PolygonSheep

I think the problem is similar to "free software". Adobe will give you a copy of Acrobat Reader for $0.00 - that's "free software" right? It's "free" as in "no money changes hands" but not "free" as in "you can download the source code, modify it, redistribute it, redistribute it with your modifications, etc, etc".

So occasionally non-technical people would get confused by what is meant by "free software". To resolve the confusion some people called it FOSS or FLOSS, some people called it "Free as in speech" vs. "Free as in beer", some called it "Libre". But there is a meaningful distinction between locked-down proprietary software given away for $0.00 in furtherance of some ulterior commercial motive and software which is genuinely free for you to do whatever you want with it.

I think we need a similar distinction for the two meanings of "free speech". One which is the legal "Congress shall make no law..." narrow reading of the First Amendment and one which is the Voltaire style “I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” The first one is a law, the second is more of a moral value many feel is essential for a free society.

I think a lot of the problem is constitutional law running into Voltaire. You are correct that Twitter is not "censoring" in the sense that it's a private company not governed by the First Amendment. They are correct that Twitter is "censoring" content and is not providing freedom of speech for at least some users.

I've been reading (and 100% agreeing with!) these "here's why crypto is a giant Ponzi scheme doomed to collapse Real Soon Now" articles for ten years. When is it actually going to happen?

I'm not a crypto guy. I've never bought, sold, or mined a cent worth of it. I really can't stress that enough. But it's gone on an awful long time now. At this point these articles are starting to seem more like the "Here's why Facebook will die out like MySpace" articles I used to see circa 2010.

How can you tell if they own one or not and, if so, what their motives are?

Genuinely curious here how you were not only able to verify Samsung refrigerator ownership status for 100K people on Facebook but also that 99% of them were slandering Samsung's good name purely for racist/nationalist reasons.

> Easy to say that would never happen, but "private citizens operating unregulated hotels/taxis" seemed impossible/illegal just a decade ago...

I think a lot of it was making it "cool". These things definitely existed in the past and you could avail yourself of them if you knew where to look but these were seen as seedy and lesser than calling a real taxi/car service and staying in a "real hotel. Somehow making it an "app" from a "tech company" really changes customer perceptions.

> if essential services start getting "gigged out" in a similar manner, that would be problematic..

Just have Uber drivers carry a gun, handcuffs, a fire extinguisher and a first aid kit in the trunk. Now they can shift from taxi driver to cop to firefighter to paramedic at a moment's notice. Maybe an LED light bar/siren combo they can quickly attach to the roof of the car with magnets when they switch to emergency responder mode. It'll be a hell of a lot cheaper too, they won't have all those silly pensions and unions and stuff.

What actually causes Flat Earth/Qanon/Lizard People/5G coronavirus/whatever?

Is it a manifestation of mental illness and therefore some defect in brain chemistry or structure, in which case they need psychiatry more than fact checking?

Is this not some kind of schizophrenia variant but maybe a pseudoreligion which fills the hole that in an earlier era might have been filled with fire and brimstone Baptist bible thumping or End Times theology, except Alex Jones got to them before the preacher did?

Is it an information problem? Did their fourth grade science teacher just not do a very good job of explaining how Foucault's pendulum works and now they are into Flat Earth and all the rest but they can still be saved if we can just get them to read the Snopes article debunking it?

How many are doing this just to be edgy (while possibly attracting some followers in the above three groups in a symbiotic relationship), because it's a pretty easy way to get media attention right now? Come up with some ridiculous stuff about the Flat Earth 5G Dead Internet Bird Hoax and The Guardian/NYT/WaPo/etc will write a bunch of hand-wringing articles fretting about the latest disinformation campaign which has been debunked six ways to Sunday by all right-thinking people. How else can you be transgressive and shocking in the 2020s?

> But if there are no dumb TVs for sale, how do you know if that's the consumer's desire or not?

Because there was a period of several years overlap where both smart and non-smart TVs were available. If smart TVs had been a sales flop they would have been killed off like 3D TVs were. 3D TVs were being pushed hard ~10 years ago. It was supposed to be the next hot thing. But it flopped and has been all but forgotten about. Smart TV could have easily ended up the same way.

> Legend tells that every Englishman found west of the dyke was hanged. Every Welshman who ventured east of the dyke had their ears chopped off.

Why the asymmetrical punishment I wonder? Were the English relatively less upset by Welshmen crossing over illegally than the Welsh were by Englishmen doing so?

> just some reasonable suggestions on a website.

I'm not terribly familiar with the inner workings of Durham U but I know that in the business world a "suggestion" can mean anything from "do this if you feel like it" to "you are in serious trouble if you don't do this" depending on context.

How can we tell if Zimbabwe/Venezuela style hyperinflation is a real risk in the US? I used to read ZeroHedge 10 years ago where every day they would point to an increase in the Fed balance sheet/money supply/deficit/debt to GDP ratio/something and proclaim hyperinflation and the end of the world as we know it is right around the corner.

