mikeash

Gifts in kind aren’t subsidies? If the government gives equipment or resources or labor, rather than money, it’s no longer a subsidy? That sure doesn’t fit how I understand the term. What would you call those?

Can I dump my trash on your lawn?

I didn’t use any numbers at all. Perhaps you meant to reply to a different comment.

It’s not an analogy at all, let alone a tortured one. Polluters are allowed to dump their trash on my (and everyone else’s) property without paying for it.

Now, if you object to it being called a subsidy, fine. (Although I’d like to know which step in my story stops qualifying as one.) But “a tortured analogy”? No way.

It’s an unconventional way to use “subsidy,” but I think it fits.

Imagine a garbage company. The government pays them so they can buy land where they dump their garbage. Obviously a subsidy.

Now, let’s say the government buys the land themselves then gives it to the company for dumping. No money changes hands but this is still pretty clearly a subsidy.

Instead of giving the company land, the government retains ownership, but lets the company dump there for free. Still a pretty clear subsidy.

Instead of buying the land, the government just takes it. Now no money is involved at all, but it’s still a subsidy.

Instead of taking the land, the government just declares that it’s legal for the garbage company to dump trash on other people’s land, and the owners just have to deal with it. This is quite different in the details from the original subsidy, but the overall effect is essentially the same.

Polluters are in a situation that’s exactly like this last scenario. They get to dump their trash on everyone’s property and don’t have to pay for the privilege. They’re being subsidized in an amount equal to whatever payment it would take to get everyone to willingly accept this trash.

Which is to say, it’s a subsidy that we pay with people’s health and people’s lives.

The point of the law is that virtually every measure is a proxy to some extent. Finding a measure that exactly matches what you really want to optimize is almost impossible.

I think it’s quite appropriate in this context, where tons of them come out of the woodwork to defend this bullshit.

Now it means “caveat emptor.”

Put another way, they’re giving their part time workers a massive pay cut.

How do you think it would be going if Hong Kong has gun ownership at the level of the US?

How so?

The big thing that sets you apart is how open you are about stuff like this. Don’t feel bad for doing it like this!

When measured in dollars for all the data you have (what Backblaze sells), S3’s price goes up every time you create a file.

Price per byte doesn’t really matter for an unlimited service. As that cost goes down, your users will have more and more data to store, in an amount that will basically cancel out.

And doing so on a work related mailing list.

What should happen is that he should either find an employer who will tolerate his inexcusable behavior, go into business for himself, or learn to shut the hell up at work.

We don’t need to worry about his entire life. That’s his job. We can say “this person clearly should not be leading an advocacy group” without figuring out a whole future career path for him.

Tech bros: “I wonder why tech is so disproportionately male. Must be something biological.”

Also tech bros: “I can’t believe RMS got forced out just for going on a crazy rant about rape on a CS mailing list. Why, any one of us could be next!”

I find this argument to be so bizarre it’s hard to imagine it’s sincere. In what world is writing dumb and offensive rants to a CS mailing list a good way to learn about the legal, psychological, and moral aspects of sex slavery?

Where do you go to learn more? Maybe you could go to the library. You could enroll in classes. MIT is famous for technical subjects but I’m sure they have good classes about psychology, law, and ethics too. Or you could find stuff online, I’m sure there are plenty of good resources out there.

Right, the foundation produces community, and the community produces software. RMS’s role is almost entirely about leading that community, not producing that software.

I could already be fired for far less important reasons. Where’s the slope?

Of course. The American justice system is horrendously evil.

Why do those licenses matter? Because of the community they created. Nobody would care about the GPL if it was only used for the FSF’s software.

I think that’s a facile Hollywood idea of evil. People like that exist, but plenty of evil people don’t care about suffering.

A psychologist assigned to the Nuremberg trials put it better than I ever could. “In my work with the defendants (at the Nuremberg Trails 1945-1949) I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”

Thankfully, professional cleaners are not difficult to find.

Most of us are at risk for losing our jobs over far less. Our boss can decide he doesn’t like the way we dress, and we’ll be looking for a new job before the end of the day.

Millions of workers labor under threat of starvation just for standing up for themselves a little bit. Expressing a straightforward opinion like “it is illegal to work off the clock” or “a 30 minute lunch break is mandatory in this state” can be enough to provoke retaliation.

Why are people so eager to spend so much energy defending a guy who, at the very least, wrote a bunch of inappropriate things in a completely inappropriate place?

What’s the slippery slope here? “If a man can’t rant about the unfairness of statutory rape laws on a computer science mailing list, then....” I don’t know how that sentence is supposed to end.

There are so many more important things to worry about. A kook is losing his platform. He’ll have to shout into the void like the rest of us. Oh, the horror!

Evil is fundamentally a lack of empathy and I see no empathy from this man. He’s not a cackling crazy Hitler figure, but he seems to have a difficult time figuring out just what the problem is with having sex with children and with child slaves, and chooses to dedicate a great deal of mental energy defending the more powerful people in this scenario.

Nobody’s burning him at the stake or putting him in jail. He can go on living a perfectly good life. What he can no longer do is act in a leadership role in the community and corrupt that community with his crap.

I’m allowed to criticize him after reading what he actually wrote, right? Because I did and came away from it with the conclusion that he’s evil and shouldn’t be anywhere near anything resembling a leadership position.

The FSF is foremost about community, and only incidentally about software. He is, to put it absurdly nicely, not the sort of people person who should be leading such an organization.