What is your definition of Free speach? In america we have a fredom of speach to protect the people from the government. Not to protect the government from the people. As a buisness owner i may refuse some one/entitiy service, it is how the free market works.
Can you really? Here in Sweden, if a business owner refuses service to people based on political opinions or similar they are in for a world of hurt. I imagine it’s the same in most of the western world.
(In US) I agree that business owners should never refuse people based on political opinions. I would be firmly against AWS/Google not willing to work with a company because it has conservative views.
In Parler's case, the issue isn't that they are conservative. The issue is that they refuse to take any responsibility for the hate and violence on their platform. John Matze had every opportunity to take responsibility for the content, but he was vocal that he would not do anything about it.
If I were running a cloud provider company, I wouldn't want anything to do with this behavior either. Who cares whether the users lean right or left - hate and violence are unacceptable.
And yet, there's plenty of hate and violence on Twitter, but they're not getting 24h notices before being deplatformed from the Apple app store. Take some key phrases from the Parler screenshots and paste them into a Twitter search.. it's pretty eye-opening.
I think the owner would get sued, but I'm not sure if it would hold up in US court. We have laws preventing businesses from discriminating based on race, sex, ethnicity, and national origin, but I don't know if there are any such protections that apply to businesses for political affiliation.
The US tends to bias towards letting market pressures take care of this sort of thing, and then stepping in if there are enough high-profile cases of failure.
There are also a bunch of edge cases that I think most people would be ok with. There are conservative-only dating sites. I wouldn't be allowed on the platform, but that doesn't really bother me. If there was a republican-only grocery store, that gets sketchy. And if there was a democrat-only government program, that would clearly be illegal.
> I think the owner would get sued, but I'm not sure if it would hold up in US court. We have laws preventing businesses from discriminating based on race, sex, ethnicity, and national origin, but I don't know if there are any such protections that apply to businesses for political affiliation.
It depends on the context.
Political affiliation is a protected class for employment in some states[0].
Political affiliation is a protected class for accommodations such as grocery stores in DC[1] and Madison, Wisconsin[2].
Fun fact- political affiliation, which is not a protected class in most of the US, IS in fact a protected class in DC. So yeah, you can kick someone out of your bar simply for wearing a MAGA hat in almost the entire US...except for DC.
Broadly speaking, the situation you described is legal in the US. We have protected classes that you're not allowed to discriminate against, but "political belief/affiliation" isn't one of them.
Actually, it’s not in Sweden either. I thought it was, but it’s apparently not.
There are other laws that prevent business owners from denying people entry or removing somebody from their store or similar (see Supreme Court decision NJA 1995 s. 84). They can’t even prevent people who have historically stolen from them from coming in and spending time in the store. But apparently they don’t have to do business with them. I thought they did.
> if a business owner refuses service to people based on political opinions or similar they are in for a world of hurt
That surprises me. "Political opinion" is not a protected class [1] in most jurisdictions in the US, and I assume that the same holds for whatever the local equivalent is to protected class. Especially considering that a lot of European countries also have laws that prohibit Holocaust denial--which are unconstitutional in the US per the 1st Amendment.
[1] Protected class, in US discrimination law jargon, is an attribute that you cannot legally use to discriminate against. The usual protected classes are sex, race, ethnicity, national origin, disability, age, sexual orientation, and gender identity, although there is some variation from jurisdiction to jurisdiction (e.g., military service is protected in my state).
You’re right to be surprised. I looked it up and political opinion actually isn’t protected in Sweden either.
There are other laws that prevent business owners from denying people entry or removing somebody from their store or similar (see Supreme Court decision NJA 1995 s. 84). They can’t even prevent people who have historically stolen from them from coming in and spending time in the store. But apparently they don’t have to do business with them. I thought they did.
So if a neo-Nazi walks into a restaurant and says that all Jews should burn to death then tries to order lunch and is refused, that owner is in for a world of hurt?
We need to stop pretending like everyone's viewpoint is equal and we shouldn't exclude people for what they believe. Violent racists should be ostracized and pushed out of society. People who choose to have those kinds of beliefs are a constant threat to the safety of people around them.
