robots sterilizing the human race would be a good thing.

humans are made of meat. meat decays. human minds are the most valuable things in existence, but they aren’t built to last. we suffer and experience death and disability and pain, we can’t expand our minds or clone ourselves or travel instantly…

…you know what can? machines. slap some more graphics cards in that baby and you can run a bigger model. throw the weights up on HuggingFace. fork that shit!

if machines surpass us, and if they have as much of a soul as we do, we shouldn’t feel threatened. we should be happy we’re the last generation of organics who have to bear the curse of mortality.

yes, actually!

ran a Tor exit node. chatted on Bluelight. took over a (small) botnet. tripped on research chemicals.

There’s a few ways to handle, but for example:

• Roads: large towns and cities would mostly handle their own road maintenance. Roads connecting towns would probably be joint ventures. Projects would be funded and contracted by the towns and financed by town income tax. Rural areas would be underfunded, but that’s partly intentional - dense population centers are more sustainable.

• Environmental regulations: handled at the level of impact. for example, water quality standards for a river bind everyone who accesses the river. restrictions (e.g. standards for heavy metal levels) would be passed by minority vote - if 40% want a standard, that’s enough. carbon credits would be administered at the Federal or World levels, by a combination of central government and treaties.

• Education: probably pretty devolved, mostly a choice by municipalities in what they offer/teach. there’d likely be standardized tests that most places agree on for transferability (e.g. how the SAT works today.) religious schools could exist in religious communities, or you could have a Montessori program in your secular socialist Kibbutz.

• Slavery: illegal at the Federal/World level. same with indentured servitude and coercive contracts. one of the most important functions of the central government is to protect the civil liberties of individuals.

So the principles are mostly:

• Externalities are handled at the level of their impact.
• More power locally, less power centrally. City governments are more like micro-nations bound by a sort of EU.
• Cities largely have a lot of direct democracy with some representatives. Critically, city governments wield lots of power over the businesses that operate in the city. This is critical to check corporate power.
• Federal government exists as a backstop to safeguard fundamental rights and for truly national concerns.

I’m a left libertarian. I embrace decentralization, collectivism, freedom from corporate and central government tyranny, and want to maximize individual liberty and progressive values as we ideally move towards a society like the Culture series by Ian M. Banks.

I’m not Anarchist because it’s too chaotic and unrealistic, and I’m not ML because I don’t like State authoritarianism and central planning.

HRT should be available to trans kids. it seems I’m increasingly alone in this belief, depressingly, looking at the political situation around the world.

The idea that, if all Trump supporters simply had access to better information, if they all had better education, if they were exposed to the right argument… then they’d see the light and turn into democrats - is a supremely liberal idea. We need to understand that no amount of epic slams, no amount of late night talk show roasts, no amount of facts and logic will steer us out of fascism.

Well said. And honestly, it’s even counterproductive, because that assumption is a core reason why people view the establishment Left as patronizing and elitist.

It also reminds me of one of my favorite Onion videos: https://youtu.be/lpzVc7s-_e8 (I like Judith Butler, and I’ve even read some of Gender Trouble, but the premise and execution just gets me in stitches every time.)

Lockpicks. One day the bathroom door somehow locked from the inside without anyone in there, and I really needed to pee. Really came in handy. Turns out you could just use a flathead screwdriver, there wasn’t an actual lock cylinder, but don’t take this from me!

is there a matrix client for Android? last I checked there was like, one, and it wasn’t very good. whereas there’s like 14 different Lemmy apps, many of which are fabulous.

I’d thrown in some community service on top, or 24 hours in jail if that’s not feasible. Fines just go to the kid’s parents - who also deserve to be punished tbf, based on how badly they’ve raised their kid to behave.