I will be able to meet someone in a cafe, receive cash, and transfer bitcoin.
This is yet another of the many motivations for governments pushing "cashless" currency/exchange systems; to eliminate side-channels for moving/holding wealth/capital outside of government regulatory & enforcement infrastructure control.
I mean, sure, Facebook doesn't have to do business with the EU. It'll tank their stock price to give up their second most valuable market, but it's up to them.
Sorry, the US and China are the two top markets, the EU is a distant third at best and falling further back as China's markets expand and grow. FB's stock prices would take a hit, but only briefly.
I say that everyone (FB, Netflix, Google, Apple, MS, etc etc) should simply blackhole EU IP ranges until they wake from their collective fever-dream.
After EU citizens torch a few cities and possibly a few EU political leaders, those (surviving) EU political leaders might reconsider their foolishness.
We're hard-wired for lazy, but we're also hard-wired to be powerfully motivated by fear. Fear overcomes laziness.
Fear and the other motivators mentioned in earlier replies to your post are only a subset of the prime motivation of all animals capable of having "motivation"; survival.
Laziness, in the textbooks I read in school, was a survival trait passed down because laziness conserves bodily reserves which is a logical response when the availability of food is uncertain as it's been for most humans for the vast majority of human existence.
Seems like pretty solid logic to me and follows along with other accepted evolutionary phenomena among various species.
Maybe it would be a good idea to have researchers first search through US high school textbooks in the corresponding subjects from the '50s/'60s/'70s before they begin spending money, time, and resources that may have been better used to greater effect elsewhere, and on less previously-researched subjects?
I mean, it just all seems to be a terrible waste when they could have simply opened a McGraw-Hill high school textbook from 1975 or something.
It seems the one thing that is free is money for the heirs of artists.
It's not even the heirs themselves who are pushing this as much as the all the rest of the industry that profits from being solely licensed distributors/publishers and continuing to make a profit from works that should have entered the public domain long ago.
The social contract has been broken. The deal was we protect the works for the author/artists for a **limited** time (eternity minus a day is NOT what was meant by "limited time", that's just sophistry and semantics) and, in exchange, those works become free for anyone to do anything they like with them. That is no longer true in any but the technical sense. For example, any time the copyright on Mickey Mouse nears expiration, boom!...a new Act extending copyright terms magically is passed with few voting against even in the partisan warzone that is Congress.
And I'm sure they'll be shocked & surprised when more and more people simply stop even pretending to obey copyright restrictions. It appears so counterproductive that you'd almost think there might be ulterior motives involved.
But that would be 'conspiracy theory' territory, as we all know just how honest, open, and transparent those in power in the private and public sectors are about such things.
congress has already granted the authority to regulate telecommunications.
In legislative & regulatory jargon, "telecommunications" and "internet/data services" are not the same things even though you & I know that the technical and functional differences are fast disappearing and the two are merging. In the existing governmental/legislative/regulatory reality they must be addressed separately.
Laws, and the bodies and processes that create them, often make little logical sense, but there we are. Yay for bloated, overly-bureaucratic government!
It seems obvious that it should be the FCCs jurisdiction.
See, that's the thing. It has to be done according to the processes and procedures set out under the US Constitution and the Rule of Law. "It should be obvious" is not a legal or Constitutional standard and depends upon who you ask and what they believe. Going by "it should be obvious" instead of following the proper process is what got us into all this mess in the first place.
"It should be obvious" instead of Rule of Law is what put Japanese & German Americans in internment camps in WW2, passed Jim Crow laws, and kept institutional racial segregation alive.
Look, I have no problem with the basic principles NN is supposed to support, but do it the right way and bitch at Congress to pass a law or Act or something, don't go creating backdoor ways to enact shit through unelected bureaucrats such that citizens have no say. Not only can the next administration undo it, it can use those same tactics you created/used to hurt you worse. It can only end badly for all.
The argument isn't whether or not a state can preempt federal authority, it's whether a federal agency that has claimed they specifically DO NOT HAVE AUTHORITY can somehow also enjoin a State from exercising that authority. Completely opposite issue.
Almost there.
Congress has original authority which it has granted to *neither* the FCC *nor* the States. *Congress* is who have failed to act for many years even before Obama.
Hell, this entire NN uproar started because Democrats wanted NN but knew they couldn't get it through Congress and so had the FCC deem itself additional regulatory scope because reasons in an end-run around Congress to get what they wanted.
