bruiseralmighty

If all these subreddit had instead migrated their users to a hastily built alternate frontend that web scrapped reddit.com, the entire mother site could have been taken down quite effectively.

There's plenty of methods for routing around ip-address blacklisting or region blocking.

Just as there's no law against web scrapping there's no law protecting the labor rights of the moderators who work for free. Overall it just strikes me as a weaker axis of attack.

Rousseau agrees. I'm glad we've finally reached terminal Enlightenment.

Having the applications keep a cached version of the db means that when one of them runs a complex or resource intensive query, it's not affecting everyone else.

Although I agree with the Treasury's actions here so far, this is a potential issue. They should instantiate more stringent rules for banks that who cater to business accounts and then raise the cap for insurance on those accounts to a number that makes sense for small businesses across the country.

Too many CEOs and CFOs were allowing their business checking accounts to sit in dangerously uninsured positions. Headliner being Roku with nearly a half a billion dollars sitting in a single checking account with SVB. But plenty of smaller businesses leave ten million plus dollars in their accounts as a course of business as well.

The actual amount those accounts can be insured for needs to be formalized and it should probably be higher than the standard quarter million for consumer accounts as this is way too low for business larger than a half dozen employees.

Nobody wants to or has enough trust in telecommunications to present their driver's license in order to participate in an online forum. If DoD really could provide a private key to bypass captcha tests then it could be useful, but there is a zero percent chance that it doesn't get tied back to people with real-world consequences almost immediately.

A persistent, costly ID for online communications and commerce is good and well implemented in an OS like Urbit, but relying on DoD maintaining them is too risky given the current laws around government surveilling, policing, and an ascending domestic 'war on terror'.

It is self-evident that reversing a decision to play freeze tag is orders of magnitude easier than reversing a dental tooth cleaning; a mundane medical procedure.

Hardly, our understanding of the human body is more experimentally valid and much more aesthetically developed than our understanding of the human mind. If there is some kind of 'mismatch' as you say and the body appears well regulated, then the medically responsible move is to defer to it.

For instance, most Americans know they're fat or obese and that this is not good for their long term health outlooks and will have detrimental affects on other aspects of their lives. Some may choose to be okay with this, but very few sincerely argue that being fat is 'healthy'. Most will try to lose weight (excess fat) at some point in their lives.

Sometimes we remove body parts that are no longer well functioning within an understood ordering of the body. Inflamed tonsils can be removed, large wisdom teeth pulled, even ovaries can be discarded if they're found to be hosting cancers, but all of these are examples of organ dysfunction. We know what is regular, non-painful, and non-disruptive about the human body because many human beings spend a lot of time in that state and most begin life in that state before transitioning to a disordered state. When that transition happens, medical science seeks an explanation for the dysfunction: how did these tonsils become inflamed?, why do wisdom teeth crowd the mouth?, how did this woman's ovaries come to carry so much cancer?

We look for the cause of a dysfunction in order to treat it.

If instead we remove the well functioning breasts of a 15 year old, or replace a healthy penis because a patient informs us that they abhor their member, or prescribe a blocker for an otherwise well regulated puberty, then we have inverted the entire thrust of centuries of medical understanding. We are taking a healthy body and searching for a malady that we have been told must be there. Once there is no longer a discernment between the regular and the dysfunctional for a human body then an explosion of maladies abounds all begging for treatment.

If enlarged breasts are causing spinal issues then perhaps they should be reduced in order to correct those issues. But why not removal? We remove enlarged tonsils, why not enlarged breasts? Surely the removal of them would also correct any spine issues. In fact, it may even be ethically easier as the doctor and patient do not have to contemplate a correct breast size. But of course it is unlikely the patient or doctor ever considered the wholesale removal of the breasts in these cases because both approached the question with an idea already in mind of what a healthy human body would look like despite they're not having any precise agreement on the topic beforehand.

