Yes, I agree.

It appears GNU Taler is seeing some initial deployments. That’s for payment system.

An index can have centralized control, while being itself decentralized. Like for checking certificates you don’t contact some CA website every time, you have a certificate chain, cryptographically verified. That’s for CSAM and DMCA notices. That center can deal with them, sending deletion notices signed with their certificate or whatever, or recalling index entries. Those would have to propagate over the network fast enough, of course.

That system just has to allow plugging in paid services in a uniform way. Then the serious money part will not be as important.

With torrents one can have sequential downloads, and again, with paid services one could have those having new publications faster and with better download speeds.

The word “uniform” is the only thing differentiating this from the Internet we already have.

We’ve had bittorrent for many years.

The issue is creating a global index and dedicating some storage to the less popular (at the moment) data.

One can have paid storage provided over such a network, available only to subscribers. So you want to fetch a video from the global index, there are no peers having it online for free or their upload speed it atrocious, but there are some offering it not for free. You choose them and download, or maybe you have something like trade and auctions automation in MMORPGs - setting for auto-purchase and auto-sale with caps for what you would pay.

That requires a payment system, though, that one can seamlessly connect to identities in such a network.

I agree, but it’s still the place to look first.

They mean - maximize irritation? Put ads in the most obnoxious way?

There’s a good global task for FOSS alternatives of YouTube and other places where life happens.

A decentralized scraper. Something similar to SETI@home, or that hentai analog for storage. So that based on some metric YT content would be divided between users willing to contribute their machines and accounts to scraping YT (a bit similar to searching DHT, and probably some kind of DHT would be useful), and then they’d download that and re-publish in some p2p alternative.

TBH probably also good for that little of the web that is still possible to represent as static pages and browse via links.

The issue is that alternatives lack content, and the closed nature of proprietary services gives them an advantage - there is content there which doesn’t exist outside of them.

And people just reuploading by hand what they themselves consider interesting are a little fraction of the majority that doesn’t bother.

An analogy:

Stalin took over USSR in 20s by pressuring specific councils (“soviets”), because a council could vote to recall its representative to a council of next level any time, and that would cause a chain reaction for that council and so on. So every representative of the upper level could be removed by pressuring\persuading only the initial council they were delegated from, and one wouldn’t have to wait for any election or such. Eventually one could get a jackpot combination by removing unpleasant representatives through pressure.

So with email, changing mail servers is not such a good solution, because one could still pressure a registry to unregister the domain name, a hoster to stop hosting it, an ISP to do something else …

Maybe cryptographic identities should be used for users and addresses and even name registries (using hex strings as addresses is inconvenient, I can’t even remember phone numbers), while storage and service should be separated from that. Like in NOSTR.

That’s probably because toxic corporate culture (we-ell, one can sometimes find contributions of heroes from Japan into FOSS projects, so maybe not so toxic, especially when you look at NetBSD) they already have, so they simply can’t afford breaking market laws, not in the slightest.

The rest think they can, which is wrong.

The economic stagnation in numbers is regrettable, though. I would prefer countries like Japan to grow (not on the map, I mean playing tall). And cultures.

You just have to be the guy who turned a half-Sunni, half-Alawi city on the coast into half-Sunni, half-dead. Then after calls for stopping the murders and loads of videos with dead men, women and children he … forbid filming that.

With machine voice with no attempts at imitate human’s intonation - yes.

Two things here:

1. yes, it’s not good when vulnerable people get less income from their, eh, already kinda desperate work.

2. no, it’s not sexual abuse.

Some people while cleaning a table just love to scratch it a bit. Why not leave that fossilized fat stain alone.

Same vibes. There’s no use in agreeing. You are just adding to a clueless crowd.

Disagreeing helps everyone.

And the second guess is cartels without motive, just havin fun

That’s interesting. Makes a bit of a connection to Putin and Russian current regime.

They are mostly children of party bureaucrats, with some mafia and special services seasoning added. That includes Putin himself, people painting him as ex-intelligence or his KGB past as something big miss the point, he had a minor role, he was a kid from a party family and he was sent to GDR because foreign postings were prestigious.

