In this case (and probably lots of others) the amount of resources needed to make an impact on the problem means that it would never work if the funding was decided through a democratic process. As soon as a committee of people are deciding to where to put resources they decide to share it between a number of worthy causes, and that means none of them get the bulk of what's available. If you have something that's percieved to be a relatively small problem by people it isn't directly impacting every day, that needs a lot of resources to fix it, then it's never getting done.
(Tech-related side note: This is why companies build mountains of tech debt unless there's a former engineer running the show.)
the reason your encouraged approach tends to produce poor results, is that you increase the distance between the decisions that need to be made and the people who understand how to make the decision or whether a decision is even valuable to make.
it is basically an unsustainable structure. there's not much value to replacing one structure which you might think is unsustainable with something equally or less sustainable that also produces worse results anyway.
another issue is that it can dilute responsibility and someone will take more assertive control anyway which further reduces the quality of decision making. someone still has to enact and enforce the decisions, so whoever does the enacting has to obey and whoever does the enforcing has to enforce the right thing. it's easy to end up with a bunch of people influencing things for their own reasons which have nothing to do with maximizing the production of good results.
Poe's law? Can't really tell, with the internet these days. Things are so polarized that people talk from and to their tribe and the message is often understood to be obvious.
Anyways, in case you're serious: there is a famous thought experiment about healthcare: should a hospital administrator approve a complex and expensive treatment to save a 7 year old girl, with a 100% success probability? Or more to the point: is approving this a "good" act, or a "bad" act? The unintuitive answer is that it depends on the opportunity cost long term, and the math is far from obvious. The quick answer is often "not even wrong" - it simply ignores a lot of facts down the line. The same cash can be used very boringly to do maintenance or to buy a piece of life saving equipment.
And it gets very dirty very fast. The easy version is pay for the operation vs buy an MRI machine - in this case you can at least compare apples to apples, if you squint - an MRI machine also saves lives. But if the alternative is renovating a waiting room, you're really off the deep end. Because doing it one time it's an obvious decision: just save the life. And it's not even bad as a general policy: have waiting rooms be a bit dusty, if this means spending more money on treatments. But... how much to cut, exactly? And then you have second order effects: throwing a moderate amount to waiting rooms can make them look a lot better, while having it linger in disrepair can make people actually avoid the hospital (if they can't even paint the walls, why would you trust them with your life?).
And all of this is assuming the hospital admin actually has mental bandwidth and latitude to make this decision. In practice, he's looking at the kid's mom when he has to turn her down because the operation money would pay for renovating a whole hospital wing. And the mom is an influencer with a large following.
> democratize the means of production
This means having humans make such decisions, and even worse, it means a committee or a mob will make such decisions. Zero skin in the game, all vibes and feelings. Some girls will get saved, but I've seen how hospitals look in such a system, and it's not good.
To note: the US system may or may not be "democratized", but it managed to have exactly the same flaws - most decisions are taken by humans in a bureaucracy. The government simply wrote the rules then outsourced the bureaucracy and the blame to private corporations.
I am really fond of countries creating public wealth by supporting art like this. Imagine how beautiful everything around of us could be if more were to create art instead, e.g. denying people their cancer therapy at an insurance. I yearn for that future…
It seems to me that MS has started to vibe code Windows. It's so surreal that they managed to kill the shutdown program. I mean: this 1 simple program worked for 30 years no probs doctors hated this trick but idk
And hence under no circumstances one should ship a code that just doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do in the first place, we know the cloud doesn’t use it much, but c’mon it’s a critical part of the system.
That still does stuff like unmounting filesystems (which can take a minute with snap, if they haven't fixed it), you can go further with the (rather unsafe) SysRq key "o", which tells the kernel to shut down without any preparation.
I've had the opposite problem with laptops. There's like 3 different menus to configure sleep-on-idle but none of them actually let you disable it even if they claim they do.
They don't even share the same state and can be set to conflicting values, with the oldest looking one usually taking priority.
Disabling screen timeout is even worse since there's additionally the screensaver settings to muddy the waters.
What makes it propaganda? I haven’t read any of Ayn Rands work but have had some exposure to objectivism its general axioms seem to be pretty consistent.
You'll find a consistent set of axioms in most bigger theories. The question is if their model maps well onto the real world (which is fuzzy and inconsistent) or if it needs a lot of "if we only do a little more of X, it might finally work".
My problem with Ayn Rand is that she starts the description of her world view with agreeable statements like "A is A and therefore one can see truth (or draw objective conclusions) just by looking" (which disregards the problem of missing information). But then goes on to draw a moral from that idea which basically negates the whole point of objectivity by making the subject the center of the world. But that's not yet what makes her work propaganda.
What makes her work propaganda is that she, from there "induced" that, since there's only the individual that matters, it is only moral that one tries to maximize one's own happiness and that a fully capitalist society without any regulations whatsoever were we worship the then-to-be-godlike individual entrepreneur would be the only way to achieve said happiness. This also implies that while is is only moral to strive for one's own happiness, there is only a certain kind of individual who actually deserves it. The rest is there to worship or just be screwed over and over again, because there can be only a few winners.
So we've come a long way from making seemingly agreeable statements to justifying a system that dehumanizes most of its subjects (pun not intended) and makes them nothing more but a fleshy mass to the disposal of a select few winners. And that's just what propaganda does: drawing conclusions from a seemingly agreeable standpoint in a way that seems to be logical, but in its essence ignores the fuzziness and incompleteness of the world for the sake of some sense of purity. Don't be fooled by that. There's always complexity hiding somewhere. And while A might seem to be A, you just don't know, how large the hidden b is, yet.
In practice, I'd recommend to look for mental tools that help you analyze but always leave room to deal with the inconsistency of reality. Outside of formal science, consistency is a trap. Building a world view from a set of basic axioms works for mathematics, but not for the extremely complex network that is human relations. I had to learn that the hard way. I'd recommend thinking in networks, path dependencies, path probabilities and network centrality (power) instead. It leads you down a path that allows you to form a much clearer critique than you ever could by adopting Ayn Rand's way of thinking.
Yeah... They just want to ban NewPipe. It's sad to see Android getting locked down, also with the source closing of the development branches, etc. I can as well buy Apple then, it doesn't matter anymore.
I seriously didn't expect to find one of the best critiques of capitalism I've ever read on a site about Bikepacking. It's got almost everything one needs to know about the enclosure process and the relationship between platform companies and their users, all nicely described through an example that the Bikepacking community can really feel by just having been owned.
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