And in fact, we should question the ethics of both vasectomies and birth control. In 2023 these treatments are mostly, though not entirely, considered mostly in the pursuit of carefree pleasure and fun. Why should either be condoned? We condemn being fat on entirely the same terms. Often Americans are fat because they eat too often and always in excess due to eating feeling good. If one doesn't praise obesity, then what ought they find desirable about self-imposed sterility?

Of course what compounds these ethical concerns is that in these cases the subjects are children. On the whole this takes the acts from merely questionable or wrong-headed to monstrous.

Russia and Belarus are the number one and two suppliers of a basic fertilizer component, but now Western aligned nation cannot import from them and the Brits have gone further by making it harder to insure the shipments which affects the ability for Russia (and by extension Belarus) to export to anyone by sea.

The Germans _could_ have helped make up the difference since they can make some amount of fertilizer using natural gas, but some terrorist state (we still don't know exactly who) blew up NS1 and NS2 which makes this basically impossible. Germany now needs to preserve all its gas just to keep some manufacturing going, heat people's homes, and run the lights.

The pandemic has had some effect, but a lot of the fertilizer being sold internationally goes to Egypt, the Middle East, and North Africa. It doesn't actually have to go all that far in the global scheme of things.

The conflict itself affects wheat prices, since Ukraine is a major wheat exporter (as is Russia), but the fertilizer issues are due primarily to Western sanctions and Kremlin counter-sanctions.

However, if the mapping is even somewhat complicated, or this pipeline has to be shared and productized in some way, then it would be better to load the data using some `pandas` like tool, store it on a `tsql` flavored database or datalake, and then exported as a .csv file using a native tool or another `pandas` equivalent again.

Having a pipeline live solely on a notebook that is passed around leaves too much risk for dependency hell and relying on myself to create the csv as needed is too brittle. Either have the pipeline live on its own container that can be started and run as needed by anyone, or dump the relevant data into the datalake and perform all the needed transformations there where the workflow can be stored and used repeatedly.

I think your treating 'globalization' as equivalent to 'American-style liberal democracy' in your last sentence there.

If only a hemisphere of the globe is 'globalized' than clearly the term has become disconnected from any literal meaning at that point. Both democracies and autocracies are increasingly de-globalized at the moment, its a statement about the network and not the nodes on it.

Although not yet directly comparable to the surveillance state that the CCP has created, there are have been highly successful forces within our own government to generate and implement systems of oppression within the United States. There is a definite inclination among regime elites to favor more centralized control of the public.

Just recall efforts to nationalize voting, policing, housing, and the internet. To say nothing of the covert surveillance or the plans to phase out non-digital transactions in order to curtail 'money laundering', or the gentle reminders of the IRS that they will pursue ever smaller transaction amounts. Or even the sword of 'regulation' that hangs over the head of social media companies should they not heed the _"""advice"""_ of executive agency functionaries.

It may be less formalized than China, but there can be no mistaking the current of this undertow.

That "Where's Nancy?" line comes from the report of a single police officer on scene, none of the others heard it. We don't have the cam footage or sound from the PD or the Pelosi residence yet. When CNN reported that (and they are the only ones who have done so, everyone else is regurgitating their report), they were trying to make political hay out of the situation.

Paul Pelosi refers to the assailant as 'friend' to the 911 dispatcher. Perhaps that was coded language to protect himself, but we do not know.

We do know that the attack on Paul Pelosi occurred in front of police after they arrived. It is simply too early to know for sure what the motivations or intentions were of either Paul Pelosi or David Depape that morning.

A mentality of doing as little as possible makes life harder for the people around you as well. Twitter is low-stakes; no one will die due to some developer slacking off, but if you don't want to participate, then the least you can do is leave.

So as an individual, I convert my cash to e-coins through some e-coin dedicated ATM-like machine. And I can redeem my e-coins for cash at another e-coin-ATM somewhere else (maybe anywhere in the world).

