A death is a death.

I can quote from memory a case in my country, in the 80’s, where a man assaulted a couple, killed the woman and was about to kill the man.

The killer got tackled and beat to death by the widower. The sole survivor was sent to trial for murder regardless being under mortal peril.

Got acquited on the appeal. First instance deemed it an excessive act, regardless self defence.

I am going to repeat my point as many times as necessary until it gets through: your example is only a punishment system with an extra layer to be more palatable to the society where it is inserted.

Being free does not imply in any moment an individual can do whatever they may concieve or desire; freedom requires and demands constraint, precisely because the freedom of the other is the boundary of my own. Life in society predicates on this. There is no society of one; the individual often finds a swift end if insisting on it, by its own actions.

A society that simply represses or discards individuals because they engaged in destructive behaviour is not doing anything to in fact solve a problem. A society is as responsible by its individuals as the individuals are by their society. And a society that so simply and easily opts by fractioning itself just to allow more (blatantly artificial) freedom to its elements is not a society. It is something I lack the word to describe but a society it is not.

That is a system predicated on getting rid of the problematic, like the one it exists today, just with an added layer of distancing, to ease the rest of the population’s mind. It does not solve any problem.

So what? It still exists on the web. People can visit you, enjoy your content. Make a stand.

Nobody. Unless you had the capability/knowledge/will to maintain your own instance, which makes your content and yourself unbreakable.

That doesn’t work. The average individual is too hedonistic to refrain from any pleasureable or self reinforcing loop. It’s been a cautionary tale in stories since ancient times.

If I didn’t understood there is already a problem of bad actors, I wouldn’t have approached your reply. And deny it in any way would be bad faith from me.

What I feel the need to underscore is that individuals make and influence groups and even the most progressively thought out environment is open to being corrupted if any individual present there lacks, in any way, the self awareness that their attitude is damaging.

It’s not the group that needs to regulate the individual; the regulation needs to arise from the individual themselves, in the first place. And most individuals lack that hard individual sense of responsability.

Before all that - and you are right on your take - there is a more basic flaw that affects social media: people do not know how to act properly.

The anonimity emboldens the small minds that use it to mistreat, slander and ridicule others and spread lies and rumours.

Unless we can force people to act with civility - which implies people being fairly conscious of the consequences of their words and actions - social media will remain what it is: a cesspool where the worst of our species destils into a refined poison.

And that is valid.

I have never subscribed any of these streaming services. The pressure from friends was intense but at the end of the day I simply felt no need and even less appeal to it.

Nowadays, I hear those same friends how expensive it has become to keep all of these services to follow their interests and how the catalogue has been degrading.

I sincerely do not care.

I am all up for starving machine learning of new knowledge but I view this as the least friction path. Otherwise, if the machines try to brute force their entry, what harm can kt cause?

There is more commercial proximity between China and the EU than China and the US.

The current taxation run is to curtail the online markets like AliExpress, Shein and Temu to flood the market with garbage. Shein got hit with their dumping practices very hard.

Taxing the import of vehicles, when an industry already exists just makes sense. European automakers were sleeping on their job, granted, but the other option is to let them fail and surrender another industry to non-EU territories.

Why not? To my knowledge, the 3€ surcharge is applied by category, not item. So, if you’re buying electronic components, you pay 3€, once.

I’m not a hobbyist but in Portugal Robert Mauser is a big player. Then there are the specialty shops, as you mention.

The irony of this is unavoidable. The experts have reached the conclusion the rest of the mortals have been warning on for months.

I’m screwed, then. I was never able to memorize those weird “cool” handshakes as a kid. My chances today are even lower.

You solve the problems you have at home before you start making yourself concerned with what your neighbor is doing at theirs.

Space exploration, as it was sold to the general public, was an arms race. The public demonstration of which nation could build faster the engine and carcass capable of delivering a nuclear payload on the other. The money spent on that would have been better spent towards achieving true and long lasting civilizational goal, like disease and poverty erradication, environmental preservation, clean energy and so forth.

It’s the broken window falacy.

This is going to force a resurgence of honour based behaviour. If anything is false(ifiable) then the only way to demonstrate something as true is by personally commiting face to it.

Hydrogen can make some degree of sense if we take as an energy reserve, stockpileable, for an event where it is necessary to suplement energy needs.

So many countries with solar farms being turned off to prevent grid collapse could consider building hydrogen plants or, those with sea acess, dessalination stations, to stockpile fresh water underground and extract minerals directly from the water.

Who cares about fusion? There was a study in the late 90’s stating that if only 10% of the capital put towards oil research, exploration, extraction, etc, annually, was put towards renewable energies it would catapult the research output by a factor of 30, by year.

We could have, by now, moved completely towards renewables for everyday life needs and start towards producing more energy we could ever need and put that excess towards greater achievements.

Hence my statement: it’s a matter of imagination

There is a paradox which I can’t name now that states that every time there are advancements capable of solving scarcity problems instead of ending the issue new uses for the solution are come up with and what became plentiful gets stressed again.

That much excess heat is energy. An immense amount of it. Maybe use it to smelt scrap or process artificial diamonds.

The matter at hand is, for a change, excess when it is usually the opposite.