You forgot to say that regulatory apparatus should have much fewer points of failure. That is, it should be made stronger and more efficient, but it should be radically contracted. It’s bigger than needs be.

By points of failure I mean opportunities for strong entities to make regulations work for monopolies\oligopolies.

No quick way. There are too many regulations which are enforced badly and abused to actually support that “big fish”. Make them fewer and make the punishment swift and unavoidable and hard. And split a few of the worst offenders into parts each in one specific area - Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta are all good candidates.

It works great under wine

Which version is that?

EDIT: Never mind

And I think a lot of that revenue is in the Middle East to be honest. Those are poorer parts of the world, but with very bad culture of demonstrative consumption.

Still, how big this is for Apple is important only for Apple users. While creating a culture of not fucking around is important for everyone.

So I’d say the EU should cut Apple down right now. They’ve made a lot of bad faith and faux compliance actions. Just ban them. I’m confident there’s much more than one reason justifying that legally. No, that company doesn’t help innovation, education and whatever else.

That’s the point. One can think what they want, decide and go there. Or one can just leave their home and walk with the crowd wherever it brings them. (A metaphor.)

Social media make it appear like you could live a life like the latter. Doing all things you need. Just walk with the crowd and never decide.

People are afraid of even the tiny bits of freedom, when they are looking at it from that human stream which never leaves them. They think that outside of it, if a decision they make is wrong, they are lost.

It’s psychological, all of it, like a very subtle and less deadly slaughtering block.

I feel like trying to make the big fish act in our interest and not theirs is fighting windmills.

Better kill the big fish.

Not directly on topic - note how all the socialist revolutionaries always start with killing the smallest fish and hate it the most. The big ones they try to convert.

All the hate you see out there isn’t society. It’s money.

I know, right? No matter how rude I am on one forum I still frequent, or in a groupchat of friends, or in family chat, it just dissolves because everybody wants to understand each other. In “global” social media it’s some PvP, as if people didn’t have boxing pears to vent their frustration there.

The NKVD was a tool of the Russian Soviets to police itself. So, less a contract between citizens than between party bosses.

NKVD means “People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs”. And in Stalin’s era they still retained the pretense of a democracy on new principles from the 20s.

But Soviet police were far closer to the ideal community policing model than their Western peers, simply because they weren’t built atop the framework of plantation overseers, slave catchers, and anti-indigenious paramilitary.

No. If you ever learn Russian well enough … I actually don’t know what specifically to recommend you. Vysotsky’s songs? It’s just everything you read that will communicate some idea of how it all worked.

Soviet “militia” (it was called that, but in fact it was police, of course) was quite similar to all three things you’ve mentioned.

Also NKVD was both what later became KGB and what later became MVD (after Stalin and Beria USSR had sort of a moment of epiphany, not complete, but hundreds of thousands of people were released from prison camps, hundreds of thousands rehabilitated postmortem, and it was said publicly and officially that such things shouldn’t happen again), so it included both people in black leather coats who’d come at night and people in white coats who’d regulate road traffic and catch small time thieves at day. With pretty similar methods between them.

Imagine if German police under Nazis and Gestapo were one and the same organization administratively. There’d be more “cultural exchange” than there was in reality.

Pick up a copy of Fanshen (Chinese Cultural Revolution, not Russian Stalinist era, but it’s the same through line). The social transition from a country of sovereign landlords to egalitarian policing was rocky, but it was real and significant.

I will, but my knowledge of Stalinism is closer to the root, and Russian is my first language, so I don’t think this will be useful for that kind of example.

The difference between a plantation overseer and a union rep is significant primarily because of who they answer to.

Since USSR came into this discussion, official unions in USSR made that difference very small. Their main activities were about organizing demonstrations on all the important days, though. And also the usual Soviet organization stuff - distribution of some goods via that organization to its members (like some fruit which would rarely be seen in some specific area due to Soviet logistics being not very good), sending children of some members to some kinda better summer camps or some competitions, all that.

and will never find that niche forum that has what you are looking for, like they once did 20 years ago.

I remember finding them in web directories, populated manually by people, and from people sharing links.

A search engine was the brute force approach, and you’d find something useful after some manual work on 20+ page of results.

I know, I meant something interactive from that time, complete and consistent. Like Encarta.

E.g. wikipedia is reflects somehow my view of the internet in the 2000s (Encarta :D)…but for some people today the internet is just social media…or just videos?

BTW, does anybody know of an offline encyclopedia which works under Wine?

I liked those too.

The Internet for me was about finding texts about fandoms or anything interesting, roleplaying forums, chats and some browser games. Downloading MP3`s once in a while, downloading and printing Star Wars pics.

EDIT:

They dont even know what a directory is or what a file path is, because of design that dumbs things down…

A kiosk with services.

That’s an exaggeration. We had nice things back then with forums and ICQ\AIM\others, which we don’t have now, but the tech allows us to have them. It’s the society that has degraded.

Early Internet - yes, but then there’s the middle Internet (or the high Internet if you like, like high Middle Ages) which was in large part scraped by archive.org, and also people generally still knew about offline backups in both eras, and then there’s the late Internet, which moved to siloed services and at the same time most people using it were and are oblivious about preserving data elsewhere. That’s the worst one.

I bet a lot of pages were also added in the same time frame, very likely orders of magnitude more.

No. What you’d make a page for in the 00s, you’d create a FB group or something in the 10s. Hostage to corps and probably too removed for whatever reason.

I agree it’s an unsolved problem, but have you contracted police to, well, police your area? Had Soviet citizens contract NKVD?

It’s rather between the two. In fact it’s a mechanism imposed on you with power, but there’s a lot of effort to conceal it as an imperfect market.

Yes, meant copyright

OK, you’ve owned everybody with facts and logic, now go away

You are a shitty human being, now get off me

I started my career as a media lawyer to protect those who made things that helped us see one another, and the truth about our shared world.

This … can be interpreted in a few ways, some suicidal for one’s reputation.

I meant that all the mentioned support Winamp skins, and XMMS/BMP/Audacious are, eh, almost as esteemed.