The Republicans have been stacking the courts for 8 years now (with the help of right wing Democrats I might add). This might not even make it to the SCOTUS. It's a federal case, so it won't wind through the state courts either.
I'm pretty sure the Feds are right and that they have the right to regulate the Internet under various interstate commerce laws. Maybe if it ties it all up long enough for a pro-Net Neutrality president & Congress to get in (which, realistically means Democrats as the Republican party has made their stance very clear). But that's far from certain and if it happens it'll be by razor thin margins...
and I don't mean materially. I mean being treated like a God. To have the entirety of human civilization bent not just to your will, but to exist for the sole purpose of improving your personal quality of life.
It's a level of narcissism and power that's hard to really imagine. It's like trying to get a grasp on a google (the number, not the company). The human brain isn't well equipped for it.
And they're not going to cut themselves off from everyone, just most everyone. Also, they're not intentionally cutting themselves off from those people. At that level of wealth 95% of the population becomes like ants. You just don't think about them, again, any more than you and me spend our days thinking about the kids currently getting bombs dropped on them in Yemen. It's too far removed from your life. And the remaining 4% of the population (which is still several million) spend every waking moment trying to get into or stay in your good graces. Again, it's the closest thing to Godhood humans can imagine.
because if nobody is poor than nobody is _rich_. Being wealthy isn't just about material wealth. It's about the political power that comes from deciding how resources are distributed and, more often than no, who lives and who dies.
the problem you're describing is mostly a man power one. We've got plenty of that if we want to put it to use. It's usually done through the military because that's the only place you can get Americans to consistently spend money. Norm Chomsky pointed this out ages ago, how the Military Industrial Complex was used to get things done that needed doing but that Americans were too cheap to pay for.
the question we should be asking ourselves is what will happen when the ruling class doesn't need the working class to keep the military class in check? Right now we've got a bit of a balance going on. The Army protects the ruling class but the working class keeps an eye on the army and going into a decent civilian life after some time in the army gives them something to do besides run a Junta. Because of that there's a floor on how bad the ruling class can treat the army and the working class.
All that goes out the window when they've got a robot army. The robot army will never betray them. Sure, there's some engineers keeping it running, but they're nerds and typically lack the drive and charisma to overthrow the ruling class. Those kinds of coup are pulled off by charismatic generalissimos. So you're gonna have the ruling class, a small, well paid merchant class to keep the killer robots going and everybody else. That's you and my, btw. And the ruling class won't need us to buy their crap to be rich either. They'll own everything and have factories to build it. I suppose there'll be a few positions for their doctors and sex slaves. The rest of us get abandoned, sorta like how we ignore starving people in Africa.
what I see most commonly when folks talk about unsustainable pensions is that the pension has been raided by someone. That's what happened to Hostess. It was doing just fine until the owners of the company used a downturn in the economy to get employees to agree to give up most of it. Eddy Lambert, owner of Sears, is currently trying to do the same thing, claiming that the pension is why Sears is failing (and not his mismanagement or that he keeps selling off their best brands).
when faced with a large outbreak. Aside from flu shots there's quarantine procedures, extra steps to be taken at hospitals and clinics, keeping water clean, etc, etc. I suspect I'm only scratching the surface since I don't work for the CDC and I haven't studied flue outbreaks.
That's another problem the world has (America especially). This idea that we can't do anything about these things. It's mostly from folks who, well, haven't really studied the topic. It's part of a general antipathy towards experts and "elites", a desire to not be told what to do and a desire to think that "common sense" can solve problems.
Thing is, the world is really, really counter-intuitive. There's so much in this world that doesn't work they way you think it would. Like how it's several times cheaper & more effective at stabilizing a nation to send some food aid than troops, but that if you overdo the aid local businesses can't thrive because they can't compete with free.
The world is a really, really complex beast. Even things we think are simple aren't. There's damn near nothing that couldn't do with a bit more study and care.
if we don't have a strong, coordinated response to a large scale outbreak yeah, it'll happen again. We haven't magically evolved somehow. We're still vulnerable to the same crap we always were.
This is kind of a sticking point for me. I know lots of folks who, because something bad hasn't happened recently or to them or their immediate family, they think it's a non issue. Like those folks who were vehemently opposed to background checks for guns until they were shot at or folks in favor of single payer healthcare because they lost their jobs after a stroke. People's inability or unwillingness to extrapolate never ceases to amaze and infuriate me...
