mindslight

The entire reason we treat corporations as independent entities, rather than as the extensions of the government that they are, is that they are supposed to be institutions executing on their own imperatives, and protected to do so under the rule of law. If owners and management of corporations can't take moral stances, then who else can do so at scale?

If we're really to the point that a trillion dollar megacorp can't stand up to a tinpot dictator (on an issue as simple as data provenance) because his xits might hurt their stock price, then we need to drop this illusion that corpos are independent from the government, and start directly democratically regulating them - starting with stopping their blatant infringements of our natural rights as referenced in the Bill of Rights.

For the technicals, this is why data source malleability and decentralization is important, even if 99.9% of the time you never want to use it. How much needless sticky friction is there from people's workflows defaulting to "Google Maps" software, which has no option to actually pull up from this and let people decide "you know, this US GNIS doesn't seem very authoritative any more". Does OpenStreetMap show any inkling of propagating these stupid antics?

Politically, tell me again how the "unitary executive theory" (aka autocracy by any other name) is going to make our country "great" ? We're a fucking laughingstock - if this senile old man were in the correct venue of a memory care home, staff would have long ago learned to mitigate his behavior - and it's not like the rest of the world is blind to this! Instead the corpos and their stooges stuck him in the highest office in the land and let him loose from the rule of law, to destroy what last vestiges of Constitutional rights we have left. We're talking about what had been a straightforwardly trustable agency, now having that trust destroyed simply to preserve one idiot's ego after having been called on his bullshit.

This seems like a hollow victory. "No signal" will quite soon become a vanishing minority of users, and websites will simply reject anybody that isn't providing the signal. These laws mostly just prime the pump to get the corpos over the activation energy of coordinating a conspiracy to make browsers start doing this on their own.

I'm not an attorney and haven't read these laws, but here is an interesting question: if Linux is exempt from legally needing to supply a user's age for verification, but websites require an age to be presented as a condition of access, can browser developers on Linux send a pre-programmed age for interoperability purposes and be legally in the clear? It seems legit to me.

Of course, since the whole point of these laws is to absolve Faceboot (the laws' sponsor) of liability, Faceboot (et al) will then move on to demanding remote attestation to make sure users are on proprietary operating systems that are legally required to send a faithful signal.

I do wonder if there is an angle here for pushing back against the ever-growing surveillance industry. What if instead of sidestepping the age requirement by choosing an "old enough" age, we chose "too young" ages instead. A signal saying "I am 12" and all the COPPA requirements start to apply, including to embedded ads. Probably easy enough for most sites to flat out reject access. But some sites can't / won't - think government sites that currently embed corpo-surveillance crap like recaptcha etc, or sites that serve neutral content and don't care themselves but use cloudflare. Or perhaps browser extensions could even mix and match which signals they send where - "over 13/18" to the main site, "under 13" to the subresources, etc? I suppose by the time you've gotten there you might as well just be running best-in-class adblock extensions that work based on lists of hostile sites. But I think there might still be a core of an interesting aspect to a well-known way of telling websites that you're under 13.

"Locally true" doesn't help when you need to deal with a much larger-scoped problem, right?. "ZOG" locally suceeds at making you feel like you've got it all figured out, but it's self defeating in the bigger picture. Talk about AIPAC all day long. Talk about congress critters of all political stripes tacitly approving Grump's Iran debacle. Talk about how Epstein seems to have been a politically protected honey trap operation. Talk about Israeli intelligence's well established pattern of no-holds-barred meddling in other countries.

... but balling that all up into "ZOG" just gives one a simplistic rabbit hole where "everything clicks" (ie it proves too much), and mostly written off by anyone else. And if it were to start being widely accepted, it will just fuel a reactionary dumpster fire like every broad-brush populist message inevitably does.

I fully elaborated in the other comment, which you didn't respond to. There is a sibling reply that is on point as well. And sorry no, "Obama is responsible too" has no purchase with me.