This whole ball of shit from the beginning is because Congress is too partisan and too chickenshit and cowardly on *both sides*, afraid to lose campaign money & votes to enact legislation to either deal with the issue directly (unlikely), create a new Federal agency and delegate it regulatory powers to deal with it (also unlikely) or to authorize an existing agency and delegate regulatory powers appropriately to deal with it like the FTC or FCC (one of those most likely).
Both sides need to stop these end-runs around the Constitution, due process, and checks & balances. Any gains you make will be fleeting, the next person/people can roll ir all right back and then do even worse to you. It only ends in a crisis of government, civil disorder, and social & economic chaos. Not a pleasant Tuesday for anyone except those who desire death, chaos, and destruction. My Tuesdays are booked, thanks all the same.
If you read the article, Apple has been offering for years but some sleazy companies and researchers found it more valuable to keep the information hidden.
The only way this program will be successful is if Apple consistently offers more money than the NSA et al for exploits/zero-days.
If Apple does outbid the government spy agencies, watch for a law/regulation to come down the pike to prevent it. Gotta keep tabs on the Proles or else there could be an outbreak of Constitutionalism, and we can't have *that*! That would ruin *everything* and strip us of power!
Those helpful souls at AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon don't want to see you bothered by those troublesome passwords any more, so now they'll take care of all that for you.
Aren't they nice?
What this is, is an attempt to assuage those in the government that are pushing for mandatory "backdoors". If they can convince a sufficient number of users to breach their own security voluntarily, they hope that will persuade the government not to enact mandatory access which would put those carriers in the middle between an authoritarian regime and an outraged populace. Of course, that this centralized authentication plan also would allow them to collect & sell even more customer data doesn't hurt, either.
It would not surprise me to see a similar push for "authentication centralization" among Google, FB, Amazon, etc etc in the near future and for similar reasons.
My library must not have stocked this particular book. Do you know which one this was featured in?
I believe it was from a restricted-release series called "Dick And Jane Live Under A Social Democratic Government".
The series features titles such as "Dick And Jane Learn To Virtue-Signal:, "Dick And Jane Help Shut Down A Speaking Event By Using Violent Riots", and that fan-favorite, "Dick And Jane And Their Friends Beat An Old Man Wearing A Trump Hat".
As a matter of fact, all this hand-wringing about teens vaping is just smoke to cover the fact that the government wants to find an excuse to ban e-cigs and vaping because it's seriously cutting into tobacco sales and especially hurting the creation of new teen smokers, not to mention all the federal and State tobacco & cigarette taxes the government is losing out on, and stands to see even more losses if teens take up vaping instead of smoking tobacco.
The government would much rather see Dick and Jane. See Dick and Jane with a 3-pack-a-day habit. See Dick and Jane pay thousands in tobacco taxes every year. Watch Dick and Jane get lung cancer and spend many tens of thousands on medical treatment and hospice costs. See the Government and healthcare providers run away with pockets bulging with cash. Run, merchants of death, run!
I am interested in understanding both the positive as well as the negative aspects of global warming.
I understand. You're looking at this from an intellectual point of view employing intellectual honesty in seeking some answers for a seldom-asked but insightful question.
What you seem to be missing is that by pointing out that there actually are positives to warming, you might contribute to people deciding to make plans to adapt to inevitably-rising average temperatures instead of wasting their resources on attempting to control the global climate (and every nation's contribution to warming), thus leaving them helpless, frightened, & desperate when their efforts inevitably fail and they haven't the resources left to adapt, and extremely vulnerable for any political strong-man or any political Party to take total control that tells them "Come with me (us) if you want to live! Only I (We) can save you!".
It's the same sort of tactics that Marxists and Communists have always used, simply on a global instead of a national/regional scale.
If they wanted to be left alone, maybe they should tone down the criticism of how everyone else are living their lives...
Er, wut!?
Seriously.
If someone is trying to control how you live your life, then they are the nearly polar-opposite of a small-'L' libertarian. Believing that everybody should stay out of other people's business and leave everyone else the hell alone to think, believe, marry, smoke this or that, or say stupid and hateful shit or sing beautiful music, etc etc is the short version of being libertarian. Not some stupid shit about lawlessness/Somalia and no government.
