If something is possible, and this simply indeed is, someone is going to develop it regardless of how we feel about it, so it's important for non-malicious actors to make people aware of the potential negative impacts so we can start to develop ways to handle them before actively malicious actors start deploying it.

Critical businesses and governments need to know that identity verification via video and voice is much less trustworthy than it used to be, and so if you're currently doing that, you need to mitigate these risks. There are tools, namely public-private key cryptography, that can be used to verify identity in a much tighter way, and we're probably going to need to start implementing them in more places.

That is not at all what right to work means.

I get the frustration, but if you're going to criticize a thing, it's a lot more effective if you actually know what the thing is.

You're never going to get an honest answer to this question, but props for asking it anyway.

Maybe you can run the servers and pay the engineers with good vibes or praxis?

I just wish that consistent flavor was something more than ash.

Not joking, that is essentially the strategy. It's very hard to get coffee beans from a hundred different farms to taste the same all over the world. That task gets much much easier if you simply burn them to a crisp so that all the varied flavor gets burned away.

I think the bar for being "a giant piece of shit" should probably be a little higher than the act of getting a coffee. I mean, if customers are giant pieces of shit, what are the Starbucks executives? Galactic boulders of excrement?

Jokes aside and more practically speaking, I think it's more productive to urge people to consider patronizing their local cafes - or learning how to make good coffee at home - instead of trying to shame people who probably don't know or honestly care that much about random labor disputes for getting a coffee. Beyond being more positive, it's less likely to annoy people into spite.

Not really, no. Freedom of speech is very strongly ingrained in our Constitution. The only legal restrictions on it are essentially direct threats or incitement of violence.

"Go kill this Jew" - Absolutely illegal.

"Go kill the Jews" - Illegal

"The Jews should be killed" - Borderline based on circumstances

"The Jews deserve to die" - Borderline, but probably protected by the Constitution

"The Jews deserved the Holocaust" - Almost certainly protected by the Constitution

Honestly, I would love to see a Wikipedia-style social media platform take off, but I really don't know if the finances could work out. Wikipedia already struggles, and it's obscenely useful. I don't think nationalization is really feasible for social media - at least in an American context - because it would be subject to the government's legal limitations on regulating free speech, which are extremely minimal. A federally run platform would not be able to remove literal unironic Nazism, which is probably going to be a bit of a turn-off to normal people.

Genuine question: given that running a platform like that costs money, and that money must come from somewhere, what would you actually do if you were in charge of running it? You either take money from advertisers, or you charge users directly, and I'd hazard to guess that if you'd nuke your account upon seeing ads, you probably wouldn't pay actual money to use it.

So what do you do?

Being surrounded by a bunch of people that are all excited about the same thing as you can be a really great experience for some people. It can make you feel like you're a part of a community. Add in music you really like, some friends or people you might meet, perhaps a mind-altering substance of some sort, and for a lot of people, that's a really fun time. If you just generally don't like dealing with people though, yeah, it's not gonna be your thing.