As I said to your first comment: positive arguments rooted in what is aren't terribly compelling when the government has gone off the rails (unfortunately).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49480377

Basing an argument around the unavoidable physical embodiment of speech is sophistry. There is no "above". The "material support" you speak of is all just republishing speech.

By the argument laid out by the government here, merely reading writings by terrorists would be illegal. You'd be providing "material support" by helping them spread their message to yourself - regardless of whether you're processing their writings with your network and computing device, or trafficking in their printed books.

> As for the constitution, they are surrounded by lawyers and if they overstep something, they back off. They are applying unitary executive theory as a solution to a slow congress to address the many critical issues facing the US in our time, one of which is demonstrating to China that we can act, which is one more element of deterrence to prevent them from starting World War 3.

The solution to save the country is to write off the Constitution in favor of "unitary executive theory" aka autocracy? Falling flat on our face in Iran creates a deterrent for China? I'm sorry, these are nothing more than partisan rationalizations.

FWIW I was right there with you regarding the woke groupthink of the past decade, but as I said the real issue is that the political winds have shifted, and unless you shift with them you go from speaking truth to power to simply speaking for power's new buntings. I completely understood a vote for Trump 2016, I was the weirdo telling my friends he was likely to win. But by 2020 it was clear that he had no actual substantive policy or leadership, just more division and "I don't take responsibility at all".

As I said, please come to your senses. You don't have to listen to my arguments (in fact you shouldn't, because what I said above aren't actually arguments - rather they're short blurbs to measure how far from centrist non-partisan reality you've gotten). But please listen to criticism from somewhere. Standing up for individual liberty in the face of tyranny is plain old-fashioned American, not woke.

I'd say the more salient dynamic is mass communication increasing the power of propaganda (now individually tailored!) making it so people are increasingly tolerant those lines being crossed. People voted for this, right? There are legitimate understandable gripes underlying Trumpism. Propaganda is able to use that frustration as raw input, and twist it to convince people to support things that directly make their gripes worse! How much did we hear about inflation and the price of eggs, and yet forty trillion dollars more in the hole and now they cheer for it.

Sometime during the Obama years I came up with the realization that the primary information flow in democracy (especially a two-party democracy like the US) isn't the commonly accepted people->government, but rather goes parties->people. The act of "choosing" a candidate makes people have an affinity for everything that politician goes on to do, even when they would have rejected most of it. Trumpism, specifically how people who considered themselves "conservative" didn't look at his abject failure of a first term and send him permanently packing in favor of someone with leadership or patriotism, has thoroughly proven this out.

Fair!

Why do you need the detour through the CIA? Our de jure Constitutional government is merely part of a much larger de facto government formed by large corporations and the billionaire (oligarch) class. The same group of people who funded the lobbyists that had the "Patriot" Act ready and waiting on September 10th also funded "24", the politicians and think tanks behind the Iraq War, and so on. The main difference is that production of "24" was a direct bona fide business expense for tax purposes.

There is a difference between failing to condemn something and gloating/supporting attacks on liberty simply because one's favored political team is now doing it.

We've got a billionaire funded conspiracy openly ignoring the Constitution, wantonly trashing our American liberties, and yet you're still raging about "communist billionaires" ?

The politics of billionaires as a group is not leftism, nor is it rightism. The politics of billionaires is self-serving authoritarianism. From each camp, they pick the sides of issues that stand to increase their own power, taking stakes in them as if they are horses. They will gladly support woke groupthink as long as it's getting results, and then readily switch to supporting anti-woke groupthink when society has had enough and the winds shift.

The net effects from both phases are losses from our individual liberty, which have been accumulating for decades, and are presumably the source of your rightful anger. But please come to your senses!

I didn't claim that there was no basis in the legal system for these draconian actions. Clearly there must be, or they wouldn't be happening, right? Positive arguments rooted in what is aren't terribly compelling when the government has gone off the rails (unfortunately).

