Cloudflare DDNS updated by ddclient on my OpnSense router. Cloudflare happens to be my current domain registrar. Honestly, my IPv4 doesn’t change that often. And when I used to be on Comcast, they assigned a block of IPv6 addresses and the router dealt with that. Unfortunately, I now have Quantum Fiber who only assign a single IPv6 address, so I gave up on IPv6 for now.

Well I also did get the warrantee on the seats, though I never needed to use it.

They can be good negotiating points, though. Often, they will reduce the price of the vehicle more than the cost of the add on because they make more profit on the add-on than the difference in price of the car. And often the add-ons are preinstalled, so they have to give them to you anyway. Not true for all brands or dealers, but works for some.

With my last car there was a windshield coating, leather seat coating and bumpers on the door edges. After getting them nearly at the price I wanted, I told them I’d buy the seat coating if they’d lower the price another thousand below my previous price. The windshield coating and bumpers were also on the car when I finally got it. But I didn’t get the warranty on them, of course.

Which is why I was emphasizing that theoretically it is possible, but that it’s not realistic. The realistic scenario is revolution which would require centralized leadership which then never actually gives up the power and money they were put there to redistribute and decentralize. Thus it’s never been done. The only way for communism to exist without the need for a group of people to give up power would be in that theoretical world where no elite-run government ever existed to need to take the power and wealth away from and that only historically has existed in very small communities prior to them having regular contact with hostile outsiders. Currently only a few “untouched” tribal societies exist in that way.

No there are many forms of communism besides Marxist. None have been successfully implemented, including Marxist communism. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_communist_ideologies

Socialism, specifically in Marxism, is one of the steps of economic change between capitalism and communism. But yes it has many different forms outside of Marxism, just like communism has many different forms outside of Marxism.

But I’m talking about communist ideology overall which in a very broad sense is designed to transfer power and economic control from the elite and/or wealthy to the general population, which by definition is a decentralization of power and wealth. Marxism starts with a centralized government designed to gather up all of the resources and power from those elite classes and redistribute that to the people, so while it starts out centralized, centralization is not the goal even in Marxism. But that’s the only step that has ever been implemented, so many people mistake it as the only step.

No, now you’re talking only about Marxist communism. Communism as a whole does not state that a single central power owns everything or that individuals can’t own property. Marx was very much against almost all personal property, but communism is simply about making the means of production owned by the people doing the production and not a small subset of individuals. That doesn’t mean ownership by a single entity. That very much could be local community governments that own each factory or power plant or whatever. And it’s only about the “means of production” not the products necessarily. People can still own the products in many forms of communism. Communism doesn’t necessarily dictate a specific economic theory beyond the idea that entities that produce goods that are to be owned by the people, should be owned by the people making the goods, not individuals, and especially not individuals who don’t participate in the production, only in the sale and profit of the goods they don’t produce.

But communism is less centralized than representative democracy or dictatorship or whatever the pre-revolution government likely was. These portions of the government must decentralize as part of the process of moving between government types. That decentralization is essential or it’s not true communism, it’s the fake things that pretend to be communism like PRC, USSR, DPRK, etc.

The only way that some amount of decentralization doesn’t need to happen is if were talking about a society with no previous need for government forming into a communist state, which is what I mentioned was extremely unlikely, even if there were societies isolated enough to still exist without any form of centralized government.

I’m not really talking about Marxist communism. See my other comment, but in any realistic scenarios, communism is unlikely to form spontaneously as the first form of government in a new society.

And since revolution on a large scale requires centralized coordination and leadership, there will always be someone or some group given centralized power that is unlikely to allow for decentralization to happen on a large scale and is actually more likely to grab the power of the previous government system and keep it centralized, “for the good of the people” or “to defend the people” or whatever. Even well meaning revolutionaries are highly likely to crave control and be unlikely to want to allow “someone else” to change what they put in place. This then leaves in place the centralization indefinitely and never leads to communism.

Theoretically, one could spontaneously be created from scratch starting with a small group of people on a new world who have never experienced a centralized form of government. Formal governing is not required if the society is small enough and there are no outside forces at work to create a threat. But once governing is required, there will generally be forces at work that will centralize it. The only exception might be in a society with very limited need for cooperation due to plentiful resources available to all, such as a utopia like Star Trek’s Earth.

In all other, realistic scenarios, there will need to be a revolution. That will always be led by a person or group of people to organize the overthrow and coordinate the changes. This group will inevitably be in search of power themselves, corrupted by the power they are given, or infiltrated by those in search of such power and are unlikely to give up that power.

Because, at a high level, communism requires that a leader or group of leaders get things on track and then give up all of their power over time. Instead, the type of people who tend to lead revolutions are the same type of people who are unlikely to want to give up power and instead end up wanting more power. So no true communism has ever existed because it never gets to that phase.

Never

Romantic attraction and sexual attraction can often be different. It’s just society says you can’t have sex with people you aren’t romantically involved with, and once you’re romantically involved with someone, you can’t have sex with others. That’s totally unfair IMHO. You should be able to have a romantic relationship with someone and not expect sex and then be able to have sex with others who are interested in sex. This is why asexual people have a hard time with monogamy and have to pretend to be into sex because otherwise they can’t have a relationship with someone they love.

It’s supposed to be about relevance and moderation of abusive content, not agreement, but that’s not usually the case.

I don’t believe it’s something for the government to enforce. Any law that requires a nongovernment agency to collect identification means that identification is at risk of being stollen and means it will be used to track the person. If every person using the internet will have to prove their age everywhere, it’s going to be a mess.

Whatever company has the worst security will have all the IDs stollen and used everywhere else. And I’m sure at first, it will be used so that criminals can frame others for their online crimes really easily.

I mean how do you prove the person using the internet is the one in the ID over the internet. It’s easy enough to just use the picture on the ID and some “AI” to produce a fake image if they’re going to require taking a picture of who’s using it or something like that. This won’t stop any minors from accessing information they shouldn’t. The only way to do that is through education to make them realize they don’t want to access that information and then give them the tools to avoid it. Not try to keep it from them. That just makes them want it more and to have to become criminals to do it. And further, if they’re committing that minor crime just to do something normal it desensitizes them to more serious crimes because they don’t understand the reasoning for them. Which is why making minor stuff that doesn’t affect anyone but the offender a crime is always a bad idea.

Babylon 5

American “Libertarians” consider liberty as self-sufficiency, not just freedom from a government, but from being required to contribute to society as a whole.