Obviously that didn't happen (and after a few missed predictions, I abandoned all "doomer" media). But what are the warning signs that stuff is seriously going off the rails and it's really time to worry?

While I have absolutely no doubt that oral history of a great flood or earthquake is often true, I'd be quite interested to see the breakdown of how many of these myths are confirmed true, confirmed false, and can't be determined one way or the other.

Some of them have got to be the equivalent of our story of Noah's flood or Atlantis. But how many?

I've noticed the generic version of Flonase is usually in a thin cardboard box which can be easily opened by sliding a finger under one of the flaps and breaking the glue. The spray itself has a little tamper seal on it which is perforated and can be peeled off pretty easily.

Looking at the packaging between the two I think it's more about branding than saving a cent or two. The name brand Flonase package is colorful and eye catching and very pretty. The generic one is a plain dull box which just says "Allergy Relief Nasal Spray".

Keeping the product looking nice in transit is a factor too. I notice the generic Flonase boxes are sometimes a bit crushed on the shelf because the packaging has zero structural rigidity. The stuff inside is fine but it looks bad. This never seems to happen with the name brand packages due to their more robust design.

> it somehow managed to effect places outside of New York across the country that didn’t adopt similar policies.

I definitely remember "tough on crime" being nationally popular (not just in NYC) in both parties through the '90s. Even if it wasn't called "broken windows policing".

Obviously some of the Bratton/Giuliani policies were specifically tailored to NYC and not really applicable elsewhere (no need to crack down on subway fare evasion in Houston for example) but the general sentiment of "the police should aggressively enforce all laws and lock all criminals up" was extremely popular.

This is not to say that any of this was right, or good, or just, or why crime fell or whatever. But it was definitely popular in the '90s outside of NYC.

Since an argument about Chernobyl inevitably comes up when nuclear power is discussed I thought it would be interesting to ask: what would the coal/natural gas power equivalent of Chernobyl be? That is, an accident which caused significant death or ecological contamination.

The closest I can think of for a "coal Chernobyl" would be something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly...

Do the posts in German really need an indication that they are written in the German language?

Just from the title I can immediately see that "Die Metapher der Stadt für das Bauen und Betreiben von Softwareprodukten" is definitely not going to be in English.

I assume readers fluent in German don't need to be told that post is in German, the same way I don't need a little UK or US flag to know "March 2018 Book Recommendations" is in English.

If you can read the title and introduction you will immediately know which language its written in with no need for flags at all.

I too think the poor should be driving clapped out beaters and wearing secondhand clothes. It builds character!

I think it's a terrible input device for typing, okay for games (if the game has been designed with touchscreens in mind - if it's a port of a game originally designed for controller/mouse and keyboard just forget about it).

I can't touch type on touchscreens at all even though I can effortlessly type on a physical keyboard. My first few smartphones had physical keyboards and I could type quite fast on them after a week or two learning the layout but I just can't do it on touchscreens even after 10+ years.

I'm 34 so I guess I'd be an older millennial?

I wonder if people are just getting subscription fatigue? I never cared for TV news so I wouldn't have subscribed anyway but now it seems every show is on a different subscription service. At some point the market is just going to be saturated.

The pricing is weird too: $2.99/mo or $59.99/yr - why would anyone buy the yearly plan?

I never though "sideloading" had a negative connotation in the Android world. It always felt neutral to me. Kind of a "you can do this if you want but you're on your own if it's malicious".

It also made a distinction between apps acquired from the Play Store and apps you loaded yourself from outside of it.

I think it's the inconsistency that gets me. I can quite legally order at local restaurants: eggs sunny side up, a rare hamburger, raw hamburger with a raw egg on top (steak tartare), a rare steak, raw steak (carpaccio) raw fish (sushi, ceviche), and raw oysters. This is all very legal.

Put up next to those, a ban on buying raw milk seems kinda odd. If we're gonna ban selling raw milk why not ban serving raw fish too? "But it's safe if it's fresh and prepared properly". So is raw milk.

I'm not saying this is good. I won't personally eat raw hamburger or raw seafood. I have no urge to drink raw milk. I think you're playing Russian Roulette with your intestines if you do.

It just reminds me of weed being illegal (still is in a lot of the US) but tobacco and alcohol being legal despite the massive amount of lungs and livers they have ruined (not to mention stuff like drunk driving). Winners don't do drugs of course but it just doesn't make sense to ban this drug but allow that one which is arguably worse in every way.

I wonder if it's something your body has to get used to? Raw milk has been rare in America for quite a while and I doubt these lawmakers grew up on it. Certainly people drank it for thousands of years and if it was something that had a very high chance of making you sick every time then the practice of drinking fresh milk would have been abandoned pretty quickly and drinking milk would be about as common as eating raw chicken.