Just a government that isn't in your grill all the time micro-managing, regulating, invading your privacy and violating civil rights, and taxing the shit out of everything and everyone, all resulting in the US having the world's largest percentage of a nation's citizens incarcerated in prisons.
Yeah, libertarians are a real scary bunch, alright.
Watch out, some sneaky libertarian could be covertly leaving you the hell alone right NOW!!!1!!
But of course, that doesn't make for a clickbait headline, now does it?
Human nature is often very nasty.
There are and will always be those who, for a variety of reasons from the psychological;/emotional (envy, jealousy, obsession/fixation, etc) to the political/ideological, will try to bring down & destroy those who are successful and/or visionaries, probably even more-so regarding visionaries. Musk being both paints a double-sized target on his back for "nay-saying nabobs of negativity".
"We acknowledge our failure to totally silence US Conservatives (labeled as "state actors", "Nazis", "White Supremacists" etc for the convenience of this political purge) but promise to de-platform all opposition voices to Progressive viewpoints and politicians before the next election."
[As an American....]...there's times I really love Europe.
LOL, agreed as another American.
I will say, however much or often I might disagree with many European's political and cultural views, I have no problem stating that I stand with them on this. These scientific pay-walled journals are simply old distribution channels seeking to halt the advance of technology in information distribution to preserve an outdated business model just as the **AAs are attempting in the US.
I may often disagree with Europeans (and others as well), but I have no personal antipathy towards them or anyone as people. It's the leaders I mostly get frustrated with, as I know many Europeans (and others) do with US leaders as well.
Disagreeing with someone's political, religious, cultural, or ideological views doesn't make someone a monster, only monstrous acts themselves do.
The creative internet well see EU censorship then create routes around EU gov controls.
The "creative internet" is not hardware and networks, it's the people building and using those resources. The "creative internet" can be prosecuted, imprisoned, or simply taken out back and shot in the head by TPTB. When the government is more powerful than those it governs and has no fear of them, bad things always happen eventually.
"Left" and "Right" is not what we should be talking about, but "Up" and "Down", where "Up" is more authoritarian, bigger government, and "Down" is smaller, less intrusive and micro-managing government.
With a smaller, less powerful government, "Left" and "Right" do not matter as much to the population and does not impact their liberty nearly as dramatically. It also means political Parties have far less power and there would be far less government corruption, as why pay someone who doesn't have the power to help you or harm you?
If you say "socialism" and "Venezuela" in the mirror three times a socialist account will appear behind you to tell you Venezuela isn't actually socialist and anyway it was done wrong. (just like all of the others)
LOL! Noice! Agreed, the socialists always trot-out that old, tired, "No true Scotsman" logical fallacy every time. People have gotten tired of hearing that BS to the point that even folks who aren't very politically-minded roll their eyes at those types anymore.
Strat is exactly right. Fascism was an attempt to avoid the economic collapse of Leninism while retaining the authoritarian control.
Thank you. Yes, Lenin even congratulated Mussolini when he took Italy Fascist, as Socialism and Fascism are both based on Marxist ideology.
Socialism is an economic distribution model, not a government.
So there are no Socialist governments? Venezuela would like a word with you.
You're engaging in Post-Modernism. Why do you want to regress to something the West abandoned long ago for logic and reason during the Enlightenment which propelled humanity thousands of years forward in the space of a little more than a century?
Read about this stuff, Strat.
Back at you AC, and at least I have the confidence in my knowledge, principles, opinions, and facts to not post AC.
Fascism and socialism or social-democratic-ism are not the same thing in any respect nor did the Nazis practice socialism.
Fascism, Socialism, and Communism are all top-down, command-and-control, redistributionist, collectivist, authoritarian ideologies that place little value on individual freedom over the interests of the collective. "Everything within the State, nothing outside the State." applies equally to all three. In none of them does the individual have "rights", only privileges allowed by the State that can be revoked anytime for any reason.
It's like Catholics, Protestants, and Methodists each accusing the others of not being Christian. They are all Christians that differ only on relatively minor points of doctrine. It's the same with Fascism, Socialism (and it's sub-variants like "Democratic Socialism" which is an oxymoron) and Communism.
Rather than "Left" and "Right" we should be discussing an "Up" and "Down", "Up" being larger government with the commensurate loss of individual liberty, and "Down" which is smaller, less powerful government with a commensurately larger amount of individual liberty.