Would coin pools like Tornado Cash then be acceptable? It would not be tied in any way to the credit or banking systems, it takes cash only, and then just a basic utility internet connection. Maintenance for the machines and paying the internet utility would just be a fraction of a percentage fee on each transaction.

Now all e-coins would simply exist as a privacy themed alternative ecosystem to cash.

Since we are not joining the U.S. financial system, these e-coins should not be expected to have any obligations to that system correct?

It would in fact be better live in a country with financial privacy where assets form the tax base instead of income. In terms of convincing the public, I think time will do the former and education the later.

Because it would only remove the violence in our neighborhood and not the violence 1000s of miles away. This plan is not worth pursuing.

We can grant everything you said that the Silk Road may have only reduced violence in our immediate vicinity. That is still a huge success that should have been continued. Its not a failure for only reducing local violence.

That local win could have grown more globalized acceptance; reducing the niche cartels fill. Even if it had merely encouraged greater local production of illegal drugs that alone could have reduced cartel violence in Mexico.

The legality under existing laws has nothing to do with whether the right exists or not if its a natural right.

I also fail to see how one could construct a right to privacy that would include communications but not include financial transactions especially exchanges of value done over a btc-protocol (or one of its descendants) that exchange value with pure speech.

If congress and/or the judiciary was full of privacy enthusiasts, then the tax law would be changed majority be damned.

Tornado Cash is just a coin mixer implemented through smart contracts yes? The 'coins' themselves already enjoy some first amendment protection by being built on top of the protected encryption protocols. The smart contract itself is just another communication protocol defined in code. So it seems patently obvious that TC is allowed to exist under U.S. law.

The only remaining question is whether anyone can be allowed to use it. We actually have to get deep into first amendment jurisprudence to answer that question. Generally speaking all speech is permitted but, when it is paired with conduct, the conduct can be regulated by time, place, and manner. This at first appears a simple distinction for us. Users of TC or any e-coin standard are _conducting_ transactions. But this is thorny.

Commerce used to be conducted entirely physically with an exchange of cash. Then it was done with an exchange of electronic funds on a banks balance sheet; essentially a change on two different excel spreadsheets. But the btc-protocol and its derivatives don't function like this. They use a ledger. When we transact in e-coins we don't exchange anything. No digital coins fly from my computer to yours or vice versa. Rather all that happens is a message is sent to a public server which contains enough information to allow that server to determine that we both agreed to send that specific message. The server then updates the ledger and publishes this change to other servers hosting the ledger so there is agreement that we exchanged value.

It's not actually 100% clear that when communicating this way we have conducted anything. Sending encrypted messages like this has been determined to be first amendment protected activity as pure speech. Indeed we wouldn't have an internet today if it weren't. Having a message be encrypted inherently provides privacy and precludes restrictions on a message's content. Even when that message's content includes information to exchange value. Citizen's United also has some precedent over whether speech + conduct regarding money transactions are permitted speech when that speech is political in nature.

This leaves us only with the few recognized non-speech categories with which to regulate pure speech:

> lewd, obscene, or pornographic content; defamatory content; insulting or “fighting words”; expressive content that tends to inflict injury; speech that incites an immediate illegal conduct such as riot or violence; speech that poses an imminent threat to public safety or national security; false or misleading commercial advertising; and perjury.

There are a few categories here that may help us. Inciting immediate illegal conduct and imminent threat to public or national security. To qualify as incitement to illegal or a threat to public safety the speech has to pass the 'clear and present danger' test. This test has two parts:

* first, the speech must impose a threat that a substantive evil might follow

* second, the threat is a real, imminent threat.

This test is extremely hard to meet and just because the TC protocol is may be or even if it is likely to be used for money laundering it will likely never rise to the threshold of this test in a U.S. court. Cases where speech does meet this threat are specific threats or instructions. If TC included specific instructions on how to evade law enforcement then that may qualify.