They tend to make pretty damn safe investments and don't usually get dragged into stuff like this. Did you just want to make a generic attack on pensions? Why?
not to screw with wealthy, well connected investors. For those of you playing at home Enron & Bernie Madoff did just fine ripping off little old ladies of their life savings until they got greedy and big heads & went after bigger fish.
of the GPL. Would you be posting this same post if the person in question wanted their code back because they discovered it's worth millions? Or if they didn't like the political party Linus Torvald's belongs to?
It's the same thing. The point of the GPL is software freedom. Regardless of the circumstance the software remains free. That freedom _is_ his ethics. Go spend some time reading the many, many things he's written on this topic and you'll find him completely consistent in this regard.
even in Europe property rights (IP law) are going to trump Moral rights.
Do you have any idea the chaos that would ensue if you could claim you were morally wrong and thus reclaim copyright on something you previously licensed away? Imagine a musician claiming, under that precedent, that he was morally wronged by how his music was used and therefore rescinded his granting of copyright to his record label.
No, there's now way that's going to pass muster. Even if you want to argue that, as a matter of law, this might be correct, as a matter of how law is applied it's not going to happen.
the only project of any size I know that folks site for that is LLVM, but, well, LLVM has been in decline for some time now and as far as I can tell they're just losing devs to more exciting projects.
Also, keep in mind that the sword cuts both ways. You can lose people to toxicity.
Back in the 90s a woman coded a working Sega CD emulator long before Kega had one. She did it for her college graduation project. It was real, and we know it was real, because we had corroboration from her school. She was getting ready to release it to the public when a raft of what can best be described as the 4chan elite descended on her demanding she release it _right_now_ and with some of the worst language possible. Most of it written around her gender.
Feeling genuinely threatened She basically dropped off the face of the earth; and that included never releasing the emulator.
The idea is equal opportunity plus a minimum standard of living. We're not so naive that we don't recognize classifications when they exist.
Don't take this the wrong way, but you're probably getting your ideas of progressivism from right wing hit pieces. It's not an exaggeration to say the media has a strong, right wing, anti-progressive bias. They're all owned by billionaires, so it's not surprising. Go watch Secular Talk, Aronra and look up the Justice Democrats.
Actual progressives stand for a lot more than you've been told, and if you dig in you'll probably find yourself agreeing with 80-90% of them. The key is to make it past the right wing propaganda.
but in another 20-30 years we're not gonna have a lot of oil based energy. Cars, even if they don't move to electric, are rapidly becoming unaffordable. And solar, wind and nuclear keep getting better.
It would be interesting to see what the middle east is going to do when the buried treasure that's kept them afloat so long is worth about the same as the rocks that bury it. On the other hand maybe if western countries stopped screwing with them for cheap oil they could modernize. True story, Iran was a secular nation until the US over through their democratically elected government because they weren't gonna give away their oil. The reason it got so crazy religious is that the Mosques were the only place you could plan a revolution since the gov't wasn't allowed there.
it's just a circus to rile their base and distract from economic issues. The one thing the right wing has always been good at, their stock in trade if you will, is manufacturing an enemy to distract from their support of low wages, weak worker protections and weak consumer safety laws. They're on the side of the oligarchs. You need only look at where all their money comes from and their unwillingness to refuse corporate PAC money to prove that.
But I'm just a partisan hack, what the hell to I know? AmIRight?
because those are protected classes. You can't choose to be gay or a women. You _can_ choose your political beliefs. Hence we protect those classes and not political beliefs.
That said, I'm not opposed to extending protected class status to political beliefs. But remember all those factory owners who fired pro-Obama people? Or how about Amazon attacking Unions? Better get ready for a whole new world of lawsuits against right wing targets if you protect political beliefs.
If I may go off the rails for a bit; for some mind numbing reason we act like the right wing are not in charge of this country, even though they control every branch of every government in the country. I know what it is, it's a tactic pioneered by the Soviets and embraced during Karl Rove's tenure as a Republican strategist: whatever faults you have you accuse the other side of. In this case the right wing is the political majority with virtually all of the power that goes with it (even though they're consistently in the minority when it's time to do polling on issues). So they argue that they're an oppressed minority. It's a distraction, meant to put the left off balance and force them into a defensive posture. It's especially effective because the right wing, through mega-corporations, have bought up virtually all mass media. Again, folks will tell me the media has a left wing bias because Alex Jones got banned, ignoring the non-stop pro-corporate coverage and far right economic policy that comes out of our media. It's just crazy that nobody can put two and two together here....
it's their company and they're not hiding behind common carrier. It's only a free speech issue when the government censors.
