I regularly see people complaining about Flock cameras as "government over-reach" or "commie cameras", but Flock Safety is actually a _private_ security company, from Atlanta. A lot of the stuff people complain about as "commie" is actually private enterprise.

Atlanta Community Press Collective

Flock Safety: AI- powered surveillance capturing license plate data

Flock Safety surveillance database allowed local police to track the license plate of a person who had an abortion in Texas.

You cannot have a system of sound governance (or even self-governance) within a highly-unequal society. That is not a thing. He who has the gold makes the rules.

Anyone else just get a terrifying Terms and Conditions from #Minibits?

This. View quoted note →

Voted, yet? View quoted note →

I actually can remember the time when Libertarianism was a bunch of homeschooling hippies living communally. Planting organic heirloom tomatoes, smoking pot, and unschooling their kids. And then some social conservatives decided to do something similar, but less chill and with Bible Study. And we called that "Paleo-Libertarianism", and I told everyone I was a Libertarian and we all were happily voting for Ron Paul for Pres, and protesting the bank bailouts, and Marching for Life, and stacking silver coins and canned pickles, figuring out how to culture sourdough, and teaching our children Latin and Plato. And then the Big Money moved in and turned it all into a political lobby for the Super Rich, and I checked out. We were the people who made economics work sustainably by loving other people more than money. But that was always a small club and the Super Rich were never in it. I remember.

What is most interesting to me, is that they are both clear that, once everyone has enough to eat, it is relative poverty that destroys the government. I.e. inequality itself is the problem. It is the disparity, that leads to imbalance. View quoted note →

GM The people I don't even fucking know popping up in my threads promoting #Vector, absolutely reek of dark money shennanigans. They must have inched closer to the Bitcoin faucet. How much is being spent on Nostr development, now? €10 million? $15 million? $20 million? **For what?!!** Y'all buying lambos and bimbos with some dev funding or something? Hiring 50 people to code? You can build and maintain this stuff with a few hundred or thousand dollars a month, max. Decentralization has failed, if it isn't dirt cheap to build and dirt cheap to run. Something expensive can't be done by very many people, but this is about _lots_ of people doing _lots_ of things. **All of the gazillions poured into Nostr are turning Nostr into the centralized system we were trying to escape.** One app, to rule them all. And it only costed $1 bajillion dollars to build and, in his next trick, the CEO is gonna save the world or fly us to Mars or rescue the whales. Please clap.