I’ve been predicting for while we’re going to see two parallel Internets develop, the “new” net running on the old infrastructure that’s basically run by the big guys and a new infrastructure modeled after the old internet that’s decentralized. We’ve been seeing a bunch of different pieces from Fediverse to LoRa communication, Meshtastic, Matrix, increased hobbyist interest in old ways of connecting computers (even saw a guide on how to set up your own dial up ISP for fun), etc. I’m not sure exactly how all those pieces are going to come together, but a locked down internet is only going to increase demand for what was lost in its creation. And its already been trending this way for awhile.

Perhaps, but one could argue it happens so often that the hammer lends itself to hammering this particular nail, and so often devolves into that. The Balkans are this experiment played out, attempting to carve out ethno states, and we’ve seen how that’s gone. Once you start saying things like “this country should only be (or primarily be) for X people”, you almost necessarily have to engage in some degree of genocide (in the wider sense of removing a people and culture that doesn’t fit the paradigm), or apartheid, otherwise the statement ends up a bit vacuous, no?

Israel is, in my view, a very clear example of this; once you’ve decided “this is a Jewish state”, anyone not Jewish by definition become second class citizens.

If we’re just talking general assimilation, that’s more nuanced… I don’t oppose calls for more assimilation, but I think governments have done a very poor job in using more stick than carrot. They tend to not put any effort in helping people integrate, which is, from experience, very difficult. One could argue it isn’t their responsibility, but I think such framings for state action is silly… either the state has an interest in a thing being done or it doesn’t, and in this case I think they very much do. Most immigrants that form insular communities do so not out of any inherent pull to, but because they’re already being somewhat ostracized. In the US, Chinatowns arose as a direct result of ostracization and discrimination.

I do think there is a danger of assimilation programs overzealously wiping out culture… the Sami have faced multiple attempts in the past at trying to stamp out their culture, the US and Australia religiously forced the elimination of many native cultures in the name of assimilation. It is also a fine line to walk. But there is undoubtedly a state interest (and immigrant interest!) in assimilating into society.

I’d argue the binding culture that should be assimilated shouldn’t be things as fuzzy as ethnicity… the culture that binds should be the values of that nation. Which doesn’t really have anything to do with ethnicity.

I guess I’m just skeptical this false impression will work on locals… I’d presume they aren’t hearing from this group from lemmy mainly and likely already have feelings established, no? It just seems to me this wouldn’t be a good forum on which to spread misinformation… strikes me as a lot more likely that a forum known for being pretty left leaning is just latching onto a story that is related to their interest.

Because (at least on lemmy) they spam articles about this, and treat it like some “gotcha” moment that would make the company no longer able to fulfill their purpose.

Because more militant left leaning views are pretty common here. Seems to be the Occam’s Razor answer.

Yes of course, it is to me just clear that it is not about Mullvad. The post are about ÖP.

To what end? Surely locals would have a better idea of exactly where their politics stand… what’s the point in giving a false impression to people from random countries on the Internet?

I still wouldn’t support it and would probably pull my money from someone who is actively promoting it. Often this kind of sentiment is a soft pedaled version of more ugly policies, and I just don’t agree with it in the first place. I think nationalism is generally an ignorant position and the lesson of the 20th century should be that trying to maintain homogeneous states nearly always leads to genocide in the worst cases and apartheid states in the best of times. So this doesn’t assuage me much.

That said, extra context is always welcome.

This is way worse than what Yen did. This guy donated a lot of money to a party that explicitly pushes demigration policies, and if there was any doubt that this was a motivating factor for the donation, he later said he felt those policies were necessary. That’s understandable to not want to give your money to someone who you know is going to go bankroll demigration politics with some of your money.

Yen praised the Republicans at large over an anti trust pick.

I think the other criticisms of Proton’s policy changes are valid, and everyone has different standards for what is enough to divest from a company I guess, but I’ve heard people calling Yen a fascist sympathizer for that statement, and that’s just divorced from reality imo.

Dress codes for restaurants (jackets and ties required), dress codes for gas stations (no shirts, no shoes, no service)

Now this is goofy… comparing a private business telling you what you’re allowed to wear in their business versus a state mandating what you can or can’t wear? Come on, man…

dress codes for schools (uniforms)

We have all sorts of extra restricted rights for children. They don’t have a lot of rights most adults do in public schools. Free speech is greatly restricted… should the state then extend these restrictions to the wider public because it happens in public schools for children?

Calling this idea goofy when making a false equivalence that should be dispelled with a 101 level understanding of government is the soul of throwing stones from a glass house, dude.

There are definitely arguments for restricting this kind of thing, but this isn’t one of them, this is just silly.

I mean, this is true, but if you ignore enough rules you’re essentially playing a different game.

But some systems are easier than others to wing or remove pieces. 5e already, for better and for worse, hand waives a lot stuff as up to the judgment of the GM, rather than having explicit rules on how to handle something. I think this is a bad thing for long term groups because it puts a lot more work on the GM (this might, ironically, make it good for new players but less good for new GMs), and for people who know their way around ttrpgs it’s a little annoying that so much of the experience, even more than usual, relies on each given GM with less reliable and predictable outcomes.

But what rules 5e does have are usually pretty simplified… looking at 3.5, something like grappling has very explicit rules on how to resolve things in what feels like a pretty satisfying way, but it is very verbose… 5e just says “eh, contested Strength check and call it a day”. It’s just a very, very simple system at its heart. And again, a lot of stuff is just straight up written as “leave it up to your GM”. This is frustrating for more veteran players that might want to try optimizing or pushing the bounds of a system and need a structure to push against, but for a newbie just having fun and who isn’t too hung up on outcomes, this is a feature not a bug imo.

