This, though, I'm fully behind. I can never understand the "ooh, socialism will pry your hard-earned fruits of your labour from your needy hands" fearmongering. There is far more than enough of nearly everything to go around, and for the vast majority of people it would indeed look something like this. The problem we're trying to address is concentration where the worst actors manage to hoard so ridiculously much that they turn "far more than enough" into "widespread shortages".

RE: @[email protected]
CC: @[email protected]

Largely agree in the broad strokes, but there's already more than enough people in the armed forces that we don't need to expand, particularly if we bring them home as primarily defensive. Like you say, the worst budget drain is just providing over-engineered and under-performing toys, anyway, so cut all of that and we're so much better off.

If you really want a draft, bring back something like the Corps of Engineers working on civil projects, we've got plenty of infrastructure (by which I mean trains, not roads, though I guess we can spare a little for that if we must) that needs doing, forest management, housing, etc.

Though on that as well, I can get off my socialist box long enough to recognize that there might be legitimate reasons someone needs two houses. There's practically no reason they need three or more, nor hundreds of acres of private parkland. Put low limits on real estate and landlording, cap the number of short-term rentals per population, and you've got a really good start on homelessness even before the Corps builds a single house.

RE: @[email protected]
CC: @[email protected]

I imagine those are the people who have internalized the Social Network model -- your followers represent your friends (to one parasocial degree or another, at least) and so who you surround yourself with says a lot about you. That's never made sense to me, I definitely interact with these sorts of software under the Feed model -- a follow is just slightly more polite RSS pull, since you introduce yourself before running off with the content (the most they might do is take a look at your feed in turn in case they find it interesting as well).

Though I guess a legitimate case for safety is if someone does a lot of posting on followers-only, in which case by accepting a follow they're including you into a more private circle. The problem there is that ActivityPub really doesn't work well on that model. From what I remember of the specs, it could very smoothly handle group visibility, but since the protocol requires software to push notifications rather than just having it up for others to pull (i.e. RSS), having followers be the only group someone can address separately breaks a number of assumptions the designers made.