• 4 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • How come copyright owners are not legally required to distribute their work?

    Copyright is supposedly a deal society strikes with creatives: They create art for society and in return the law ensures that they profit off of their original works. If they no longer uphold their end of the bargain how come the rest of us should still uphold their copyright? If they no longer make their works available their copyright should be forfeit automatically.







  • Can someone explain to me why Americans seem so hostile towards Biden over Gaza all of a sudden?

    US support for Israel goes back decades. America has been in bed with all sorts of dictators commiting heinous crimes and still is. Not to forget the illegal invasion of Iraq with hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties or the long list of US war crimes revealed by WikiLeaks and largely indiscriminate drone strikes across the globe. Most of these seemed to elicit much harsher condemnation overseas while the US public appeared generally uninterested. So why does this conflict in Palestine in which the US isn’t even an active party suddenly evoke such an emotional response?



  • For now reddit seems fine (even though I feel a noticable deterioration of multiple communities). Though the important change is that alternatives have established themselves. Lemmy might not be big right now but from now on reddit has to be extra careful not to upset redditors. Every new step they take that worsens the experience will drive a new wave of users away from their site and now more of them will find communities elsewhere that have been established during the first exodus this year.

    At the same time I’m unfortunately quite certain that the enshittification of reddit will continue as investors demand higher profits. So we will see more waves of redditors leaving. Such a migration in waves could also be observed with Twitter, after every new step that Elon took to ruin the site.


  • Xenon@lemmy.worldtoEurope@feddit.deDraghi: EU must become a state
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    7 months ago

    Can we please stop this eternal debate about the EU becoming a state? I feel like it’s besides the point and only evokes harmful reflexes on all sides. The question should be how to streamline and organize decision making. Who decides on which level about what. As Draghi points out correctly, certain stategic decisions should be made at an EU level. That would be more efficient, more impactful and help Europeans as a whole but it’s not really about “turning the EU into a country”. I get that “the sovereign nation state” has been the single one all-encompassing, all-powerful entity at the heart of political thinking since at least the 17th century but I just feel like it’s no longer necessarily a helpful frame of reference for many developments in the 21st century.



  • Xenon@lemmy.worldtoMemes@sopuli.xyzProperty Values > Everything
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    7 months ago

    That’s exactly the point many people don’t seem to get. Yes, zoning more land for construction or lowering building cost might help but the key issue is that housing has become a major asset for the rich and especially institutional investors globally. There’s just so much money out there in search of investment opportunities but unlike stocks or Bitcoin housing is a core human need. Coupled with increasing wealth inequality and stagnant wages this is a major problem. When crypto or Nasdaq celebrate new records that’s nice for investors but when the property market goes up and up many people can no longer afford rent.

    Privat property investors are part of the problem whether they like it or not. Given these circumstances I find it hard to imagine a solution that doesn’t include massive state intervention in the housing market.


  • As far as I know the fact that slave trade was already a well established business in western Sub-Saharan Africa, mostly with Muslim nations played a huge role. European colonizers were in desperate need for workforce in their new American territories. Plagues from the old world had absolutely decimated most of the indigenous population plus many Europeans also struggled severely with tropical diseases that they weren’t used to.

    Originally, African slaves were mostly used out of economic convenience and not for specific ideological reasons. It’s quite disturbing to consider how this particular anti black racism that is still very prevalent today developed directly as a result of and as an instrument to maintain the institution of slavery. The economic circumstances of the 16th or 17th century still have enormous implications for our moral landscape in the 21st century.






  • Your legs would obviously not be in that position during takeoff and landing. This picture was clearly taken with the seat reclined to show the relatively comfortable seating position during the flight. If you search for any other pictures that are not cropped like this one, you can see that there’s still some space below the seat to put your feet down.

    And whenever I disembark from a plane not once have I felt like getting out of my seat is the limiting factor for why it takes so long. The bottlenecks are always the limited number of exits and aisles that every passenger has to squeeze through.

    Edit: actually I found a 3d render of the proposed cabine layout here it looks tight but otherwise pretty standard if you ask me, except for the two levels of course.






  • You have to be delusional if you think that a military coup orchestrated by Russia benefits anyone but a few corrupt elites. Your kneejerk reaction is nothing but cutting of your nose to spite your face. The French are certainly no saints but between military dictators, jihadist terrorists and Russian warlords they are one of the better actors in the region. If you unironically call the current state a French colony you must be lost deep in the Russian propaganda rabbit hole.