With a less powerful government "Left" and "Right" would not matter as much nor affect individual liberty as drastically.
...the fact that a lot of people like to pretend like being opposed to religious freedom, freedom of speech, and freedom of association and the like is based on a skewed understanding of equality and the 1st Amendment doesn't make it any less bigoted.
the current administration is attempting to keep the existing ones [eg. coal plants] in service longer.
This is because it's taking longer than expected to bring alternatives online and the engineers in charge of balancing the grid are telling the government the grid is already very precarious and further loss of generation capacity, especially quick-response generation, will pose a major hazard to the national power grid network.
Would you prefer major blackouts and brownouts now, or a stable grid and a delay while the alternative capacity is added over the objections of NIMBYs, anti-nuke, and anti-natural-gas/fracking lobbyists and activist groups?
Of course, we could just toss all our tech and transportation and live like Amish. Even then, however, unless the other major-population nations reduce their CO2 output drastically, even the entire US partying like it's 1799 won't have that much effect on climate trends worldwide.
The fundamental flaw is that in economics-as-we-know-it things are done purely for profit, not for getting things done.
It's more an intrinsic part of basic human nature, not "economics".
It's why Socialism fails (in larger and diverse societies) and capitalism succeeds. Socialism fails because it depends on people doing things not in their own personal self-interest that benefits others but not themselves. You end up with the old Soviet trope "we pretend to work, they pretend to pay us". Capitalism leverages that self-interest and allows people's pursuance of self-interest to benefit society and the world as a whole.
I mostly agree with some of the posters above, that TFS/A starts off excluding up front all the profitable services that add value and bitches that F/OSS can't be turned into rent-seeking proprietary software selling copies of the same set of ones and zeroes over and over. Well, duh! 'Working as intended'.
Slashdot Mirror
I will be able to meet someone in a cafe, receive cash, and transfer bitcoin.
This is yet another of the many motivations for governments pushing "cashless" currency/exchange systems; to eliminate side-channels for moving/holding wealth/capital outside of government regulatory & enforcement infrastructure control.
Strat
I mean, sure, Facebook doesn't have to do business with the EU. It'll tank their stock price to give up their second most valuable market, but it's up to them.
Sorry, the US and China are the two top markets, the EU is a distant third at best and falling further back as China's markets expand and grow. FB's stock prices would take a hit, but only briefly.
I say that everyone (FB, Netflix, Google, Apple, MS, etc etc) should simply blackhole EU IP ranges until they wake from their collective fever-dream.
After EU citizens torch a few cities and possibly a few EU political leaders, those (surviving) EU political leaders might reconsider their foolishness.
Strat
We're hard-wired for lazy, but we're also hard-wired to be powerfully motivated by fear. Fear overcomes laziness.
Fear and the other motivators mentioned in earlier replies to your post are only a subset of the prime motivation of all animals capable of having "motivation"; survival .
Laziness, in the textbooks I read in school, was a survival trait passed down because laziness conserves bodily reserves which is a logical response when the availability of food is uncertain as it's been for most humans for the vast majority of human existence.
Seems like pretty solid logic to me and follows along with other accepted evolutionary phenomena among various species.
Maybe it would be a good idea to have researchers first search through US high school textbooks in the corresponding subjects from the '50s/'60s/'70s before they begin spending money, time, and resources that may have been better used to greater effect elsewhere, and on less previously-researched subjects?
I mean, it just all seems to be a terrible waste when they could have simply opened a McGraw-Hill high school textbook from 1975 or something.
Strat
It seems the one thing that is free is money for the heirs of artists.
It's not even the heirs themselves who are pushing this as much as the all the rest of the industry that profits from being solely licensed distributors/publishers and continuing to make a profit from works that should have entered the public domain long ago.
The social contract has been broken. The deal was we protect the works for the author/artists for a **limited** time (eternity minus a day is NOT what was meant by "limited time", that's just sophistry and semantics) and, in exchange, those works become free for anyone to do anything they like with them. That is no longer true in any but the technical sense. For example, any time the copyright on Mickey Mouse nears expiration, boom!...a new Act extending copyright terms magically is passed with few voting against even in the partisan warzone that is Congress.
And I'm sure they'll be shocked & surprised when more and more people simply stop even pretending to obey copyright restrictions. It appears so counterproductive that you'd almost think there might be ulterior motives involved.