You could argue that political ideas should make you a protected class, but as of right now they do not (outside of a few instances in California). And I'm guessing most self described conservatives don't _want_ them to be. After all, that would be the very definition of Big Government interfering with the free market.
But if you want there to be an open platform that anyone can join where the only thing that gets you banned is overt threats of violence and crimes then there's an easy solution: Public Access. Have the US government create it's own version of Youtube, completely free and let any US Citizen sign up and post as much video as they want. Heck, if you really want to stick it to Youtube that's the way to go. It'd cut 'em off on the knees. And then Alex Jones could join and so long as he didn't violate laws or make threats there'd be no problem. And even if he did we could have judicial oversight to confirm it.
That would make it a real free speech issue and not just a case of a bunch of powerful people trying to protect the folks who push their particular political ideology. You know, I don't remember seeing anyone from the House stepping up for the Left Wing Youtube channels when they got demonitized in the adpocolapse...
destroying Linux? Did it ever occur to you that for every person who quits kernel development because he can't belittle the other developers they'll gain another (or two) who join because they don't have to put up with what can best be described as high school level bullshit?
Ever notice that company's have had code of conducts as far back as the 40s? Could it be that a civil workplace is an asset, and not a liability. The the sort of person who can consistently produce useful work is rarely the sort of person that would spout off at somebody. Yeah, Linus got by with it for a long, long time. But I'll say this, Linus is probably more clever than just about everybody on this forum, and he pretty clearly has just one goal: Write good software. He's come to the conclusion that this is the best way to do it. And I find it difficult to fault him.
Outside of hacks like Al Sharpton (which the left isn't exactly too keen on) who, exactly, on the left attacks the person not the argument. Be specific.
If you'd like to point to somebody like Nancy Pelosi, I'll refer you to her very, very right wing voting record. If you'd like to see somebody with an actual left wing voting record I'll refer you to Bernie Sanders & Liz Warren and ask you to show me them attacking the person, not the argument.
Finally, if your only example are a few bitchy chicks from your local community college's woman's studies program... well. If the best you have is the left wing equivalent to the pastor of a run down church in Alabama you're just gonna have to do better my friend.
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The Republicans have been stacking the courts for 8 years now (with the help of right wing Democrats I might add). This might not even make it to the SCOTUS. It's a federal case, so it won't wind through the state courts either.
I'm pretty sure the Feds are right and that they have the right to regulate the Internet under various interstate commerce laws. Maybe if it ties it all up long enough for a pro-Net Neutrality president & Congress to get in (which, realistically means Democrats as the Republican party has made their stance very clear). But that's far from certain and if it happens it'll be by razor thin margins...
and I don't mean materially. I mean being treated like a God. To have the entirety of human civilization bent not just to your will, but to exist for the sole purpose of improving your personal quality of life.
It's a level of narcissism and power that's hard to really imagine. It's like trying to get a grasp on a google (the number, not the company). The human brain isn't well equipped for it.
And they're not going to cut themselves off from everyone, just most everyone. Also, they're not intentionally cutting themselves off from those people. At that level of wealth 95% of the population becomes like ants. You just don't think about them, again, any more than you and me spend our days thinking about the kids currently getting bombs dropped on them in Yemen. It's too far removed from your life. And the remaining 4% of the population (which is still several million) spend every waking moment trying to get into or stay in your good graces. Again, it's the closest thing to Godhood humans can imagine.
because if nobody is poor than nobody is _rich_. Being wealthy isn't just about material wealth. It's about the political power that comes from deciding how resources are distributed and, more often than no, who lives and who dies.
the problem you're describing is mostly a man power one. We've got plenty of that if we want to put it to use. It's usually done through the military because that's the only place you can get Americans to consistently spend money. Norm Chomsky pointed this out ages ago, how the Military Industrial Complex was used to get things done that needed doing but that Americans were too cheap to pay for.
the question we should be asking ourselves is what will happen when the ruling class doesn't need the working class to keep the military class in check? Right now we've got a bit of a balance going on. The Army protects the ruling class but the working class keeps an eye on the army and going into a decent civilian life after some time in the army gives them something to do besides run a Junta. Because of that there's a floor on how bad the ruling class can treat the army and the working class.
