420stalin69 [he/him]

Star Trek is what comes after communism

USA spends decade after decade brutalizing South America, Central Asia, south east Asia, and the Middle East: yeah but China funded a port in Sri Lanka

Image being unhealthy and saying "it’s going to take more than a 20 minute walk once a week to get in shape.

Imagine being unhealthy and your doctor is doing genocide in Gaza

If the public are paying for it, then it becomes a subsidy.

And good luck getting the US government to require the code to be GPLed. That’s even less likely to happen than a public subsidy for OSS at all.

They typically do the opposite and require “commercialization” to ensure the benefit of the publicly-funded technology is captured by their donors.

This is how it basically works in biotech, for example. Government grants to study the medicine and then when the scientists actually find something important it becomes a “public-private partnership” often without even a royalty for the public let alone making it a public good.

That’s not how government funding works in a modern democracy, unfortunately. It would amount to a cash transfer to big tech to make the public pay their R&D costs.

So a public subsidy for big tech to get free code?

The rule is you have to post something before you leave

VPNs are much cheaper than Netflix, torrents don’t have ads, it’s always perfect quality, and the content catalog is excellent.

Not really. At all. Like they’re barely even a bandaid.

The issue is a car weighs a couple of tons and it’s being used to move a person who weighs around 100kg.

It’s massively inefficient use of energy.

Even in some fantasy world where the energy used to charge the batteries is all renewable - not even close to reality but let’s pretend - all that lithium and other precious earths are still an environmental disaster.

The answer is mass transit and lower mass vehicles. A lifestyle change is actually required and the thing is it wouldn’t even make people less happy, just that change is so fucking scary for some reason.

Walkable cities are a dream lifestyle and an electric scooter in a walkable city is outstanding. Fuck urban sprawl.