I didn’t really have a high school bully, but I did have an elementary school bully. I knew he would end up in prison when we were both five years old.

He did, for manslaughter, at 19.

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.

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.

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.

Zero. It seems like software is increasingly expecting to be deployed in a container though, so that probably won’t last forever.

Television as a medium, defined by scheduled programming became obsolete as soon as internet-based streaming became viable. The viewer being able to choose what to watch and when is vastly superior.

Piracy was viable a bit earlier, and I quit watching traditional TV then.

Power corrupts, and concentrations of power attract the corrupt.

It can be subtle, such as business deals just favorable enough an impartial observer would say they’re not bribery. The not-bribe leads to a not-favor. The lines become blurred.

Linux is a kernel which is often bundled with proprietary components. Android, for example uses the Linux kernel. The whole desktop operating system you seem to be thinking of is a Linux distribution.

There have been many Linux distributions with proprietary components over the years. SUSE’s YaST configuration tool used to be proprietary, for example. There’s probably something current along the same lines, but there’s not much demand for semi-proprietary desktop Linux.

There’s concern about it where the content has utility beyond art, such as academic research and raw datasets.

That’s not to day art isn’t useful, but much of what people value about it is originality.

That’s comparable to alcohol. I’d be good with that.

The illegality of production and sale makes the drugs far more likely to be adulterated or a concentration other than advertised, which kills people. Prohibition causes black markets, which leads to people resolving disputes through violence since they can’t use the courts.

Legalization would make all of that go away, almost instantly.

I think all drugs should be legal. I think using most of them is a bad idea.