This leaves only threats to national security as a legal basis. We have to begin by saying that many of the use of national security as a means to restrict the rights of Americans has an extremely checkered past. These were the arguments that bullied journalists under the red scare, interned the Japanese in WWII, attempted to stifle the pentagon papers after the Vietnam War, maintained the patriot act of 2001, lead to secret courts with secret evidence, torture, suspension of habeas corpus, etc. However, the standards for what constitutes a threat to national security have been much degraded in the past two decades. You could probably convince a judge or even SCOTUS that the use of TC by foreign hostile powers like North Korea and its potential to be used as a tool of terrorism from the likes of Iran and ISIS constitute a threat to national security. But arguing this not only degrades your moral character, it is also unlikely to be effective in the long term. We did reinstate habeas corpus, we un-interned the Japanese, and we did publish the Pentagon papers. Hopefully we will also get rid of the Patriot Act in the coming decades. And even if TC was determined to be a threat to national security, that determination would likely one day be reversed as an understanding of the technology and its necessity aged into the judicial system.

We can argue over how easy it would be, but I would presume its possible for a government to switch over to taxing hard assets like land, machines, and shipments at ports rather than income and investment products if we decide those should be shielded by a right to privacy. Most of human history existed without a tax on income or loans (investments), an argument that a right cannot exists because of the present tax structure is like the ultimate status quo warrior-ing.

The CDC, being a public health agency, had a definition of vaccine that was intended for the public's consumption. Scientists generally do not have to check the CDC website for terms of art regarding their profession.

There is/(was?) a general understanding that a 'vaccine' was an injection or spray or ingestable that primed the immune system to fight a potential 'real' infection of a disease. This priming meant that while you may come into contact with the disease, you would be exceedingly unlikely to develop symptoms.

Changing the public definition of the vaccine after the initial covid vaccines had already been released to allow 'vaccine' to mean any therapeutic that gave any degree of protection from a disease is an obvious bait and switch. Evidence of this definition being changed as a damage control measure due to floundering public trust is evident from emails made available through FOIA requests.

We are not going to pretend that updating that definition was a sincere miscommunication of the science when the text is so obviously not scientific. The political motivations and objectives are clear.

If this had been a single event we may still express doubt, but these language games that prey upon the public's preconceived definitions of common vocabulary have been rampant for years at this point. 'With-cause' being another recent instance.

When reporting covid hospitalizations the phrase "X people hospitalized with covid" was used. Last week we had Fauchi on air explain that although those people are in the hospital _with_ a positive covid test many of them are asymptomatic and are in fact at the hospital _because_ of something other than covid; they just happened to test positive as well. Yet for months these numbers stood without question or explanation allowing a narrative of 'high covid hospitalizations' to be pushed.

Effectively we are treating the public as if they are idiots for hearing the obvious common parlance meaning of such statements-- "hospitalized with covid" when instead they should read as lawyers questioning every word. This is governmental malpractice.

A small note on season flu vaccines. The public generally understands that scientists are playing a guessing game with the flu and some years they guess better than others. But on years where they do guess well, the flu vaccine operates as the public generally understands it in what I've written above. Not only has there been no messaging that these covid 'vaccines' are playing a similar guessing game there has in fact been the exact opposite messaging. We developed an 'alpha variant vaccine' now we are developing a omicron variant vaccine. These are being discussed like treatments that 'should work' similar to a flu vaccine on a good year.

Currently, there are only a handful of large technology companies in control of most of the world's inbox. Google is the first that comes to mind. At the same time we've just had some of our most highly publicized hearings involving these tech companies (facebook and google) as well as our first hearing on cryptocurrency and the larger web3 infrastructure. There is a rising public awareness and therefore political will to regulate these technologies and companies. This would formally fold google and the like into the USG despite their long standing less formal arrangements with the intelligence agencies.

