leepowers

There's two distinct concepts being confused as one. The first concept is property rights in general. This concept is singular and correlated with the ideas of ownership and territory. This is may be a universal concept and may be a good candidate for designation as a "natural right". The second concept is the classification of what counts as property. This concept is numerous because we have to actually enumerate everything that counts as property.

Slavery is exceptional because it counts people as property. The error is not with the first concept of property but an error of the second kind, an error of misclassification. Owning a farm and working the land is ok. Owning a farm and owning slaves to work the same plot is immoral.

We see this reified during Reconstruction with Sherman's promise of forty acres and a mule. Where former slaves would be compensated by being granted property rights to the land they worked. Property rights were to be their salvation. As we all know that didn't happen. And a century of systematically denying the rights (including property rights) of their descendants (or anyone who looked like them) is the major reason for the disparities between black Americans and other racial groups.

So it's OK for your design to emulate gmail, but it's wrong for anyone else to emulate you. Got it. Inspiration can only travel one way.

At the same time it's a great tool for assessing the quality of posts. It's the same reason HN allows downvotes.

However the dynamic of SO is different. Users are coming to the site to get help and solve problems, not to have open-ended discussions.

SO should have a grace period for new questions. No downvotes during the first 1-2 hours. Aside from being less discouraging for new users it would also mitigate cases of incorrect downvoting. A negative score is a signal to other users that a question is not worth consideration, and dissuades possible answerers from providing a solution.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem#Variants

Or perhaps better stated in the Wikipedia article:

> "By opening his door, Monty is saying to the contestant 'There are two doors you did not choose, and the probability that the prize is behind one of them is 2/3. I'll help you by using my knowledge of where the prize is to open one of those two doors to show you that it does not hide the prize. You can now take advantage of this additional information. Your choice of door A has a chance of 1 in 3 of being the winner. I have not changed that. But by eliminating door C, I have shown you that the probability that door B hides the prize is 2 in 3.'"

The show is successful because it knows that Google exists - it knows there's a universe of information outside the bounds of the show. It provides the gestalt and it's up to the listener to explore the details.

Nothing quite matches the gut punch of being on time for a deadline then having to push it back to troubleshoot mail problems. Or losing a weekend because while you know enough to get started your experience isn't deep enough to fix deliverability problems in a timely manner.

> I work on an opensource SMTP server. I build both opensource and proprietary solutions related to mail. I will likely open a commercial mail service next year.

Translation:

"I am an intelligent guy who works hard. My entire professional career is devoted to designing and maintaining mail systems. I work full time to achieve mastery of my craft. Yet I can't understand why people outside my specialization might find it difficult to do my job."

Email _is_ hard. That's why I'm very happy to outsource mail to experts like OP.

Another piece is the increasing insular nature of some institutions. Ideas ricochet within the walled gardens of higher ed, gain momentum, and lead to results that appear zany to the outside world. Focus is needed to study; but insular practices are creating campuses that are worlds unto themselves.

That's not to say we shouldn't agitate against bad practices in society. Real progress is being made in the real world to combat sexual assault and sex crimes.[1] But it's hard to see how campus protestors are having any positive impact outside their hallowed halls.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2019/07/nati...

1) Grace period. For new questions (and especially for new users) - add a grace period where the downvoting, closing questions, and voting to close are all prohibited. Could be 4 to 24 hours - some optimal window where questioners can read comments, clarify their question, add/revise code examples, etc. Getting downvoted or closed is an extremely toxic experience and tends to position the well for all questioners, be they newbies or veterans.

2) As an answerer I also need a way to watch a question and see if it improves over time. So when I provide feedback in a comment, or flag/watch a question, I need a historical view of all my threads.

Right now the experience is upvote or downvote right away, proffer an answer right away, vote to close or otherwise flag right away; there's too much immediacy in the interface. It feels like a churn. And churn is a game that appeals to rule enforcers (moderators).

