Why do you want to be less reliant on Wikipedia?

You might get more interest if you specify what the community is for.

Sugar only has about 4 calories per gram, so 28 grams would be 112 calories. So a blend of sugar and pecans has less calories per gram (somewhere between). Fat is very dense in calories per gram, and pecans are mostly fats.

Yeah this is why I don’t use cloudflare, I have my domains on porkbun.

I think that’s mostly driven by regulatory capture and the fact that lobbyists can drive regulation. If our government actually worked for the people, we could actually enforce monopoly laws, and the SEC (or equivalent in countries besides the US) would actually prevent mergers that threaten competition. The government is supposed to prevent this kind of behavior, but they have basically been bought out.

As for how to stop that from happening, I’m not sure. I think it would require at least getting rid of the two party system, because that stifles competition in the governance space. That means that even though there are probably lots of voters who would vote for a real candidate who would break monopolies, there is no such candidate available. But in order for that to work we would have to switch to a different voting method, like ranked-choice (or one of the even more fair ones).

I think a free market in a given sector can encourage innovation. That’s not to say all sectors need innovation, there’s not a lot of innovation to be had in many sectors, like providing water, or housing, and those probably don’t need to be a free market. They could be provided by the government for example.

Yeah this is exactly what free market lunatics on the right don’t understand. Monopoly isn’t a free market. Free markets simply cannot exist without regulation to prevent unfair business practices.

Also any reasonable economist can tell you that the free market does not solve issues like the tragedy of the commons, because negative externalities are not factored in. It is also the government’s job to ‘internalize’ externalities so companies actually see the costs of, for example, polluting our air and water.

TLDR: free market != unregulated market

Yeah, I agree, I think a true free market is basically impossible because there will always be winners and those companies will certainly use their power to stifle competition. Also it is difficult for the consumer to evaluate every product they buy even if there is a number of competitors, so issues like what @Telorand@reddthat.com mentioned (sawdust in food) come up because consumers just don’t have the measurement equipment to check.

I like the free market too, but having a small number of companies control a necessary resource definitely isn’t a free market.

I don’t think there was anything in the article indicating the privacy of WhatsApp was actually breached, they got info by reading WhatsApp messages from other people in the chat who had already been arrested and from Apple.

According to the article they did seize whatever they could.

At least in the US there are a number of subsidies that help to keep meat prices low, which isn’t really great because it increases demand for one of the more environmentally damaging foods to produce.

This is just false, there is a mathematical framework for aggregating data in a way that prevents de-anonymization https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_privacy. This is what the US census department uses to release census statistics without impacting anyone’s privacy.

I prefer not to buy games on steam, and when a game is available from another channel (for example Factorio is available on the devs’ website) I will buy it there. And yet, most games are only on steam, so the devs really don’t seem to care about trying to avoid that 30% cut when they can.

Unless you are verifying DNSSEC, they could intercept any outgoing DNS queries and replace the response with whatever they want, if you are using DNSSEC they won’t be able to modify the responses since they can’t create the signatures, but they could still send queries to their own server instead of your chosen server. With either of these options they can still see what you query. DNS over TLS or HTTPS is a way to prevent all of these things, since with those you know the endpoint of your HTTPS connection is the actual server with the signed certificate and the connection is encrypted.

Edit to add: it shouldn’t matter what DNS you use to look up the IP of the DoH/DoT server, because only the real servers should have the correct private key.

Oh yeah you’re right, I mixed up what conversation I was in.

See also https://us.7digital.com/; there are a number of places you can buy and download CD-quality music files. I believe iTunes actually lets you download music you buy as normal audio files as well.

Yeah I don’t think DRM-free is really a requirement for most people.

I don’t really think tea brewed at a lower temperature tastes the same, I’m guessing it’s because the relative rates that different flavor compounds go from the tea to the water change at different temperatures, but the main noticeable effect is that tea brewed cold is usually less astringent for a given concentration of other flavor.

It’s because the people making money off most academic papers are not the authors, rather the journal/conference they likely had to pay to publish in. Textbooks are a different story though.