We also outsourced our social media. That has to change - it's literally not safe.
There is a lot of witless verbiage about the "town square", but precious little acknowledgement of the obvious fact that every town has its OWN square, and that's the point.
For the last decade my feeds have been polluted by "content" about Brexit and Trump, almost all of which has been noise/distraction/propaganda. I'm sick to the back teeth of it, and it's time to make it stop.
I truly believe the Fediverse is a viable solution. I've found Lemmy to be an extremely viable alternative to Reddit. The fediverse, more than any other centralized solution, seems equipped to avoid the hellish pitfalls that profit-motive behemoths seemingly must sink into.
There is no monetization, corporate decisions, manipulative algorithms; just self-hosted open source instances as far as the eye can see. Certainly there are rough edges and a perceptible decrease in dopamine from using them, but surely that's worth toughing out as they shape up if it means stopping the unfathomable destruction of society that we're experiencing in real time from big tech?
In Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky makes a powerful argument that independent, citizen owned media is of critical importance if we're to pull society to a better, more collaborative place. It doesn't get more 'citizen owned' than a web of interconnected self-hosted servers.
I agree. As well as the technical merits, it seems to me to be a better match for natural human interaction. Your point about citizen-owned media is well made - in the US we seem to be seeing the near-total collapse of integrity in commercial media - on the one hand it is dismaying to watch, on the other it is as clear a call to arms as we could wish for.
It's been good to see Bluesky up its video game in response to the TikTok nonsense. I'd like to think that the Fediverse could evolve to meet the expectations of people fleeing Facebook, Twitter & co, but it's not there yet. Those of us who are highly motivated (and I am, after recent events!) will make do, but I think it needs to be easier in order to get the critical mass required.
No, they don't just work at these places, they run these places.
There may be some problems in UK society caused by upper class Harrow school boys (!), but the batch of those very same upper class Harrow school boys currently running the security services are obviously smart enough to recognise that getting the job done requires more diversity.
> IPP sentences were created specifically to deal with prisoners who habitually reoffend on release.
The whole point about this situation is that the sentences were applied to people who do NOT fit that description (not my just view, also the view of the architect of this atrocity, David Blunkett), so in the majority of cases in question your reasoning does not apply.
HM Inspectorate of Probation's review on IPP prisoners released on license paints a very different picture - of people with complex problems, chaotic lives and a high and ongoing risk of reoffending.
IPP prisoners can't be arbitrarily detained forever. There has to be a reason for the refusal of parole or for a recall to prison. There are clearly significant shortcomings in how IPP prisoners are supported, but it's also clear that a cohort of people who are living with drug addiction, severe mental illness and behavioural problems are going to struggle to stay on the straight and narrow even in ideal circumstances.
Thanks for the link - will take some time for me to digest.
> people with complex problems, chaotic lives and a high and ongoing risk of reoffending.
Surely that applies to almost all prisoners?
I don't think that you have addressed my point though, which is that the people who have been given these sentences are not those supposedly targeted by the law.
I couldn't disagree with any of the points that you make, but I think we're talking past each other. There is a threshold at which these sentences might make sense, and we risk conflating discussion about those cases with the much larger number of problematic cases where the logic is - at least quantitatively - different.
The slippery slope argument can be made that this power could be abused (and likely is to some degree anyway) and that justifications could be made to apply to just about anyone. But if we assume the best intentions here, then something like this does make sense. There will always be a small percentage of people in any large society who are just going to commit violent and criminal acts over and over again.
I think most prisoners are in the category where they are regular people who made a bad choice due to things like environmental factors, poor judgement, and the like. And there are a few prisoners who are just wired differently - they will never not be dangerous. The trick is correctly sorting between the two.
Because on the other side of the coin, in every large society there will also always be a small percentage of people who will try very hard do the right thing.
The incentives involved in incarceration as it's practiced in our society - as a means to secure the living of the people doing the incarcerating - means that you're implicitly not going to find any of that small percentage involved with it.
Agreed. I have to schedule the "big" stuff, but for the rest the best I can do is work productively, following the connections between things.
I'll have a day doing the tasks using one sort of tech, and another doing something else - a python day, a sysadmin day, a writing day. I can't tell when a thing will get done, but by working this way as long as it's on a list I know I'll get to it. If I try to schedule it, my productivity plummets.
I use Joplin, and am with you on the half a zillion notes thing.
What is helping me is the "bidirectional links" plugin (so I'm linked to the the first version of the notes and don't forget it exists and keep starting again), and the "home note" plugin (so there is a hub for all those spokes).
It's a lot of work "curating" stuff, but I haven't found a better way for the way my mind works.