3) Chat. A bad question may be intrinsically bad - incoherent and confused and unanswerable by anyone. Or a question may be bad in context.

SO is like email. It's asynchronous and creates a conversation history. In this context a good question is direct, concise, and descriptive.

Many questioners approach SO like it was a chat. They need to ask several small questions before they can formulate a real question. They need an informal conversation (chat) to set up a well structured, intelligible question (email). Many users are looking for help through the whole process: exploration > formulation > resolution. SO is optimized for the last step and ruthlessly moderates out the antecedent steps.

SO already has a chat at https://chat.stackoverflow.com/ - but usage seems sparse. Instead of "vote to close" being the only option for bad questions, maybe recategorize them instead. "Send to chat" or "Request for comments" to flag a question that needs help getting to an answerable state.

For instance WCAG 2.1 requires a minmum text color contrast ratio of 4.5:1. If a web designer and other stakeholders haven't taken this on board there's a risk they'll select an inaccessible color palette. And that's just one requirement.

Designs that appeal to management and other stakeholders are more often hostile to accessibility than not.

https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG/#contrast-minimum

Audacity is overrated. Twitter is full of clever people straining to be as audacious, controversial, memorable, and viral as possible. Audacity is as common as dirt - an insight the shock troops of modern art have yet to absorb.

> Art goes beyond the technicalities of the creation of the work itself. Art is a form of communication.

Yes - but the skill involved in creation is just as important as the idea being communicated. Installing malware on a laptop is a relatively common skill; a task that could be completed by any millions or even billions of people.

The difference between this form of art and the various iterations of The Sick Child is stark - anyone who has experienced loss can relate to the themes of Munch's painting. True, a critic may not like Munch's technique and compare it to bad food. But the skill and technique actually exist and are encoded in the piece alongside powerful ideas of loss and yearning. And that's what art means to me - it's not a bare, cheap, hacky communication of an idea - art is a synthesis of true talent and transcendent themes.

Munch's work could be sent backwards or forwards in time 500 years and the people viewing the piece could still comprehend the themes and appreciate the skill involved. (Or not - I'm sure there'll still be art critics 500 years from now). An infected laptop on a live stream can only exist in a very narrow and parochial context. That doesn't mean it's not art. It's just bad art.

> "Here is no longer a question of nature, only a bizarre madness, delirious moods, feverish hallucinations"

As an aside, that's actually a spot-on description of Munch's most famous work, The Scream - some critics may simply have not realized the shambolic madness of the piece is a feature and not bug.

“We do have some good longitudinal data following the same people over time, but I am going to do a massive disservice to that science and just say: if you’re a man, you should probably get married; if you’re a woman, don’t bother.”

Obviously this guy is speaking off the cuff. And the article is light on detail and doesn't reference any studies.

Study from 2017 that makes the opposite claim:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-017-9941-3

Using data from the British Household Panel Survey, we control individual pre-marital well-being levels and find that the married are still more satisfied, suggesting a causal effect at all stages of the marriage, from pre-nuptual bliss to marriages of long-duration.

A brief APA article describes possible marital bliss confounders:

https://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/10/marriage

In short: marriage qua marriage won't make anyone happy; children reduce reduce happiness; economic insecurity causes unhappiness.

But I think that misses the point.

Only 41.8% have enough cash on hand. That is, a majority of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck. They're not saving money or building wealth - they're surviving.

Maybe this is the norm in other countries. Maybe it's the historical norm. But it doesn't bode well for wage earners.

[1] https://keepassxc.org/

Investors may favor partnerships over solo ventures due to the proprietorship effect. A skills-based solo founder is usually too idiomatic to be an investable business. The catch here is when starting out a solo founder must be a sole proprietor; it's his particular skillset and drive that creates the company. The trap is it's natural for the business to evolve and grow around that particular skillset.

> Apple's mail service silently censors the mail people send.

Is based on this article:

https://www.cultofmac.com/103703/apple-may-be-invisibly-filt...

