-The US has had a lot of success by letting businesses run pretty free. This has produced some of the largest and most powerful companies on the planet.
-The conservative party traditionally has been suspicious of a powerful, centralized government
-In the US, there is a common thread of "government workers are impossible to fire" as well as a common thread of "government moves at a snail's pace".
In light of just that, there are many people who would prefer that healthcare is run by a private industry, as private insurers are enormous companies in the US. Everyone knows Blue Cross Blue Shield, Aetna, or Kaiser Permanente. Many people give a benefit of the doubt that companies are doing things efficiently. Additionally, health insurance companies in the US have a requirement to spend a certain % of their revenue each year on medical care, and will sometimes send out small refunds when they simply cannot suppress costs in certain other regions of the company enough to keep their spending at the right rates.
Beyond this, states may provide additional benefits, and many do (some with the help of federal funding, even). You may find someone in one state where they are suffering greatly, while someone in an identical economic situation in another state is not suffering at all. It's easy to convince the first man to vote for a better healthcare situation. It's hard to convince the latter.
I could go on for ages, but this is getting long. There are like a billion reasons.
> there are many people who would prefer that healthcare is run by a private industry,
The grammar is a little ambiguous around this, but you seem to be claiming that this is a majority position. It isn't. Single payer polls over 50% basically every time it's tested (the exception being some spun partisan reframings you occasionally see pushed), and has for decades.
The people who vote are old. The median age of primary voters is 65, regular voters 54. This is why you get a gerontocracy - old people vote for their interests, and young people don't vote. It's also probably why the median age of politicians has risen to 58 and 66 in the house and senate, respectively. With an 80-year-old president.
The solution is to have both a) mandatory voting and b) a voting holiday. This is done in many other democracies around the world, and it works. Personally I would prefer term limits and age limits for congress, the president, and federal judges. Diane Feinstein, Ruth Bater Ginsberg died in office. Mitch McConnell is working on it. We have age limits for lots of professions that require high performance - political leadership should not be an exception. But of course to make any of these changes young people have to vote, but they're mostly busy being poor and doomscrolling to block out the pain.
Easy. No corporate social media networks. Hobbyists run local light social networks (such as forums) again (like they do currently; see Mastodon, Lemmy), with super efficient SSR HTML that is cheap to host.
> Yes it does. Hobbyists are willing to spend their own money, hence their blog doesn't need ads.
Until it is unsustainable which is the majority of cases due to no funding.
> Wikipedia is donation supported.
The majority of websites are not as big as Wikipedia, let alone having donations in the tens of millions.
The GP talks about Mastodon which hobbyists run and users sign up to instances to have their social identity on.
toot.community, mastodon.cloud and many others are closing down this month due to no funding.
And even some organisations don't want to run instances due to it being expensive. (1.)
Even mozilla.social shut down.
Sure, these services wouldn't run ads, but they can't charge users either which leaves donations as the only way to fund it, and 9.9/10 times it doesn't work.
Using Wikipedia as an example to prove a point about donations makes no sense for everyone else who also contribute to the open web for free.
I'll concede that it doesn't work out a lot of the time. This is not very different from for-profit websites. Also, your number of 9.9/10 is probably pulled out of your ass. I'm note sure what the real number is, but I'd wager it's lower than 9.9/10.
I'm not sure how old you are, but in the early 2000s there were so many community forums; most of them survived. Even if it doesn't, the community can go to another host at some point.
For every Wikipedia or Thunderbird that gets millions in donations you get thousands of others that cannot live off sparse donations alone.
And since you are lazy to read the article:
"After three years of running our Fediverse server, we're shutting it down. Not because we've given up on the Fediverse, but because it isn't safe or sustainable enough for a community org like ours to run a server on a shoestring...
...Since 2024, all of our core funding and funding bids have fallen away. The server dwindled to three active users, and the operating costs and effort of keeping it maintained were no longer worth it for our economy of scale. It was a bigger cost, and more effort, than the rest of our hosting put together."
This is one of many examples of hobbyist / community run instances of what you describe, as donations didn't even work for them and they shut down.
Remember, they cannot do ads or subscriptions, so donations are their only way to be sustainable.
> I'm not sure how old you are, but in the early 2000s...
Spare us your fallacious "back in the old days" argument, we aren't there anymore, we are talking about now.
The issue they are having is moderation, not technical costs. This is the same issue sites like Reddit have. In the article, they even mention that private social media sites use moderation centres from poor countries. That is abhorrent. Not sure why you are advocating for this?
> Spare us your fallacious "back in the old days" argument, we aren't there anymore, we are talking about now.
From my perspective, what is the point of continuing this conversation if you won't address an example in the past where my argument worked?
> The issue they are having is moderation, not technical costs. This is the same issue sites like Reddit have. In the article, they even mention that private social media sites use moderation centres from poor countries. That is abhorrent. Not sure why you are advocating for this?
You go an admit that you haven't read the article and then you knowingly make a strawman argument saying I support "social media sites using moderation centres from poor countries"
Where did I even explicitly say I supported this? You just made that up and you know it.
The argument is about funding without ads, those that run hobbyist federated social media like Mastodon cannot use Ads or subscriptions, so they need to use donations (which is unsustainable)
Even if you throw in moderation, isn't even worth it if you're running a costly Mastodon instance and no donations are coming in.
