Students view doing that as basically the same amount of work as writing the paper yourself

Aye that’s exactly the same thing that I said

Just another 1.21 jigawatts of electricity, bro. If we get this new coal plant up and running, it’ll be enough.

This is why invisible watermarking of AI-generated content is likely to be so effective. Even primitive watermarks like file metadata. It’s not hard for anyone with technical knowledge to remove, but the thing with AI-generated content is that anyone who dishonestly uses it when they are not supposed to is probably also too lazy to go through the motions of removing the watermarking.

Prior to GitHub, everyone just hosted their own Git repositories. The nature of Git is pretty decentralised. And Linux kernel development still uses old-fashioned mailing lists for development co-ordination, rather than something like GitHub. I have heard before someone say the difference between Git and GitHub is similar to the difference between porn and Pornhub.

Prior to Discord, there was IRC.

And now, since you are the father of writing, your affection for it has made you describe its effects as the opposite of what they really are. In fact, [writing] will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so.

—a story told by Socrates, according to his student Plato

Words become more acceptable over time. In centuries past calling someone a devil or saying that they should go to hell would have been deeply offensive. Today these insults are so mild that even schoolchildren say them to each other. Even twenty years ago the word “fuck” was viewed with nearly as much taboo as racial slurs. Now, it’s a very common word that people will throw around in a casual context.

Even the word n****r (means “black person”) and its non-hard-R variant are starting to lose their offensiveness. In African-American Vernacular it has taken on a variety of inoffensive meanings. It is now only offensive in certain contexts while fifty years ago it was pretty much offensive in all contents.

At the same time, new words emerge and get labelled profane. For example, the word t****y (means “transgender”) would not have meant anything twenty years ago, and now it’s one of the most offensive words in the English dictionary. Similar story with the word f****t (means “homosexual”).

Thanks

Okay, but who. I want the name of a specific person or organisation and a link to where they said that. Because it’s such a stupid statement that I’m not going to just take someone’s word that someone was dumb enough to say it or thought people would be dumb enough to believe it.

Pasting the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article here:

Anarchism is a political philosophy and movement that seeks to abolish all institutions that perpetuate authority, coercion, or hierarchy, primarily targeting the state and capitalism. Anarchism advocates for the replacement of the state with stateless societies and voluntary free associations. A historically left-wing movement, anarchism is usually described as the libertarian wing of the socialist movement (libertarian socialism).

Man, if only there were some organisation that were powerful enough to enforce these rules against people who don’t want to follow them.

Classic Lemmy where someone says “not every is American” in response to an issue that actually does apply to them

lol who said this

It gives the average person more purchasing power but it also opens up new supply by opening the foreclosure auctions to the average person. The increased demand I argue is partially or wholly counteracted by pushing out the house flippers from the foreclosure markets; those people are generally only interested in buying properties at severely under market prices at foreclosure auctions or similar sales. Essentially, I am saying that the entire “flipper” business model should be destroyed as it does not provide sufficient value to the taxpayer to offset its negative effect on the market and this policy could do severe damage to that sector.

Quadratic property tax is a combination of the “quadratic” nature of quadratic voting and, of course, taxation. I made this term up hoping people would know what I was talking about but it turned out to not be as obvious as I initially thought.

Essentially, the taxation scheme takes into account the number of lots owned by a person in addition to the value per lot. Consider the following sample scheme:

The amount of tax due on any given property is calculated according to the following formula: r×(1 + Np)²×V, where N is the number of lots owned by the taxpayer beyond the first and V is the value of the lot. The variables r and p are determined by the local taxing authority which correspond to tax rate (higher = more tax per unit of money) and the penalty for owning excessive numbers of lots (higher = greater penalty for owning multiple lots).

If a local taxing authority selects values r = 0.002 and p = 0.05, the tax due for a lot worth 100 units of money would be as follows:

• An individual or family who owns only that lot pays 0.002 × (1+0×0.05)²×100 = 0.2 units of money per year.
• A small individual landlord who owns this property and 2 others would pay 0.002 × (1+2×0.05)²×100 = 0.242 units of money per year.
• A corporation who owns this property and 10 others would pay 0.002 × (1+10×0.05)²×100 = 0.45 units of money per year, which is more than double the individual family
• A huge real estate conglomerate who owns this property and 100 others would pay 0.002 × (1+100×0.05)²×100 = 7.2 units, which is so high that it probably would not be profitable to even own this property.

