As I said, MY choice is p2p communications, which complete eliminates the central point of censorship/failure, giving no one any opportunity either to remove users, or enforce policies. But the fact that I can (and do) run my own Jabber server does not mean that the rest of society no longer exists. The fact that I operate a server does not mean that OTHER operators of OTHER servers cannot be held accountable for their actions. And the fact that Google's actions affect so many living humans (indeed the mere fact that they control public access to so many computers and so much data) makes it far more important to hold them accountable than most other server operators.
You are definitely missing this point: The mere theoretical possibility to replace Google (or any other corporation) does not in any way eliminate their responsibility for their own policies. Even if MY restaurant does not have racial segregation, that does not excuse YOUR restaurant for implementing racial segregation. If we want an integrated society, we need to hold all spaces with racist policies accountable.
Obviously I'm not calling Google racist or comparing their policy to segregation; but I AM saying that, just as brick-and-mortar spaces must grant certain rights to the public which have been established over time, so virtual social spaces are a domain for the establishment of public rights, of standards for the treatment of the public, which are enforced whether through legal or social mechanisms.
You do not have to be on Facebook or Google plus. I know more than a few people that live pretty active lives that are not.
Hi LWATCDR. I don't know your real name, although I'm using mine. I just wanted to say that, whatever you think about the policies within G+ or facebook, I think it's very dangerous to accept this "love it or leave it" logic. The problem is that social web sites are kind of like public spaces, or anyway, spaces open to the public. Google has the power to decide what kind of space G+ will be: what will be the rules, how will their power to expel users be used? It is very important that they not be granted a right not to be judged according to the policies they implement. In a digital community, source code is a form of legislation. Like a government, Google must be held responsible for how it uses its power.
Simply put, if G+ is a space without privacy, Google is to blame for making our world a little less private. (For better or for worse -- many people believe we have too much privacy, although I am not one of them.) Either way, Google cannot be granted immunity simply because people had the choice not to sign up. Perhaps we don't have to worry so much since people can choose to ignore G+, and most of them probably will -- but we do have to worry, because every other web service may also decide to govern their virtual space in the same way, and then what choice will we have?
(Well, I will be choosing p2p communications, but all you other suckers are fucked.)
grumbel -- I read this exchange, and just want to say I appreciated your insighful commentary. I don't think we have to worry too much though, because any network without real privacy is not going to get any of the good content.
Oh, and I'd like to take an off-topic moment to point out why I think *nix people are horrible user interface designers: because all *nix command line interfaces are AWFUL.
Unix interfaces are designed for completeness, not learning curve. The model of learning is that you learn a whole little language, and then you use it. You may say that that just "sucks," but show me a Turing-complete point-and-click learn-as-you-go interface and we'll see which is easier to use.
TL;DR: GUIs are easier to use because they do less.
the standard 8 hours a day, 5 days a week (which we have Henry Ford to thank for - he carefully researched the optimum working time for assembly line workers)
Ford was indeed one of the first companies to grant factory workers an 8 hour work day, and a 5 hour work week, but this was not the result of some scientific calculation of "optimum working time". This was at a time of violent conflict between industrialists and labor, and such rates were a concession to the demands of labor, meant to win the favor of employees.
PS. I just read that, at the same time that Ford shortened the work day to 8 hours, it also doubled wages (to $5 per 8 hour day from $2.34 per 9 hour day).
And the Nobel Prize isn't quite what it used to be, at least the Peace Prize isn't what it used to be. I mean, they gave one to Obama for what they thought he might do, not what he has actually done.
They also gave one to war criminal Henry Kissinger, and one to genocide apologist Teddy Roosevelt -- I don't think it was ever all that honorable. One must imagine that, had he won, Hitler would have gotten one.
OK, the difference between a for-profit and a non-profit is that the non-profit does not pay anybody dividends. A non-profit is legally forbidden to reward its investors (who are called "donors"). So, actually, it's completely different, since the entire purpose of a for-profit is to pay dividends to the investors.
A monolith on the moon certainly isn't going to pay anybody dividends in proportion to their investment. Either no investors get paid, or everybody gets the same "dividend" (even those who didn't invest), depending on how you look at it. Either way, it's a non-profit.