But that would be 'conspiracy theory' territory, as we all know just how honest, open, and transparent those in power in the private and public sectors are about such things.
Right?
Strat
You only got through the first half of one sentence of the above comment?
IMHO his getting past the post's title at all places him on the high side of the bell curve here on Slashdot.
Just sayin'...
Strat
congress has already granted the authority to regulate telecommunications.
In legislative & regulatory jargon, "telecommunications" and "internet/data services" are not the same things even though you & I know that the technical and functional differences are fast disappearing and the two are merging. In the existing governmental/legislative/regulatory reality they must be addressed separately.
Laws, and the bodies and processes that create them, often make little logical sense, but there we are. Yay for bloated, overly-bureaucratic government!
Strat
It seems obvious that it should be the FCCs jurisdiction.
See, that's the thing. It has to be done according to the processes and procedures set out under the US Constitution and the Rule of Law. "It should be obvious" is not a legal or Constitutional standard and depends upon who you ask and what they believe. Going by "it should be obvious" instead of following the proper process is what got us into all this mess in the first place.
"It should be obvious" instead of Rule of Law is what put Japanese & German Americans in internment camps in WW2, passed Jim Crow laws, and kept institutional racial segregation alive.
Look, I have no problem with the basic principles NN is supposed to support, but do it the right way and bitch at Congress to pass a law or Act or something, don't go creating backdoor ways to enact shit through unelected bureaucrats such that citizens have no say. Not only can the next administration undo it, it can use those same tactics you created/used to hurt you worse. It can only end badly for all.
Strat
The argument isn't whether or not a state can preempt federal authority, it's whether a federal agency that has claimed they specifically DO NOT HAVE AUTHORITY can somehow also enjoin a State from exercising that authority. Completely opposite issue.
Almost there.
Congress has original authority which it has granted to *neither* the FCC *nor* the States. *Congress* is who have failed to act for many years even before Obama.
Hell, this entire NN uproar started because Democrats wanted NN but knew they couldn't get it through Congress and so had the FCC deem itself additional regulatory scope because reasons in an end-run around Congress to get what they wanted.
This whole ball of shit from the beginning is because Congress is too partisan and too chickenshit and cowardly on *both sides*, afraid to lose campaign money & votes to enact legislation to either deal with the issue directly (unlikely), create a new Federal agency and delegate it regulatory powers to deal with it (also unlikely) or to authorize an existing agency and delegate regulatory powers appropriately to deal with it like the FTC or FCC (one of those most likely).
Both sides need to stop these end-runs around the Constitution, due process, and checks & balances. Any gains you make will be fleeting, the next person/people can roll ir all right back and then do even worse to you. It only ends in a crisis of government, civil disorder, and social & economic chaos. Not a pleasant Tuesday for anyone except those who desire death, chaos, and destruction. My Tuesdays are booked, thanks all the same.
Strat
If you read the article, Apple has been offering for years but some sleazy companies and researchers found it more valuable to keep the information hidden.
The only way this program will be successful is if Apple consistently offers more money than the NSA et al for exploits/zero-days.
If Apple does outbid the government spy agencies, watch for a law/regulation to come down the pike to prevent it. Gotta keep tabs on the Proles or else there could be an outbreak of Constitutionalism, and we can't have *that*! That would ruin *everything* and strip us of power!
Strat
Those helpful souls at AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon don't want to see you bothered by those troublesome passwords any more, so now they'll take care of all that for you.
Aren't they nice?
What this is, is an attempt to assuage those in the government that are pushing for mandatory "backdoors". If they can convince a sufficient number of users to breach their own security voluntarily, they hope that will persuade the government not to enact mandatory access which would put those carriers in the middle between an authoritarian regime and an outraged populace. Of course, that this centralized authentication plan also would allow them to collect & sell even more customer data doesn't hurt, either.
It would not surprise me to see a similar push for "authentication centralization" among Google, FB, Amazon, etc etc in the near future and for similar reasons.
"Just say no."
Strat
My library must not have stocked this particular book. Do you know which one this was featured in?
I believe it was from a restricted-release series called "Dick And Jane Live Under A Social Democratic Government".
The series features titles such as "Dick And Jane Learn To Virtue-Signal:, "Dick And Jane Help Shut Down A Speaking Event By Using Violent Riots", and that fan-favorite, "Dick And Jane And Their Friends Beat An Old Man Wearing A Trump Hat".
