- 22 Posts
- 103 Comments
Wxnzxn@lemmy.mlto
Technology@lemmy.ml•Bitcoin price falls by 17.5% in biggest monthly loss since 2022
191·1 year agoI know that this is the argument, and I agree in principle (no inherent worth), but people tend to forget: Money laundering, buying black market goods online, supporting illegal organisations internationally and speculating on something are technically some kind of worth. That’s why it still never crashed out to 0, imo.
Wxnzxn@lemmy.mlto
Asklemmy@lemmy.ml•What would the world look like if billionaires actually helped the people?
3·1 year agoIt really isn’t, but as long as those resources are distributed through a market, there are problems even if you add money. Say the billionaires truly are incorruptible angels and put all their money to providing food and shelter, the not-yet-billionaires in the market suddenly have incentives to raise prices, withhold food to the market while prices are rising as a speculative gambit, stuff like that.
That’s one of the mechanisms through which the system itself, that produces billionaires, makes it at least hard or - imo - even impossible to truly undo the damage it does to create such billionaires, even when you have those billions. Another example is corruption: As soon as you put a lot of money into an issue, it creates an incentive there to funnel money away in secret, to provide false solutions that don’t solve anything, to scam, etc. A friend of mine worked on projects providing water infrastructure in countries in Africa from philanthropic and international aid funds, and he did get often frustrated telling how some projects simply vanish halfway through, because someone down the line had basically run off with the money (not that the projects were wholly useless, either, but they failed to fundamentally solve things by just throwing money at them). Someone like Bill Gates, as another example, has been unironically doing a lot of good as a philanthropist, but all his money still wasn’t able to truly tackle the root causes of the problems in the countries where he supports healthcare and such things - and inevitably, some of the funds he provided were used on glamour projects or ineffectual, nice-sounding strategies, or ended up in outright corruption. And at the same time, the question remains, what the system that made him a billionaire caused in damages to begin with.
That’s why I still think you can’t really tackle all these problems without doing away with a market structure, exchange value, capital accumulation, etc. - i.e., why I remain a dirty commie, instead of just arguing for redistribution (redistribution and more social-democratic, beneficial investment is still good, but you gotta always aim for the abolition of private property and capital accumulation as an end goal, imo).
Oh, and I just realised my ramble kind of missed OP’s point, which is also important: All the money caught up in the three-digit multi-billionaires net worth? It’s not representative of true goods and labour, it is what Marx would have called “dead” capital. As soon as it is used for anything but as financial capital, it can drive inflation massively, which connects to part of my first point.
EDIT: Another example that just came to my mind for how this can impact things - Mansa Musa and the stories surrounding his lavish spending during his Hajj, basically crashing the local economies. So, even pre-capitalist systems had to deal with these dynamics.
Wxnzxn@lemmy.mlto
Asklemmy@lemmy.ml•What would the world look like if billionaires actually helped the people?
24·1 year agoThis is an interesting conundrum, actually. The big question at its core being:
Can you ever do enough good through philanthropy, so that it offsets the damage you had to do, in order to become a billionaire? Can even all the billionaires in the world do enough good with their money, to offset the damage done by a system, that allowed for them to become billionaires?
I, personally, don’t think it is possible.
To give an actual answer: I think, the world would definitely be better, but unless those billionaires collectively used all the power their money provides, to do away with money and the possibility of billionaires altogether, I don’t think it would amount to all that much.
To anyone not wanting to give on Patreon, there is also: https://liberapay.com/PieFed/
All things considered, it’s not yet falling off as quickly as I would have expected, maybe my memory is playing tricks on me, but I seem to remember Lemmy had a harder crash after the first reddit exodus, as did mastodon several times, when people fled xitter.
the sole dev of both of these apps doesn’t think he needs any help and refuses to open source them.
Oof, that sucks. Seems like someone else needs to create an open source alternative app. The platforms themselves are libre software, right? I couldn’t find a lot for loops on that, but Pixelfed itself seems to be.
Wxnzxn@lemmy.mlto
Fediverse@lemmy.world•Is this being used for fediverse stuff yet?English
21·1 year agoPerfect moment to plug !Peertube@lemmy.world
Growing steadily, and in my opinion, definitely a way to supplement (still far from replace) YT. There’s actually some neat content on there by now, from just good to fascinatingly bizarre - but almost always very genuine and authentic. Especially when comparing to some years back, it really has become a proper seed for a platform instead of a novel experiment - but more people interacting with the content and/or supporting the creators would be amazing as the next step.
