420stalin69 [he/him]

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?

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

There was that hot Somali who was Tik Tokking himself while boarding a cargo ship.

But he was enforcing a blockade enacted by his government within Yemeni territorial waters so unfortunately it wasn’t piracy.

The problem is that if you own a home and you’ve paid off the mortgage or paid it down over 20 years already then there’s no reason to sell, meaning prices likely won’t fall that much as people will prefer to sit on their asset than to sell at a loss, or at a perceived loss relative to what they were previously told the market would pay for it.

The only mechanism for prices to actually return to earth and make housing affordable again is wage growth and inflation, and the hope that housing prices don’t simply rise alongside wage growth. The only way out of this catastrophe is for inflation to reduce the value of money while house prices remain static in nominal terms. And even the “left” government of Australia see “tackling inflation” and “constraining wage growth to prevent inflation” as critical policy priorities.

Inflation driven by wage growth is actually the medicine needed. But this would hurt the already very wealthy minority so the cure is verboten and branded economic heresy by technocrats and the spineless neoliberals serving the interests of the wealthy that dare to call themselves the Labor Party.

Even if you conquer the mountain of ending negative gearing and the insanely generous tax subsidies that investors get, even then you need to wait a decade just to see prices enter a sane range relative to income again.

Millennials are doomed. Half of them will be renting until they die. The only way out of this trap is to making own 3-10 homes a bad investment. But can you imagine any Australian government decommodifying housing? It’s not going to happen which means a generation of renters and a poverty time bomb when the millennials want to retire.

For people stuck in the renting trap already in their 40s, they’re doomed now and the best idea the intelligentsia have is “maybe just live with your rich parents who sent you to a private school a bit longer and ask them for a loan.”

What’s needed is (1) a sudden and total end to the enormous subsidy given to the already wealthy in the form of tax incentives for property investment and speculation, (2) inflation driven driven by wage growth to reduce the real value of housing to bring it back to an affordable level.

Neither of the major political parties are unwilling to do (1) and even the “left” of politics view wage growth and inflation as the key evils that hurt “the economy”.

So we’re fucked. Time to read Mao.

6Howard always implied a distinction between Asian countries and Australia’s Asian communities. As Brett (Citation2003: 151) reminds us, Asian-Australians were consistently presented as individuals instead of members of cultural groups. As such, and by virtue of the fact that they had brought in values like family, hard work and entrepreneurial flair – not coincidentally the restricted pool of ‘Asian values’ that overlapped with Howard’s cultural outlook – ‘Australians of Asian descent’ could aspire to be ‘as honoured citizens as any other section of the Australian community’ (Howard Citation1996).This circumstance allowed the ‘integration’ of Asians as individuals maintaining the separateness from Asian countries from the identitarian point of view.

8In a speech to the Heritage Foundation – often overlooked supposedly because it was given three years into his ‘retirement’ – Howard (Citation2010: 5–6) stated that ‘the values that bind the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand … are deeper and more abiding … than the bonds between any other countries’ and that ‘one of the errors that some sections of the English-speaking world have made in the past few decades has been to confuse multiracialism and multiculturalism’, to conclude that ‘the English-speaking nations have made an enormous contribution  … in excess of any other grouping of countries – to the defence of liberty in the last two hundred years’. Howard thus appropriated the whole intellectual body underlying the Anglospherist perspective in its entirety.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10361146.2014.965658

Emphasizing “shared values” in international relations and emphasizing the closeness of “values” with similarly anglo-sphere nations.

The “shared values” rhetoric is a very thin wrapper hiding outright white supremacism.

Implying Spotify pays artists a fair fee.

Fuck, and I cannot emphasize this enough, them

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Is this dialectics? 🦋

We don’t prohibit anyone from the right to protest

We will put your name on a fucking list that says “probably a terrorist” though so maybe think twice about going before I tell your employer that you’re an antisemite for opposing the carpet bombing of refugee camps in gaza