> From my perspective, what is the point of continuing this conversation if you won't address an example in the past where my argument worked?
Because they simply don't work today and at scale. We have new problems today that didn't exist in the past.
> You go an admit that you haven't read the article and then you knowingly make a strawman argument saying I support "social media sites using moderation centres from poor countries"
To clear it up, I read the article before my most recent reply to you. The very article that you linked mentions that private social networks use moderation centres from poor countries. Did you read the article you linked to me before sending it?
> Because they simply don't work today and at scale. We have new problems today that didn't exist in the past.
So your response is just to throw your hands up and say "won't work". Buddy, let me tell you, we could squeeze out a lot more performance to run social networks if we needed to. The hard part is the moderation, as you correct identified. But private-run social networks use questionable labour to moderate anyway (as per the article you linked).
In the past running a hobbyist social media worked, it can work again.
Mastodon isn't a good example. It's written in Ruby and serves up a heavy React application. A light version of it could be written in something much faster, and served up on something much smaller.
You haven't provided a coherent argument to suggest otherwise. Goodbye and thanks for the discussion.
The problem is the creepy big-data-advert-ocracy might propagate that scarlet-letter in ways that are unfair an unpredictable.
So a throwaway account for reading Reddit (even as it decays) might lead to an totally unrelated account you do care about getting unfairly suspended, or the MonopolyCloudFlareBot "helping" your bank starts rejecting your IP/browser-fingerprint, etc.
This would worry me less if we had laws that make it easy to demand accountability and fixes, but we don't. (Not much in the US, and in the EU efficacy is still questionable.)
We should be careful to distinguish between "everything goes back to normal" versus "they you move your money to some other bank."
Anywho, you're right that the final example is more-likely to be resolved, thanks to a formal customer relationship backed up by decades of law plus physical locations... but what about Reddit, Facebook, Amazon, Google, etc. where they sometimes don't even have any remotely responsive support system or nearby physical branch?
Basically I'm saying we have some Kafkaesque stuff out there, it isn't sensible or fair, and if someone wants to tweak the nose of the beast they should at least consider the range of what could go wrong.
That doesn't mean that it will actually be resolved. And do you really want to be doing that with everyone you ever do business with for the rest of your life?
Not currently, but we are going to add some features in the future to allow users to report courses that have content that needs to be reviewed for false hoods or any other reasons. In the meantime, if you do see this feel free to email us and we can address it.
Odin... technically not a scripting language, and haven't used it that much. But if compile times are good enough and hot reloading works, might worth a try. Though I think manual memory management can be antithetical when churning out gameplay code quickly (or when you're working with game designers with minimal background in programming)
Thanks. I know that there are things that can be done to bring down the compile speed of Rust, like splitting a project into sub crates. But I agree with the post that you linked. Game dev, especially UI and game mechanics benefits from a high degree of polish. You just can't realistically get that with compile times in the 10s of seconds. The most polished game I've played, Balatro, was built using Lua and Love2D specifically because of the iteration speed that they made possible.
You just reminded me of Star Wars Roleplaying on Habbo Hotel when I was a preteen circa 2006. Habbo Hotel was basically an IRC and MUD with user-created hotel rooms. The Sith and Jedi orders were popular "rooms" in Habbo, and would often rise to the top and bring an influx of users– mostly teenagers.
But they were clearly gated, like a nightclub. There were those who were "in" the Jedi Temple or Sith academy, and those who were out. This creates a sort of exclusivity, and people would naturally want to join the Jedi Temple or Sith Academy. They'd have to agree to a set of rules written on a sticky note on the room's wall, and dress the part.
Sometimes all hell would break loose when a Sith Warrior or Inquisitor would come and attack the Jedi Temple. They were legally allowed to do this, as long as people were online to witness it.
It was really interesting how they battled each other with just text chat. They had specified rules where you'd have to type out five action lines (minimum of 5 words) after an attack in order to maime or kill someone. At any point in those five lines, the defender could use 2 lines to repel the attack. To add a complication, the actions had to be coherent with each other.
So it ended up being a lot of;
Sith: Jedi filth! Hiding in your temple, while the universe suffers. I will free them of you!
Jedi: Your oppression ends here, Sith!
Sith: swings lightsaber towards your body
Sith: it connects with your neck
Sith: it cuts through the muscle
Jedi: swings lightsaber at lightsaber (illegal: 4 words)
Jedi: it parries your lightsaber away
Sith: it connects through the bone (illegal: parried)
Of course, these would often devolve into long OOC (out of character) arguments, and this drama would bring in even more of a crowd. It was chaotic, and a whole bunch of fun.
It wasn't just RP fighting though. They would have all the Jedi initiates wear "robes" and hang out in rooms decorated like a Jedi temple. Then the Jedi Masters would conduct lessons and we'd have to memorise the Jedi code.
I still remember the Sith code. I had to memorise it and recite it at random times to the Sith Lords. When I graduated from that, I ended up teaching it myself to several acolytes.
"Peace is a lie, there is only passion. Through passion, I gain strength. Through strength, I gain power. Through power, I gain victory. Through victory, my chains are broken. The Force shall free me."
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