From a normative what ought perspective, a rationalization from an institution that has been slowly chipping away at our Constitutional rights is not particularly compelling. "Bad facts make bad law" is a saying for a reason. You're certainly not the first to casually disregard the freedom of speech!

So make no mistake, this action here is still fundamentally about speech - regardless of the routine legal hack of focusing on the concrete embodiment of said speech to sidestep a restriction on policing the speech itself. A/I is providing a platform for speech to these other groups, which seems eminently reasonable to me. Accepting the government's arguments here would imply accepting that it's also illegal to read what a terrorist group has written, as you would be giving them "material support" by helping their writings reach you by transiting your network and processing them with your computing device.

Which is why I said "weak men create hard times". It is difficult work to look at people you disagree with and acknowledge they too have rights, especially in the face of the powerful pushing rationalizations otherwise. But it's necessary work, lest the next time political winds shift you find yourself staring down the business ends of same exact pointy sticks that you had been cheering on.

I don't think that really changes my interpretation? There is an all-too-common dynamic of people working overtime to connect actions the administration is doing with what could be a sensible plan.

If that was not your intent, then please don't take it personally.

Yes, we are talking about a communications service, one specifically focusing on political speech.

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Email, chat, websites, blogs - these are all speech! A/I's overt political statement (that you are indicting them for) points to their primary interest being to facilitate political speech - a type of speech with some of the strongest protections (that whole "assemble ... and petition the Government" thing)

Beyond that, they're presumably a neutral conduit like every other service provider. If some users of their services are communicating to coordinate crimes, then unless A/I is getting directly involved in those conversations (with the government producing hard evidence of this), it's the exact same dynamic as every other email/hosting provider.

Keep in mind we're talking about communications services here, and one focusing on political speech at that.

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

In general I think the free lunch of centrally hosted services and persistent doxxable identities is nearing a close. It was inevitable that governments would meddle more, and more, and more - implicitly treating communications are something other than speech due to how encompassing the digital world has become - and now here we are.

The problem is that perception can only carry things so far. Surveillance Valley had been coasting on unjustifiable positive perceptions while continuing to build their digital cages. The jig is up, and it's a long way down.

That die has already been cast. It's stop everything versus "accelerationism" full speed ahead. Both sides will point to how their full world view is coherent and would have sensible results, and will blame the other side for the problems from their own agenda not being allowed to go far enough. The former will succeed at when pushing regulations that merely constitute speed bumps for the big players but hamstring individuals and small businesses, and the latter will succeed at pushing for little government restrictions on the regulated sandboxes of the big players. Regulatory capture complete.

I had a terrifying thought while mowing the lawn today that we don't even have an inkling of a feel for how imaginary property laws are going to destroy the usefulness of hosted LLMs for individuals. Ask Claude Jr the easiset way to attach some mechanical actuators to your lawnmower and to write some software, and it's going to respond "sorry, automated lawnmowing runs afoul of patents X, Y, and Z. Please upload your patent license certificates". With LLMs we're currently at the stage where Google used to reliably return good links to cracks/warez/etc, and as we all know that's been thoroughly locked down.

As a centrist libertarian, I would say the dynamic is better framed in that authoritarians are frequently attracted to libertarianism as a way of cloaking and justifying their true beliefs, to both themselves and others. So called "right" libertarianism is rife with this, as it emphasizes a fallacious axiomatic conception of rights which are to be overtly rejected when the logical preconditions have not been met. This captures essentially all of the Surveillance Valley hucksters claiming to be "libertarians" - rights for me, not for thee.

How about concrete actions rather than marketing "visions" ?

You're missing the other choices that link those two things. Being able to export dollars lets the government create new dollars out of thin air, which can be traded for real goods and services - a great deal by any measure. But the political mantra of the last thirty years has been a fake "fiscal responsibility" where the government has been stopped from spending that new money for most deliberate purposes, especially on a large scale (eg subsidizing domestic manufacturing in strategic industries). Yet instead of the natural price deflation that true fiscal responsibility would have brought, economists have declared that our currency still needs to inflate. And so the Fed still creates just as many new dollars, but instead gives them away to banks in the form of low interest loans (fueling the ever growing asset bubble, essentially a handout to asset holders). The combination of all of these are what has decimated our industrial base.

