials show 86% of Mozilla’s revenue came from the agreement keeping Google as Firefox’s default search engine - lemm.ee

Sure. But loosing the money to fund development surely won’t help, will it? My point is that there is a real danger here. There are other forces at play which is why you have the chrome dominance already. Long term firefox will fall behind if not maintained. There really needs to be a push to finance firefox or alternatives.

Or imagine if more and more websites “require” some new web protocol to prevent ad blocking, or use of DMCA against browsers or addons altering websites as “web apps”. This is another problem that cannot be solved through individual responsibility.

But Firefox is about to loose it’s funding because google is a monopoly lol