WRT OpenMoko, I don't know about their "original mission statement", but they were quite clearly attempting to make a phone with an open hardware platform. And now the company is making another hardware platform unrelated to phones. It's a company full of hardware designers who produce hardware as a product for sale. So I think it's fair to judge them on that basis.
Finally, the difference between taxation and theft is that taxation attempts to take from all in order to enable collective purchases, while theft does not exist to enable collective purchases.
In fact I can think of no better use for a tiny drop in the total sum of money floating around the planet, than a mass exercise in artistic expression. It's kind of the ultimate way of saying, here we are.
This is the question isn't it?
Certain activities are excess, certain are essential. You can't play the game forever: the food people eat is essential to their survival. Art is not, and as excess, it exists only in a situation of abundance of the essential.
The only reason excess can be derided, rightfully, is that the abundance of the essential, and thus art, exists amidst (and indeed is made possible by) the deprivation of the essential from a vast majority of humans. Art and excess are the privilege of the few amidst the many who live in a world of scarcity.
I do realize that one can make the argument that if we wait for justice before beauty, we will just end up with a world that is without both. It is unfortunately rare to see this position coupled with the candor to admit injustice.
Myself, I do not think we should refrain from all fun until the chimera of social justice is conjured -- and I am certain that even the poor and starving, that even those in concentration camps and prisons, find energy to devote to humor and celebration. However, given the state of the world, the message of such a piece of art as this is, to me, a message of the harshest disregard for human suffering and equality.
Except that OpenMoko was not "crowdsourced" -- it was a failed for-profit investment-funded business.
And they didn't fail to make a phone; they failed to make money.
No, the OP was quite correct: you lose the constitutional right to privacy when you are arrested (not convicted). RTFA for the relevant supreme court decision.
And of course, those who are arrested are indeed treated like those who are convicted. They are held in the same facilities, subjected to the same restrictions and punishments, and not socially separated in any way. The guards do not even know which is which.
It is said that the COURTS treat the accused as innocent until proven guilty, which is true in a certain way, but no one could ever say such a thing about the "executive branch."
The reality is that everybody plea bargains. The percentage of cases in which arguments even occur (let alone arguments about constitutionality) is such a tiny minority as to be negligible. Mostly, the accusation leads immediately to a plea bargain which is 1/100th of the maximum penalty (or more, but in proportion to the arrest record of the accused and without regard to the accusation) and is immediately accepted. Neither attorney needs to become familiar with the case.
The analogy is this: if the police arrest you, and you're carrying your keys, do they get to go into your house? Your car?
Well, they would probably be able to get away with either, these days.
You don't need to means-test the services if you means-test the taxation rates.
Of course I realize that that isn't done either, for these programs.
There is absolutely no disagreement that the programs in question cannot be sustained without fundamental modification.
(But again that is an exception to the way the majority of federal taxation works -- as a political compromise, "social security" is supposed to be a mandatory mutual insurance scheme, instead of a socialist redistribution.)
True, but where there is correlation you have to look for causation.
As a general principle, no, you don't. As a rule of thumb, you are probably safer assuming that a correlation between two variables is the result of a common cause. E.g., in humans, height over 6'5 is strongly correlated with usage of urinals. At no point should you bother to rule out causation (in either direction) in this case.
A more practical example is the media's constant repetition that healthier people have more sex. Of course, they jump to the sexiest but dumbest possible conclusion, that the sex causes the health. But we don't even have to assume that the health causes the sex; in fact we can intuit that health must be only partially the cause, since many healthy behaviors will increase attractiveness completely aside from their health benefits. (Especially diet and its effect on body shape.)
The general principle is that any one cause will have myriad effects, all of which will be correlated with one another. By default, assume a common cause.
It's true that the Democrats prey on stupidity but what I had in mind was alliances made with various politically ignorant but mobilizable groups or segments of society, which contemporary Democrats have not really achieved, as far as I know.
OK, you're right, but those two programs are really the exception to the general rule in the USA.
Anyway, in practice, government services generally work much better when they are not "means-tested" -- many problems are much more easily solved when everyone has access. (E.g., stigma of use; perpetual underfunding; overhead associated with the means tests; the exclusion of some who should not be excluded; contention over where to draw the line.)