My fear with more open systems is like you said above, it can give especially new GMs and players a bit of paralysis in not really knowing where to go… I think 5e strikes a good balance of giving newbies a structure to work with while telling them not to sweat details too much. I could see with the right group though that isn’t too timid or afraid to explore how this might be a benefit more than a hindrance…

All that said, I haven’t tried Fate itself, so I’m speaking generally here. I’m sure I’ll get around to checking it out at some point, though I’m mostly moving genres these days into stuff like the new Shadowrun and Cyberpunk RED so might be awhile… appreciate the rec though, we have a sub group that runs new systems all the time so I’m sure we’ll get around to it lol. Again, appreciate the discussion! :)

Just hasn’t been my experience, man, and I’ve introduced maybe 2 dozen people through that system to ttrpgs. 2 bounced off. That’s a pretty good success rate imo.

I think it feels fiddly to people who already know a thing or two about mechanics, but most of the fiddliness can easily be ignored or barely paid attention to and you can still manage to play and have fun. It’s a lot easier to just hit straight brick walls in games like pathfinder or shadow run where the player is so lost they just can’t play. I’ve started 5e games impromptu at parties for people who’ve never played and been up and running in 30 minutes with drunk people and had a blast lol. That’s hard to pull off in a lot of systems imo.

The ones I referenced that wouldn’t learn to roll dice weren’t confused by the system… they just honestly didn’t really like to play as much as they liked the idea of playing through popular media. The hobby just wasn’t for them, I can’t really see them engaging with any system.

I’m not saying there may not be other systems out there technically better suited… but 5e is pretty damn good at it while also being popular enough that people have heard of it and are interested in trying. That last part is just as important as being technically good on paper.

It’s by design. It’s just meant for more casual play, that’s all. I play Shadowrun (pre Anarchy) so I’m no stranger to crunchy systems, but 5e is nice for just getting together with friends, drinking some alcohol, and having fun role playing without having to pay too close attention or needing a group that’s really dedicated to learning the game deeply. More tilted towards friend groups and less towards gaming groups, if you will.

I’ll say as a GM, the low bar needed for learning and playing 5e is much easier to get people on board with and even then that bar isn’t always reached… I’ve had to kick people for just refusing the learn what dice to roll after months of sessions. 5e is a great gateway drug to get people into TTRPGs though, and then when you start finding out who is really getting into the hobby, you can spin that group off into crunchier systems and keep 5e around for the more casual role play enjoyers.

I generally agree, but there is a level of ignorance where you don’t even really know what questions to ask, and subjects complicated enough that you just aren’t equipped to understand an answer without needing a lot of background education first because they just aren’t intuitive at all by nature. At that point, is there really much value in asking the question?

Determining where that line is is hard sometimes, but I do think it’s there.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: this kind of “elitism” is literally just division of labor which is basically required for a modern society to function.

Oh, come on. It’s not bad if you play something fantastical like cyberpunk… that’s a world so far removed from reality, we’re talking corporations running the world, harsh police actions driven by corporate interest, commodification of basic health services, constant death and destruct…tion.

Well, shit.

Either pay the price asked because you want that game or movie so bad, or say the cost is too high and walk away entirely.

I don’t entirely disagree with this regarding newer content, and I personally don’t pirate that… but I will happily subvert a system of near perma-copyright that was never meant to exist, goes entirely against key concepts around copyright when it was first conceived, and only exists due to extreme regulatory capture. It has been perverted far beyond its intent.

7 years. Copyright was meant to last about 7 years. There was, at that time, an acknowledgment that culture belongs to society as a whole and shouldn’t be monopolized by one person, stifling innovation (I mean, Disney is basically founded on reworking others’ stories; would they ever have hit it big if they couldn’t have done that? Hard to say…)… copyright was seen as a sort of necessary evil to give an artist a few years of a legal monopoly to incentivize art creation.

That’s about the cutoff I use. If it’s older than 7 years, you’ve had your chance to make a buck. Even moreso today… 7 years is far more time today to actually exploit your monopoly, information is just so quickly disseminated. I tried to show my kid Charlie Brown Christmas this last holiday season… absolutely criminal that people can still gatekeep that for money, that kind of thing should belong to society as a whole. Zero qualms about going to the high seas for that kind of thing.

tl;dr I think the ethics of piracy are nuanced, but I absolutely do not buy the argument that the current law around copyright is ethical as it stands and as an unethical law, it should be subverted.

Text based CLI browsers also seem to get around it often. I’ve used w3m to good effect, but there’s still a few that just won’t even talk to you without js enabled…

“Dang.” adds two new email aliases.

Not directly but cost:fun ratio definitely comes into play which often favors indies. A $5 game will get a lot more leeway than a $60 one.

Yeah, I was particularly irked by that 16 limit I encountered the other day.

And I stand corrected, then, and color me impressed. I’ll look into doing this for those passwords I need to remember, like masters.

How many characters are we talking, though? I’ve had passwords as limiting as 16 characters for some services (unfortunately)… that seems small to me for generating real randomness with passphrases.

That said, fair enough, but as someone who has administered a network before, I would never, ever want my users relying on their brain… the security from a pass manager is practically going to be way better than the standard practices of an average user without one. IMO.

But hey, color me impressed, honestly.

You don’t need to cite another country as having a better structure to point out the one you currently live in is broken.

I didn’t say you do. I agreed, I just see this as a very international problem among western democracies that all embraced neoliberal politics and economies.

Lastly, nothing about the tone is suggesting this is specific to the US.

“You people think that the source of the problem is the solution.” does seem to be applying only to Americans, and the OP came back and did make an argument that this is a uniquely American problem.