All that goes out the window when they've got a robot army. The robot army will never betray them. Sure, there's some engineers keeping it running, but they're nerds and typically lack the drive and charisma to overthrow the ruling class. Those kinds of coup are pulled off by charismatic generalissimos. So you're gonna have the ruling class, a small, well paid merchant class to keep the killer robots going and everybody else. That's you and my, btw. And the ruling class won't need us to buy their crap to be rich either. They'll own everything and have factories to build it. I suppose there'll be a few positions for their doctors and sex slaves. The rest of us get abandoned, sorta like how we ignore starving people in Africa.
what I see most commonly when folks talk about unsustainable pensions is that the pension has been raided by someone. That's what happened to Hostess. It was doing just fine until the owners of the company used a downturn in the economy to get employees to agree to give up most of it. Eddy Lambert, owner of Sears, is currently trying to do the same thing, claiming that the pension is why Sears is failing (and not his mismanagement or that he keeps selling off their best brands).
when faced with a large outbreak. Aside from flu shots there's quarantine procedures, extra steps to be taken at hospitals and clinics, keeping water clean, etc, etc. I suspect I'm only scratching the surface since I don't work for the CDC and I haven't studied flue outbreaks.
That's another problem the world has (America especially). This idea that we can't do anything about these things. It's mostly from folks who, well, haven't really studied the topic. It's part of a general antipathy towards experts and "elites", a desire to not be told what to do and a desire to think that "common sense" can solve problems.
Thing is, the world is really, really counter-intuitive. There's so much in this world that doesn't work they way you think it would. Like how it's several times cheaper & more effective at stabilizing a nation to send some food aid than troops, but that if you overdo the aid local businesses can't thrive because they can't compete with free.
The world is a really, really complex beast. Even things we think are simple aren't. There's damn near nothing that couldn't do with a bit more study and care.
if we don't have a strong, coordinated response to a large scale outbreak yeah, it'll happen again. We haven't magically evolved somehow. We're still vulnerable to the same crap we always were.
This is kind of a sticking point for me. I know lots of folks who, because something bad hasn't happened recently or to them or their immediate family, they think it's a non issue. Like those folks who were vehemently opposed to background checks for guns until they were shot at or folks in favor of single payer healthcare because they lost their jobs after a stroke. People's inability or unwillingness to extrapolate never ceases to amaze and infuriate me...
They tend to make pretty damn safe investments and don't usually get dragged into stuff like this. Did you just want to make a generic attack on pensions? Why?
not to screw with wealthy, well connected investors. For those of you playing at home Enron & Bernie Madoff did just fine ripping off little old ladies of their life savings until they got greedy and big heads & went after bigger fish.
see here.
Freedom requires a measure of power. Would you give up all your guns? Your military? No? Why not?
of the GPL. Would you be posting this same post if the person in question wanted their code back because they discovered it's worth millions? Or if they didn't like the political party Linus Torvald's belongs to?
It's the same thing. The point of the GPL is software freedom. Regardless of the circumstance the software remains free. That freedom _is_ his ethics. Go spend some time reading the many, many things he's written on this topic and you'll find him completely consistent in this regard.
So yeah, no take backs. Whatever the reason.
even in Europe property rights (IP law) are going to trump Moral rights.
Do you have any idea the chaos that would ensue if you could claim you were morally wrong and thus reclaim copyright on something you previously licensed away? Imagine a musician claiming, under that precedent, that he was morally wronged by how his music was used and therefore rescinded his granting of copyright to his record label.
No, there's now way that's going to pass muster. Even if you want to argue that, as a matter of law, this might be correct, as a matter of how law is applied it's not going to happen.
As the saying goes, Possession is 9/10ths of the law
the only project of any size I know that folks site for that is LLVM, but, well, LLVM has been in decline for some time now and as far as I can tell they're just losing devs to more exciting projects.
Also, keep in mind that the sword cuts both ways. You can lose people to toxicity.
Back in the 90s a woman coded a working Sega CD emulator long before Kega had one. She did it for her college graduation project. It was real, and we know it was real, because we had corroboration from her school. She was getting ready to release it to the public when a raft of what can best be described as the 4chan elite descended on her demanding she release it _right_now_ and with some of the worst language possible. Most of it written around her gender.
Feeling genuinely threatened She basically dropped off the face of the earth; and that included never releasing the emulator.
The idea is equal opportunity plus a minimum standard of living. We're not so naive that we don't recognize classifications when they exist.
Don't take this the wrong way, but you're probably getting your ideas of progressivism from right wing hit pieces. It's not an exaggeration to say the media has a strong, right wing, anti-progressive bias. They're all owned by billionaires, so it's not surprising. Go watch Secular Talk, Aronra and look up the Justice Democrats.
Actual progressives stand for a lot more than you've been told, and if you dig in you'll probably find yourself agreeing with 80-90% of them. The key is to make it past the right wing propaganda.
but in another 20-30 years we're not gonna have a lot of oil based energy. Cars, even if they don't move to electric, are rapidly becoming unaffordable. And solar, wind and nuclear keep getting better.
