Frankly, the answer should be for every site to just cut the UK off entirely. Let them have their own little North Korean style micronet. Maybe when the people of the UK can’t visit anything but a bunch of miserable English websites, they will get off their asses and elect competent leaders. If not, well maybe they’re just not the sort of people we should allow access to the global communications network. Let the barbarians stew in their own barbarism.

Unfortunately now Google is ChatGPT. It provides its own shitty AI answers, and its search results have been corrupted by an ocean of slop.

To me, the hardest part seems to be - how do you keep your small web from being infected by AI slop? Currently the slop spammers aren’t focusing on these small web rings and web 1.0 communities. But if they did start to become popular, the AI slop would inevitably follow.

Perhaps such sites need to run on a 100% no-advertising model. Individual hobby sites or those supported by subscriptions and donations only. That would cut out most of the vast, vast majority of the slop. AI slop currently can’t produce content that people are actually willing to pay to subscribe to. If sloppers can’t bring in revenue via ad impressions, they won’t have any incentive to create slop AI 1.0 sites.

Crawl up into your attic or wherever the air circulator is installed and find the exact model number of your unit. See if instructions can be found here: https://web.archive.org/web/20160603194940/https://vanee.edenenergy.com/res-air-exchangers-literature.php

If not, I would contact vanEE directly. I had to use the Wayback Machine as the documentation section on their current site is blank.

One is made from imported materials. The other is made from locally available materials. There ain’t no tariffs on lumber from within an hour’s drive of my house.

Don’t copy that floppy!

I assume it’s because it’s run entirely off of a single old zip disk drive manufactured in 1998.

Much less so than imported crap from Ikea.

I reject your hypothetical. Your hypothetical is built to ensure the conclusion you desire, not to accurately reflect the possible worlds that exist. Seeds could be developed by government labs and released into the public domain. Hell, the foundational science behind patented crops is all publicly funded already. The private companies just come along later and reap the benefit of the taxpayer’s investment.

Science doesn’t happen for a profit motive. Most scientists are people who are genuinely and passionately interested in their chosen field. They are intrinsically motivated to pursue knowledge for its own sake; they’re not in it to make a buck. The actual biologists and agronomists developing these crops don’t even get paid in a portion of the profits; they’re paid a salary. They would be just as, if not more happy, to be paid a salary as part of a state-funded research lab. The people actually developing these products would happily give them away to any and all, but parasites at the top turn it into a rent-seeking operation.

Your reading comprehension is disturbingly poor.

Neat life hack. If you need more space, there is a tried and true solution. Simply declare the apartment next to yours as part of your people’s historic homeland. Then proceed to occupy and annex half of your neighbor’s apartment.

Who cares? It’s deeply immoral to patent any living organism. You’re under no moral obligation to obey patently unjust and corrupt laws. And if you’re only “pirating” organisms on a small personal scale, your legal risk is nil. If you start an industrial operation selling patented foodcrops, then you’ll get in legal hot water. But just in your backyard garden? No one is suing you over that unless you create a whole YouTube video series publicly documenting and celebrating your actions.

Fuck evil companies that dare to patent living things. The very concept is an abomination against nature and common decency. It’s not only morally allowable, but a moral obligation to violate these laws whenever it is practical to do so.

My general rule on secondhand goods is “nothing permeable, unless it can survive going through the washer on the steam clean setting.” Secondhand clothes are fine, as long as they can survive a good strong washing. Secondhand furniture is OK as long as it’s not upholstered, like a table or dresser. But couches and mattresses? Forget it. My washing machine can’t fit a love seat inside it.

That’s why I prefer to build my own furniture out of solid hardwood.

Can I say Luigi

https://lemmy.world/c/luigimangione

Things need to be paid for, but why does that mechanism need to be baked into the platform?

Imagine I’m the best, most engaging poster and commenter on Lemmy. Everyone loves my posts and comments, shares them, quotes them, and responds to them endlessly. (Maybe in this scenario everyone has brain damage for some reason, and this allowed me to become the top Lemmy user.)

If I’m in that position, what’s stopping me from just putting a little blurb at the bottom of each comment saying, “this post is brought to you by Carls Jr.” or whoever wants to sponsor my comments. If people for some reason loved my posts and comments enough, I could find sponsors and just put those sponsorships right in whatever comment or post I make. Lemmy doesn’t need to be involved. They don’t need to go out of their way to recommend my posts either. If they’re good enough, then they can be spread naturally by people sharing and engaging with them.

It makes sense for platforms to provider revenue to creators, but only if the platform has substantial ad revenue. YouTube pays its creators, but it also brings in billions of ad revenue. I don’t think most Lemmy servers even have ads.

Yeah, mutual aid works on the local level or in insular communities like long-term discord groups with a tight group of regular members. With community mutual aid, I’m generally in favor of just taking people at their word. If they say they need help, give them help. No need to interrogate them like the food stamp office will. You prevent people from abusing the system by simply not granting endless requests from the same person. Or if someone needs severe aid, at that point you can start actually verifying their story, helping them access government benefits, helping them find employment, etc.

But that kind of open approach works for in-person aid. It doesn’t work for anonymous online aid, where someone can use bots to spin up hundreds of convincing profiles each begging for money.

I just don’t think mutual aid works well in an online context. The only online context it works in is among communities like small discord groups where people know each other for years. But on a lemmy or mastadon-type service? Mutual aid is impractical. Any people asking for aid should be directed to local groups that can help them in person.