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Comment by eternalban | Hacker News Reader

Interesting point. Capital (still) trumps knowledge. There is a pop meme that tries to sell "information as the new oil", but your post reminds us that the 'value' of information is akin to 'weight' of a 'mass'. The gravitational field in question is centralized power, market or otherwise.

[personal meta-aside: Did you know that JFK gave that speech to persuade American press to self-censor? That pull quote has been misused rather egregiously.]

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Thomas Jefferson drafted the US Declaration of Independence, and was a particularly violent "slave owner" [1]. While context is important, it doesn't mean that a document with an unsavory origin story should be ignored for that reason alone.

[1] scare quotes indicate that I reject the assertion that anyone was ever "owned" by anyone else. Some people were violently imprisoned against their will, but never owned.

No issue with the content, just a meta fyi/?.

I had not heard that Thomas Jefferson was particularly violent in his slave holding vs other slave holders. A quick google search isn't informative either, do you have any source for that claim?

Henry Wiencek wrote a book about it. That particular work received intense criticism from other respected Jefferson scholars. It's a debate worth reading.

I don't think it is just the authors of the US Declaration of Independence who were unsavoury, but also some of the things in the text itself. The most well-known aspect of its unpleasantness is the part about "merciless Indian Savages"; less well-known is its opposition to cultural rights for French Canadians ("For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province...")

When Britain conquered New France, Britain promised that French Canadians would retain cultural rights, including the freedom to practice the Catholic religion, protection of the French language, and the continued use of aspects of French civil law in the legal system. It is that last aspect of Britain's commitment which the authors of the US Declaration of Independence found so offensive.

(Strangely, when the US agreed to buy Louisiana from France 27 years later, the American objection to the French legal system appeared to have vanished, and Louisiana still partially uses French civil law to this day.)

Don't they usually mean data when they say information? And data is hardly freely available.

I don’t know.

Frankly it’s a bit of semantic muddle in my own head. For example, is my browsing history “data” or “information”? So for my own personal dictionary, “data” means basically ‘measure’, and “information” is ‘processed data’.

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