paisawalla

One of their most visible (on Twitter) attorneys is a transgender person who openly called for "stopping the circulation" of a book discussing critically the transgender phenomenon [0]. This is the same org that once fought for a neo-Nazi organization's right to hold a march. From "I may not agree with your opinion, but I'll defend your right to say it," to "we must prevent opposing views from being heard" in under a decade.

0: https://www.iwf.org/2020/11/16/some-in-aclu-have-new-cause-b...

I just see someone who, having spent ten years at university studying "Quantum Philosophy," is an imminently qualified futurological expert.

It's a relevant sales pitch, and I myself learned about an alternative to Heroku, which was a nice gain.

Let's assume that there's a consistent and coherent definition of socialism which could be applied to all of these civilizations, which there isn't. Rank these historical civilizations by technological progress, quality of life, territory held, and population. You won't find historical proto-socialism at the top end of that list. Why is that?

Your contributions to this thread have the tone of a wishful, rosey, cherry-picking trip through history motivated by the desire to arrive at a predestined conclusion: that we all should be living in a Communist utopia today, because it's logically the easiest and most available organizing system for humans. Therefore, we don't live in that world today only because intense energy and effort is directed into maintaining a non-optimal status quo.

At least please provide some specific and tangible reasons why you believe this is so obviously true, instead of repeatedly alluding to these numerous, incontrovertible, imminently applicable examples. Your statements are, I imagine for most readers, directly opposed to what history has shown about human nature and the nature of power.

> As for why people would choose to live in more egalitarian forms

The question is not why would people choose to live under supposed egalitarianism, but why would that be the default system. It relies on non-betrayal behavior across multiple actors in whom power is vested, which depends on many non-intuitive cultural innovations in thinking about your peers and social responsibility. Feudalism is at least straightforwardly plausible as the point towards which high entropy systems descend. Conversely, it's very hard to see how democratic communalism would just spontaneously emerge and maintain itself without consistent effort and cooperation, both fragile dependencies.

If you agree with this, you're saying they're not entitled to any business, plus are on the hook for all of their tenants. Why would anyone do this?

Ah hmm, that's interesting. How have lotteries for highly desired goods worked out in other centrally planned regimes? Did we find a pretty broad socioeconomic distribution among dacha owners in the USSR?

The point is that 1 KWh is 1KWh, but your home on the top floor of Millennium Tower is not equivalent to my home across from the 680 overpass. Housing is not a commodity like electricity, it's not fungible.

How will you be deciding who gets to have a view of the ocean, and who gets to sleep next to the overpass? First come first serve? Birthright?

It's really incredible that you're saying "superficially similar policies are being enacted in multiple, disparate geographies around the world, in vastly differing cultural and economic contexts, so you can't deny that all of them should coincide in one totally separate place I've chosen."

I notice you didn't mention Berlin's rent control fiasco btw

So the landlord what, eats all of the downside in that scenario? But I'm sure you'd also restrict their ability to raise rents on other tenants (if they have multiple units) to compensate, so why would the landlord even do this to begin with? It's potentially 100% downside and restricted upside.

You're out here saying 640 sqft ought to be enough for anyone.

Ah yes, I also was deeply enamored with Coruscant the first time I saw it depicted. It never occurred to me to reverse engineer the planning policies which could give rise to such a nightmare however.

One example, taken from the forum posted in another comment:

https://youtu.be/JYEYP-iTNHc

Does this mean you're storing a backup of your NextCloud as a large encrypted blob in your gdrive?

"It will run just on just about any terminal on any OS" is an extremely tall claim and requires more than stating what's easy to imagine, in order to back it up. Xterm is not some kind of universal standard, it's a constructive definition.

I have a difficult time imagining what a test suite looks like that can exercise all the relevant test cases in, and correctly evaluate the output of, terminal emulators across all OSes. So to me, this statement probably means "we tried a few sample scripts in VMware at some point."

Historical median inflation-adjusted incomes have increased around 14-16% in Asheville since 2005 [0]. So there is something to the idea that this person's father probably went and found a home in a then-unknown location, rather than starting out with the expectation that he'd be able to live in a trendy, high-cost locale as an entry level laborer.

0: https://www.deptofnumbers.com/income/north-carolina/ashevill...