No, Democrats do not see wealth redistribution as a means to eliminating class divisions. Jesus. What Democrat says anything like that? Name one class warfare Democrat in US office.
I don't think you'll find hardly anyone that doesn't agree that poor people should live better than they do
On the contrary, you don't have to look far to find many who say the poor live too well -- that they should live within their means, stop borrowing money on credit cards and mortgages, stop taking handouts, etc., because it's unfair for them to receive what they have not earned.
Nazism is both conservative and liberal, ideologically -- it promises radical change, a new society, a new man, etc. -- but it conceives of this new world as a return to the purity of the old world, tradition, etc..
I don't think there is anything conservative about eugenics though. If conservatives supported it, it wasn't out of conservatism.
I agree with you about the persecuted groups, and about the neutral "two sides of the coin" stupidity...
Still, there is something real to philosophical conservatism that is not simply "the wrong side of history." The pro-soviet left was also on the wrong side of history.. They, as you said, made "new mistakes" -- opening the possibility (since realized) for a completely new level of disaster. If the conservatives at the time were not right, at least their form of wrongness would have been safer.
Conservatism is the voice that says "you cannot design a new society on paper; what exists today has reasons for its existence and is integrated into the social body; to destroy it will disrupt the organic whole, and the way of life of everyone, in ways we cannot predict."
There is value in that voice, so long as it tempers progress, rather than impeding it.
Using ad-homs on your opponents won't make you correct.
You have badly misunderstood me. I didn't use any "ad-hom", nor am I opposing anything.
In fact, what I say is closer to a defense of conservative ideas than to an attack. The whole point is that, if on the average conservatives are more stupid, it's not because stupidity makes people believe in conservative ideas -- on the contrary, the stupids don't even understand conservative ideas, but they stupidly call themselves conservatives (instead of stupidly calling themselves liberals).
However you cannot honestly deny that the GOP seeks out the stupid demographic (misinformed single issue voters) in exactly the same way that both parties seek other demographics. The democrats don't give away the stupid vote because they don't want it; they do so because the GOP has already got it.
Yes I'm sorry you ran into a wall and broke your hip, but you've had a job for ~30 years. You have money and should pay the bill yourself out of your personal wages/savings
Only in your fantasy world are the people receiving shitty government services those with savings they could be using instead.
Slashdot Mirror
Perl uses sigils, like shell script. It's not a big deal.
As I said, MY choice is p2p communications, which complete eliminates the central point of censorship/failure, giving no one any opportunity either to remove users, or enforce policies. But the fact that I can (and do) run my own Jabber server does not mean that the rest of society no longer exists. The fact that I operate a server does not mean that OTHER operators of OTHER servers cannot be held accountable for their actions. And the fact that Google's actions affect so many living humans (indeed the mere fact that they control public access to so many computers and so much data) makes it far more important to hold them accountable than most other server operators.
You are definitely missing this point: The mere theoretical possibility to replace Google (or any other corporation) does not in any way eliminate their responsibility for their own policies. Even if MY restaurant does not have racial segregation, that does not excuse YOUR restaurant for implementing racial segregation. If we want an integrated society, we need to hold all spaces with racist policies accountable.
Obviously I'm not calling Google racist or comparing their policy to segregation; but I AM saying that, just as brick-and-mortar spaces must grant certain rights to the public which have been established over time, so virtual social spaces are a domain for the establishment of public rights, of standards for the treatment of the public, which are enforced whether through legal or social mechanisms.
You do not have to be on Facebook or Google plus. I know more than a few people that live pretty active lives that are not.
Hi LWATCDR. I don't know your real name, although I'm using mine. I just wanted to say that, whatever you think about the policies within G+ or facebook, I think it's very dangerous to accept this "love it or leave it" logic. The problem is that social web sites are kind of like public spaces, or anyway, spaces open to the public. Google has the power to decide what kind of space G+ will be: what will be the rules, how will their power to expel users be used? It is very important that they not be granted a right not to be judged according to the policies they implement. In a digital community, source code is a form of legislation. Like a government, Google must be held responsible for how it uses its power.