Strat
Ban cigarettes while your at it dipshit.
That's not going to happen.
As a matter of fact, all this hand-wringing about teens vaping is just smoke to cover the fact that the government wants to find an excuse to ban e-cigs and vaping because it's seriously cutting into tobacco sales and especially hurting the creation of new teen smokers, not to mention all the federal and State tobacco & cigarette taxes the government is losing out on, and stands to see even more losses if teens take up vaping instead of smoking tobacco.
The government would much rather see Dick and Jane. See Dick and Jane with a 3-pack-a-day habit. See Dick and Jane pay thousands in tobacco taxes every year. Watch Dick and Jane get lung cancer and spend many tens of thousands on medical treatment and hospice costs. See the Government and healthcare providers run away with pockets bulging with cash. Run, merchants of death, run!
Strat
I am interested in understanding both the positive as well as the negative aspects of global warming.
I understand. You're looking at this from an intellectual point of view employing intellectual honesty in seeking some answers for a seldom-asked but insightful question.
What you seem to be missing is that by pointing out that there actually are positives to warming, you might contribute to people deciding to make plans to adapt to inevitably-rising average temperatures instead of wasting their resources on attempting to control the global climate (and every nation's contribution to warming), thus leaving them helpless, frightened, & desperate when their efforts inevitably fail and they haven't the resources left to adapt, and extremely vulnerable for any political strong-man or any political Party to take total control that tells them "Come with me (us) if you want to live! Only I (We) can save you!".
It's the same sort of tactics that Marxists and Communists have always used, simply on a global instead of a national/regional scale.
Strat
If they wanted to be left alone, maybe they should tone down the criticism of how everyone else are living their lives...
Er, wut!?
Seriously.
If someone is trying to control how you live your life, then they are the nearly polar-opposite of a small-'L' libertarian. Believing that everybody should stay out of other people's business and leave everyone else the hell alone to think, believe, marry, smoke this or that, or say stupid and hateful shit or sing beautiful music, etc etc is the short version of being libertarian. Not some stupid shit about lawlessness/Somalia and no government.
Just a government that isn't in your grill all the time micro-managing, regulating, invading your privacy and violating civil rights, and taxing the shit out of everything and everyone, all resulting in the US having the world's largest percentage of a nation's citizens incarcerated in prisons.
Yeah, libertarians are a real scary bunch, alright.
Watch out, some sneaky libertarian could be covertly leaving you the hell alone right NOW!!!1!!
Strat
But of course, that doesn't make for a clickbait headline, now does it?
Human nature is often very nasty.
There are and will always be those who, for a variety of reasons from the psychological;/emotional (envy, jealousy, obsession/fixation, etc) to the political/ideological, will try to bring down & destroy those who are successful and/or visionaries, probably even more-so regarding visionaries. Musk being both paints a double-sized target on his back for "nay-saying nabobs of negativity".
Human nature is why we can't have nice things.
Seriously.
Strat
"We acknowledge our failure to totally silence US Conservatives (labeled as "state actors", "Nazis", "White Supremacists" etc for the convenience of this political purge) but promise to de-platform all opposition voices to Progressive viewpoints and politicians before the next election."
Strat
[As an American....] ...there's times I really love Europe.
LOL, agreed as another American.
I will say, however much or often I might disagree with many European's political and cultural views, I have no problem stating that I stand with them on this. These scientific pay-walled journals are simply old distribution channels seeking to halt the advance of technology in information distribution to preserve an outdated business model just as the **AAs are attempting in the US.
I may often disagree with Europeans (and others as well), but I have no personal antipathy towards them or anyone as people. It's the leaders I mostly get frustrated with, as I know many Europeans (and others) do with US leaders as well.
Disagreeing with someone's political, religious, cultural, or ideological views doesn't make someone a monster, only monstrous acts themselves do.
Words are just words, actions define.
Strat
The creative internet well see EU censorship then create routes around EU gov controls.
The "creative internet" is not hardware and networks, it's the people building and using those resources. The "creative internet" can be prosecuted, imprisoned, or simply taken out back and shot in the head by TPTB. When the government is more powerful than those it governs and has no fear of them, bad things always happen eventually.
