No.

It isn’t a defense at all. You said you didn’t understand. Abused people (or peoples) becoming abusive in turn is a common process, and that phrase is commonly used in such a way that searching on it will reveal many studies of the process, and what has been tried (successfully and unsuccessfully) to short-circuit it.

Understanding is not absolution, though. You can both see how the genocide of Jews led to fears, politics, and colonial interventions that contributed to Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, and also condemn that genocide and those perpetrating it (which I absolutely do). But not understanding the motivations makes any problem easier to effectively resist or solve, as you can use that knowledge to determine where and how to apply pressure and create a lasting rather than a temporary change.

Hurt people hurt people.

The worst part is they may weasel out of it. If the claim was “it detects 98% of AI generated samples” it could do that while having a high false positive rate. I hate this timelime.

They could have imposed up to €55 billion across the two companies. That doubles for repeat offenders. This was clearly meant as a warning.

That still doesn’t follow. For every mole of particles dissolved in a liter of water, the boiling point of water increases by about 0.5°C.

I was skeptical of your numbers, so I did the math:

Taking the first article I found newer than 2022, US billionaires have about $6.22 trillion of wealth ± recent stock market changes. UBI of $1000/month is most commonly estimated to cost $4 trillion/year.

US budget in 2024 was 6.8 trillion, but 1.87 trillion is in social security and income security programs UBI would replace, so the net change would raise the budget by 2.17 trillion to 8.39T. So 8.896 months - more like nine months than eight, but surprisingly close.

Of course, that assumes all other taxes are wiped out, which nobody has ever proposed. I can’t find a number anywhere for total income tax paid by billionaires, so we’ll be generous. OMB estimates billionaires pay an average tax rate of only 8.2%. Their wealth increased 2.9 trillion over 7 years, so ignore compounding and call it 414B/yr. And pretend it’s all taxed (which it isn’t - most isn’t considered income). That’s 33.9B in income taxes the IRS doesn’t collect after wiping out the billionaires. That reduces IRS revenues collected from 5.1T to 5.06T (being generous again with the rounding). That buys us another 7 months of government funding.

Alternatively, doubling the effective tax rate on the top 1% earning over 3.3M/yr from 26.09% to 52.18% would balance the budget including the new UBI. Get the effective tax rate on billionaires to match and you can start paying off the national debt. All without touching the middle class or even lowering anyone’s income below 1.65M/yr.

Don’t get me wrong - taxing billionaires out of existence is certainly a moral imperative - it just isn’t necessary to fund UBI.

The contributor’s frustration with Linus started with Linus ignoring multiple explicit requests for his intervention. When the contributor was so frustrated at the lack of response from Linus that he had the audacity to talk about it off list (linking here because the original toot has been deleted), it was at that point that Linus finally chimed in to tell the contributor “Maybe the problem is you,” implying that Hellwig’s obstructionism was not a problem in his eyes and that the only issue was the contributor drawing public attention to it.

If he orders it, they’ll go. They can’t afford not to. It’s an economic draft, and the poor are about to get even poorer.

For now

There are entire genres of music that are inherently political

I would suggest Mullvad as a trustworthy alternative.