Beehaw just removes the downvote button entirely, so there is a community for that.

Agreed, a few states (4-5?) have been able to fully eliminate the biggest issue with civil asset forfeiture (including removing the loophole that allows their state employees from working with the federal govt. to get around those restrictions).

Over half the states have started to do something about it. But as long as that loophole remains and as long as the federal govt. itself can continue to abuse civil asset forfeiture, we'll continue to see problems.

Hmm you raise an interesting point. I do agree that it's helpful to explain to someone why they're being downvoted.

An experimental feature might be to allow downvotes only if you reply, or else you can choose to down vote a comment if you also upvote a response to the downvoted comment.

This is much easier said than done. Around large parts of the United States you can't reliably commute by public transit. For me personally, without a car, a one way 40 mile trip to the major city near me would take 5 hours. That's 2 different trains and 2 different busses.

Add that to the fact that the station closest to me only has a few trains a day and my options are very limited.

Even if we ignore the current train schedule and assume that trains come by every 5 min, it would still be a 2 hour trip that costs me $20 for one way. I could then bike the rest of the way and avoid the last 2 buses.

There are rail passes I could get, but those would cost $477/month. It's cheaper to lease a Tesla at that point.

Owning a car is pretty much the only reasonable way of getting around for many parts of the U.S.

Alright, I'm still new to all this federated stuff, but I heard there was a way that users could post across platforms including places like Mastodon.

So if I wanted to "like" or comment on that awesome video with this account, how would I do that?

Interesting, I didn't realize that Russia was already renting out the base pre-2014. Thank you for that context.

Perhaps an option could be that Ukraine gets their land back, but there's some agreement that Russia can rent out the land around the port at Sevastopol.

Ukraine gets paid for the use of their land (and ultimately they still own it), and Russia gets exclusive access to that part of the port where they can do whatever they need.