It would be interesting to see what the middle east is going to do when the buried treasure that's kept them afloat so long is worth about the same as the rocks that bury it. On the other hand maybe if western countries stopped screwing with them for cheap oil they could modernize. True story, Iran was a secular nation until the US over through their democratically elected government because they weren't gonna give away their oil. The reason it got so crazy religious is that the Mosques were the only place you could plan a revolution since the gov't wasn't allowed there.
it's just a circus to rile their base and distract from economic issues. The one thing the right wing has always been good at, their stock in trade if you will, is manufacturing an enemy to distract from their support of low wages, weak worker protections and weak consumer safety laws. They're on the side of the oligarchs. You need only look at where all their money comes from and their unwillingness to refuse corporate PAC money to prove that.
But I'm just a partisan hack, what the hell to I know? AmIRight?
because those are protected classes. You can't choose to be gay or a women. You _can_ choose your political beliefs. Hence we protect those classes and not political beliefs.
That said, I'm not opposed to extending protected class status to political beliefs. But remember all those factory owners who fired pro-Obama people? Or how about Amazon attacking Unions? Better get ready for a whole new world of lawsuits against right wing targets if you protect political beliefs.
If I may go off the rails for a bit; for some mind numbing reason we act like the right wing are not in charge of this country, even though they control every branch of every government in the country. I know what it is, it's a tactic pioneered by the Soviets and embraced during Karl Rove's tenure as a Republican strategist: whatever faults you have you accuse the other side of. In this case the right wing is the political majority with virtually all of the power that goes with it (even though they're consistently in the minority when it's time to do polling on issues). So they argue that they're an oppressed minority. It's a distraction, meant to put the left off balance and force them into a defensive posture. It's especially effective because the right wing, through mega-corporations, have bought up virtually all mass media. Again, folks will tell me the media has a left wing bias because Alex Jones got banned, ignoring the non-stop pro-corporate coverage and far right economic policy that comes out of our media. It's just crazy that nobody can put two and two together here....
it's their company and they're not hiding behind common carrier. It's only a free speech issue when the government censors.
You could argue that political ideas should make you a protected class, but as of right now they do not (outside of a few instances in California). And I'm guessing most self described conservatives don't _want_ them to be. After all, that would be the very definition of Big Government interfering with the free market.
But if you want there to be an open platform that anyone can join where the only thing that gets you banned is overt threats of violence and crimes then there's an easy solution: Public Access. Have the US government create it's own version of Youtube, completely free and let any US Citizen sign up and post as much video as they want. Heck, if you really want to stick it to Youtube that's the way to go. It'd cut 'em off on the knees. And then Alex Jones could join and so long as he didn't violate laws or make threats there'd be no problem. And even if he did we could have judicial oversight to confirm it.
That would make it a real free speech issue and not just a case of a bunch of powerful people trying to protect the folks who push their particular political ideology. You know, I don't remember seeing anyone from the House stepping up for the Left Wing Youtube channels when they got demonitized in the adpocolapse...
why not just switch to one that doesn't penny pinch?
is that I can't station police in riot gear outside polling places in predominately black neighborhoods^X^X^X places that need extra security.
then you're probably right. In both China & America you do not directly **** with the rich. And Zuck is loaded.
destroying Linux? Did it ever occur to you that for every person who quits kernel development because he can't belittle the other developers they'll gain another (or two) who join because they don't have to put up with what can best be described as high school level bullshit?
Ever notice that company's have had code of conducts as far back as the 40s? Could it be that a civil workplace is an asset, and not a liability. The the sort of person who can consistently produce useful work is rarely the sort of person that would spout off at somebody. Yeah, Linus got by with it for a long, long time. But I'll say this, Linus is probably more clever than just about everybody on this forum, and he pretty clearly has just one goal: Write good software. He's come to the conclusion that this is the best way to do it. And I find it difficult to fault him.
fictional things are often funny.
Outside of hacks like Al Sharpton (which the left isn't exactly too keen on) who, exactly, on the left attacks the person not the argument. Be specific.
If you'd like to point to somebody like Nancy Pelosi, I'll refer you to her very, very right wing voting record. If you'd like to see somebody with an actual left wing voting record I'll refer you to Bernie Sanders & Liz Warren and ask you to show me them attacking the person, not the argument.
Finally, if your only example are a few bitchy chicks from your local community college's woman's studies program... well. If the best you have is the left wing equivalent to the pastor of a run down church in Alabama you're just gonna have to do better my friend.