borkborkbork

*Alternative

Imagine all the dirt on GOP email accounts

You didn't mention sex selection in your previous posts. You said:

"Labs can make sperm from stem cells, so there's really no need for us anymore."

That statement is ambiguous. You could have been referring to how a post-male, post-genocide society would be able to function.

I agree that sex selection is a much less radical position to take. It's still wrong.

American society is becoming more and more multi-racial. It's not hard to imagine future parents selecting for phenotypes that are strongly associated with various racial groups today. Blonde, or curly black hair, for example.

Do you think it would be advisable for parents to use contemporary crime statistics to decide which "race" they want to pass on to their children? Do you understand why some people who are already alive might consider such rhetoric dangerous?

We're talking about the biodiversity of the human genome here. It shouldn't be winnowed so carelessly based on current societal conditions.

> As ever the perfect is the enemy of the good. A male-free society would be expected to have a much lower violence rate.

How about we consider a different demographic group? It's well known that African-Americans are disproportionately responsible for violent crime in America. Would it be "good" to get rid of them too?

I'll just leave this right here:

http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2014/04/male_...

For the TL;DR crowd:

"In asking 40,000 households about rape and sexual violence, the survey uncovered that 38 percent of incidents were against men."

"A recent analysis of BJS data, for example, turned up that 46 percent of male victims reported a female perpetrator."

"Women were more likely to be abused by fellow female inmates, and men by guards, and many of those guards were female. For example, of juveniles reporting staff sexual misconduct, 89 percent were boys reporting abuse by a female staff member. In total, inmates reported an astronomical 900,000 incidents of sexual abuse."

I was wrong to have brought up your personal political beliefs. I apologize for that.

The arguments you are making, however, are dependent on the idea that markets are a necessary mechanism for the existence of the modern internet.

You have the right to withhold your political beliefs from anyone in any context.

You've gone astray by demanding that others de-politicize their language in a similar way.

Welp, maybe you shouldn't have commented on a political article then? I'm really not trolling you here. I'm reading everything you're writing.

I suspect others will notice that it is you who have been ignoring me.

This is my biggest problem with people in the tech industry. You can't divorce the systems you build, or the tradeoffs made by companies and policymakers, from the underlying political ideologies that inform those decisions.

I'm actually enjoying this conversation. That's why I've stuck around this long. To quote your last comment:

"What they do instead is impose regulatory frameworks that forbid companies that could run gig fiber networks from doing so unless they also serve markets where they would hemorrhage money."

Who cares if they're hemorrhaging money? The Public Works Administration hemorrhaged money electrifying the South. The Post Office hemorrhages money delivering to far flung rural areas. Society however has made the judgement that these costs are worth it because they promote inclusiveness and equality. You are making the opposite judgement. That judgement is inherently political.

You're right. They're prioritizing access over the financial concerns of the providers. That's what public utilities do. That's what we did when we electrified the South. That's why I keep pointing to your fundamental political assumptions. It's not that we can't do it, it's that certain people don't think it's valuable.

I haven't asked you to do anything of the sort. I point out the NHS because I want you to explain why the internet is fundamentally different. You've done an excellent job explaining how the existing internet emerged. You've done nothing to discredit my actual argument.

Yeah, they'll tell you their internet connection speed is shitty. Unless you live in Chattanooga, where the evil Department of Fiber Optics is busy oppressing them.

The attitude that leads to you ridicule government provided services is exactly why I made my previous comment about your obvious political bias. It wasn't any more rude than the sarcasm that you're exhibiting here.

Ask the Brits about the NHS.

He's just better at dodging my questions than you are :). But please, keep erecting your straw man.

The entire point of this is that the internet would be fundamentally different if it were democratically controlled. That does not mean we would miss out on innovations like streaming video. It does mean that average users would have faster speeds and more control over their data. This of course assumes a political environment geared towards the average citizen. Sadly, in the United States, that is not currently the case. But it is achievable, and we used to be much closer to that ideal.

That's not my argument. Publicly funded does not necessarily mean primarily academic. The market is not the only driver of public demand for goods and services. Streaming video is a fairly obvious innovation that benefits the general public.

How so?

You're right, it's not. But it could have been.

Government has been responsible for the largest undertakings in human history. Space flight, nuclear weaponry and energy, particle colliders, etc.

Actually I was replying to your original comment before you edited. The idea that a publicly run internet would not have been able to produce the innovations necessary for Netflix is debatable and betrays a certain political persuasion on your part.

Comparing the internet you have in 2016 to the internet that existed in the 1990's is a bit unfair, don't you think? The idea that only markets are capable of delivering innovations or necessary services to the public is debatable.

For example, the U.S. government, through DARPA, created countless valuable networking innovations that private companies, such as AT&T, didn't want to touch even when given the opportunity.

Ah, you're right. Sorry for the misunderstanding on my part. They abandoned NSFNET and declined to pass regulations regarding the new privately built infrastructure. That begs the question: if the government so successfully innovated in this space during the 60's, 70's, and 80's, why did that have to change in the early 90's? Perhaps the prevailing political climate had more to do with it than economic or technical considerations?

They inherited NSFNET, which emerged from ARPANET. It's in the article.

Are you saying that this couldn't have been accomplished by a public utility? Or that these companies have produced better outcomes? We made the choice to hand over the existing backbone that took decades and billions of dollars to build.

Your argument assumes it's not within their power to end this threat. In fact, the Senate proposed a bill that does just that [1]. There's nothing inherent to the current architecture that prevents the government from compelling companies to do their bidding. We've seen that time and time again with NSA surveillance. The crux of this article is that the Internet was largely funded by the public, then handed over to an oligopoly of telecoms in the 1990's. There's nothing about this arrangement that protects average users. In fact, it is partially responsible for the U.S. having the slowest average broadband speeds of any industrialized nation [2].

[1] http://www.dailydot.com/layer8/encryption-backdoors-legislat...

[2] http://gizmodo.com/why-americas-internet-is-so-shitty-and-sl...

The U.S. government seems to have no trouble achieving its commercial and surveillance goals under the current architecture.

That's correct. We don't enforce restrictions on political speech or deviant pornography, for the most part. But we do enforce intellectual property restrictions that largely benefit Western corporate interests.

China and Russia are doing this largely to avoid Western cultural and political influence. Their choice to opt out does not necessarily imply that we're structuring our networks in the most just or efficient way.

I'm from Chicago and learned to program at school in Chicago.

Chicago consultancies won't pay you market rate either

I'm a homegrown Chicago developer who moved to NYC last year and I haven't looked back.

The Chicago devs that work downtown ride public transit or commuter rail. The ones that don't work downtown don't have much traffic to deal with.