The one way to make this regulation and upcoming legislation moot? Decentralization by any other name. Self-hosting of email servers, or distributed computing and storage with web3. Perhaps its is only my latent paranoia, but I can't help but shake the feeling that the glut of the 'don't bother hosting your own email server' sentiment is, at least in part, artificially amplified in order for the coming formal regulations to have more of an impact.

It wouldn't surprise me at all if google themselves was helping to facilitate this in order to steer conversation towards stalling any potential competitors as a part of the new regulatory framework. It is for instance a lot easier to argue that outlawing self-hosting of email servers (or requiring a license to do so) makes a lot more sense if you can point to a 'general public sentiment' that hosting your own email server is 'too complicated' and 'less useful' and 'less secure' and therefore would only be done by antisocial actors such as 'criminal elements' and 'terrorists'.

Seeing as we are at the cusp of a new distributed infrastructure movement, all this feels like preemptive damage control to me.

This seems rather vague. That chart presumably was measuring individual instances of hate speech on the platform. That means that a plausible explanation is simply that there are more instances of "white trash", "cracker" and a gay slur, than hate speech against blacks, Jews, and transgender people. Or perhaps that the former is more reported than the later. Either way, that hardly seems like a Facebook policy failure.

I also make a special note of the cultural shift to slide gays in with whites and poor whites in the text. Their position now replaced in print with transgender people.

shrug I suppose we'll all just muddle through.

Perhaps this is more of an issue with larger projects, but I also noticed that 'no need to use virtualenv' as a positive.

The author rightly points out that there was no connection between the killing of Amess and 'social media anonymity'. So I suppose at least they are doing their part to combat that false narrative set up by Parliament.

However, we then launch into one-armed counter attacks about how MPs who cut benefits (ahem Tory ahem) have more of a responsibility to endure vitriole from 'the poors' whose benefits they cut. Yet simultaneously, we should still stomp out 'right-wing-extremists'. Whom I suppose have no legitimate grievances with the government despite the fact that Islamic State can operate within London and kill their political representatives.

This is pretty close to the truth. For a further nudge in the right direction you should apply that thinking to the state of mind your family member was in prior to encountering any "anti-vaccine propoganda".

They were not in a kind of limbo where they could go either way on covid vaccination. They consumed specific media because they already distrusted the authorities in power in the USG.

The reason you are ending up in this apparent to censor or not to censor paradox is because leadership had already previously failed to convince your family member that they could be trusted. Everything that came after was just mobilization.

Now in your situation you should of course censor the hell out of any anti-vaccine sentiment for the same reason that ISIS should not get to train on Army gym equipment and weapons: it *strengthens* your enemies.

Downranking will of course be equally hopeless. This is the equivalent of the Army allowing ISIS to train with them but only on Sundays at midday or something. Its incoherent.

The right answer has been and will always be to have a leadership class (and that includes the people at Youtube and Google as well as legacy politicians) who can be relied upon to display even a modicum of trustworthiness towards *all* Americans. Ironically censorship also fails to move the needle in the right direction at this point.

Guess we are still in that paradox after all.

You can hold great conversations on any of the like 30 other boards on the site without worrying about censorship or performance for internet points. There is still moderation, just the minimum amount possible.

A default of anonymity also helps curb a lot of spillover into the real world that happens between users of other forum sites.

The only reason 4chan gets dragged through the mud is because its containment facilities (/pol/, /b/, etc.) are among the most active boards. That speaks more to the human condition than 4chan in that people, when given a choice, tend to gravitate towards the least moderated sections of a website because they are the most engaging.

In terms of a solution I think it offers a fairly good one. If you don't want to have to keep banning malcontents across your site, then give them a place to congregate and they will mostly stay there. Try to ban them and they swarm looking for a new home.

> * Any past U.S. Presidential election

> * The 2021 German federal election

I don't ascribe to election stealing myths; but my god, listing them out specifically really makes me question whether I'm wrong. It's like a blueprint for what to review further.