So they have this inferiority complex to make themselves seem real mafia and special services.

I wonder if Putin’s hate for Ukraine is a result of its organized crime not treating him as anything interesting. Same with Georgia, it was once the center of the organized crime in the ex-Soviet space, and Saakashvili didn’t end that as much as people think.

We want a centrally planned economy,

Oh, so you want real serfdom. Where you have a dossier passed between your employers as if you were a resource. Trade unions being state-controlled and acting in the interest of your employer. Nice.

we want universal healthcare,

Teeth being torn out without anesthetics, doctors prescribing donkey piss, people finding the rare good doctors via acquaintances and ties for important operations, because otherwise you might not survive that. Oh yes.

we want federally funded infrastructure projects,

Suppose that’s fine.

and we’re gonna take that money from the wealthy.

Just remember that the most important part of ownership is deciding how the money is used, and you are giving this to non-elected bureaucrats if you want central planning.

Nah, should think a bit more.

A hint - “Soviet system” doesn’t mean the USSR’s system, and it can be good if designed very carefully.

And that’s also what Trump crowd promises their voter base.

The issue is how they are going to achieve that. The Soviet way was very inefficient, led to many unprofitable plants in the system and budget holes being closed with selling fossil resources to “capitalist” countries. And eventually tanked the USSR.

Succeeding in creating such industries in the first place and making them work is more likely with Soviet approaches. But making that a stable, efficient system is just impossible with Soviet approaches.

So they have to spend enormous funds at creating humongous processes and plants and logistics, and then prevent those owning said processes and plants and logistics from creating a bureaucratic-political deadlock which USSR was usually in. Any change would reduce some party’s power and increase another’s, so most ministries would oppose any change of status quo, and that is why all Soviet attempts at creating, say, a country-wide computer network to increase production and planning efficiency, or at optimizing military industries, or at standardization were killed.

USSR could have personal computers common enough, and not clones of Western successful designs, except clones were the only thing that wouldn’t cause such a deadlock. Domestic designs meant some ministry losing to some other.

There was a de-facto college ruling the country, with every party in that college having a veto right. Better than today’s Russia, of course.

Same even with fossil fuels export dependency, frankly - big companies today are not so different from USSR in terms of internal structure, yet they are efficient enough. It’s just that such a way of getting value would be, again, less likely to cause deadlocks.

The more intelligent (thus requiring standardization and competition, not just controlling land or oil and gas reserves) always lost to the more basic (sell something abroad, or choose a foreign design and clone it).

It’s a bit similar to how Byzantine empire killed itself, actually. Inviting foreign power to help in internal affairs became normalized. They didn’t even feel, apparently, slow and steady conquest by Turks whose help they’d employ against each other.

No, he isn’t. He’s worse than Assad, the reason nobody says Assad was better is because Assad directly caused this by killing opponents, disarming strong parties (which could have resisted jihadists) and in general destroying the country. So he’s worse than Assad, but a direct consequence of Assad.

I’m certain he’s more consistent than Assad and eventually this leads to a more stable and economically viable Syria. Note how I’m not saying anything about human rights and civilization.

Something not falling apart into tasty pieces in your hands is nice enough. In that sense.

Say, KFC and BK are something you can’t eat while walking. In my experience at least.

I feel like your last paragraph ignores my last paragraph.

One of the reasons Israel is so fucking hated by all ME smaller groups is because it casually pretends to maybe this time possibly protect them, and usually does nothing of the sort, causing more ruin.

The west doesn’t scream. The west condemned Alawites for not liking to be massacred.

And this is stupid. Inverted signal is the same signal, just inverted. It’s not independence of thought.

Yes, I missed that part, meant more the “working all your life on the same plant” thing.

What he says is less important that what he does.

I wonder how the red necks that have “Russia and Muslims are bad” engraved into their spinal cords are taking this?

If he takes money from Russia, I’ll confidently proclaim this world is done.