Quite literally, what just happened to me while trying to get myself pumped up to go and vote in 30 mins. (Will still go)
Something good keeps getting better, thank you all for your work!
As far as I know, from when this was discussed after the first Reddit exodus, only commenting and posting makes you an active user. So the number is somewhat deceivingly small, as the vast majority on platforms like this are lurkers who maybe post/comment every once in a while at most.
Wxnzxn@lemmy.mlto
Today I Learned@lemmy.world•TIL: About Dyson Sphere. A hypothetical megastructure we would put around a star to absorb the energy being sent in spaceEnglish
51·1 year agoWait until you learn about the even bigger ones:
This is the way, after all, Lemmy has lots of great mobile apps.
Wxnzxn@lemmy.mlto
Technology@beehaw.org•An OpenAI whistleblower was found dead in his apartment. Now his mother wants answers
10·1 year agoOkay, that is fair enough - although one small thing I’d add is “psychological issues not greatly exacerbated by his former employer” - where I also don’t think intentionality is important, as long as they callously don’t consider the potential of that exacerbation.
Thing is: psychological issues don’t exist in a vacuum. For example - let’s say he was robbed of all perspectives to ever work again in a field he was passionate about by his former employer de facto “blacklisting” him - they surely did not explicitly have this outcome in mind, but they accepted it as a possibility. Similar situation with the high suicide rates in countries like South Korea - they don’t exist the way they are because of independently existing, isolated mental illness, but because of a material system that interacts with, and sets the conditions of, psychological development.
So, you are right, it’s true that it could be, that it ends up as the result of a completely unrelated mental illness. But I’d be wary to take reports like “he actually had a diagnosis of depressive disorder” as simply washing OpenAI clean of all responsibility.
Wxnzxn@lemmy.mlto
Technology@beehaw.org•An OpenAI whistleblower was found dead in his apartment. Now his mother wants answers
36·1 year agoThis just as a reminder: Even if this is to turn out to really 100% be a suicide, that just means they were able to silence him by driving him into suicide - basically by all important metrics the same as a corporate assassination with extra steps.
Wxnzxn@lemmy.mlto
Lemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world•My 108 yo German great-grandma what great-grandpa was doing 1933-1945
4·1 year agoMy great-grandpa actually had to hide from the Gestapo during those years, and my great-great-uncle died in a Nazi prison, so I have some family bragging rights I guess.
Those bragging rights unfortunately don’t feel nearly as good, when I realise I might end up in the same situation with how things are going…
Wxnzxn@lemmy.mlto
Showerthoughts@lemmy.world•The Linux version of the "sonic.exe" creepypasta would just be called "sonic"
5·1 year agoFor the games I
didmade, before I had to do a life restructuring and put that stuff on hiatus, I always went with something.x86_64 - I have no idea when and where I got that idea, but I know I copied that format from somewhere.
Wxnzxn@lemmy.mlto
New Communities@lemmy.world•30 active communities which are not politics, news, memes or techEnglish
7·1 year agoIf you are German-speaking, your main instance of interest for communities will probably be feddit.org with the main community being !dach@feddit.org (and inofficially !ich_iel@feddit.org) - check it out if you haven’t yet
EDIT: Hello there, person in the future - I completely forgot about !main@feddit.org - the “landing page” community.
Are the people I normally watch on YouTube unable to be seen on peertube?
Basically this. There are some creators that either switched or publish on both platforms, mainly from the Linux sphere (and, unfortunately, also some crackpots and/or scammers who got kicked from other platforms), but overall, it doesn’t have a lot of content, especially content that’s on a “professional” level.

























The problem is: In real life, most nations want weapons potential as an added bonus to their expensive civil nuclear programs. This connects to the “Takes too long to build” and “Expensive” points.
Nuclear waste is also something, that even though ideas exist in spades, no one seems to have been able to solve. So I wonder: What are the real world hurdles, that have prevented all the talk of “we just need breeder reactors” or something similar, that I have been hearing for many years now, to manifest? Is the tech maybe not as easily implemented as thought? Is the cost/reward ratio too bad, so it would again connect to the expensive point?
Thing is: I am not fundamentally against Nuclear as part of a power mix, with climate change being the most pressing reality. But I think it’s often presented as better as it is in the real world by people that are highly intelligent and knowledgeable in the basic physics and theoretical engineering parts - but then usually don’t have answers for why, then, even states that don’t have large anti-nuclear movements don’t use it often, in real world circumstances.