Simply put, if G+ is a space without privacy, Google is to blame for making our world a little less private. (For better or for worse -- many people believe we have too much privacy, although I am not one of them.) Either way, Google cannot be granted immunity simply because people had the choice not to sign up. Perhaps we don't have to worry so much since people can choose to ignore G+, and most of them probably will -- but we do have to worry, because every other web service may also decide to govern their virtual space in the same way, and then what choice will we have?
(Well, I will be choosing p2p communications, but all you other suckers are fucked.)
grumbel -- I read this exchange, and just want to say I appreciated your insighful commentary. I don't think we have to worry too much though, because any network without real privacy is not going to get any of the good content.
Oh, and I'd like to take an off-topic moment to point out why I think *nix people are horrible user interface designers: because all *nix command line interfaces are AWFUL.
Unix interfaces are designed for completeness, not learning curve. The model of learning is that you learn a whole little language, and then you use it. You may say that that just "sucks," but show me a Turing-complete point-and-click learn-as-you-go interface and we'll see which is easier to use.
TL;DR: GUIs are easier to use because they do less.
Ford was indeed one of the first companies to grant factory workers an 8 hour work day, and a 5 hour work week, but this was not the result of some scientific calculation of "optimum working time". This was at a time of violent conflict between industrialists and labor, and such rates were a concession to the demands of labor, meant to win the favor of employees.
PS. I just read that, at the same time that Ford shortened the work day to 8 hours, it also doubled wages (to $5 per 8 hour day from $2.34 per 9 hour day).
They also gave one to war criminal Henry Kissinger, and one to genocide apologist Teddy Roosevelt -- I don't think it was ever all that honorable. One must imagine that, had he won, Hitler would have gotten one.
Any level of effort spent posting to slashdot is justified, if you can teach just one person human compassion.
OK, the difference between a for-profit and a non-profit is that the non-profit does not pay anybody dividends. A non-profit is legally forbidden to reward its investors (who are called "donors"). So, actually, it's completely different, since the entire purpose of a for-profit is to pay dividends to the investors.
A monolith on the moon certainly isn't going to pay anybody dividends in proportion to their investment. Either no investors get paid, or everybody gets the same "dividend" (even those who didn't invest), depending on how you look at it. Either way, it's a non-profit.
WRT OpenMoko, I don't know about their "original mission statement", but they were quite clearly attempting to make a phone with an open hardware platform. And now the company is making another hardware platform unrelated to phones. It's a company full of hardware designers who produce hardware as a product for sale. So I think it's fair to judge them on that basis.
Finally, the difference between taxation and theft is that taxation attempts to take from all in order to enable collective purchases, while theft does not exist to enable collective purchases.
It's really pretty simple.
This is the question isn't it?
Certain activities are excess, certain are essential. You can't play the game forever: the food people eat is essential to their survival. Art is not, and as excess, it exists only in a situation of abundance of the essential.
The only reason excess can be derided, rightfully, is that the abundance of the essential, and thus art, exists amidst (and indeed is made possible by) the deprivation of the essential from a vast majority of humans. Art and excess are the privilege of the few amidst the many who live in a world of scarcity.
I do realize that one can make the argument that if we wait for justice before beauty, we will just end up with a world that is without both. It is unfortunately rare to see this position coupled with the candor to admit injustice.
Myself, I do not think we should refrain from all fun until the chimera of social justice is conjured -- and I am certain that even the poor and starving, that even those in concentration camps and prisons, find energy to devote to humor and celebration. However, given the state of the world, the message of such a piece of art as this is, to me, a message of the harshest disregard for human suffering and equality.
Except that OpenMoko was not "crowdsourced" -- it was a failed for-profit investment-funded business. And they didn't fail to make a phone; they failed to make money.
No, the OP was quite correct: you lose the constitutional right to privacy when you are arrested (not convicted). RTFA for the relevant supreme court decision.
And of course, those who are arrested are indeed treated like those who are convicted. They are held in the same facilities, subjected to the same restrictions and punishments, and not socially separated in any way. The guards do not even know which is which.
It is said that the COURTS treat the accused as innocent until proven guilty, which is true in a certain way, but no one could ever say such a thing about the "executive branch."
