Subsidies are an incredible tool when used well, like when they funded a bunch of utility cooperatives that electrified rural US. Maybe you’re asking why we should because propping up the car industry when public transit and bike infrastructure should be subsidized instead, rather than challenging subsidies, though.

But don’t services like Discord forbid third party clients?

Me waiting for inflation to slowly increase Discord’s yearly revenue until it tips into the legally defined Gatekeeper™ status under the EU Digital Markets Act so they’d be playing with fire if they banned people for using interoperability apps.

Bidenomics is a mixture of things, but key among them is the recognition that MMT is already reality and doubling down on it to fund productive industries. Basically, government debt is not the same as household debt and strategic yet liberal usage of government debt can be very positive for an economy. MMT economists have made some pretty significant ‘discoveries’ that you can now find in the CORE macroeconomics textbooks in universities all over the world.

when we added socialist elements to capitalism (eg. social security, free healthcare, free education and so on) it didnt stop being capitalism.

This is a very black and white view of things, though. Norway is seen as capitalist, yet 2/3rds of Norway’s GDP is driven by its public sector, the government owns 30% of the domestic stock market, they have a massive government wealth fund that makes returns in hundreds of billions of dollars annually which they could singlehandedly fund UBI with, they apply Georgist taxes to natural resources (oil, hydro, aquafarms) to collectivize profits made off public land, 60% union density, 20% of housing is collectively owned (housing coops)…

Like, at what point do we call a country “socialist”?

(Not to call the US socialist, but Bidenomics might lean like 1% in that direction, and that’s my point - it’s going in a socialist direction if very slowly, and if we can maintain it)

IP is not a universal, objectively good thing. There are plenty of people who disagree with either a) how awful IP law is currently, or b) the mere existence of IP. You don’t even have to be a socialist like China supposedly is (although many would call it state capitalist) to be against IP, plenty of social democrats and libertarians are against it.

Intellectual Property is just a more abstract form of private ownership that wealthy people use to take advantage of us. Remember when they refused to give up COVID vaccine IP? They literally can’t sacrifice profits even during an insane pandemic that’s taking millions of lives. Remember when Canada, Sweden were kind of OK with piracy and then US politicians/lobbyists entered their country to ensure they would be cracking down on piracy? As a European I’m not happy that yet another form of welfare transfers (which piracy de facto is) was taken away just because the US isn’t content with being the wealthiest country on the planet - they need to maintain or even grow their obscene wealth.

Honestly, I could not give a rat’s ass about China “stealing” IP from literally the country that owns 30% of the world’s household wealth. More countries should follow suit so that we can break free from private IP holders delaying human technological and scientific progress.

My immediate concern with tags is descending into what Twitter has become: hashtags have been meaningless for a long while since there’s too much wrongly tagged stuff, different communities often use the same tag for different things, or there are ten tags all for the same thing. All of which means we’d need some form of moderator role that handles tags, and while I think it’s doable, it might take some trial and error to figure out how exactly we divide tags between moderators, how tags are proposed/created, and how tags are grouped/combined (e.g. food, foods).

For the record, government debt isn’t bad. What is bad, is how that debt is used. If you use it to fund productivity boosting infrastructure projects, then it pays for itself. If you use it to invest in successful companies in return for shares then it pays for itself… unlike when Tesla got a $400 million gov. loan and gave nothing in return - which meant tax payers had to take the hit when Solyndra (which got money from the same scheme) bankrupted itself into the toilet, tax payers took all the risk and got shafted both when a company failed and when one succeeded.

The Norwegian government, for example, owns 30% of the domestic stock market. One of many strategies the US government should probably be looking to if they want a healthier way to invest in companies.

Using debt to back tax cuts on the other hand, like Trump did according to this article, is an awful strategy.

When I was in kbin and could see who voted because voting metadata is visible there, almost always left wing comments (e.g. supportive of trans rights) received downvotes from someone on lemmy.world while the upvotes were from multiple, varied instances. So I’m not sure kbin is the biggest problem unless things have changed since then

How many takes do you think each of them needed before they all managed to look at the camera while talking, read the script appropriately, and move their head and hands enthusiastically?

