Zak @ Zak @lemmy.world

Posts

10

Comments

1,274

Joined

2 yr. ago

If you're getting ads for an adblocker, it might be time to get an adblocker (but not that one).

That may be viable for some combinations of finances and lifestyle, but credit scores are used in interactions that don't involve borrowing money. I'm inclined to believer they shouldn't be, but I don't make the rules.

A failure to set an excise tax on a product or service that offsets its externalities is not a subsidy. A lower tax rate than a competing product is arguably a subsidy.

I'm not aware of any modern societies that make a credible attempt to adjust the price of all or most goods and services to include their externalities. That sounds like a good idea in theory, but very difficult to implement in practice.

Fuel, and other car-related taxes (sometimes based on horsepower or engine displacement) in most countries in Europe were much higher than in the USA long before there was widespread concern about the environmental impact of cars.

That's probably not true, but hard to calculate.

The previous time I looked, which was a while ago, federal fuel tax revenue in the USA and federal highway expenditures were about equal. Since then, fuel tax revenue has fallen behind highway spending; the required increase to even it out would be modest in absolute terms - something like 15 cents per gallon. States each have their own taxes and budgets, of course.

As for the road damage each car causes, it increases (roughly) proportional to the fourth power of vehicle weight. Semi trucks and similar heavy commercial vehicles cause almost all of the traffic-induced road wear, and passenger cars contribute very little. It's likely the fuel taxes paid for a passenger car (even a relatively large one) are several times its marginal impact on road maintenance.

The commodity price for gasoline right now looks to be about 2 USD per gallon. Retail gasoline in the USA is at least a dollar more due to taxes and markup.

Subsidies may play a role as well, but the taxes in some countries are extreme by American standards. My take on it is that a fuel tax is effectively neutral if it brings in enough revenue to pay for the road system.

From what I can tell, Bluesky is both decentralized and federated in terms of the protocol and software, but in a practical sense, trying to run the whole thing independently doesn't seem quite there yet.

The things that are easy to do are use a domain name as an identifier and host your own personal data server. Owning your own data is nice in theory, but being able to take it with you isn't that valuable when there's nowhere to go.

Choosing an instance has gotta be culled.

The trouble with that is having many instances is the core trait that makes it a federated system.

There are certainly ways to de-emphasize that step during onboarding; an onboarding site that picks an instance from a curated set of general-purpose instances would be a good way. Bad ways include joinmastodon.org making mastodon.social the default, and join-lemmy.org asking a couple questions and presenting a list.

Anything that requires manufacturer permission to unlock is untrustworthy.

I've been the person people came to (and paid money to) when they installed something stupid on Windows XP in 2003. Quite a few people do need their hand held to use a computer effectively.

Until that era, app developers were generally considered trustworthy. Malware existed, but anything that openly advertised itself, that users would install intentionally was unlikely to work against their interests. "Spyware" was a new category. App permissions in smartphones represent a recognition that app developers do not necessarily share the users' interests.

I certainly don't want knowledgeable users locked out of making decisions for themselves (even bad ones), but arranging the UI so that someone with a limited understanding will have a hard time finding the dangerous settings isn't a bad thing.

I’m not at all sure what the author wants, except for wanting to roll back time to something less secure.

I'm not sure what the author wants either because the article is written in such a both sides style.

I know what I want though, and it definitely includes access to "dangerous" permissions; I've had root on my smartphone pretty much as long as I've been using one. I don't mind making those a bit awkward to turn on though, and it seems like that's what's going on here. If anything, I'd like to see that broadened to all apps rather than just installs outside app stores.

What I don't want, and what I'm concerned about is that this is a stepping stone to is a system where some permissions are only available to apps from Google-approved app stores, or a scenario like iOS where apps can only be installed from stores or with Google-approved developer credentials.

That's a good overview, yes.

The restriction can prevent any abuses of the unlock system in making mass customizations to sell.

That's a value-add, not abuse.

instances have no native ability to crawl other instances for communities or content

That's not quite true. They don't do it automatically or routinely, but a user can cause a server to read a post from another server by putting its URL into the search box. This can be useful for an end user to manually address a federation glitch.

Here's a concrete example. I was trying to post a comment via lemmy.world, but lemmy.world sits behind Cloudflare, and Cloudflare flagged its content as potentially malicious. I then posted that comment via my own Mastodon server, but push federation to lemmy.world also failed, for the same reason. I could, however cause lemmy.world to pull the comment using the search.

Correct. Each server that shows the post to its users stores a copy of the post. It does not necessarily store attached media (IIRC Mastodon usually does and Lemmy usually hotlinks media).

They don't duplicate the database in a technical sense, but when things go right, they each have a copy of the same post and comment text, and the same votes.

How are we measuring?

• Global harmful impact: it's hard to beat Facebook
• Disgusting: long ago, I got a spam advertising a dedicated CSAM site. I looked to see it it was really what it said, and sent it to NCMEC when I saw that is was
• Actively malign: 8chan is up there, as are old fashioned hate groups.

It's a little high for my tastes, notably in blocking piracy communities from other servers. I don't even care to participate in them; it's a matter of principle.

I'm not sure what "safe" or "mostly private" means to you in this context. The Vodafone filtering proxy might stop you from visiting some websites that host malware.

My aunt spent a long time working in education in the USA, much of it in leadership roles. When she incorporated lessons on critical thinking into the curriculum, it resulted in a lot of pushback from parents who did not appreciate their kids applying the lessons at home.

People who actively resist the use of critical thinking will seem cognitively impaired because they are, in fact intentionally impairing their cognition. My intuition here is to blame religious fundamentalism, but that's not a well-researched position.