quacked

I wouldn't say that's entirely true. I've changed my mind reading debates on the internet, and less frequently I've changed my mind months or years after having had a debate on the internet.

Is your opinion that the denizens of a locale ought to have no say in what happens to it?

Then maybe I used to wrong term. It was a building full of singles, built to look almost exactly like the classic 5-over-1.

That's what they're working on next.

As I understand it, NIMBYism is "don't ever build anything anywhere in the neighborhood/town", not "don't build in this one spot we all really like". As I said, there are tons of other buildings going up over town.

They weren't multifamily units.

I live near a small town of about 10,000 people that's about 30 minutes away from a "hot commodity" city. The crown jewel of this small town is the main street, which retains a bit of kitschy Americana that has remained charming for decades and even draws tourists, for whatever reason.

A local business owner bought up one of the blocks in the center of the street and announced plans to demolish it in order to build a 5-over-1 complex several stories higher than any of the other buildings.

Without the public comment process, he'd have been able to do this practically overnight, completely ruining the street. The public fought back long and hard for many months and eventually won by convincing the town council to vote against the rezoning that would permit this construction.

I can't say I'm opposed to the public comment process.

(Note that this was not a case of never-change NIMBYism; tons of other similar buildings are going up all over the town completely unopposed. It was the ugly, generic design and the sheer size put so blatantly in the middle of everyone's favorite part of town.)

I don't understand why this standard is always applied to westerners. When we go to other countries, are they explaining all the fundamentals of western music in addition to the theories of their own? "Yeah our students in Boston don't know anything about Carnatic rhythm, but over in Bengal they all learn counterpoint and fugue before they learn the traditional ornaments"

Sorry, are you saying that small direct action is pointless until you can overturn the entire governmental system?

Yeah, it would mean that the British Crown would no longer hold dominion over the Colonies. I'd insult you, but then dang would get mad at me.

There are other ways of attacking the camera directly, I think.

I've been very pleased to see the reaction to Flock in the US. I was talking to a younger guy, very normal kid who keeps his nose clean, studying criminal justice in his junior year at college. I jokingly mentioned to him that maybe he could bring some anti-surveillance awareness to whatever law enforcement agency he goes to work for and he said, very seriously, "oh yeah, definitely. I've only gotten two cameras so far but I want to get at least five." It turns out that he and his friends all follow an app that marks the location of Flock cameras and there's a whole youth culture around knocking them down.

I wonder if we can win that battle as a society over the decades. A "traditional" human-only surveillance state is bad enough, but with LLMs involved it's just a nightmare. It would be extremely cheap to now have full automated surveillance over cameras, phone lines, etc. "Computer, send me a scored list of any dissident violations conducted on any channel under surveillance in District 14 over the past two weeks. Cut off their credit cards and send a notice to appear in Civilian Oversight Court".

The problem with granting every worker permanent residency is that they would then lose the impetus to perform the work they're so critical for at the low wage they currently take, and the prices of goods and services will rise just like it would if the immigrants were not granted permanent residency and the labor force was scrutinized and protected property. I would rather simply just stop using immigrant labor and go after exploitative companies. I realize this is politically infeasible under the current status quo, but to really solve the problem we should be jailing owners who use illegal labor, perform wage theft, etc.

We also need to end the practice of holding workers to few enough hours that they require supplemental government welfare to thrive, for example the fraction of Walmart workers on food stamps, or who want full-time for benefits but can't get it.

We'll do it ourselves! People are natural hoarders and archivists, as should be effortlessly proven by custom wikis.

I would not. I'm far less concerned about the rights and profits of copyright holders and far more concerned with society and civilization having access to the art that's produced within it.

Since I'm just pitching wild ideas on the Internet of course I have the freedom to make any suggestion I want, but I would like to live in a world where (a) no companies or rights owners are able to play bullshit games with gating access to art that can be reproduced at trivial cost and (b) we can consume all the art we want that's past its sell-by date. It's insane to me that we don't have free, legal databases of every work of art created before, say, 2006.

In theory, the financier or team of financiers would be added onto the list of creating individuals. I suppose some sort of fractional representation might be worked out.

I think that we should change copyright law such that

1) Rights can't be held by corporations, only individuals. So the rights to a piece of art or IP would always trace down to a list of names.

2) Everything enters the public domain after 20 years or the death of the entire list of ownership.

While I understand that you think this is romantic and ethical, it also guarantees a status quo where the economy and indeed everyone's quality of life is kept afloat by a permanent imported labor underclass. As we are finding out, we end up with colossal amounts of undertrained, entitled citizens and artificially deflated prices for critical civilizational services.

I spend a lot of time seething at how poorly modern software interaction is, and I've come to the belief that they basically solved most of the window-based GUI computing interactivity problems by around XP, and have just been gutting them since then.

