Comment by EGreg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by EGreg | Hacker News Reader

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Thank you for sharing this, fancy_pantser. Are you the current maintainer also, or the current developer?

This is what capitalism looks like, folks. Someone "built it" so they now privately "own it", no matter how big it gets. It's not put into the hands of an organization. The profit motive is quite strong, which is why someone can be "corrupted" by very tempting messages like this. If you had a lake or a forest privately owned by one or two people, and they had a lot of debts, they could easily sell it to polluters and loggers.

Some people scoff and say "socialism has been tried, it never works." I admit that socialism simply trades one class of elites (the capitalists with a lot of shares) for another (the bureaucrats with a lot of political clout). BUT! I would like to say that socialism is not the only alternative. The other alternative is decentralized systems with no private ownership. I'm talking about science, open source software, and so on. There can be a Merkle tree of version updates (e.g. git version control) and each one can have various reputable organizations (like Zagat for software) building their reputation vetting it. Then, each community would run their own app store (think Wordpress plugins) which would work with these reputable organizations. There would be no heroes, no celebrities, no tweets at 3 am to 5 million people, no pulling from repos without peer review, no scientists instantly believed after publishing on arxiv.org .

Congratulations for building a popular extension, fancy_pantser. You live in a world where you it's really bad to "criticize the profit", and where building it means you are responsible for it no matter how big it gets, but then we are all depending on your integrity and ability to rebuff life-changing amounts of money to not mine our data. We can pass laws to punish people after the fact, or we can gradually change our culture by rejecting "immediate gratification" of updates that are not vetted, just as corporations have done with bleeding edge vs stable Linux distros etc. Unfortunately, the Web has made it so that anything can be updated at any time, with no sysadmins or reviewers in the loop. It's a wonder more malware isn't silently everywhere already.

> decentralized systems with no private ownership

aka anarchy. that turns out to be worse.

Yes, as we all know, open source software is a failed experiment, a cesspit of "anarchy".

As well as science, language and other human endeavors. No one is in charge! I’m glad society advanced so much from secret alchemy cults with their “intellectual property” protections on their secrets.

That’s a good description. A successful cesspit of anarchy.

Most open source software is neither decentralized nor publicly owned.

All of it is, otherwise it wouldn't meet the 4 freedoms that define open source.

The 'project' maintaining the software may be centralized, but all its users "own" the software in the sense that the don't need to ask permission to the maintainer, and they can create their own modifications.

You're mixing a few different things. Free software and open source are different. and for each of them there are hundreds of different licenses that allows you to do something but not another.

Free software and open source are different marketing strategies for the same concept. The most commonly understood meaning for both terms is the same, from the very moment the Open Source Initiative was created.

Not open source. Open source is a resounding success. The marketplace with the problems is advertising. We need to enact laws banning selling of third party data and make leaks a liability (perhaps even one that automatically pierces the normal corporate veil and opens VPs and up to personal liability if there was any circumvention initiated encouraged by them). Then businesses have to actually decide if the liability is worth it for them vs a free-for-all market that intelligence agencies and criminal enterprises are primarily funding.

Anarchy is simply absence of tall hierarchies.

You can have each individual community choose what OpenStreetMap tiles to use, what to censor etc.

Like HN does. What if HN was kicked off a host? They would put the backups somewhere else and repoint the DNS.

What if ICE seized their domain? Then we could move domain name resolution to a DHT.

What if AT&T refused to carry it or charge extra? The signal could route packets along other lines. No single point of failure.

It’s not just about banning 0% or 100% but the prices and friction imposed by privately owned rentseeking infrastructure monopolies. Why in a span of less than 10 years, VOIP has caused international calls that used to cost $3 a minute to turn free and have video!

The weird thing is that when A wants to connect woth B you think there has to be a one-size-fits all C that can block it.

"Anarchy is simply absence of tall hierarchies"

No it is not!

“I came here for an argument, this is mere contradiction.”

Ah, yes, the little project known as Debian completely failed and never took off. Anarchy is so bad. How could it ever produce anything of value, like say the world's most used linux distribution?

What is your evidence?

Mackknovist Ukraine, Spanish Republic, and Zapitista country now...

All were/are quite different. Worse than what?

It seems you've misinterpreted the poster's intentions as if it should be illegal for a developer to do this. But he/she was merely informing users, and well informed customers is a requirement for capitalism to work.

The cost of using this extension is your information, and there are other products available that do the same thing at a lower cost. Based on the most fundamental concept of economics (supply and demand), "The Great Suspender" should fail as a product very quickly.

It's incredible how much downvotes you got for this without any explanation. Your proposal sounds sensible and I agree that we need to find a new system. It doesn't have to be this that you described but we should be open to change. Capitalism the way it is leads us in the wrong direction and socialism doesn't fare too much better in practice. We need to redraw a plan for the 21st century

It is indeed incredible. As I said, you cannot “criticize the profit” in the USA without losing social standing. Capitalism is a national religion because people think the only alternative is socialism (collective ownership of the means of production - which btw isn’t scary on small levels) and the USA fought a cold war with USSR for decades.

That’s why there will be a third party in the USA that unites disaffected progressives on the left with disaffected paleoconservatives on the right. A lot of people are fed up with the divisions.

I welcome counterpoints and debate but as you can see — there are just silent downvotes instead

You're probably being downvoted because even if your critique might be thoughtful at some parts, it is also quite snarky and smarmy at the beginning, and sounds like it's posing an ideological battle. Starting at the third sentence, "This is what capitalism looks like, folks." In fact, you're still doing it, "Capitalism is a national religion..."

Do you think people on HN want to engage with your comments when you're saying they're foolishly clinging to a religious belief?

By the way, this was a decent point: "[W]e are all depending on your integrity and ability to rebuff life-changing amounts of money to not mine our data." Maybe this thread would be different if you stayed with points like that instead of accusing people of harboring religious beliefs that pulls the wool over our eyes, preventing us from seeing things your way.

> Do you think people on HN want to engage with your comments when you're saying they're foolishly clinging to a religious belief?

To be fair you inserted "foolishly clinging", and are now blaming them for something they did not actually say.'

Capitalism is highly akin to religion - they're not the first and will not be the last to draw that comparison, and plenty of words have already been written on the topic. If your response to reading "capitalism is a national religion" is to assume you're being insulted, perhaps consider that the statement may be more true than you think.

Off topic, but....

There is unlikely to be a third party in USA as the system is designed to have two parties.

There may be a third party that forces the Dems and GoP to unite, back to two...

If I were to guess, it's down voted because when SKIMMED, it sounds like an off-topic, far too long, and overly political comment.

It's a fair comment, but only if you actually read it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html might be the reason why a lot of things here got downvoted. Specifically:

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

this doesn't read like a battle, though. one could argue that opinions that run counter to the generally accepted norm are inherently good for curiosity.

Discouraging political discussions is a very political thing in itself. The comment we are discussing might not be a great example of encouraging curiosity, but being the person that says "don't be so political" is complacent and ignorant. We arrived at the current situation due to political decisions and a political process.

I am not accusing you of being that person, not anyone else. I am just tired of people not seeing that upholding the current situation is as political as criticizing it. This discussion made me try to put it in words.

But part of a curiosity-based discussion is also trying to satisfy the curiosity of others by providing answers. The most insightful and thought-provoking of those can sometimes be rather “political”, because the things we think about and are curious about are.

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