Vinegar
Careful, there’s very little that separates you from those you wish to disenfranchise.
You might want to check out Anthony Ray Hinton’s The Sun Does Shine for a memoir of what it’s like to be wrongfully sentenced to prison for nearly 30 years all because your friend was mad at you over a girl.
There’s also the case of Crystal Mason who’s in prison, right now, despite comitting no crime.
Profit and Punishment: How America Criminalizes the Poor in the Name of Justice by Pulitzer prize winner Tony Messenger is a more comprehensive book, but one that I think every US citizen should read before defending the status quo.
Criminal justice reform is extraordinarily difficult in the US because citizens with first hand experience are disenfranchised. Everyone affected by society should have an equitable voice in society - there should be no disenfranchised underclass.
Yes. A superficial search yielded this article citing the American Bar Association as stating 98% of federal criminal cases end in a plea bargain - confession in exchange for a lesser sentence.
Many solid defenses never go to trial because the accused does not have the resources to fight the charge. Many of those individuals who plea guilty will lose their right to vote. The books cited in my previous comment provide more compelling statistics and case studies showing that any one of us can easily find ourselves in trouble with the law, in over our heads, and eager to take the path of least resistance back to a “normal” life.
All too often I think the discussion misses the fact that there is no alternative to driving for the vast majority of US citizens. Busses, trains, walking, biking, etc are not viable options because US infrastructure & city planning overwhelmingly neglects everything but the automobile.
It is supposedly a personal moral failing every time someone drives too old, too tired, or too impaired, but if trains, busses, & walking were the default ways to get around then this chronic societal problem would diminish dramatically. Incompetent driving is rooted in systemic failures, not personal moral ones.
In the US it is normal and expected to eat meat and animal products 3-5 times per day with every meal and snack. If popular culture can shift to consuming meat and animal products 3-5 times per week that would be an ~80% reduction with minimal sacrifice.
These days it’s not the tremendous change it used to be - there are at least a dozen brands of vegan meat replacements for sausages, chicken, roasts, burgers, etc. It’s fairly easy to find vegan pastries, cakes, cookies, ice creams, etc. It is not as if people will need to suddenly start eating salad for every meal, if we only eat meat once per day that alone is a massive and achievable change.
Vegans today sacrifice less than ever before, and we have all those who went vegan decades ago (the hard way!) to thank for that.
Police spend most of their time on routine traffic stops, and routine traffic stops could be eliminated by transit and walkable infrastructure. It’s almost like it’s a racket…
Until humanity is mature enough to stop exploiting, poisoing, and destroying everything in our path it seems best that we quarantine on Earth imo. There is so much possibility down here as soon as we stop trying to run away from home and we bloom where we’re planted instead.
The 9to5 article is poorly written. In the first paragraph 9to5 says a new window system is “scheduled to replace” the current one, but this is not true. The cited blog post explicitly says “There’s no timeline or roadmap at this stage”. The Gnome developers are merely experimenting with a new window management system and at this early stage it’s impossible to know what the finished product may look like if these experiments go anywhere at all.
Here’s a link to the original blog post where Gnome developer Tobias Bernard explains their dissatisfaction with existing window management systems and discusses the techinical challeneges developers face.
It’s good that this discussion keeps coming up; federated instances are not meant to get so large. Once communities become too large they lose cohesion and culture, invariably they eventually sacrifice users’ well-being for practical purposes like funding, and at that point they become no better than the platforms they replaced. The cycle of exploitation continues.
There are communities online that have preserved their community culture and have not resorted to unethical practices to maintain themselves for more than 20 years, they are always smaller more intentional communities that value quality interactions over quantity of users. Given all the evidence showing how mentally and socially harmful large centralized platforms are - should we really aspire to recreate those unhealthy spaces in the fediverse?
The fediverse is an opportunity to take things a different direction, a direction in which smaller more cohesive communities share with each other without any one community dominating and suffocating the others. Federation is a fundamentally different model that challenges the centralizing paradigm “growth is good”.