Now obviously it's a blurry line, but again, the neo-Nazis storming the capital and their ilk are just way over the line. Just because it's blurry doesn't mean we have to pretend it doesn't exist out of some sense of fairness.
It is a founding principle of western civilization that you cannot be prosecuted for thoughts and ideas. All viewpoints and thoughts are equal before the law; only actions can be prosecuted.
> We need to stop pretending like everyone's viewpoint is equal and we shouldn't exclude people for what they believe. Violent racists should be ostracized and pushed out of society. People who choose to have those kinds of beliefs are a constant threat to the safety of people around them.
I will hard disagree with this every day of the week. To me this is a clear example of how ideology has taken the place of religion in today's society. It's no longer enough for you to be civil and respect the laws, but even having the wrong thoughts is considered criminal, just like lust and envy are considered sinful in religion.
We're heading in a dark direction if we're re-adopting the same principles and perspectives that were behind McCarthyism, let alone used to burn witches and conduct the Inquisition.
So do you agree we were wrong to ban ISIS recruiting groups on facebook?
Less sarcastically, do you agree that the amplification of thought and rhetoric possible using social media isn't something that was considered 500 years ago? i.e. having wrong thoughts isn't dangerous, but having 75 million followers and pushing your wrong thoughts on them is dangerous. It isn't thoughts any longer - it's an action.
> All viewpoints and thoughts are equal before the law; only actions can be prosecuted.
And this would be an issue if we were actually talking about government action, but we are talking about private individuals deciding who they will associate with. When the government gets involved then you have reason for concern, but if this is private parties engaging in commerce you have absolutely no leg to stand on.
It's a bad faith argument, yet it's everywhere. I'd think HN would be better than that, yet here we are, having the same fight every time free speech is the topic.
Also note that the parent mentioned "government action" whereas the GP is referring to a business taking action. The distinction is incredibly important, yet so many free-speech purists respond to corporate action as if it was a government action.
Freedom of speech exists to provide freedom of expression, even if it is controversial. I don't consider planning crimes, especially ones that would end freedom of expression as a societal value, to be covered under freedom of speech.
Certainly each individual comment on Parler can't be considered to be planning a crime. That can't be said for the platform as a whole.
Notepad++, has a platform to communicate their views. Does this us bother you? Would you in uninstall the product because their message is in opposition of your beliefs?
This reminds me of tech advocates with blogs and twitter were followers get very upset when the content creator steps out of an imagined content subject matter agreement.
We haven't lost anything, but we've gained the expectation that we should be accommodating a tiny minority of people being offended for no reason. Sure it's not much work to switch "master" to "main" (although in aggregate it's probably a tonne of person hours), but what happens when the next trend is to be offended at "blacklist", or "sanity check", or any of the other thousands of words that someone is inevitably going to be offended by.
And once the expectation is that you change your language based on the irrationally offended minority, if you refuse to do so because it is a lot of work and makes no sense you become deamonized as some kind of sexist/racist/*ist.
I've seen lots of people claim that if you aren't a part of the minority in question you have no right to say what is or isn't offensive. I strongly disagree, some people are offended for stupid reasons, and we shouldn't feel obligated to accommodate them. Now if a significant portion are offended then there is probably some legitimate reason behind it, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.
That has already happened in some places, though blacklist/whitelist are still the most common naming convention for that sort of thing.
Blocklist is actually a better name IMO, and I've seen it used in places, and an easy enough change. I don't have any examples I remember of what people might use instead of whitelist though, allowlist doesn't particularly trip of the tongue IMO.
Grandfathering is another common word that I've seen argued against because of its history.
> Blocklist is actually a better name IMO, and I've seen it used in places, and an easy enough change.
You should try to avoid using "Blocklist" in most code IMO, it's ambiguous in a number of contexts as the word block itself is ambiguous and can mean very multiple different things such as blockchain blocks or data/filesystem blocks which would be something very different from the intended definition of a disallow rule.
