Ironically the violence unleashed by these so-called "revolutionaries" makes me wonder whether the police firing on the protestors was based on intelligence alert that the protest would turn to violence? Now imagine if these people also had guns. Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, (Myanmar?) - some BigTech seems to have cracked the social media politico-cultural code of the indian sub-continent to foster revolution and throw these countries into political turmoil. The template is the same - "fight against corruption", "('organic') student movements / gen-z protests", "new democracy", "installation of inexperienced politicians in power", "get rid of experienced ('corrupt') politicians" ... it's a political recipe setup for failure.
> I find it hard to go and do anything physical or social, and the only outlet left is to learn obsessively cause otherwise I’ll lose my mind.
That's depression's "twin" sister (with a different personality) anxiety taking command of your behaviour. It's well-established now that obsessive-compulsive and avoidance behaviours are linked to anxiety. Both depression and anxiety feed each other.
Welcome to the group - due to the lack of public toilets (especially clean ones), we Indians have always treated the whole outside world as our toilet!
It doesn't matter - western superpowers are complicit in this genocide, and that is why this genocide still continues.
From the "there is no genocide" Joe Biden to "it's not genocide if we get to build a beautiful resort there" Donald Trump, there is bi-partisan support in US politics for Netanyahu's genocide. Don't believe me? Well, tell me just one concrete thing the US and its allies have done to actually stop the genocide. (And by concrete, I mean be sure to compare it with the political steps taken to protect certain "blue-eyed blondes, white Christians", who are "like us" - https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/3/8/some-lives-are-m... ).
Just look at the list of countries that already recognize the State of Palestine ( https://www.dw.com/en/which-countries-recognize-palestinian-... ) and you may be surprised to find that the western powers (and a few of their allies) are the odd ones out, against the global majority that recognizes that Palestine is a settler-colony of Israel. It doesn't just stop there - the US even uses its veto power to deny Palestine a UN membership, despite the majority support they have to become one - https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-19/us-vetoes-palestine-f... . (And note that all this is happening despite the political opposition against Israel's genocide amongst the western populace).
The skin colour of the victims is not such a relevant part of the issue here- the issue is that Israel has spent decades infiltrating every position of power in western countries as well as building an ideological framework for its impunity: one that identifies Jews as the eternal victims, antisemitism as the root of all criticism and violence towards Israel, while disseminating the idea of Arabs as inferior savages. This is the result. Had they decided to direct their propaganda against Ukrainians instead of Arabs, we would be almost as paralysed as we are now.
Does anybody know if WineHQ refuses to accept new submissions to its Application Database ( https://appdb.winehq.org/ ), if you don't opt to be a "maintainer" for the software? I submitted an application for a software that doesn't work on Wine, a few months back, taking care to fill all the details but opting not to be the maintainer, and the software still hasn't been accepted and doesn't show up in the application db. There's been no follow up or communication on what to do next.
The article is not talking about people who own large tracts of farmland; it's talking about monopolies controlling the supply of seeds, chemicals, and fertilizers. At any rate, if Bill Gates owns 242,000 acres of farmland, that means he owns a bit less than three one-hundredths of one percent of the US's 880,000,000 acres of farmland.
That's 242,000 acres of farm land - crops, vegetables, etc.
Ted Turner has two million acres of personal and ranch land in the US, Gina Rinehart has well over 28 million acres (at the end of 2016 - she has purchased more since then) of "ranch land" in Australia (they're called stations here in Oz).
It seems probable that
if Bill Gates is the largest single farm land owner of record with the same holding name on all titles
then there is likely several larger companies each with multiple subsidiaries that each hold almost as much farm land as Gates with a common subsidiary name such that each larger company controls more farm land by a magnitude than Gates does.
I haven't done that work.
( I have done similar work for mineral and energy leases globally though, ownership is generally diversified through a few layers ).
The single largest (legible) landowner by acreage is some timber magnate. Over in Australia a few ranching families own so much land it makes the American figures look like rookie numbers
> Over in Australia a few ranching families own so much land it makes the American figures look like rookie numbers
1/ Australia doesn't have "ranching" families anymore than it "throws shrimps on the barbie" - that's 'Merkin Engrish there.
2/ Gina Rinehart's massive station holdings come from her mining empire which was inherited from her father Lang Hancock - an iron ore mining magnate.
Sure, Lang sprang from Ashburton Downs, a sparse Pilbara lot of land:
At the time (1918) it occupied 755,520 acres (3,057 km2) and was stocked with 19,000 sheep and 320 horses.
In 1949 the property was carrying a flock of 30,000 sheep, but by 1951, following a severe drought, shearing had to be cancelled as the stock were too weak to be droved to the shearing shed.
