• 7 Posts
  • 190 Comments
Joined 4 months ago
Cake day: July 5th, 2025
  • Coopr8@kbin.earthtoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•Could rising sea levels caused by climate change be thwarted by digging a big hole at the bottom of the sea?
    29·
    2 days ago

    Possible yes, practical no. Effectively you would need to build a new sub-continant to have an appreciable impact on sea level. That said, you don’t need to dredge from the low point in the ocean, all that matters is displacing solid material from below sea level to above sea level, so the best option would be to find a shallow sea with an existing archipelago of islands and build up from there making it a deep sea with the islands connected as a continent. Alternately you could go after reefs, despite the collateral damage, with the great barrier reef being the obvious choice, essentially pump up dredged sand from the surrounding ocean bed onto the reef to make new land, the reef has the advantage of being very shallow and stabilized with lots of surface area, so good for making lots of land if you don’t mind being the architect of an ecological apocalypse of unprecedented proportions.

  • Coopr8@kbin.earthtoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•Richest American to FAFO?
    22·
    7 days ago

    Bernie Madoff had the largest fall from $65 billion estimated at peak to $17 billion at time of arrest then dying in prison.

    Changpeng Zhao of Binance will be the richest person in the US, and probably ever, to do time in prison after conviction, but his wealth won’t be impacted and it is only a few months, so hardly much Finding Out involved.

    Sam Bankman-Fried is potentially an even bigger Find Out than Madoff, because unlike Madoff who maintained a large estate even after going to jail, SBF has gone from around $24 billion to $15.5 Billion at time of arrest, to now close to zero on paper as almost all his wealth was tied up in FTX and crypto and it was “all” siezed as part of his conviction and the FTX winddown. Now that said, he probably has a lot of crypto stashed in cold wallets somewhere that have appreciated substantially since his arrest, so it is hard to know how much he would be worth if he ever got access to them, but as I understand it he is basically banned from using computers and facing over 100 years on his sentence, so he better be putting in a lot of good behavior of he ever hopes to see any of that secret stash again.

  • Coopr8@kbin.earthtoFediverse@lemmy.world•The highlighted division and factions of Lemmy.
    21·
    7 days ago

    At first read I see a flaw in the first part of your argument, which is that centralization vs collectivization of economic ownership is not directly indicative of policy, rather it is the percentage of economic output which is used for collective services that dictates the Left/Right spectrum, which indeed is how a Far Left position can be coextant with a market economy and private ownership but with a tax or public stake in economic actors that returns a majority of the “profit” to collective service, it is rather the degree of enforcement of property rights as one of a set of rights and regulations by a central Authority which lies on the Auth/Lib spectrum that dictates the structure of the economic order. This is how for example you could be a Lib/Left Marxist who prefers central planning of the economy, so long as you don’t believe the central planning should be enforced by monopoly of violence and instead implemented by collective consensus, there is no fundamental conflict in the position. Leninism on the other hand implies use of force by a centralized state military/police to restructure the economy along central planned lines, which is an Authoritarian position.

    I agree the “quiz” is very flawed, it would need an order of magnitude more questions to be accurate, and authorship bias is certainly an issue.

    That said, the compass itself I find to be quite accurate to the mental political models of most individuals. What you are pointing to, Centralization vs Distribution, is a relatively new way to concieve of the older Federal vs Local or State vs Community political framework. I would indeed view this as a “third axis” or omission by the two axis compass, as both Authority and Economy can have organization and flow biased towards fewer or more numerous nodes of participation/enforcement. To go back to your Lib Left Marxism, you could say that the Marxism part of that formula calls for a State economic planning model with high collectivization of economic output and low State enforcement of policy. On thing often missing from the Auth/Lib axis description is that reduced State enforcement does not mean reduced enforcement overall, but rather that the enforcement does not rely on the state monopoly on violence, instead directing enforcement through social exchange relying on the individuals applying their independent power onto each other to discourage deviancy from the consensus.

    An easy example of this is in many tribal groups and including pacifist Western religious sects the worst corrective action an individual faces is shunning, which relies on all of the individuals of the community independently choosing to no longer participate socially or economically with the individual being corrected. The decision to do so may be more or less centralized or decentralized (for example a Priarch/Priest might declare shunning in a nonviolent Christian community, while a specific tribal group may only do so through a process of full group consensus, or even the most lib/local of all a spontaneous reaction of each individual against the deviant based on norms.

  • Coopr8@kbin.earthtoFediverse@lemmy.world•The highlighted division and factions of Lemmy.
    21·
    7 days ago

    Political Compass Vector

    Learn the Political Compass

    Because politics is not limited to Left and Right, compressed down to it’s minimum reasonable simplicity it is at least two dimensional. In mass media you see “Left” vs “Right” division, on Lemmy you see Lib Left vs Auth Right vs Center divisions, which are just as strong but largely suppressed by entrenched political interests especially in the US but also across the industrialized world where Lib Left has been suppressed by the capitalist political apparatus.

    Note that most of the time when someone on the Fediverse decries “Liberals” they mean capitalist centrist in the “Neo-Liberal” mode. In some specific circumstances though you might see Auth Left criticizing Lib Left with the term, essentially insulting them by lumping them in with the Centrists. In other cases more in line with mass media you might see any Right position using the term against anyone center or left of center.

    Essentially, Liberal has become a term only meaningful in context, and for that reason largely useless in common discourse. This is why the Political Compass is so useful a tool, situating political positions in their context, though of course it is flawed by being only two dimensional when actual political groups are very much multidimensional.