The reality is that everybody plea bargains. The percentage of cases in which arguments even occur (let alone arguments about constitutionality) is such a tiny minority as to be negligible. Mostly, the accusation leads immediately to a plea bargain which is 1/100th of the maximum penalty (or more, but in proportion to the arrest record of the accused and without regard to the accusation) and is immediately accepted. Neither attorney needs to become familiar with the case.
The analogy is this: if the police arrest you, and you're carrying your keys, do they get to go into your house? Your car? Well, they would probably be able to get away with either, these days.
You don't get to use your cell phone after you've been arrested, of course.
You don't need to means-test the services if you means-test the taxation rates.
Of course I realize that that isn't done either, for these programs.
There is absolutely no disagreement that the programs in question cannot be sustained without fundamental modification.
(But again that is an exception to the way the majority of federal taxation works -- as a political compromise, "social security" is supposed to be a mandatory mutual insurance scheme, instead of a socialist redistribution.)
As a general principle, no, you don't. As a rule of thumb, you are probably safer assuming that a correlation between two variables is the result of a common cause. E.g., in humans, height over 6'5 is strongly correlated with usage of urinals. At no point should you bother to rule out causation (in either direction) in this case.
A more practical example is the media's constant repetition that healthier people have more sex. Of course, they jump to the sexiest but dumbest possible conclusion, that the sex causes the health. But we don't even have to assume that the health causes the sex; in fact we can intuit that health must be only partially the cause, since many healthy behaviors will increase attractiveness completely aside from their health benefits. (Especially diet and its effect on body shape.)
The general principle is that any one cause will have myriad effects, all of which will be correlated with one another. By default, assume a common cause.
It's true that the Democrats prey on stupidity but what I had in mind was alliances made with various politically ignorant but mobilizable groups or segments of society, which contemporary Democrats have not really achieved, as far as I know.
OK, you're right, but those two programs are really the exception to the general rule in the USA.
Anyway, in practice, government services generally work much better when they are not "means-tested" -- many problems are much more easily solved when everyone has access. (E.g., stigma of use; perpetual underfunding; overhead associated with the means tests; the exclusion of some who should not be excluded; contention over where to draw the line.)
I'm quite outside both parties as well, why do you assume otherwise?
If the Democrats do the same thing, I simply haven't seen it. (However, I don't think I missed it...)
On the contrary, you don't have to look far to find many who say the poor live too well -- that they should live within their means, stop borrowing money on credit cards and mortgages, stop taking handouts, etc., because it's unfair for them to receive what they have not earned.
Nazism is both conservative and liberal, ideologically -- it promises radical change, a new society, a new man, etc. -- but it conceives of this new world as a return to the purity of the old world, tradition, etc..
I don't think there is anything conservative about eugenics though. If conservatives supported it, it wasn't out of conservatism.
I agree with you about the persecuted groups, and about the neutral "two sides of the coin" stupidity...
Still, there is something real to philosophical conservatism that is not simply "the wrong side of history." The pro-soviet left was also on the wrong side of history.. They, as you said, made "new mistakes" -- opening the possibility (since realized) for a completely new level of disaster. If the conservatives at the time were not right, at least their form of wrongness would have been safer.
Conservatism is the voice that says "you cannot design a new society on paper; what exists today has reasons for its existence and is integrated into the social body; to destroy it will disrupt the organic whole, and the way of life of everyone, in ways we cannot predict."
There is value in that voice, so long as it tempers progress, rather than impeding it.
You have badly misunderstood me. I didn't use any "ad-hom", nor am I opposing anything.
In fact, what I say is closer to a defense of conservative ideas than to an attack. The whole point is that, if on the average conservatives are more stupid, it's not because stupidity makes people believe in conservative ideas -- on the contrary, the stupids don't even understand conservative ideas, but they stupidly call themselves conservatives (instead of stupidly calling themselves liberals).
However you cannot honestly deny that the GOP seeks out the stupid demographic (misinformed single issue voters) in exactly the same way that both parties seek other demographics. The democrats don't give away the stupid vote because they don't want it; they do so because the GOP has already got it.
Only in your fantasy world are the people receiving shitty government services those with savings they could be using instead.