If that were seriously on the table, we could have just used the proceeds from having the world reserve currency to do that. Instead, their open plan for that national asset is to squander it.

In general, stop trying to steelman the looters. Sometimes a con artist is really just a con artist.

It's fucking heads they win, tails we lose. The only way we can win is to walk a narrow line, and in the presence of populism that is seemingly impossible. How much support for Grump was because "Biden supports genocide" ? Of course it's hard to tell how much was genuine grassroots vs dead Internet, but surely there were some voters that fell for it. Congratulations, you played yourself.

Don't bother. "woke/marxist crap" is an obvious tell that they're delusional from a Facebook feed or similar. They will have plenty of examples because it obviously does exist, but it's ultimately just a strawman without much sway over the larger Democratic party - especially in the current context of how Republicans have gone all-in for con artist in chief and are currently running the show. As a centrist libertarian who had never in my life voted for a major party in a national election until 2020, I'm holding my nose and voting conservative (ie democrat) for the foreseeable future.

"ZOG" claims way too much, is inactionable, and ultimately just feeds the reactionary dumpster fire that has created our current predicament. "Please don't release the real Epstein files Mr Bibi Sir" suffices.

For voters to actually be in control, they would have to do straightforward things like reject the obviously terrible destructionist candidate in favor of the milquetoast corpo stooge. I would love to say it's as principled as "I chose the wrench" from Good Will Hunting. But from everything I've surmised it's that mass media propaganda is really strong - most people simply can't fit more than one thing in their head at once. Focus them on how bad A is and they will eagerly choose B all day long despite it being clearly worse.

A long time ago I had the realization that the primary information flow in democracy isn't the few bits from each citizen to the government, but rather it's from the candidates/parties to the people making them think they wanted any of the ensuing shit because they "chose" it. And I'd say Grumpism has thoroughly proven that out. The people who used to be your average conservatives are now radical reactionary destructionists, and if you nudge them to ponder their former values they wince at thinking too hard and then get angry at you.

Aren't we out of feet to shoot ourselves in?

The glaringly obvious answer to stop the looting of American industry over the past thirty years would have been to use our asset of having the world reserve currency to directly subsidize strategic industries. But that was denied from being in the Overton window, as it would have hurt line-go-up from fake austerity where monetary inflation was instead given away to banks as low interest loans (ie the asset bubble). And after the political will finally built up that "something had to be done", we merely get this dipshit con artist regime squandering what remaining strengths we have left, marketing their morally bankrupt destruction in narratives that beatings will continue until the market improves. But the market is clearly not going to improve from these actions - the sticky value center is manufacturing things using semiconductors, and tariffs on the inputs make it even harder to start domestic businesses!

> And we all saw the "summer of love" in 2020. Personally I want to see more accountability.

I presume you mean starting with accountability for the police riots? State organized mayhem is much more of a pressing problem than violence by individuals - it's exactly the coordination dynamic you've invoked, but at an even larger scale.

Witness: we already have straightforward avenues of accountability for individuals caught engaging in violent acts while protesting - they're simply crimes already written down, enforced, and prosecuted every day. While state-supported violence, even with open and shut video evidence (eg lines of police marching down a street and slashing every car's tires), gets handwaved away as some kind of perversely necessarily official action. The former is eminently legible to the justice system, while the latter is basically illegible. Never mind how the far right terrorist contingent has now found an official home in federal "law enforcement" where they're encouraged to summarily execute uppity women and 2A enthusiasts.

The important part here would seem to be that we're talking about communications hosting. Why would we want to propagate a framing created by a far right terrorist network, just because they've managed to capture the bully pulpit? It's not required to pick any extremist organizations to support, you know.