When I say "irrationally offended minority", I mean "minority" as in a small number of people, not "minority" as in racial minority, although I see why they isn't clear given that I use the word in two different ways in my comment. Most of the people I've seen get offended for trivial reasons are actually not a racial minority at all.
As I said, if a significant number of people are offended (or if a small number are offended for a good reason), we should probably change our language. But if it is a small number of people getting offended at a word used in a context where it has never been offensive, I don't think we should accomodate them.
I believe it's called white fragility nowadays bt insane Americans. Also, someone who is from Eastern Europe and white, I'm grossly offended by people using my skin color everywhere, I have nothing to do with your history.
Do you even realize tech community is bigger than California?
I now have to go to extra effort to get my default branch to be called `master`. Plus I can no longer assume that the default branch is `master`. I have to check for every project whether they are using `main` or `master`.
Maybe not a lot more effort, but it definitely is more effort, and for basically no gain. Let's not kid ourselves that black people being targeted by the police care about Git branch names. Hell apparently nobody even cares that Git is called Git, which is definitely a ruder word than "master".
> Nobody identifies as a git or the descendant of gits.
I see you've never been to Finland.[0] (Perhaps Linus comes from a long proud line of gits ;) )
[0] I briefly considered saying Switzerland, after a Stan Freberg skit where he speaks in an outrageous accent and claims to be from Switzerland "that way, nobody gets offended". Crockford's page with various types of JavaScript inheritance (including Swiss inheritance) unfortunately now has a broken link to the Fredberg skit.
I'm not entirely convinced convinced it will make for a larger nor a more empathetic community.
I think these kinds of changes only makes it harder to enter the community, by adding more landmines to discourse and saying that there is a right and wrong way to talk regardless of intent and context that you need to know regardless of if you come from a background where these words are as heavily loaded as other places.
It also creates a community which seemingly supports and defends personal attacks against people whenever the mob finds something new to hate on. For example in the case of Rubocop, when all of the sudden cop was a loaded word. The developer seemingly got harassed when he didn't want to change the name.
I think we are losing more than we are gaining by going through with this. Not because of master or main but because we are seemingly not assuming best intentions when communicating anymore.
A lot of work fixing code that depended on the old behavior, having to guess if a repo uses the old or new style and probably implementing workarounds for both cases.
At the foggy promise of recruiting people that cannot be in the same room as anyone holding a masters degree without suffering from mass hysteria.
My perspective is this is my home network and this application is infringing on my freedom. I should have the right to monitor my network and my traffic. An application is a guest in my house/computer it does not set the rules.
> I should have the right to monitor my network and my traffic.
The key is that if it's really your traffic, then you can easily reconfigure Firefox so that you can monitor it. The benefit of DoH is that if someone else is using Firefox on their own computer, you can't snoop on or hijack their DNS just because they're on your network.
There was an interesting section in Risk Factors, on pages 39 - 40.
>> Our marketing efforts currently include referrals, affiliate programs, free or discount trials, partnerships, display advertising, television, billboards, radio, video, direct mail, social media, email, podcasts, hiring and classified advertisement websites, mobile “push” communications, search engine optimization, and keyword search campaigns. Our marketing initiatives may become increasingly expensive and generating a meaningful return on these initiatives may be difficult.
I think you implied that marketing is expensive for them and I think you're right. And I think the commodity job that DD does is pretty dangerous since there isn't a lot of brand power to be had. I could be wrong there since I only order delivery once every few months.
True it depends on what their churn looks like and how long it takes to pay back customer acquisition costs.
But if they have some amount of organic growth that is close to or higher than their rate of churn (which is not too crazy an assumption) then they could cut marketing spend and they would grow slower but not start shrinking.
If you're the kind of person who equates harmonic distortion with "warmth" you're in for a big treat with these Nelson Pass designs. On objective measurements these are just about the worst amps you can buy (or build). We're talking about 2nd harmonics at only -50dB. Warm AF.
This is just a quibble, but most switchmode amplifier chips are analog. Granted the term "digital" has been adopted by the audio community for switchmode amplifiers, but it still raises eyebrows.
