Auburn

I don’t think that schools (at least in America) teach enough about Eugene V. Debs. Despite his failed presidential runs, this guy was one of the most popular politicians of his day. His imprisonment for sedition caused literal riots across the country. His release from prison was attended by over a million people. He founded the Industrial Workers of the World. Some of my favourite quotes of his that stick with me:

I am not a Labor Leader; I do not want you to follow me or anyone else; if you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I led you in, someone else would lead you out. You must use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition.

While there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free

Goodhart’s Law:

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure

Corollary to this is the “I want to be able to choose my doctor” line. If there’s only one health insurance provider, then every doctor will have to accept it, ergo you get more choice in your doctor

Impossible! Trump has lowered prices 600%! [sarcasm]

Glad I renewed mine early. Now if only I had a work visa from somewhere else to put in it…

“Citizen I.C.E.” - Dropkick Murphy’s

“Solidarity Forever” - Old trade union song to the tune of Battle Hymn of the Republic, here performed by the Mountain Goats

The people essentially have been demanding it. As several others have mentioned in this thread, 70-80% of the public supports universal healthcare in some form. For the nitty-gritty, basically 50 years ago and earlier, extremely wealthy people realised that their preferred policies weren’t especially popular with the general public. They identified that their main issue was that what they had was money, not people. So they embarked on a decades long quest to give money the same (or greater) political power as individuals, culminating in the Citizen’s United Supreme Court case. I bring this up because it essentially means that the People demanding it doesn’t matter, because while there may be a couple hundred million people asking for it, there’s a couple hundred billion dollars asking to never do it. It’s gotten so bad that there’s a kind of perverse, Stockholm Syndrome effect starting to happen to. In 2016 there was a big dust-up during the Democratic Primary where the Culinary Union in Las Vegas/Nevada didn’t want to endorse Bernie Sanders, the most pro-Union candidate in decades, essentially because medicare-for-all would remove health insurance as a bargaining chip

I’m not some big technical guy, but there is a pretty fundamental difference in how the protocols work. Mastodon uses ActivityPub, Bluesky uses the AT Protocol.

ActivityPub is like email, it’s an exchange protocol. So basically you create a link between two accounts by “following” and that says “whenever A posts something, deliver it in this format to B”.

ATProto is a bit more complex. It’s based around the idea of nodes. A node in this sense is basically a pile of letters. If I decide to post something, that letter gets thrown into the pile with some info like user tags, etc. Another user somewhere else who follows me is in essence just telling their client “pull out all the letters that A has thrown into this pile and shown them to me”. And then you have a front facing client that displays the result of that filter in a convenient way. On the one hand, this is why topic lists (I think called collections?) are much easier/better in Bluesky because at the end of the day it’s just another filter onto the pile, whereas with an ActivityPub based collection would be a bit more complicated.

In practice what this basically means is that Bluesky is federated in name only. If the Bluesky board decided one day that you couldn’t post about cats, but I really wanted to post about cats, I would have to then host the node, the filtering apparatus, and (potentially) the front end. The node hosting specifically is the most technically onerous. If I wanted the Catsky node to federate with the Bluesky node, I would need to set up a tunnel between the two, then posts from Bluesky that the Catsky users would want to see would also be deposited into my node meaning my storage requirements would go up quickly. Conversely, you can run a stable Mastodon instance on a raspberry pi because you only need to be able to store what you want to see, not the entirety of the platform. I personally have only heard of one other successfully hosted node (Blacksky for Black Twitter refugees) and I’m not sure it federates with Bluesky.

In the end, Bluesky works a lot like OG Twitter, which was just a lump of storage and the actual product was the API, but with a couple ropes dangling out the sides with a sign saying “go ahead, hook up, and federate, we don’t mind”. This is unsurprising as Bluesky and the ATProto were made in essence by the OG Twitter people