It is “quadratic” because the tax rate scales with the square of the number of previous lots owned.

Coupled with counting rules that ignore subsidiary corporate entities for the purpose of determining ownership, finely-tuning values of r and p will discourage corporate ownership of housing without punishing individual homeowners or small-time landlords.

While this strategy has not been tried in real life to my knowledge, interestingly, some Minecraft servers have implemented a similar scheme to prevent hoarding of desirable lots in the overworld to varying degrees of success, mostly depending on whether those in charge admit any loopholes for privileged players to exploit.

While I agree with this principle generally, and I believe that if my solution were to be implemented it would need to be alongside other schemes like increased public housing projects, relaxing zoning laws to allow densification, and anti-scalping measures like a quadratic property tax.

But even if my suggestion were implemented alone, it wouldn’t result in increased prices. That’s got to do with the fact that ordinary people, right now in the US, largely do not bid in foreclosure auctions. All that housing supply is actually not going to end consumers at all. The type of people who would bid at foreclosure auctions are not those who want to live in the house but in many cases, those who want to resell it. Making the foreclosure process more similar to normal house-buying and thereby increasing the hammer prices drives out scalpers and flippers because it’s not profitable for them any more. Hell, if you’ve seen the videos these people post, they start pulling back even if the price is tens of thousands of dollars under market.

The counter-intuitive solution is probably to make it easier for banks to evict people for not paying their mortgage.

In most of the US, foreclosures are a legal process that requires a court order. The bank has to take the borrower to court, prove the loan is not paid, and then the court has to find in favour of the bank and then issue an order to have the sheriff auction off the property.

In many cases, these auctions will result in the property sold far below market value because the borrower will drag their feet and not co-operate. In many cases, buyers can’t do a thorough house inspection and thus the hammer price suffers because they have to account for that risk.

The bootlicker-sounding but actually smart solution, if you consider it beyond the initial knee jerk reaction, is to make it so that when the court enters a foreclosure order, the homeowner is immediately evicted and the house is now in the custody of the State until it is sold. The borrowers can have a reasonable time to leave, but when they do, the sheriff should then open the property to the public for inspection and hire or allow buyers to hire house inspectors, perform title searches, and all the other formalities associated with selling a house in the ordinary manner.

All buyers then submit written offers (bids) to the sheriff like they would for any other house purchase but these bids would be published to avoid accusations of impropriety; the highest bidder gets the house. As with any other auction, the bank bids the amount of the mortgage plus court costs as a baseline. After it is sold, the sheriff takes the traditional 6 per cent estate agent fee for their trouble and then pays off the bank and the remainder goes to the borrower.

As terrible as it sounds for the ordinary borrower, this actually results in a better outcome for them because it would result in a higher sale price for the house, meaning the mortgage is lower risk for the bank by reducing the likelihood that the bank bid is the highest, allowing them to extend those loans to more people, and a defaulted borrower gets more of their money back in the end.

The idea that creating more housing stock will lead to prices decreasing is still economically sound.

The Sovereign Grant was some £86 million, which certainly sounds like a lot, but the reality is that heads of state are actually just really expensive no matter whether you have a republic or a monarchy. Maybe you could argue that a president could just quietly exist in the background while people expect a monarchy to be lavish and fancy, at least to a degree. There’s a lot of pomp and ceremony associated with the head of state, because they not only represent the government of a country but also serve as a cultural symbol for the nation as a whole.

For comparison, in the US, excluding the policy departments within the Executive Office, the White House Office and Executive Residence and presidential salary budget lines totalled almost $94 million in FY 2025. This does not include the cost of Secret Service protection (paid by the Department for Homeland Security) nor does it include the cost of Air Force One trips (paid by the Department of Defence). And while Brits complain about their monarch not having to pay tax, I think the fact that the American president, or at least the current one, cheats on his taxes is also a somewhat open secret.

I’m American and technically also British despite never having been there (I hold a type of second class citizenship through Hong Kong), and I honestly think £86 million is a bargain for the UK monarchy considering their cultural draw and the fact that they’re not just the head of state of the UK but a dozen other countries as well.

Now, one can argue all day about whether it’s appropriate to have a monarchy in the modern day, even if that institution were to be discharged of even theoretical political power like it is in Japan, and whether such an institution is compatible with democratic principles like the rule of law, but that’s something I’m wholly unqualified to opine about.

Did they (the gangs who asked for protection money) actually ever catch the people responsible or blamed to be responsible?