And sadly, despite how horrific it is- at the end of the day, it is legal. He didn’t hunt these people down and end them. He denied them coverage. This needs to change, but vigilantism clearly isn’t going to do it, and this is evident in the fact that it’s still happening. In fact, I believe it’s even worse now.

In the aftermath of the killings, approval of claims skyrocketed. If CEOs kept getting deleted for their horrifically immoral actions, then I’ve no doubt we’d have a different healthcare system right now. Your bootlicking is exactly what they rely on to literally keep killing people. You are enabling them to kill people.

It’s a trolly car problem. If I’m confronted with this moral dilemma, I’m choosing the lever that kills the CEO to save millions of lives.

Where do we draw the line where murder isn’t okay just because we don’t like what someone does?

In this case, this person was so vile, so directly contributing to the misery of society, the slope aint slippery at all.

There is a reason we have laws in place to stop slippery slopes like this from happening. And we are better than these assholes. They got to do what they do using our system of law- so we will need to use that system of law to stop them.

The reason is that law enforcement is a tool to protect capital. The police and politicians will never step in for this issue, because they are captured by the capitalist class. Nothing you can do (well…) can change that fact, and they want you to waste your time on performative protests and attempts at legal reform.

If Luigi had killed his health insurance claim worker instead, you’d never even have known his name. You don’t need to remind me that I’m better than CEOs. I’m completely certain of it. Because I don’t make my daily work harvesting money via the suffering of millions of people.

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Thanks for the reply! I think I understand your arguments pretty well now, Thanks for the clarification.

On the subject of “Free as in Freedom” - I don’t agree that a site is ‘not free’ if non-anonymous user membership is a requirement for adding content. Primarily because all sorts of bad actors would abuse that privilege. But that’s not the main thrust of your argument so let’s set that aside.

Your main concern, about the Wikimedia foundation “doing very little,” and concerns about fairness, doesn’t seem to hold much weight from my perspective. The entire point of the wiki project is to leverage subject matter experts from the public rather than curated work from in-house people. Not only is a comprehensive and current encyclopedia of Wikipedia’s scale impractical to produce in-house, it’s also far less valuable. The Wikimedia foundation solicits funds for additional wiki projects, site hosting, and community events. Hosting a site in the top 10 traffic list is horrifically expensive, and worth the expense. Spending their time, effort, and funding on ancillary efforts around that goal is fine with me, Even in a hypothetical situation where only 10% of the solicited funds went to site hosting and 90% went to activism around using the site, I think I’d still be fine with it, given the altruistic nature of the project.

Donations to contributors would corrupt the entire process. Contributors would have an incentive to produce content that would financially reward them. We already have plenty of sites on the internet that do that, with all of the issues with bias that come with it. We don’t need more news sites, or lemmys, or substacks. We need a free place to compile information that is driven purely by the quest for truth, not money. Punditry for profit can go anywhere else. Indeed, recently the co-founder of wikipedia recently had their admin rights pulled for falsely accusing someone of the thing you’re wishing you could do, which tells me that they take the idea of direct contributor remuneration very seriously.

Lastly, I’m very aware of the corruption with 501c nonprofits. Frankly, your comments across this post have been full of veiled accusations of corruption. If it was that apparent, you’d be posting links with factual evidence of mismanagement, instead of vague hand-waving about freedom, IP, financial mismanagement or the abuse of volunteers. This is the kind of FUD that would get you banned from editing on Wikipedia, to be honest.

Edit: From your own source you linked elsewhere, the CTO has a very detailed rebuttal to the idea that the Wikimedia foundation is squandering those dollars:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1123763881#Comment_by_Selena_Deckelmann,_Wikimedia_Foundation

I agree that those big banner ads were eyesores, and the pleas for money are off-putting. But that’s marketing, not politics.

Free as in beer? It can be free, but as Heinlein said: “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

The whole point of Wikipedia is that the “IP” is freely given, for the benefit of all. Keep in mind wikipedia editors are challenged to remain purely factual, so the idea that anything stated there could possibly belong to someone doesn’t exactly make sense. You can own the rights to a process, or a song, or own the right to produce something, but the composition of an object, the technology driving an innovation, or the background of music theory are facts, and statements around them are part of public discourse.

In the sense that media is present on Wikipedia, I believe I’ve never seen a commercially-licenced piece of media on the site. That’s why all the pictures of celebrities are weird public snaps.

Is the editing and content creation process messy? Sometimes corrupted? Yes. That’s humanity for you. We fuck things up. It’s up to all of us to keep us honest and continue to improve. Things can be irredeemable or fully captured by commercial interest, sure - that’s a Reddit situation and it can be abandoned. Wikipedia isn’t that, and it’s old enough to have proven it won’t be captured in that way.

I think maybe you’re confused on how nonprofits work? Plenty of nonprofits have paid employees who are working there expressly for money. Sometimes lots of money. Because living under a capitalist system involves trading your time for labor. How else would the site be maintained and kept running? Wikipedia is the 10th-most visited website on the entire internet. That it would run at all on the labor of less than 100 people is fucking incredible and something to be thrilled about! In comparison, Reddit makes the world much worse than Wikipedia and it runs on ~2,000 employees. So I would say that the Wikimedia foundation is definitely not just like reddit.

