- Your concerns about a majority oppressing a minority are well-founded, but a system where people vote for career politicians don't seem to be moderating this problem - if anything it's exaggerating it.
If you trust the general population to vote a marginalized person into office in order to push legislation which benefits that marginalized community, why wouldn't you trust the general population to pass that legislation directly?
The only explanation I can think of is that you think that professional political representatives will have better ideas than the general population.
- Your problem statement is effectively "I want to share access to my documents very informally with people who don't care to have any security practices, but still keep them secure"
There's another way of sharing in cryptpad though, which is for each user to create an identity/account. Once those you're collaborating with have accounts, documents and folders can be shared by granting access within cryptpad's UI. No secrets have to be circulated.
- While the bike is stationary there's limited options for moving the bike relative to your body. While the bike is moving, you can make small steering adjustments which move the bike left or right relative to your body, which helps re-balance the body-bike stack. The faster forward you're moving, the faster these steering adjustments take effect.
- > because they do non-free parts now they are likely to make more of it non-free later, is that the argument
Yes, that's one indicator of how the incentives are structured, though there are other factors to consider too - mostly regarding where the money comes from and who is involved in the decision-making.
Perhaps you find it dystopian that people make predictions about future behavior and use them to inform their decisions about who to trust. It's very common though, and is the basis for the concept of reputation.
- It has to do with the way power and incentives are configured within the project, and therefore what can be expected of the maintainers in the future.
For some people/use cases, the threat of developers rug-pulling a tool you depend on is not a big deal as long as it's good right now. But in many situations the tool which has less features but also less incentive to rug-pull wins out.
- If you want an HTTPS ingress controller that's simple, opinionated, but still flexible enough to handle most use cases, I've enjoyed this one: https://github.com/SteveLTN/https-portal
- As you point out, decades ago privacy was a widespread social value among everyone who used the internet. Security through cryptography was also a widespread technical value among everyone (well at least some people) who designed software for the internet.
Over time, because security and cryptography were beneficial to business and government, cryptography got steadily increasing technical investment and attention.
On the other hand, since privacy as a social value does not serve business or government needs, it has been steadily de-emphasized and undermined.
Technical people have coped with the progressive erosion of privacy by pointing to cryptography as a way for individuals to uphold their privacy even in the absence of state-protected rights or a civil society which cares. This is the tradeoff being described.
- An interesting thing about labor disputes like this is they're presented as quasi-political stories, where people eagerly argue "for" or "against" the union or corp as though they were political parties or philosophical camps or something.
But as with most economics, it doesn't really matter what you think is fair, or who has the best justification. These are simply economic forces testing each other, and whichever is strongest will prevail.
People in the US are so accustomed to working class people being universally disempowered that we find it perverse and "upside down" that some workers could actually have the economic force to make demands and have them met. Meanwhile employers routinely make arbitrary demands and have them met. It doesn't even occur to anyone to argue about them, because it's recognized that employers simply have the power to demand whatever they want from their employees, and that this is natural and reasonable.
- The difficulty is that owners don't just voluntarily hand out "fair shares" to workers who agree to play nice. The only reason workers get paid at all is because if they stopped getting paid, they would stop working.
Once enough automation is introduced, the owners really have no incentive to pay a fair share to anybody whose labor they no longer need. So any promises to "share the wealth" that comes from automation ring hollow.
- That looks better from your position, but if your proposal was a better deal for port workers, they would probably be asking for it in negotiations.
The port workers are negotiating based on what is best for their careers, not what would be optimum for society broadly.
Almost everyone does this with their own career - we push for more favorable wages, conditions etc simply because we want them and we believe our value to our employer justifies them.
Rarely does anyone else complain about this. The difference is that union workers do it at scale, and are therefore often more effective than the rest of us. So it seems like they're getting an unfair deal, but there's nothing unfair about it - they're just better negotiators.
- > I would rather be manipulated by private industry than controlled by government. I cannot out vote a majority, but I can out wit a billboard.
Another way of saying this is that you would rather be controlled through methods which are subtle, novel, and difficult to put a finger on than through methods which are overt and fit traditional narratives of control.
- > The extreme suspicion of commercially introduced anthropogenic agents seems a bit ridiculous in both natural ecology and the human microbiome. Prove this compound conclusively safe, but not these other ten million compounds we're just going to allow to run wild.
With endemic organisms (or viruses) they just are going to run wild regardless of how we feel about it. There's no point in banning a naturally occurring algae because excluding it from the environment is not a practical option.
The only time when we have any strong control over what organisms are in an environment is when they don't yet exist there, but we have the ability to introduce them. This is our only technical choke-point, so it makes a lot of sense to make a big deal of that decision, and probably to be quite conservative about it. You can always let the cat out of the bag later, but you can never get it back in.
- This view is unpopular because it is shallow and unserious. A vague call for people to "organize" and "make nations" as a solution to their problems hand-waves away the interesting and important practical problems which face people who actually do try to organize to create alternatives to the dominant political order.