Friend, it's bad form to impute negative motives where (over)exuberance is a sufficient explanation. This guy cares a lot about the product he or she works on, simply move on if their comment is not for you.

Yes, Mac developers tended to focus only on that platform, and a large portion of its user base was on monochrome for a long time. Therefore, you had a sizeable group of artists and devs who got developed strong techniques for monochrome art.

Comparatively, on PC I never saw CGA graphics which I didn't think were anything but compromised EGA images, which were themselves degraded from VGA images etc. Did anyone else play Prince of Persia on a CGA display?

There's a substantial qualitative difference between what gets through Youtube's and Facebook's filter, versus what gets past Twitter. They're not even practicing the current state of the art, as practiced by their peers.

We're not talking about the hardest content problems on the internet. Look at any of Elon Musk's (or anyone in crypto's) popular tweets and you'll see a flood of incredibly obvious bots that poorly mimic his account, spamming some shit coin or advertising a BTC address.

Also, you're really understating how good Tesla self-drive is. It's not full self-drive but it's a real achievement.

First scenario: user's password can be captured and stored by the app.

Second scenario: could work if we're talking about a trusted third party app (e.g. Authy) generating the response. Otherwise presumably you enter your secret into the app, where the OTP is derived. This has the same problem as above.

Third scenario: no authentication required to query for capabilities? Puts on black hat Ok let me quickly check [A-Z]{1,18}@whitehouse.gov and see which accounts I'm most interested in.

I misjudged you by the looks of it, so I apologize for that.

If we in CA could achieve compliance with the already standing laws against loud exhaust to anywhere near the levels we have with, say, plastic straw riddance, the resulting benefit to society would be drastically superior. I can't think of anything with a lower cost/benefit ratio than just the wholesale confiscation and ban of Harleys.

"Republicans aren't getting cancelled for describing their political policies, they're getting cancelled for being racist or x-phobic"

but then,

"It is an utter moral necessity to not extend civility to or engage with Republicans on issues like healthcare or police reform, but instead do everything necessary to prevent their ideas from being heard or discussed."

I'm sure your next point is that everything conservatives believe reduces to wrongthink x-isms, and therefore everything is permissible, and you probably are unable even then to see the inconsistency. But it seems like others have taken note.

Not even 500px away from here, there's this exchange from you, contradicting your clever tweet:

> Can [ignoring ideas I don't like] get a doctor for my impoverished mother in law?

> If not then I'm afraid I must oppose some ideas in ways other than ignoring them. [Context: "We do not show up at their talks and try to prevent them from communicating with others."]

What will stop pedophiles (as an example, not associating them with gays) from gaining the same rights and recognition? Or do you suppose that, if that happens, it must be that society has "discovered" that these rights are also part of democracy?

In other words, is there a limiting principle that you're appealing to?

And why do you suppose that the right of people directly to be armed, and therefore resist tyranny and remain governed only democratically, never figures into these democracy scores?

Ok, I am not looking for an argument but based on this response, I don't think you understand the critique at all. You keep using these words like democratic power, and it's not clear to me that you mean anything other than "things I like."

I would like to understand what these objective definitions of democracy are. If you look at ratings and papers created by the people who (like you) suppose the very real science of democracy measuring exists, e.g. Freedom House, what am I to make of the fact that various societal and legislative attitudes towards LGBT peoples (for example) are now a key component of democracy? No country can get a full democracy score without legalizing maximally permissive attitudes towards this population.

Taking your assertion at face value, that means no full and true democracy has ever existed prior to ~2010. Is that what you believe? Because even the then-believed-to-be freest countries of the 80s were probably quite regressive on gay rights.

You would have to believe that, because otherwise "democracy" seems to mean "all the things that good people support today," which is my point. And if that is what you believe, that only in the last 1-2 decades has a real democracy existed, then you must also believe that it's possible that the science of democracy measuring will discover in the future that the True Democracy is even more democratic than what we have today. It's not clear to me how this is any different from "everything I like is democracy," where "what I like" is increasingly progressive policies.

Why are gay rights apparently part of the canonical definition of democracy and not firearms ownership, which directly empowers people to resist tyranny? How can you explain this by appealing to universal principles, instead of simply reiterating liberal orthodoxy? I don't see a way.