Many years in the future, after global warming wrecks our world, when humanity rebuilds civilization, they will be glad for folks like this person. Without physical books there will be no way to reconstruct our time and tell our story. Digital media will be useless to future generations if there’s a blip in continuity.
> Digital media will be useless to future generations if there’s a blip in continuity.
If anything, this undersells it: plenty of not-very-old digital media is useless today with no blip in continuity, either because of bit rot or, more commonly, because of perfectly good data in a format for which there don't exist readers any more.
That's true; there are a lot of reasons not to rely passively on digital media for archival purposes. But I'm speaking here even of digital media from the lost, pre-cloud, pre-SAAS age when one could loosely presume to own at least what was on one's computer, but (therefore?) there was no institutional interest in keeping the large variety of media readable. (For example, I joined the Mac ecosystem not long after they switched away from SITX compression, and almost immediately it became--at least for a new user--impossible to find uncompressors.)
Government is the avatar of collective action. People vote for and otherwise tolerate a strong executive when they believe in "all for one and one for all". FDR was elected by a landslide on a platform of heavy government interventionism to address the Great Depression.
I think with the suburban explosion and rise of the personal automobile we’ve seen individualism trump collectivism. I don’t think we’ll ever see a new deal or social security like initiative in America until the power structures in our society are changed fundamentally.
The tone of that comment does sound a bit "dick-ish", but I can't be totally sure without knowing his history with that CEO. Thanks and I'll keep an eye out for more evidence like this. In videos he seems pretty nice to me, although it could of course be a facade.
Okay, but why is Aptoide on there[1]? If you're on Android, you've already lost the war with Google. Don't talk to me about custom ROMs. Those are only feasible for the technologically savvy.
Yeah, maybe. I don't disagree with the sentiment, but who is prosecuted for the crime? In US law, there is the concept of corporate personhood, but a corporation has yet to be tried for a crime. And even if it were tried and convicted, how do you sufficiently punish a corporation. You can't put it in jail. Fines don't seem to deter corporations as they're happy to either pay them or settle out of court and move one with business as usual.
If it is to be treated as a crime and we choose to prosecute the people responsible, how do we determine how widely or narrowly to distribute the responsibility? To the CEO of the company or the board? To the management that oversaw the environment damage? Or to the individual workers who were told to perform the actions leading to the environmental damage?
But as we've seen time and again "the shit rolls down hill." Blame will move from the CEO who will claim they knew nothing and will land on the field workers. And while these workers do bear responsibility for complying with directives that caused environmental damage, the power structures in corporations (at least in America with at-will employment and relatively few extant unions) make prosecuting such workers for these crimes an unjust outcome. Their burden of responsibility must be mitigated by the choices they were forced to make between feeding their families and performing a possibly harmful action. Not to mention the fact that such people would in many cases be acting in ignorance of the ramifications of such actions.
Environmental damage is a serious concern, but the way we have positioned private entities in our society makes it nearly impossible to affect any change in their behavior. Adding criminal penalties for such behavior includes the risk that the wrong people are charged and punished while those who bear ultimate responsibility jump from the burning plane in their golden parachutes.
> London's Metropolitan Police chief warned that officials will not only be cracking down on British citizens for commentary on the riots in the U.K., but on American citizens as well.
> "We will throw the full force of the law at people. And whether you’re in this country committing crimes on the streets or committing crimes from further afield online, we will come after you," Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley told Sky News
> One key aspect that makes this apparent crackdown on social media particularly shocking to critics is that the British government is threatening to extradite American citizens from the U.S. to be jailed in the U.K. for violating their rules about political speech online.
redwoolf: as you’ll no doubt have noticed by now, the internet is awash with bots (or worse, people) pushing right-wing and/or blatant Russian propaganda. This is one of the standard lines: any pushback against verifiably criminal actions is “censorship”.
You and I know the legal difference between posting “I disagree with the government” and “You should get a gun and shoot somebody”. One is protected free speech, the other is incitement of violence - which does not matter if you incite in person or on an online forum.
Don’t worry about the trolls and Kremlin-lovers, they’re a dime a dozen these days and not worth the hassle.
1. I'm a real American who is very easy to find. I've been on HN for a decade. I'm the easiest person on earth to find.
2. If you bothered to look up my other social media, you'd see that I'm vocally anti-Russia. If I was the US president, Ukraine would have aircraft carriers, F35s, and a couple thermonuclear warheads by now.
3. As an American, who likes American things like free speech and blowing up Russians, I can also notice and object when traditional bastions of liberty like the UK turn into fascist states who arrest people for posting on Facebook.
The world isn't simple, and everyone you disagree with isn't a paid troll. Engage with other opinions and you may learn something.
I don't think it's humanly possible for me to verify my real-world identity any more clearly. There aren't any other bpodgursky's on or off the internet.
You edited your answer so I will comment on the last thing you wrote.