In particular, the campaigns and efforts of those organizers are undermined and attacked through pervasive surveillance.
Tor is not a substitute for political organizing, in this age it's a necessary precursor.
- Maybe rather than a big info explaining that there's nothing to see, it could be a big info explaining that "source IP address" is useless as evidence of a crime, because, as this server and many, many other proxy services demonstrate, the IP listed as the origin is in no way guaranteed (or even likely) to be the actual origin of the traffic.
It's like raiding the home of the mail carrier because someone got drugs in the mail. Sure, it could technically be that the mail carrier is also a drug dealer. But when it comes to the USPS, the identity of who delivered the contraband package is not a useful data point for investigating the crime, and acting otherwise is willful ignorance.
- By that logic why not also seize and do forensics on all the ISP's routers too then, just in case? After all, the ISP could be secretly in on the criminal plot, and how could you know without imaging every hard-drive in the data center? It would be negligent not to.
The truth is that police investigations normally are restrained based on the disruption that they cause the public. Police deviate from standard operating procedure when it comes to TOR exit node operators because they want to punish and intimidate them.
They want to punish operators because the authorities are frustrated by the effectiveness of these technologies in countering the pervasive surveillance environment which the authorities take for granted.
- It seems you're saying that since there's a choice on one level (phone architecture, Android vs. iOS), it doesn't matter if choice is denied on all other levels. Your reasoning seems to be that if anyone is unhappy with being prevented from doing something with their phone, they can resolve it by buying a different phone.
This notion of freedom is compelling in its elegance, but it's not how freedom is generally understood in contexts where most people have pre-existing commitments and investments which constrain their exercise of a particular high-level choice.
For example while it's true that people who live in an authoritarian state generally do have the ability to leave, we don't consider that option to absolve the authoritarian state of its responsibility to grant rights to its citizens. The reason is that it's very hard for most people to switch countries: it requires learning a new language, re-buying all the possessions and property that can't be relocated, and losing all the connections and efficiencies people depend on to make their lives work well.
Because of the high switching cost, people who had the misfortune to settle in a state which turned authoritarian are likely to submit to conditions which they don't actually agree with or like. We don't consider such people to be free, despite the nominal first-order freedom of choice they do have.
- > when a traffic hogs asks to peer with you (as an ISP) that would certainly entail a higher level of network management or infrastructure.
Why wouldn't the ISP refuse to peer with them, then? This is a genuine question, I don't understand the industry as well as you seem to.
To my understanding, net neutrality doesn't mean "every ISP has to peer with anyone who asks". It just means "you can't treat packets differently based on where they came from".
If it's really so terrible to deal with an ISP that dumps tons of Netflix traffic on to your network, then don't peer with them, problem solved, right? Seems like the reality is that ISPs *do* want to peer with Netflix's provider, they just also would like to have the right to demand additional money directly from Netflix for doing so.
Obviously as operators of the network they have the technical ability to do this - the question is whether it's good for society / economy / etc for them to be allowed to.
- Parole judges are not accountable for their work in the same way surgeons or pilots are. If a judge makes a bad call on a parole hearing, a person stays in prison and it's effectively impossible to challenge the decision. Parole hearings are extremely subjective, so it's vanishingly unlikely that a judge will face any repercussions for making a ruling which people would consider unfair.
This means that there's no pressure for them to manage the influence of factors like hunger on their decision.
- > there is no longer an incentive to create and popularize creative work
It's reasonable to be worried about this scenario. If there was no incentive to produce creative work, our society would be much worse.
But the notion that there's only one way to prevent this scenario, and it requires a drastic expansion of the already sweeping "intellectual property" regime...well it just lacks creativity.
It's not that we want to eliminate the incentive to be creative, it's that we believe there are better ways to prevent that scenario than to further entrench a broken system.
- Drug war bad, but I'm not sure these drugs can be equated so simply. Caffeine has a mild euphoric effect but not nearly as much as meth. Both caffeine users and meth users are prone to hyper-focused behavior loops - e.g. super meticulous house cleaning. But meth is so much more euphoric that the behaviors don't have to be intrinsically rewarding at all. For many people, when you feel that high, doing pretty much anything is rewarding. That's why you get weird behaviors on meth like people pulling out their hairs one by one, or completely disassembling a working TV.
Those behaviors are not conducive to holding down most jobs. If our society did more work educating and supporting people in productively integrating their use of drugs into a functional lifestyle, maybe it would be less of a problem. Certainly there are some ways people could use meth that are positive. But I still think there's something about meth that makes it more likely to ruin lives than caffeine.
- > What is to stop the agency from just saying every request is "sensitive"?
The courts. It's not that unusual to have to litigate a FOIA request and get a judge to decide that no, the agency's excuse does not exempt it from the request.
Unfortunately this means that the eponymous "freedom" in the FOIA can become quite expensive.
What is your explanation? I suspect that it's something along the lines of: "people waving foreign flags are signaling their intention to invade the US", but that you don't want to say it overtly because it's obviously a racist talking point from right-wing media.