Yeah, just need to decide where to start the fork. The larger problem is radio firmware. FCC regs were the initial excuse, for wifi and Bluetooth too, but we need to open up the source for all of these and allocate money for enforcement if we are truly worried people are going to start adding wifi channels etc. Open firmware phone radios would let you do things like truly turning off the radio when wifi was present, no gps ping even.
I only use Firefox. It has been years since I ran into a chrome only website. Though recently I ran into an edge only websit on my corporate network, not even sure how that happens.
Heavy webpages are the main barrier for projects like this. We need something that is just reader view for everything without the overhead of also being able to do non reader view. Like w3m or lynx but with sane formatting, word wrap etc.
I am interested, thank you! I still think there is room to make a text browser that allows as many webpages as possible to be usable without requiring MB of ram per page. You can do things piping curl through pandoc but that isn't terribly useful.
Taking in immigrants is a short term solution. Within one generation their fertility rate drops to match the local one. Which means you have to keep bringing in new ones. That means there is never time to integrate, leading to cultural clashes and second class labor. And unless you are pulling from Africa or a couple middle eastern countries, the source of immigration is also declining in population at this point so it isn't a permanent fix.
That said, the fix doesn't need to be permanent. The deceleration of fertility rates is the problem, not the velocity simply being negative. Japan is almost through their problem, as they started it first. Soon they will be on a constant downward slope. Which can be handled by productivity gains. Trying to use unlimited immigration to handle the deceleration bump will create more issues than it solves. Unless maybe if you are China... Their deceleration looks like a sharp edged cliff instead of a hill. Their productivity gains are also very non linear, so maybe that will make it less horrible.
> That means there is never time to integrate, leading to cultural clashes and second class labor.
That's a far-right talking point. It's not true. The US has been wholesale importing immigrants for a long time and benefiting greatly from it.
The problem is the safety nets broke down, eg minimum wage hasn't kept up with anything. Or housing/college/healthcare pricing has gone up much faster than income. When people feel insecure they have a tendency to go racist and blame outsiders. If we fixed those, nobody would care about 1 or 2 Somalis in their high school.
It is a far right talking point, or just right now I guess? But it also is a reasonable one. Not from the blood and soil only Europeans are American standpoint, but from the standpoint of having an increasing percentage of first generation immigrants. Japan has seen issues with this at the same time they have benefitted from it. It isn't a matter of blaming the immigrants, it is a disservice to them too. We can't welcome them properly at the rates that would be necessary to fully offset fertility decline. That doesn't mean we shouldn't allow any immigration at all. We should do it as quickly as we can do it correctly. And that would be true even without the demographic problem. Having one or two immigrants in a school is probably too low, we can go faster than that. Having half the class be new from varying places doesn't work. It is also a problem for the donating countries. South America can't afford for all their working age people to head to Spain, they are already hitting their own demographic decline. Africa is on the other side still. They have too many children relative to the working age population. Taking only working age men and not their children harms Africa in a similar way.
I'm not saying allowing immigration in a steady controlled fashion won't help, just that it won't be enough, and that the levels that would be enough aren't possible without impacts on the immigrants, their new countries, and their originating countries being severe enough they don't balance.
Right now the US has 4.1% of its population residing unlawfully. That is 8-20x any European nation. It is largely due to the federated system and a suspicion of national identity systems, but just being able to bring in the rate we have been, but correctly through the system would be a start.
> That's a far-right talking point. It's not true. The US has been wholesale importing immigrants for a long time and benefiting greatly from it.
The last time the foreign born population was at the level it is today, the U.S. enacted restrictive immigration policies for 45 years and instituted aggressive measures to assimilate immigrants.
The president only nominates them. The Senate confirms. Until the obama administration, judges required a supermajority of the senate to confirm, but a gop minority were filibustering all his nominees. So he asked the senate to remove the filibuster for judges. It was really the only use of the filibuster that made sense. Most democracies have independent commissions. Perhaps they all do now...
Not a bad theory actually. None of the stuff they have done to distract from the files has been without other purpose, but that is how it is done. You have a backlog of things you want to do ranked by unpopularity, and you try to only do one of them when you are being grilled over a worse one already. I'm sure it is down to a science and probably has a name.
When you say should hav, do you mean in the legal sense, or that you agree with such laws? I can't fathom being ok with any book being banned, but usually when I cannot understand a perspective I'm missing something pretty big. So I'm actually asking, not trying to start a pointless Internet debate.
The arguments for and against end up similar to those for and against banning drawn or AI generated depiction of csam. No actual children are harmed, it's artistic expression, moving the topic out of sight won't solve it, and any ban will also catch works that speak out against sexual abuse. On the other hand any such content risks playing into pedophilia fetishes (and some content simply does so very openly), and so far research is (very lightly) in favor of withholding any such content from "afflicted people" rather than providing a "safe outlet". Though this is debated and part of ongoing research
I think one additional objection to AI generated depictions is that photo-realistic AI generated content gives plausible deniability to those who create/possess real life CSAM.
And it would make authorities waste time finding the real csam to investigate or mistakenly investigating AI csam (under the hypothetical that AI csam is decriminalized).
I deliberately didn't want to get into that. It's not as if my opinion makes much of a difference anyway. But I do want us to be consistent, and I want as little as possible to be decided by "I know it when I see it" judges.
Yes, that is where I get stuck. Of there was a deterministically harmful book, like the play ,"the king in yellow", which drove every reader violently mad, then I would want it banned. There are unquestionably books and ideas that are statistically harmful to the society most of us want to live in. I just don't trust anyone to be the arbiter of what gets included in that category. But I live in a low trust society, so maybe it is a solvable problem?
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