> Never mind. I’m wrong about everything as usual.
> How the fuck do I delete my account?
Admitting you said something incorrect takes courage and it never feels great. Everyone says something incorrect about something at some point. I would have no account if I deleted it every time I said something incorrect. God knows I make mistakes on a regular basis. Just because you said something incorrect now does not mean you will have nothing positive to contribute to another discussion. Just take it as an learning opportunity.
I don't think Popper was saying what you think he was.
"[Popper] does not however want us to silence or censor them, but to fight them back with reasonable arguments. He does however say we should have the right to be intolerant (even violently!) to them if they are not ready for a debate, as they may prevent "their followers [from listening] rational argument, because [they say] it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols." [0]
The Paradox of tolerance advocates violence against those that would prevent speech, not those with intolerant views, unless those be the same group.
Using the Paradox of tolerance the idea of censoring speech you do not agree with, especially when using government authority to do so (monopoly of violence and all that), would be an intolerant view point, and as it prevents debate, should not be tolerated in a tolerant society, and in the end should be met with violence.
We should also always keep in mind that he wrote this around 1945. When he wrote this he had Nazi Germany in mind where the Nazis used the SA to beat down their opposition.
This quote gets trotted out every single discussion. This quote dodges the most important question. Where do you draw the line? In that quote it even says that we should fight intolerance with tolerance for as long as possible and not just censor it immediately.
"In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise."
The interesting and most important question remains. Where do you draw the line? That quote simply implies a limit exists. Which most people will agree with. You will only rarely find absolute free speech absolutist where everything goes.
We try not to delete entire account histories because that would gut the threads the account had participated in. However, we care about protecting individual users and take care of privacy requests every day, so if we can help, please email hn@ycombinator.com. We don't want anyone to get in trouble from anything they posted to HN. More here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23623799
I've seen this argument (if linking to wikipedia qualifies as one) so many times, and it always strikes me that those who cite it often have either not read, or completely miss the point Karl Popper was trying to make. He goes so far as to even say: "I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise." I am quite sick of the usage of the paradox of tolerance being used as an attack against freedom of speech.
That's interesting because I find it to be one of the most ergonomic build tools I've ever worked with. It sits somewhere between make and autotools in terms of what it does and I find it far easier to use than either.
You've probably learned it more thoroughly than I have, or maybe we have different tastes. I find it just impossible to get into, it all rubs me the wrong way. It is so overcomplicated, and unlispy in the way that FORMAT and LOOP are unlispy, only much worse. I actually like FORMAT and LOOP but they're foreign implants amid the lispiness and that's how ASDF feels as well.
it's fukamachi-ware, guy has a bunch of own solutions in the web development space, i suspect driven by his specific needs. they are, fwiw, not as idiosyncratic as some of the artisanal common lisp one-man solutions can be, but they are distinctly and recognizably their own thing
I use his web stack in some of my projects. His stuff is pretty great, it's just that he basically doesn't write any documentation at all, and the small scraps of documentation he does write assume that you're intimately familiar with the details of his packages. So you need to figure a lot out on your own by digging through source code, which is very irritating when you're trying to be productive.
The middle class is the designation for the part of the population the owning class has duped into thinking they are temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
I’m not sure if you’ve seen housing prices lately but most of the middle class are technically millionaires now, just of the “land rich, cash poor” variety.
I'm in partial agreement with you. But I don't think the middle class will shrink, I think it will disappear.
The real threat to humanity from AI is not a Skynet or a Matrix like intelligence. The threat is that Artificial Intelligence WILL make labor irrelevant. When human capital has no value, we will disappear.
Don't kid yourself into thinking that those who owns the means of production will stop to help. If they were interested in that, they'd be doing it now. There's enough money and food to feed everyone on the planet. People still starve.
Revolution against what? Should we act NOW to take out all the plausibly psychotic plutocrats, well before they can arm themselves?
Or do we wait until they actually create an army of armed drones? Of course, by then it'd be too late.
Or do we choose a time frame that's in-between, trusting that the politicians and the courts and the police departments will pass and enforce laws to protect us before the plutos can amass power via fully automated factories -- laws that will never actually come to pass, since plutocrat-interests-and-their-minions already own the current system?
Nah. We frogs will boil LONG before revolution is a viable option.
> before the plutos can amass power via fully automated factories
Fun science fiction but this idea that the rich could develop an entire self sustaining infrastructure to protect themselves from any leverage from the working class is completely infeasible.
Let's day a full automatic drone factory was built. Factories don't make their own tools and general parts, they don't mold their own screws and bolts, no, they source those. Even if they could, they'd need raw materials. So they'd need completely automated mines. Those mines would be on land that they'd own, but they'd have to physically defend it. So the scenario you're proposing is: fully automated mining, with fully automated defense measures, delivering raw materials to some fully automated smelter (all travel routes automatically defended against sabotage), this all to feed a factory that would churn out defense robots. It's completely circular and silly.
