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Huh. Well, everybody I hung out with knew about it. IIRC moderation was tacked on after USENET had already taken off. If a newsgroup wasn’t proposed with moderation then it couldn’t be moderated, so most of them weren’t. It’s pretty wild that they didn’t understand how desperately necessary it would be. In order to get a group to be moderated you’d have to get a proposal for an entirely new group through the committee, which was nearly impossible. The process was so slow and bureaucratic that the web literally just showed up and stole it all in what seemed like overnight. I remember when I switched over… it was like 2002, 2003? I’ve never had as much fun on any web forum as I had on USENET though. Those were fun times. And don’t get me started on the web’s lack of threaded discussions. Drove me NUTS.

I asked my SO what she thought his wallpaper might be. First answer: himself.

Yes pardon me I left off the word “largely” before “unmoderated.” We all knew it was possible, but it didn’t matter because, as you point out - nobody really did.

Which doesn’t really change the point does it. These people are de-facto kings ruling us; their wealth subverts the entire idea of democracy. You can’t tax them out of existence without taxing their wealth because none of them have any actual income. Banks fall all over themselves to fund anything they care to do.

In any case, 2% isn’t going to do fuck-all even if it gets passed which is hardly a certainty.

Google buying Dejanews, the largest archive of all messages, and merging it with the travesty that was (and still is) Google Groups just about killed the whole thing.

Well that and the fact that it was unmoderated which eventually led to it being populated almost exclusively with mentally ill troll savants. USENET by the end was the digital equivalent of a horror zoo of abused monkeys slinging shit all over everyone and themselves.

Le Coq suggested that when simply considering the 10 biggest fortunes in France, the tax would bring in no less than €13bn for the state.

A 2% tax on billionaires. Give me a break.

The point isn’t to bring in money, the point is to eliminate these blights on society by any means necessary. How bad will the world have to get before something that looks like this happens? When the world was more civilized - the world conservatives constantly pine for - the ultra-wealthy were taxed over 90%, because we knew that too much power in the hands of a single person was immensely dangerous. We knew this intrinsically from generations of being ruled by kings, but we got firsthand experience with it from them constantly fucking up the economy.

There was shame in being wealthy. Hell, there was shame in being rich when I was growing up - it was understood that you couldn’t get mega-rich without stepping on the necks of the working class and being horrible people. It’s nearly Christmas - go rewatch It’s a Wonderful Life for crying out loud. 1946!

They don’t need any dirt on him, he’s a fucking coward. All they have to do is point to the window, ask him if he is familiar with the term “defenestration” and assure him he will become intimately familiar with it unless he starts behaving the way Moscow wants. Yet another reason billionaires should be taxed out of existence like they used to be.

Absolutely goddamn tax them out of existence. Yesterday.

In case anyone was wondering, this article makes abundantly clear that McConnell is (still) nearly as big a bag of shit as Trump is. He is a loathsome, worthless human being who deserves nothing but contempt. If I got to be president and had a congressional majority the first fucking thing I would do is put two new members on the SC to nullify the two illegitimate members that were put on the bench thanks to this fucking turd.

So do you suppose the SC is basically saying “quit bringing us these piss-ant rulings, bring us the real shit” by basically ignoring this one? Takes no work to just ignore it, but requires a lot of work to write up a contentious 6-3 ruling? I can’t understand it otherwise.

No, that’s why I said “I’d like to think.” Because I don’t.

If they take control of both houses of congress, I would like to think one of the first things they would do is expand the supreme court with the justification that denying Obama an appointee was straight-up unforgivably unethical. And suspend the filibuster to do it.

Now if only they could do the same with the stock market. But the conspiracy theorist in me believes that all this manipulation is being done hand in hand with certain arms of the government in order to maintain the government’s appearance of solvency and to control inflation in the face of what appears to be nearly unlimited spending. Just keep moving around fake money using a million different utterly opaque methods.

Nice straw man. Nobody said the community was going to “Linux-sized” nor that it was going to be built in a “few days,” nor that it was going to have paid devs. It’s like you’re being intentionally obtuse.

There are already multiple supported forks of Firefox and while it doesn’t take much to maintain such forks when they are being fed a large part of the codebase by Mozilla, if you think such a project would not pick right the fuck up where Mozilla left off if Mozilla tried to pull a Google and get behind Manifest V3, you are, I believe, mistaken.

Mozilla itself owes its existence to Netscape’s failure in the face of unfair competition by Microsoft’s Explorer. Netscape released its source code, Mozilla was founded and the power of open-source created Firefox. Chrome’s halfhearted support of Mozilla is itself owed to the fact that they don’t want to get spanked over Chrome like Microsoft was over IE.

As if installing and using something else means you can’t have Chrome lying around for that one stupid website.

Yes, and we will drop Mozilla when it drops uBlock as well. We will all get behind whatever open-source browser stops ads, and it will very quickly become the most widely used browser. Why? Because everybody despises fucking ads and you can’t curb-stomp them into liking ads, that’s why.

Google can spend all the money it likes trying to piss on users and tell them it’s raining but at the end of the day, a new king will be crowned and if it isn’t Chrome and it isn’t Firefox, then it will be something else.

And no, FOSS doesn’t need money behind it. FOSS needs a dedicated community behind it. Assertions to the contrary are FUD constantly being seeded by Google, Microsoft and their ilk to destroy competition. This is an existential necessity for Google, you can bet they are doing everything in their power to maintain the status quo.

It needed better talent. Thom Hartmann was the sole survivor because he’s actually listenable. Randi Rhodes and Ron Reagan were just shit. But progressive talk can be done well. Stephanie Miller is hilarious when she has the right crew, but she has a penchant for self-owning. She gave us John Fugelsang, who is just brilliant.

So… this is great and all, but how come the senate will confirm any Biden appointments? One would think these days it would just be business as usual to deny all appointments if you control the senate. They face no repercussions for anything these days it seems.

I feel this way about all the meddling and bullshit that state actors are doing - Russia, China, Iran - are you really fucking certain that this isn’t going to fuck you in the ass worse than you’ve already been fucked? Really?