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[Loud Whispers]

Quickly accelerating downhill

[Jimmy]

Actually, I'd say things are improving. It wasn't too long ago you'd be burned as a witch if you weren't known as a good church-going Christian woman with a man to vouch for you. Or be enslaved for the color of your skin. Or arrested and sent to concentration camps for being Jewish. And there's people still living that remember having friends murdered or imprisoned for their sexual orientation.

Humans have been doing horrible things to other humans throughout the entire history of man. So long as there's some feature they can point to that defines 'us' versus 'them' they will continue to do this. Luckily, we're reaching a point where universal education has allowed the majority of common people to realize that it's no justification for such horrific acts.

[SaberToothTiger]

The core of Nazi ideologues were very educated and intelligent people. This, in fact, did not hamper justifying the literal Holocaust. Education does not guarantee morality, nor does it stop violence.

[Loud Whispers]

Education and ideology are inseparable, I concur with SaberToothTiger in that more education need not mean nonviolence. It is perhaps more the case that well-educated people tend to have better jobs & lives, and so have more at stake to lose by taking violent action

[Jimmy]

You're confusing the education of the core ideologues with the education of the population en masse. Politicians are typically very well educated. They also have a clear interest in dividing the population into camps of thought. Exposure to critical thinking and rational decision making through education gives the average person a far better chance of cutting through the propaganda and rhetoric of those who seek to influence their thoughts to justify their own power base. This is true whether it's from politicians seeking scapegoats for their country's problems, religious leaders seeking a target for their flock's holy war, or extremists seeking to blame a minority for failing to conform to their viewpoint of their cultural norm.

[Pumble]

If I remember correctly, in the years leading to the rise of the Nazis, Germany was a highly advanced and cultured place. Science, art, all sorts of groovy stuff. Then they plunged themselves into the abyss.

[Reelya]

If I remember correctly, in the years leading to the rise of the Nazis, Germany was a highly advanced and cultured place. Science, art, all sorts of groovy stuff. Then they plunged themselves into the abyss.

That's not a very accurate picture of what things were like in post-WWI Germany. The economy was in tatters, there was hyper-inflation and they were beset by communist and fascist paramilitary organizations. Then, the Great Depression hit. It's incredibly blase to describe Germany's turn to fascism as "all sorts of groovy stuff" which they just gave away by voting for Hitler.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weimar_Republic

While there was a "golden age" in the mid 1920s, it was not organic or self-sustaining. The hyper-inflation lead to a lively speculator class who liked to spend their money fast (before it devalued) and this spurred a bohemian sect into existence in some of the big cities, further financed by American loan money from 1925-1929. This allowed the cool / groovy stuff you're talking about. All that ended in 1929 when the bottom fell out of the economy because the USA stopped lending the Germans money. So yeah, there was some groovy stuff going on but it wasn't any sort of sustainable reality, it was merely soceital excess made possible because of a credit bubble.

[Kagus]

So yeah, there was some groovy stuff going on but it wasn't any sort of sustainable reality, it was merely societal excess made possible because of a credit bubble.

[growing concern]

[smjjames]

Did the US stop lending because of the stock market crash or was that before it?

So yeah, there was some groovy stuff going on but it wasn't any sort of sustainable reality, it was merely societal excess made possible because of a credit bubble.

[growing concern]

I haven't heard anything about a modern credit bubble. There is a growing global debt bubble though.

[Reelya]

the US lending to Germany stopped after the 1929 Wall Street crash. Germany was heavily dependent on this loan money to prop up the republic economy.

Uh, the more common term is in fact "credit bubble" when there's too much debt. Debt bubble doesn't mean any different to that. A credit bubble is when too many people owe money.

http://lexicon.ft.com/Term?term=consumer-credit-bubble

[scourge728]

ptw

[da_nang]

Technologically-illiterate NZ Privacy Commissioner going full-on authoritarian censorship.

"Maybe a delay on livestreaming would be a good thing as an interim measure until they can sort out their AI. It could be that they just need to turn it off altogether. It is a technology that's capable of causing great harm," the Privacy Commmissioner said.

[sic]

This benefits decentralized livestreaming platforms.

But nevermind that. I can just pickup a webcamera and a Raspberri Pi and program it to repeatedly post 5-second animated gifs on any website that allows user-generated content. I can also have the Pi post still images that I take with the camera. Or video snippets.

Completely live.

A delay wouldn't even help since there is too little context without banning false positives as well. A too large a delay would also kill sites that rely on user-generated content. No one wants to wait an hour to post an image or gif or a 5-second video.

So basically you'd be back to cable.

[smjjames]

People would just find ways around it, *points at pirate bay as a rather obvious example*

[Frumple]

And generally enough, that's basically a win, if varyingly minor. Even if people find a way that doesn't mean as many will, and that many fewer dice you're rolling on someone biting the not-so-metaphorical bullet. "People will find a workaround" is only meaning neutral, so to speak, if the same number of people do. Otherwise it's not much of an argument against the whatever.

Not saying this critter's plan is a good idea, mind. Just that the potential existence of workarounds isn't a particularly strong point on its own to leverage against the concept.

[Jimmy]

"One has not only a legal, but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws." - Martin Luther King Jr.

It astounds me how far-reaching the powers of large copyright holders over common citizens exercising their fair use rights have become. Whatever happened to purchasing something and owning it afterwards? These days everything seems to be a temporary license for use under the company's unreadably bloated EULA. Now it seems that even content we create ourselves is subject to someone else's license, with the content creator being guilty until proven innocent.