Often the regulations are the start of the problem.

I remember reading an article in Portland that the city was expecting N new people to move there in the next 10 years. So they approved construction of housing for N-200k people.

They intentionally set things up to push the poorest and most vulnerable 200k people into homelessness.

Approving construction at all is a problem. Better a useless carwash ever block than not being able to build what you want.

> How have Sweden, Japan, France, etc. managed to keep income inequality around postwar lows while America hasn't?

They didn’t import millions of poor people to do all the dirty or unpleasant jobs in their countries.

Japan didn't, but France and Sweden does have a lot of immigrants.

Agreed that stability is super important.

So much so in fact that you’d think more rich countries would help pay to maintain it.

But yet here we are…

Bear in mind that after WW2 the US didn’t want European countries arming up too much, and was quite happy to pick up the slack and set the pace. Eisenhower in particular was pretty clear he didn’t want a heavily armed Germany or Italy, for reasons that should be obvious, and was Dubious about France. It was the US that wrote the heavily pacifist Japanese constitution.

US didn't want other countries to have a large military ( which includes nuclear with a Russian neighbour) power.

Germany didn't want that role too, as one of the biggest economies in Europe, because of... History.

Germany just enabled 1 trillion in spending for the military. That's historical

1,7 trillion of the Norway fund will be enabled ( partially ofc), that's entire Russia's GDP alone.

Yes - the strategy is to get the people who care about doing what’s right to fight amongst themselves.

Then the people who care only about money and power can divide and conquer.

  > divide and conquer

like they say: oldest trick in the book

Yeah you can read very similar anecdotes from people who took ivermectin. This is why controlled experiments are so important.

It’s a super hard problem.

So much so that it’s looking like maybe federation is not the best model. Your server ends up hosting any room and potentially any media that any of your users gets into. So naturally server admins must take an interest us in what their users are doing. This is in conflict with the top level goals of freedom and privacy.

Maybe the simpler client-server model of the web is better after all. Then if some user on my server is also into some super weird stuff, I don’t have to know. Because they connect to the weird server directly from their client, not through me.

Don’t log out!

If you are ever at a point where you have no active sessions (aka “devices”) then other clients will not be able to send you the keys to decrypt their messages.

This is one of the many ways to get “unable to decrypt” errors in Matrix.

I had a relative named Null, who worked in tech in the 80s, 90s, and 00s. Apparently it caused him so many issues that he finally gave up and changed his name to the name of the town where our family came from.

I think he was a Java guy too. I’m sure that just made it worse.

>changed his name to the name of the town where our family came from.

Was he from DROP TABLE?

Especially if he wanted kids, since I don’t think Java would’ve supported propagation.

Unfortunately if you built this, half of the world would publicly condemn you as a terrible horrible person.