They don't need to do any of that. They'll just use AI analysis combined with mass surveillance to identify and crush any organized dissent before it can form into anything close to a threat. A very small group of goons is all that is required.
All that may be true in the large open democracies, but it's already false in Russia, China, North Korea, Vietnam, and beyond... and based on the current propaganda-driven trends of mindless angst driving most democracies today, you could live most anywhere else and see a similar outcome in just a decade or two.
So in the next 20 years, which do you think will happen first: dictatorship by plutocrats elected to office, or by plutocrats who overthrow elections after they lose?
Sure but I was responding specifically to a scenario proposing that rich people would develop fully automated factories thereby cutting out their reliance on workers. Getting even halfway there still leaves plenty of room for revolution, I'm just responding to the 100% automated scenario as being unrealistic.
It is a major logistics problem. Trust me, you would be WAY more mad if billionaires tried to feed everyone. You'd call it 'naked neocolonalism' or similar because it would require conquest of all nonconforming regions.
isn't the issue that capitalism is amoral? you're saying the capitalists (should be) helping by now if they wanted to. They don't do it because capitalism isn't directly incentivizing it?
growing economic power is supposed to help "all of us" in proportion to our input value.
All this to say, i agree, but it means we need to augment capitalism - not speak to help and morality?
How can you call a system that disincentivizes collective care of one another "amoral"?
> but it means we need to augment capitalism
What a pithy phrase! You said yourself that capitalism doesn't incentivize those with to help those without. How do you augment capitalism to incentivize such behavior?
And to be clear, I'm not saying that the bourgeoisie should be helping. I'm just saying they don't. I think we should burn capitalism to the ground and build something better.
> How do you augment capitalism to incentivize such behavior?
By regulating it so that it serves the needs of the people living in it, and embedding those regulations in a system resilient against regulatory capture and nepotism.
As all economic systems, it’s ultimately only a means (efficient resource allocation) to an end (prosperity and growth for somebody).
Who that is, i.e. how the results of that growth are ultimately redistributed is not a question of economics but politics.
augment is the hopeful outcome. The alternatives seems quite bad to say the least. Maybe they lead to something good, something better. but there's a whole lotta bad in between for an unclear amount of time.
> How can you call a system that disincentivizes collective care of one another "amoral"?
It doesn't disincentivize collective care. It incentivizes resource allocation most optimally, whatever optimality is within applied bounds. Which leads to my next point:
> What a pithy phrase! You said yourself that capitalism doesn't incentivize those with to help those without. How do you augment capitalism to incentivize such behavior?
By applying regulation and laws to the system, the bounds. It's not like any of this exists in a vacuum and can't be, again, augmented to fit our needs better.
> And to be clear, I'm not saying that the bourgeoisie should be helping. I'm just saying they don't. I think we should burn capitalism to the ground and build something better.
That's cute. What's your proposition for replacing Capitalism? What guarantees your new system is better? And I can assume you're agreeing to pay the incredibly bloody tab destabilizing our society will have? Since I assume from your post you basically haven't known anything other then peace and stability and historically speaking great times, you're basically a larper.
Ideas like this always strike me as incredibly naive. Why not work to improve a system that has shown promise instead of the repeating the long trail of critical failures from other systems.
> It incentivizes resource allocation most optimally, whatever optimality is within applied bounds.
Exactly. And in the current bounds the optimal allocation is more into the control of fewer. Also, capitalism is a zero sum game, thus the disincentive to give what you've got.
> By applying regulation and laws to the system, the bounds.
Sure. But those regulations and laws are being repealed or revised to be toothless. And there are many places on earth where laws have no meaning.
> And I can assume you're agreeing to pay the incredibly bloody tab destabilizing our society will have?
And capitalism doesn't have an incredibly bloody tab? Take a global perspective to see the many useless wars in the 20th and 21st century that have been fought to extend the market for capital.
Or consider that our planet is fucked by global warming thanks to "optimal resource allocation" which takes no account for long-term consequences, but only short term gains. Do you think that when the oceans rise, the plants die, and the water is too acidic to drink society won't be destabilized?
> capitalism is a zero sum game, thus the disincentive to give what you've got.
Only in a zero growth environment. And in one, which economic or political system is not a zero sum game?
> consider that our planet is fucked by global warming thanks to "optimal resource allocation" which takes no account for long-term consequences
Pricing in long-term consequences and accounting for externalities is arguably not a contradiction to capitalism (and I think we should absolutely do much better there).
Ideally we’d even account for the effects of societal unrest due to massive wealth inequalities or areas becoming unlivable due to the climate, or just the immorality of poverty if nothing else.
But that’s a political decision (what do we value how much) in the end, not one of economic systems. Who gets to decide that is determined by the political system, not the economic one. And corruption of political power can exist in all systems.