My three most-hated modern trends

- Disappearing scroll bar with content that you have to scroll for

- Pills going across the top of the screen that are "most-used" filters instead of a real filtering menu

- Clickable text and non-clickable text appearing the same. I mean come on. Who the fuck is designing these things? That's the one I can't wrap my mind around. How can a self-respecting programmer put out a UI where the display and clickable elements look exactly the same? What are we doing man

That's not necessarily true; fewer limitations on who is allowed to provide health service and manufacture medicine and health technologies would also drop prices. Competition in healthcare is very, very difficult because it's often illegal to compete.

For me, getting a tick gave me a life-threatening allergy to the galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose molecule, which is manufactured in mammal cells. I will die if I eat red meat and go into possible anaphylaxis if I have dairy. There are also thousands of other foods I can't eat because they're either high in histamine molecules or they included mammal processing at some step (for instance red wine is often filtered through gelatin). This allergy is currently understood to be transmitted immediately at the bite.

I definitely agree that without these nightmarish tick conditions it's a non-event, but with them...

In what possible way would the broader public destroying Flock cameras on sight and allying with one another to defend those caught doing it benefit intelligence agencies?

I don't believe a legal solution is possible. We need a three-tiered response to Flock's surveillance state business strategy, depending on what level of meddling each citizen is comfortable with.

1. Protest via yard signs and awareness (what you're doing)

2. Impermanent vandalism. I like the idea of hanging copies of the fourth amendment over the lenses

3. Permanent vandalism. I think we need bounties on camera destruction and public legal funds to assist in defense, bail, etc.

The police as a class/caste are not interested in the fundamental principles that America was founded on. Individual officers may be interested in civil freedom and privacy but as an entity they only ever march in the direction of total surveillance and domination of the citizenry.

My father-in-law grew up on a small-time farm and then went into environmental engineering as a professor, and briefly worked on the Secretary of Agriculture's staff in the Biden administration. He has told me that there are 3-5 (can't remember the number) colossal meatpacking corporations in the US that have laid waste to smaller-time competition, and now that the market is captured their owners and shareholders can skim basically whatever they want out of the enterprise. He also was advocating to have policy written that would stop chronic underpayment of slaughterhouse and meatpacking workers at these colossal firms and was told it was politically inviable.

Unrelated to this, but I have Alpha-Gal Syndrome, the anaphylactic allergy to red meat, which is spreading rapidly as the ticks colonize every square inch of nature in the US. In Arkansas 20% of people tested on a big free testing day were sensitized to the galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose molecule (AGS is sensitization + symptoms, not just sensitization.)

I think that things are going to get weird with beef in the US in the next few decades.

After 10-20 years, yeah, I think they should suck it up.

Yeah I could be convinced to go to 20. And I think the rights shouldn't be able to be held by companies, only creators specifically.

Humanity hasn't caught up to the reality of the times; we should adjust copyright laws so anything over say 10 years old can be hosted for free on the Internet. We should have colossal databases of music, books, movies, etc. that can be freely traded and downloaded without breaking any laws. Maybe in the past the commerical protection of art and IP was necessary but with the Internet and AI I think we need to, as a species, get over it and focus on information archival and dissemination over protecting income streams.

The days where middle and high-end goods were of a relatively higher quality were also produced under a capitalist system, though. The US was capitalist when it built my parents' normal washer/dryer combination that lasted for 25 years with no interruptions to service, and it was capitalist when Google was first invented and you could conduct literal string searches on the internet. I don't think there's anything inherent to "capitalism" that causes degradation of product lines that doesn't also cause the creation of the product lines in the first place.

My suspicion is that the "great enshittification" has more to do with the swelling in numbers and purchasing/borrowing power of the lower classes. The middle class now has worse computers and dryers [1], but the lower class now has computers and dryers. Corporations can still make colossal sales numbers with degraded products because they're selling to people for whom possessing a product at all is a major life upgrade, and aren't worried about "the best version of this product". The same is happening to movies and TV.

[1] Many will point out that on paper and in certain metrics modern goods outperform past goods, but I think the extremely high prices commanded by quality vintage and near-vintage goods across all genres of product lines speaks for itself.

I'm inclined to agree with this. If management can't personally code, and they don't know how the big companies acquire talent, the company ends up in a deadspin of not paying enough, not adequately examining coding skills during interview and probationary periods, and having mediocre seniors who have been around long enough to understand the eccentricities of the stack but still aren't actually any good controlling the hiring and training pipeline and selecting the new architecture.

Teachers' jobs are difficult because they're expected to be behavioral specialists, social workers, and prison wardens. If they didn't have to do that, they wouldn't need to rely so terribly on printed worksheets and PowerPoints.