In 1979 the property was stocked with 300 cattle. In a good season the station is able to carry a herd of approximately 5,000 head of cattle.
but with brothers and an extended family there was no money there to made by Lang, he made his nut spreading mesothelioma * to the world and later convincing others to invest in vast mesa's of dense high grade iron ore, still being mined today.
FWiW the Hancock family drama surrounding the control of tens of billions per annum resources makes Dallas look a little rookie .. although Prix d'Amour** is bulldozed and gone now.
I have the opposite complaint. I wish OpenWRT ran on low-resource routers like those really cheap TP-link ones. DD-WRT does support a few of it, and my personal opinion is that it is better optimised than OpenWRT. By the way, you should explore OpenBSD ( https://openbsdrouterguide.net/ ).
But you cannot ignore that aspect - addicts do get aggressive, even violent, when they don't get their fix. So they are indeed vulnerable and politically susceptible.
Young people also like to see if there is a way to have a better world, old people tend to keep the status quo.
While I'm sure the connection to technology and the Internet as a whole plays a role, but much more-so the gross and clearly corrupt government is the reason why they demonstrated.
No one is willing to die so they can just post on social media.
Not OP, but I don't consider regulating social media as "censorship" at all because the nature of foreign owned social media platforms means that you do not know if it is your own citizens talking or some foreign agent with their own vested interest. Media and communication platforms in every country is regulated. All countries also have stricter regulations for foreign media and telecom companies. Online platforms - who are now media and communication platform - have somehow managed to wriggle by most governments so far, and even become dominant, without any oversights. That does not bode well for any country, including democratic ones. This kind of digital colonisation is the most egregious mistake made by the Global South, and they are just now waking up to it, hoping to reign it before it is too late.
"Stricter regulations" like what? It's easy to talk in the abstract about how "someone ought to do something", but if you're not asking for censorship then what exactly are you asking for? Without any specifics, "government oversight" of what people are saying to each other on social media gives off some very Orwellian vibes in my mind...
For communication platforms (messengers) - the same kind that telecom companies are bound to, for example. For social media platforms - similar to what older media platforms are bound on content, editorial / journalistic format and integrity etc. Both also require new, stricter privacy and data laws. I live in a democracy and I find the idea of BigTech "regulating" itself while also being a bastion of "free speech" to be an oxymoron, especially a foreign one.
>For communication platforms (messengers) - the same kind that telecom companies are bound to, for example.
So, like, maximum response time to outages? That kind of thing? Do you actually understand what you're asking for? Those sorts of regulations exist as consumer protections, because you're paying for a service, so a minimum standard of quality is required. You don't pay for WhatsApp, Telegram, Matrix, etc. If your country tried asking for something unreasonable out of those companies, all it would do is make those companies block your country off.
>For social media platforms - similar to what older media platforms are bound on content, editorial / journalistic format and integrity etc.
Totally absurd. First, social media platforms are not journalistic outlets. What, because Bloomberg posts videos to YouTube, every YouTuber should abide by the same kinds of standards that Bloomberg abides by?
Second, I don't know where you live, but if your country has free speech in its constitution, it doesn't have regulation of journalists. Those things are in direct contradiction. Now, of course there are defamation laws, but other than that, the government in a country with free speech cannot regulate the speech of journalists. Things like journalistic integrity and such are matters of etiquette, not legality. There are no laws that, say, forbid a journalist from revealing his sources; it's just that if he does, no one will trust them again.
> Do you actually understand what you're asking for? Those sorts of regulations exist as consumer protections, because you're paying for a service ...
Yes, I do understand what I am asking for - these should indeed be paid services (subsidised by the government through a common national communication infrastructure, to make it cheaper for ordinary people). This gives three benefits - (1) strong consumer rights (no grey areas about who owns your data, better privacy, better recourse on poor service, mandated inter-connection between networks etc.), (2) creates a more competitive market (right now, the biggest problem with "free" services are that you need a lot of money, for a very long period, to compete with them, thus giving rich, foreign corporates a natural advantage) and (3) reduces surveillance capitalism and protects national security.
> You don't pay for WhatsApp, Telegram, Matrix, etc.
We do pay for it with our personal data that is mined to create profiles which is then used to manipulate us with advertisement. This data is also sold to (foreign) intelligence agencies thereby endangering a country's national security.
> First, social media platforms are not journalistic outlets.
If you speak publicly, to a mass audience, you need to care about what you say, just as newspapers / news channels are obliged to do so. If you create content for a mass audience, you should abide by the content regulation that the television and movies do too.
> if your country has free speech in its constitution, it doesn't have regulation of journalists.