"Left" and "Right" is not what we should be talking about, but "Up" and "Down", where "Up" is more authoritarian, bigger government, and "Down" is smaller, less intrusive and micro-managing government.
With a smaller, less powerful government, "Left" and "Right" do not matter as much to the population and does not impact their liberty nearly as dramatically. It also means political Parties have far less power and there would be far less government corruption, as why pay someone who doesn't have the power to help you or harm you?
Get Down and get free!
Strat
If you say "socialism" and "Venezuela" in the mirror three times a socialist account will appear behind you to tell you Venezuela isn't actually socialist and anyway it was done wrong. (just like all of the others)
LOL! Noice! Agreed, the socialists always trot-out that old, tired, "No true Scotsman" logical fallacy every time. People have gotten tired of hearing that BS to the point that even folks who aren't very politically-minded roll their eyes at those types anymore.
Strat is exactly right. Fascism was an attempt to avoid the economic collapse of Leninism while retaining the authoritarian control.
Thank you. Yes, Lenin even congratulated Mussolini when he took Italy Fascist, as Socialism and Fascism are both based on Marxist ideology.
Strat
Socialism is an economic distribution model, not a government.
So there are no Socialist governments? Venezuela would like a word with you.
You're engaging in Post-Modernism. Why do you want to regress to something the West abandoned long ago for logic and reason during the Enlightenment which propelled humanity thousands of years forward in the space of a little more than a century?
Read about this stuff, Strat.
Back at you AC, and at least I have the confidence in my knowledge, principles, opinions, and facts to not post AC.
Strat
Fascism and socialism or social-democratic-ism are not the same thing in any respect nor did the Nazis practice socialism.
Fascism, Socialism, and Communism are all top-down, command-and-control, redistributionist, collectivist, authoritarian ideologies that place little value on individual freedom over the interests of the collective. "Everything within the State, nothing outside the State." applies equally to all three. In none of them does the individual have "rights", only privileges allowed by the State that can be revoked anytime for any reason.
It's like Catholics, Protestants, and Methodists each accusing the others of not being Christian. They are all Christians that differ only on relatively minor points of doctrine. It's the same with Fascism, Socialism (and it's sub-variants like "Democratic Socialism" which is an oxymoron) and Communism.
Rather than "Left" and "Right" we should be discussing an "Up" and "Down", "Up" being larger government with the commensurate loss of individual liberty, and "Down" which is smaller, less powerful government with a commensurately larger amount of individual liberty.
With a less powerful government "Left" and "Right" would not matter as much nor affect individual liberty as drastically.
Get "Down" baby, and get free!
Strat
...the fact that a lot of people like to pretend like being opposed to religious freedom, freedom of speech, and freedom of association and the like is based on a skewed understanding of equality and the 1st Amendment doesn't make it any less bigoted.
FTFY
Strat
the current administration is attempting to keep the existing ones [eg. coal plants] in service longer.
This is because it's taking longer than expected to bring alternatives online and the engineers in charge of balancing the grid are telling the government the grid is already very precarious and further loss of generation capacity, especially quick-response generation, will pose a major hazard to the national power grid network.
Would you prefer major blackouts and brownouts now, or a stable grid and a delay while the alternative capacity is added over the objections of NIMBYs, anti-nuke, and anti-natural-gas/fracking lobbyists and activist groups?
Of course, we could just toss all our tech and transportation and live like Amish. Even then, however, unless the other major-population nations reduce their CO2 output drastically, even the entire US partying like it's 1799 won't have that much effect on climate trends worldwide.
Strat
The fundamental flaw is that in economics-as-we-know-it things are done purely for profit, not for getting things done.
It's more an intrinsic part of basic human nature, not "economics".
It's why Socialism fails (in larger and diverse societies) and capitalism succeeds. Socialism fails because it depends on people doing things not in their own personal self-interest that benefits others but not themselves. You end up with the old Soviet trope "we pretend to work, they pretend to pay us". Capitalism leverages that self-interest and allows people's pursuance of self-interest to benefit society and the world as a whole.
I mostly agree with some of the posters above, that TFS/A starts off excluding up front all the profitable services that add value and bitches that F/OSS can't be turned into rent-seeking proprietary software selling copies of the same set of ones and zeroes over and over. Well, duh! 'Working as intended'.
Strat
Eat shit and die
Ignorant and angry is no way to go through life, son.
Strat