Most people I see (in various forums) focus on the sexism part of this. It’s bad, but I think it’s worth highlighting the way Madison says they misled her and started controlling her digital side gigs outside of LTT, and just how bad working there was. Here are a few of the things she mentioned, but I recommend reading the full thread:

I had asked and been told during my interviews that I would be allowed to monetize my YouTube channel and be allowed to join Floatplane in exchange for shutting down my Patreon. ONCE I moved [from Arizona to to Vancouver] I was presented with an entirely new contract/handbook that I was not told existed.

Work from Home was a whole issue. If you took 3 minutes to answer a personal email, you could get in trouble. (happened to me) There is a system of micro-managing and a level of distrust because the amount of content they have to push out daily is so insane, no one gets a break.

I remember getting told off for taking my sick days, as in the days you’re entitled to. This no days off, “grindset” culminated in the real moment I realized I had to leave.

They also forced me to have them as my representation if I wanted to take any sponsors for my Twitch or YouTube channels. Originally I had been told, just make sure you okay things by us for non-compete issues. Then that changed when I moved to take the job.

I honestly think the only way Linus can redeem himself at this point (for me personally), is if he made the company into some sort of multi-stakeholder worker cooperative where the workers have an actual chunk of democratic say over the direction of the company. This is how it’s done across Europe already via works councils, e.g. in Norway 33% of the board (leadership) is represented by workers, while in other European countries it goes all the way up to 50%. It’s been made very clear that the current leadership are incompetent and need to actually listen to their workers.

It really makes the argument that CEOs and managers couldn’t be elected really weak. They’d probably be far more competent if they were chosen by workers once a year or so.

It gets worse since a lot of old people vote for heavy conservative parties

This is shifting in (at least) three countries - Norwegian, British, and American millennials aren’t turning to vote for the right wing parties, instead are keeping their trend of voting left. Other countries like Italy have the opposite problem, where even younger voters are starting to vote for the right wing parties. It’s kind of tangential but I think it’s good to point out that we’re seeing exceptions to this rule.

I get where you’re coming from, but I don’t think even more private property is the answer here. This is ultimately a question of economics - we don’t like that a) we’re being put out of jobs, and b) it’s being done without our consent / anything in return. These are problems that we can address without throwing even more monopolosation power into the equation, which is what IP is all about - giving artists a monopoly over their own content, which mostly benefits large media corporations, not independent artists.

I’d much rather we tackled the problem of automation taking our jobs in a more heads on manner via something like UBI or negative income taxes, rather than a one-off solution like even more copyright that only really serves to slow this inevitability down. You can regulate AI in as many ways as you want, but that’s adding a ton of meaningless friction to getting stuff done (e.g. you’d have to prove your art wasn’t made by AI somehow) when the much easier and more effective solution is something like UBI.

The consent question is something that needs a bit more of a radical solution - like democratising work, something that Finland has done to their grocery stores, the biggest grocery chains are democratically owned and run by the members (consumer coops). We’ll probably get to something like that on a large scale… eventually - but I think it’s probably a bigger hurdle than UBI. Then you’d be able to vote on what ways an organisation operates, including if or how it builds AI data sets.

I sympathize with artists who might lose their income if AI becomes big, as an artist it’s something that worries me too, but I don’t think applying copyright to data sets is a long term good thing. Think about it, if copyright applies to AI data sets all that does is one thing: kill open source AI image generation. It’ll just be a small thorn in the sides of corporations that want to use AI before eventually turning them into monopolies over the largest, most useful AI data sets in the world while no one else can afford to replicate that. They’ll just pay us artists peanuts if anything at all, and use large platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Artstation, and others who can change the terms of service to say any artist allows their uploaded art to be used for AI training - with an opt out hidden deep in the preferences if we’re lucky. And if you want access to those data sources and licenses, you’ll have to pay the platform something average people can’t afford.

Thanks for pointing out the difference in Germany with respect to copyright and author ownership/rights! That’s really interesting, and the foundation could be used to extend rights for artists vs the power corporations have over their works - e.g. no license exclusivity as that seems to go against the spirit of the law.