I’d recommend fostering a dog first if you go that route. You can find out what works for you with no long term commitment. If it ends up working out well, you can often adopt the dog you’re fostering anyways.

I mentioned China due to due to the GP comparing America and China. Sure, China might not replace America’s position in the world, but I sincerely doubt that most people that fall under China’s hegemony will appreciate the change. This is also true for other powers such as Russia. I do think the EU would be better hegemonical stewards than America, though.

The article you linked actually says that the reporting understated the reach of the massacre:

There was no Tiananmen Square massacre, but there was a Beijing massacre.

Honestly, you seem to have fallen for propaganda, and I doubt any amount of arguing will convince you otherwise.

I think the real question is “efficient at what?”. I’m on the same page as you overall regarding open source and whatnot, but if you want to make a boatload of money, Twitter (and monopolies, and all sorts of consumer-hostile practices) is arguably more efficient for that than open source projects.

I am glad this American hegemony is breaking, for all the spying, bombing and bullying they did to foreign countries and citizens remotely, while their popular news media keeps spreading hate and false narratives about others.

I’m in no way defending America’s actions in general, but if you’re expecting whoever fills that power void to be better, I’ve got bad news for you.

And at least American news media can talk about American sins, unlike Chinese media and Tienanmen Square.

Twitter is a natural monopoly, due to network effects. Monopolies can ignore market pressure, since competing with them takes a lot of initial resources. This is why I’m such a fan of Mastodon, as federation enables competition (see related discussion here: https://lemmy.ml/post/38605).

It’s hard to compare the two on efficiency however, as it could be argued that 5,000 employees are needed to maintain this monopoly (which in turn would enable extracting greater return from a captive audience than having to compete would). If Mastodon never takes off (which I hope is unlikely), then maybe the costs of maintaining a monopoly are actually worth it, even if they’re high.

I’m not really convinced by this article. One thing struck out at me:

I am reminded of the way I put work into Mastodon for more than a year, but I never received any acknowledgement, gratitude or compensation from Gargron even though he used my ideas, because I never wrote a line of code.

Yeah, it’s easy to come up with ideas, and much harder to actually implement them well. Genius being 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration, and all that.

It is therefore safer for marginalised people to use centralised software under large companies that are accountable to the law.

What? Hard No. If Twitter says your use case doesn’t matter, you’re fucked. The U.S. political landscape is allergic to regulating business in a pro-consumer manner at the moment, so good luck having any of them be accountable to the law.

Also, if the main developer of Mastodon says your use case doesn’t matter, migrate to a different Mastodon host that cares about your use case. That’s the huge advantage of federated software, and why it is clearly superior for minorities.

The more I think about it, the more I see FOSS as a microcosm of capitalism

The general thrust of the article is that capitalism ignores minorities (and then comparing FOSS to that aspect of capitalism). Not that capitalism doesn’t have it’s issues, but to say that minority oppression doesn’t happen under other political systems is simply ahistorical. Humans are really good at ignoring the needs of minorities, regardless of political organization.

Tritely answering the title: Because the process of evolution has selected for organisms that are highly motivated towards reproducing. Organisms that aren’t highly motivated towards reproducing have been out-competed. The process of evolution doesn’t really care about how good of a parent you are, as long as your children also reproduce.

More directly answering the question: It helps to invoke the Principle of Charity, and assume that people are well-intentioned, but perhaps unskilled at parenting. Regardless, realize that life as a minor is only a fraction of your lifespan, and that having suffered under bad parenting sets you up to realize what not to do with your children.