2,183 karma · joined April 26, 2022
The gov. should use public forms of communication, like their own websites and mailing lists. Why endorse this privitzation of their communcation channels in the first place?
If some service requires you to create an account, just give them false information. If they ban you, just create another account. At the end of day, the legalese is irrelevant. If it was relevant, then people would read it.
It is not like the user has any bargaining power with the platform owner to spy on them less for example, or even verify that they are upholding the privacy policy. These companies do not follow their own rules in banning you or otherwise.
However, the smug "write-only database meme" is getting a bit old. Cryptocurrencies, and even other crypto-payment systems (e.g. chaumian cash) obviously have different characteristics than centralized money. Come to think of it, you could just mockingly describe any computer program that has structured data as a database.
Cryptocurrency has almost nothing to do with databases or storing data. At its core, cryptocurrency is a system of distributing signed transactions that uses hashcash as a sybil-resistance and (order) synchronisation mechanism.
Google spreadsheets need not apply. The whole point is that you don't require a single party to sign transactions. The problem that cryptocurrency deals with concerns co-operation between adversarial parties. Centralization leaves you hopping from platform to platform forever.
You comment about cryptocurrency backed chaumian cash, there is already a project for this aimed at increasing the efficiency and privacy of bitcoin spends: https://fedimint.org/
The technical differences are too many for me to enumerate here. They are completely different technologies that make different efficiency-privacy-decentralization tradeoffs.
Functionally, Taler (and other forms of chaumian cash) are payment systems and not currencies. It requires a bank to implement it, in this sense it is less de-centralized, but likely much more efficient as there is no need for network consensus (because it depends on a central entity's blind signatures, etc. anyway). It has different (possibly better) privacy charichteristics than monero. They are both free and open source projects.
Ultimately, you are forced to make rational decisions based on history and international politics. What hegemony is more aligned with your interests?
It is blatantly obvious that the chinese governance is immoral, and that it is not even controlled by the chinese people. Say what you will about the US, the bigger picture is that one nation is a free-democracy-with-exceptions and the other is a dictatorship that murders political dissidents and harvests their organs. There is no reasonable moral judgement that can be made that considers US dominance to be comparable to Chinese dominance.
In the same sense that there is an asymmetry in the freedom of US/Chinese markets, there is an asymmetry in the freedom of US/Chinese marketplaces of ideas. Just consider the preconditions of this argument: There is simply no equivalent chinese forum where they openly discuss the misdeeds of their own nation, so the anti-American argument is globally over-represented.
If a country has the army of robots needed to make it happen, then you have two problems.
The reality is that the current moderation of major forums like Twitter, HN, etc is so one-sided that it produces whatever passive-aggressive posturing that we are engaged in with this very conversation.
I am not going to make a defense of elon or his actions, but I will say that I believe there are two good outcomes:
* Elon behaves rationally and makes twitter usable for civil discussion.
* Elon behaves irrationally and destroys twitter, creating space for competitors like mastodon, etc.
If you agree with this premise, then it should be clear that most any change elon makes to twitter is beneficial in the long run, good or bad. This is why I am not so quick to criticize.
The users should be allowed to decide for themselves what they see. My perspective is that hate speech is basically an identical problem to spam. If you can solve spam, you solve hate speech and self-advertisements and whole other classes of problem.
Also, it's a social media platform. You basically dox yourself. The current service requires you to give them your phone number and encourages you to use your real name and location on your profile. It doesn't get much worse than that.