News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Why a German billionaire says that pledges like Mark Zuck... by jMyles on Thursday December 03, 2015 @12:24PM (#10670903)
I upvoted you, but disagree with your assessment.

> wouldn't it be better to have all this power be in the hands of the democratically chosen

In a word: no.

Although the state spends some money on things that aren't abhorrent - broken clock politics as it were - it also spends money killing, torturing, and imprisoning people.

So I think it's a very defensible moral stand to give the state as little money as possible.

Re:Why a German billionaire says that pledges like Mark Zuck... by HiLo on Thursday December 03, 2015 @12:27PM (#10670935)
Private companies used to spend money killing, torturing, imprisoning, exploiting, robbing, and oppressing people, until the public stopped them through the means available to them in government. And you're saying this is a bad thing, and the power should mostly rest with private companies? At least with the government, the people staffing the bureaucracies and agencies don't have their (non-existent) bonus tied to how hard they fucked a customer over.
Re:Why a German billionaire says that pledges like Mark Zuck... by jMyles on Thursday December 03, 2015 @12:35PM (#10671017)
> And you're saying this is a bad thing

Where did I say that?

I'm not the cynic you seem to whom you seem to be responding; I believe that the internet age will empower nonviolence from non-state actors as well as an end to the violence of government.

Although we may have needed government to stifle private violence in the past, I don't think we do any longer.

> the people staffing the bureaucracies and agencies don't have their (non-existent) bonus tied to how hard they fucked a customer over.

For most reasonable definitions of "bonus" for a bureaucrat, I think that this statement is false. Oliver North and John Yoo is not in prison. Hillary Clinton is running for President. These people all received bonuses for wrecking havoc on a level about which no private entity can dream.

Re:Why a German billionaire says that pledges like Mark Zuck... by simoncion on Thursday December 03, 2015 @11:46PM (#10674685)
> Although we may have needed government to stifle private violence in the past, I don't think we do any longer.

We moved from private jackbooted-thugs-for-hire to public police protection because thugs-for-hire are unaccountable. Sadly, over the past hundred years or so we've forgotten this lesson, lost our vigilance, and have permitted many of our public servants to make themselves largely unaccountable for their actions.

Power and leadership structures naturally emerge in sufficiently large groups of people. This is unavoidable, even in sufficiently large anarchist organizations.

As the Dothan, AL incident has most recently demonstrated, evil people come to power from time to time. All healthy organizations must be able to detect evil people and remove them from power.

In your future where government is no longer permitted to apply force, where is the accountability? Who detects and ejects evil? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Re:Why a German billionaire says that pledges like Mark Zuck... by jMyles on Friday December 04, 2015 @12:32AM (#10674859)
> In your future where government is no longer permitted to apply force, where is the accountability?

I assert that, in a social dynamic characterized by omnipresent personal recording devices, the capacity to share the gathered evidence, and the capacity to deliberate and apply social pressure in response to criminal behavior, that accountability is the natural consequence.

Re:Why a German billionaire says that pledges like Mark Zuck... by simoncion on Friday December 04, 2015 @01:00AM (#10674935)
> ...in a social dynamic characterized by omnipresent personal recording devices, the capacity to share the gathered evidence, and the capacity to deliberate and apply social pressure in response to criminal behavior, that accountability is the natural consequence.

Did you hear about the one where Social Justice Warriors bullied an artist into a suicide attempt because they felt her fan art "erased fat people" and that her use of the interjections "dude" and "man" when speaking to women made her "transmisogynistic"? [0][1]

This all happened on-the-record, on the Internet.

How does your social theory account for this incredibly harmful behavior?

What is an adequate response to this behavior under the system that you propose?

[0] http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2015/11/02/sjws-bullied-a-youn...

[1] http://www.dailydot.com/geek/steven-universe-fanartist-bulli...