Where one user was unable to send one email via the MobileMe web interface because of an outgoing spam filter. The Mail app worked btw, and was not "censored".

From this Stallman extrapolates censorship of all users who use Apple email.

Give me a break.

> “The environmental process has become about litigation protection,” he said. “You’re going to get sued so you’ve got to go out and basically do process upon process, study upon study to make sure that somebody cannot find some toehold for litigation.”

Not to knock on the environmental regulations but I think this illustrates why big monolith projects tend be very difficult or to fail outright. In the U.S. the system is setup to completely de-risk large-scale construction projects. We want a large project with a huge footprint to have zero environmental impact, zero negative impact on any community, displace no workers, and benefit every potential stakeholder. No trade-offs allowed: either everybody wins or the project is not completed or even started.

So the era of big top-down monoliths may be over in the U.S. Local, low impact solutions like Seattle's Link light rail are the future.

> His general argument was that endowments should be permitted, in some cases even celebrated, but that they should never be perpetual and that the state must always retain the right to intervene in a philanthropic endowment. His baseline conclusion: “all endowments are national property, which the government may and ought to control.”

Does this include the ACLU? It's been around for nearly 100 years, has a massive membership, a massive budget, and is the recipient of multi-million dollar endowments. The ACLU does important work advocating against government misconduct and abuses. The ACLU _should_ operate in perpetuity. It provides an important out of band check on government power, regardless of the popular democratic sentiments of a given year or decade.

Property rights are the foundation guaranteeing the ACLU's independence. It is the means by which the government encourages a diversity of institutions. By declaring "all endowments are national property" Mills is undermining this basis.

What Mills really had a problem with was the outsized influence of the church in his time. And he works backwards from that state of affairs to come his conclusions.

More pointedly - we are all in the same position as the flat-earther you posit. None of us have 100% accurate knowledge - meaning some percentage of what we believe is either false or one day will be proven false. We all have blind spots. Flat earthers have a particularly egregious blind spot. So we can be skeptical of other claims they make. But we should still engage with the stuff that makes sense and coheres. The answer to bad science is more science; the answer to bad speech is more speech.

Get a 1/2 deposit upfront. This clears out most of the scrubs. Only commit your time when the client has committed money.

The main problem with these sites is not that there's developers bidding at the lowest dollar; those devs are always around, and you're competing against them even when not using the freelance sites. The problem is letting these sites own and monetize your business relationships.

1) Google and Facebook represent only a very small and very elite slice of the developer market. This bizarre focus on what happens at the top 0.5% of the market has a distorting effect. The rest of the market is ignored in this analysis.

2) No mention of dollars spent on training vs. dollar return in labor savings. If Google spends $1 billion on education over 20 years which provides a labor savings of $500 million then they are losing out. The article speculates that there will be a net profit on labor savings but provides no data or evidence to back it up.

3) Developer salaries may actually be inflated. In which case it's only natural that many people would try to get into the market, either by participating in MOOCs, getting a computer science degree, being self-taught, etc. The article assumes it's exploitative to help people break into this market, because the MOOC companies operate at a profit and it might reduce developer salaries overall. But people are going to find their way into the market on way or another. Even if we got rid of all the MOOCs and all the tech education initiatives talented people are going to flock to these industries.

4) Article ignores positive effects. Lower developer costs mean smaller companies or less-than-rich individuals can hire talented developers to build a new service or start a new company. Developers might be paid 10%-20% less, but we would also end up with more developers total. The net benefit to the labor market as a whole would be positive.

Looks like the story here isn't the U.S. falling behind, but the rest of the world catching up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_and_occupation_tax#Ma...

So a federal B&O scheme might work if the rate was low enough. Auditing a business would be massively simplified, no need to carefully check expenses and write-offs to calculate net income. Compliance would be much easier. The question is would gross income taxation create a bigger pie, and would that pie be big enough that a low rate would substantially tax revenues.

http://longnow.org/seminars/podcast/