What other stuff? Blocking anonymous proxies is okay with me given the volume of bullshit posted by anonymous people everywhere else. Non-anonymised posting on a website wholly dedicated to facts and not opinions seems like a good thing.

From the (very long) NYT article that dropped today about this:

• Epstein was likely money laundering for quite some time, Bank ignored red flags because the penalties would almost certainly be less than the profits from moving that much money around. This is the big reason why he didn’t get cut loose. I’m sure JPM was taking a cut on all the transfers of non-cash deposits (securities, etc) and also making money on the balance of accounts as they moved through their system (being laundered). Getting to trade on $1B while it’s being disbursed is a lot of why these “market makers” are so powerful. Critically, they’re supposed to be reporting on large cash withdrawls - if you or I pulled out $180k in a year in physical cash the feds would be coming by to see what was going on.
• Despite the potential bad optics of bankrolling a pedophile money launderer, They continued lending & consulting him because he got them add’l whale clients, including the CEO of Google (4B+ Customer) and business with highly profitable hedge funds
• When things became untenable (tried + convicted sex offender, serving 18 months in FLA) the senior exec who had been covering for him (and profiting from his referrals and money laundering) lobbied to keep him because he, himself, had been entrapped in Epstein’s sex trafficking operation (as a customer, obv).
• Once word of one of their seniors being Epstein’s pal became public JPM cut everyone loose. This is pretty routine behavior by wall street tbh. Crime until you’re caught.

Obviously trustworthy banks don’t enable money laundering, so he should really have been dropped in the 90’s/00’s. Certainly his '11 conviction should have been the end of it. Incarcerated white-collar criminals usually lose big after the first conviction because the revenue stream has dried up and the justice-averting lawyers can’t be paid. In this case, his contacts kept the money moving because they were embroiled in the same schemes.

Not that I agree, but if you believe that the LLMs will continuously improve, then in 5-10 years you may only need 1/3rd the seniors, to oversee and prompt. Again, that’s what these CEOs are relying on.

Aren’t the people ICE kidnaps being deported to concentration camps regardless? So the frying of an ICE machine is purely a value-added service.

It’s a bad day to be a Putin apologist. How’s the weather in St. Petersburg today?

None of what you said is relevant or coherent. 9/11 was an attack against civilians by terrorists. This was an attack against military targets by state actors at war. NATO exists for soft and hard power projection, and to discourage intra-state conflict within Europe. Further, the weakness of the Russian Military as contrasted by their posturing has been stark. I don’t personally believe Russia remains a superpower, with their ability to project power now restricted to digital battlefields and hard power only adjacent to their borders.

Thanks for the direct quote, I appreciate you citing a source. The letter has quite a few grievances and meanders a bit, but at it’s core it’s really all about Islamic Eschatology - hastening the final day of judgement by sparking a worldwide holy war. The targets of Al Qaeda were basically “any target of opportunity” with a preference towards the west if possible. If (obviously impossible) Israel had suddenly reconciled and left all of Palestine, imo 9/11 would still have occurred and much of the antisemitic screed in the letter would still be there.

For me personally (as a secular, non-jewish westerner), I acknowledge the genocide occurring and the evil being done, and I think the sanewashing of the genocide further reinforces the absolute moral deprivation of those persecuting it.

Can you elaborate on how 9/11 was the fault of the Jewish occupation? It seems like your claim is “Terrorists were striking back in response to a series of aggressions dating back to 1948/even earlier Jewish transgressions” then I don’t buy it. Islamic eschatology is the reason for 9/11, combined with classic power struggles and posturing within that subculture.

I do agree that the settler movement and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is why Oct. 7th happened tho, 100%. Hamas is a terror organization fueled by Israel’s racist, ethnic cleansing movement. That dynamic is never going to be solved until Israel completes its inevitable genocide of the Palestinian people.

The server I subscribe to is completely transparent about their costs and displays how much lead time they have at their current spend. Per-user server cost is about $5 per year per paying user (as in, users that pay to keep the server running put in about $5, and there are many freeloaders). The admin to my knowledge doesn’t make any money on his labor.

To make $5/user in ads per year at a CPC of $0.38 or a CPM of $6 (twitter prices, which is being pretty generous for something as small as Lemmy) would mean I’d receive 833 ads per year. An ad runs until it’s CPM is hit, which means some of those ads would drag on for weeks until enough hapless fools clicked them. You might end up with one in five posts being an ad, leading to more adblocker use, which exacerbates your problem. It could end up being a significant cost to even deliver the ad content at that load.

This is all to make like $2k in hosting costs per year - imagine if you were trying to make a living running a Lemmy server, which people definitely will - it would be a hellscape. I’m happy to not deal with that.

I sincerely hope there’s less content here than Reddit, forever. I hope the UI keeps the masses out, and the technically savy are the only ones here.

I want to doomscroll less, I want to be astroturfed less. I want to interact with more humans and fewer bots, even when that means I interact less. I want fewer AI prompts, AI Art and corpo spam ads masquerading as engagement. I want less video and more text. Overall, I want to be spending less time on the internet, on my phone, and I don’t want to hear about every last toxic thing Trump did to drive me crazy. Lemmy helps me control that feed better, so I deleted my reddit account and I hope to stay here until I manage to stop opening social media at all.

Lemmy right now feels like the internet before the long september. I hope it never changes.