My country (India) doesn't prescribe absolute free speech for individuals, like the US does (for various reasons, which we indians are comfortable with). Indian courts however uphold a higher threshold for restricting free speech in the media, to prevent governments from abusing their power.
By regulation for editors and journalists, I was talking about a different kind of regulation - in the old media (newspapers) once you appointed an editor or a journalist, there is a very high bar to fire them. This kind of job security allowed editors and journalists more freedom to resist editorial interferences from their employees, thus empowering the fourth estate in our democracy. There is also a high restriction to hiring foreigners for such jobs. (This is no longer the case for newer media and we can already see the crap it has become). A similar kind of setup can be enforced for social media reviewers too, ensuring platform owners and algorithm don't control the flow of info on it, and local people (and not foreigners) do.
Okay... But they're not. I don't think it's possible to force someone to accept payment for something they want to give away for free.
>subsidised by the government through a common national communication infrastructure, to make it cheaper for ordinary people
So you want to make a free service paid, and then make it cheaper? Are you a politician? I can't imagine anyone else saying something like this. You could have said anything here. You could have said that the service should be paid by the state, which would legitimize intervention. Instead you went the preposterous, populist route.
>creates a more competitive market (right now, the biggest problem with "free" services are that you need a lot of money, for a very long period, to compete with them, thus giving rich, foreign corporates a natural advantage)
I have an XMPP server running at home, facing the Internet. I could tell my friends to install any XMPP client and hit me up there. Or we could use Tox. The problem is not investment, it's network effect and convenience.
>We do pay for it with our personal data
In other words, you don't pay for it.
>This data is also sold to (foreign) intelligence agencies thereby endangering a country's national security.
You always have the option not to use those services.
>If you speak publicly, to a mass audience, you need to care about what you say
Generally speaking, yes, I agree. I don't agree that the government should be regulating this. All it would do is harm small content creators.
>just as newspapers / news channels are obliged to do so. If you create content for a mass audience, you should abide by the content regulation that the television and movies do too.
Why, though? There's something about newspapers, TV, and cinema that legitimizes regulation. Newspapers are sold out in the open, so you can't print tits on the front cover. TV used to be sent over public airwaves, so it used a common resource. With cinema, there's a monetary exchange, so there's some expectation of standards.
With user-generated content, like with chat platforms, there's no such thing. When you watch a YouTube video, you're connecting to a server owned by a foreign company that stores a file created and uploaded probably by a foreign national and you're allowed to view that content for free. Other than your ISP ensuring a minimum QoS, what would legitimize the government stepping in in that scenario?
>A similar kind of setup can be enforced for social media reviewers too, ensuring platform owners and algorithm don't control the flow of info on it, and local people (and not foreigners) do.
What do you mean? You're just talking about worker's rights. What does that have to do journalism? You don't have an employer-employee relationship with either social media platforms or the users who post on them. Please, what kind of setup you have in mind, because I honestly have no idea what you're talking about.
To summarise - I want my democratically elected government to have a strong influence and control over foreign corporates when they operate in my country, to protect my country's national interest and enforce my rights as a citizen. I do not trust a foreign company or a foreign government to do so, whether they are American or Chinese. What I've suggested are some of the ways we can regulate foreign online corporates to (1) to create a competitive market (2) to protect consumer rights (3) to protect national interests. If you still do not understand or appreciate that, let's just realise that we have different political values.
What our values are is not even a concern in this discussion. I just think you have no fucking clue how the real world works, or how these ridiculous ideas of yours could possibly be implemented.
>you do not know if it is your own citizens talking or some foreign agent with their own vested interest
You wouldn't know that if the site was from your own country either. Could you be sure your neighbor is not a foreign spy?
>I don't consider regulating social media as "censorship" at all
To clarify, you don't consider it censorship because you believe your government would make it more difficult for foreigners alone to use their speech, and never your own countrymen. You're either delusional or adorably naive.
Inevitably, censorship will get used against you, either to silence you or to silence speech you would want to hear. Anyone who calls for censorship is a useful idiot.
I am just restating my faith in my country's democracy to protect my rights, than any private BigTech or foreign government. You, on the other hand, are deliberately ignoring that foreign media platforms have, and are, used for malicious purposes against a state.
I'm not ignoring it, I simply don't care. I recognize that misinformation is going to be spread and act accordingly, by fact-checking and suspending judgement. What you want is for a government entity to decide for you which statements are "true" and which are "false" and to be shown only the "true" ones. It's idiotic. Even if the government has your best interest in mind (which it doesn't; at any given time the ruling party is self-interested), outsourcing your critical thinking faculties is not something you should want.
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