People aren't dumb: the Inuit knew to leave polar bear liver well alone and the Mesoamericans knew corn had to be nixtamalized. Another example would be how cassava has to be washed and soaked in a particular process. There are many examples I can think of. Even if the actual mechanism behind these things wasn't understood until modern times people across the world still figured out "you must not eat this part" and "you must do X, Y, and Z before you can eat this" for a lot of toxic or potentially toxic foods.

I'm no expert on foodborne pathogens but it just doesn't make sense to me that people would drink something that would almost certainly make them sick. It seems to me it would be more like, say, eating eggs over easy: it's a risk to be sure but you'll probably be fine if they're fresh and the chicken was healthy.

Disney bought the non-news parts of Fox back in 2019 so all the animated/scripted shows have been owned by Disney for some time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_21st_Century_Fo...

This is great but why can't they just do it? If a majority of EU members agree then why can't Ukraine be an EU member today?

Yes there are rules and red tape to negotiate but I don't see why a majority can't just agree to waive it under emergency circumstances.

Otherwise it just seems like a hollow gesture.

> What we need is some way to get left-leaning people to move to platforms without excessive censorship, which would both keep the balance and deter the incumbents from continuing to be heavy handed.

There's no shortage of people trying to make these platforms but the problem is free-speech oriented sites get deplatformed. "Build your own hosting company!", "Build your own mobile operating system!", "Build your own payment processor!", etc, etc. A small handful of tech and payment companies can veto any website or app.

It's like the old days of broadcast television where if your show was too controversial for ABC, CBS, or NBC it didn't get on TV, period.

I never liked the idea of "X supports Y so I must boycott them". If you don't like NFTs then don't buy them. It shouldn't factor into your decision on whether or not to use WordPress.

I know I'm a weirdo but I just don't get the hand-wringing over stuff like this.

> There needs to be some kind of law that mandates that a company MUST reply to customers and/or users within a given time and offer a proper redress process.

It wouldn't do any good. The legally-mandated reply would just be another auto-generated form letter.

Unicomp Model M. When IBM discontinued production of buckling spring keyboards the employees at the plant in Kentucky bought the factory, the tooling, and the rights to the (now expired) patents and kept on making the Model M the same as in 1985. It's a bit like how they kept making the original air cooled VW Beetle in Mexico years after everyone else moved on.

They're nearly not as well known as they should be because they don't do any marketing at all. And at $104 they're not expensive by premium keyboard standards.

It's like pointing out that car accidents kill ~10x more Americans a year than 9/11 did so why are we so obsessed with making sure you can't bring weapons on a plane? The real threat is giving every moron with a pulse control over a 4,000lb wrecking ball.

Logically it's absolutely true that inattentive drivers are a greater risk to Americans than airline hijackers but 3,000+ people dying in one day in one location hits a lot harder than 30,000 people dying mostly one or two at a time, over 12 months, spread out across fifty states.

What's the point of even having it then? It's like saying "You are obligated to do what you want to do". You'd do it even if you weren't "obligated" to do so and if you don't want to do it then you can just deem it "unnecessary" and it's no longer obligated.

The Allies and Nazi Germany both refusing to use chemical weapons during WWII? They both had chemical weapons stockpiled but neither side wanted to go there after WWI.

What will people in 2092 think of 2022? I won't be around to see it unless Bezos makes a breakthrough in immortality research but I really doubt this decade will be seen as the magical time when we finally figured everything out. Our grandchildren will probably not look on our time any more fondly than we look on the '50s.

I doubt people in the '50s thought "we are evil and we enjoy being evil so we shall be evil". If you read contemporary magazines and newspapers they actually thought they were quite modern and progressive. And why not? 1955 was as modern in 1955 as 2022 is today. It's only in retrospect that it looks backward and barbaric.

Many things that were seen as modern and progressive then are looked on in horror now (lobotomy, gay conversion therapy, insulin coma therapy, using asbestos in cigarette filters, segregation, redlining, anti-miscegenation laws, blacklisting communists, anti-sodomy laws, many others).

What will the list of "Oh my god can you even BELIEVE people did that?" look like in a couple of generations? I've got some ideas but they're almost certainly wrong because I can't see the future any more clearly than the 1950s people could. I would however bet my life savings that some of the values held by all right thinking decent people now will be seen as abhorrent in 70 years. I just can't tell you which ones. Conversely some things seen as shocking now, stuff that will get you ostracized from polite society, will be believed by all right thinking decent people in 2092. Again I can't tell you which ones (nor do I think it will even be related to race, disability, or LGBTQ+). But this does seem to be the pattern.

To be clear I am not saying consensus views were more right then, or that we are wrong now, or that I wish X, Y, or Z thing would make a comeback. I'm just saying I don't think we've finished history yet and we should wait till history is over before patting ourselves on the back.