I would argue that a free society protects people’s rights, and this is impossible without a strong government. As for voting against its own interests, the government in a true democracy is quite literally the will of the people. We get what we vote for. So if people in general are unhappy with the outcome it is democracy itself that has broken down. The solution to a broken democratic process is not to limit the consequences of that process by shrinking government, it is to fix what’s broken in the first place. In a healthy democracy the government will take up only the responsibilities people want it to take up, and no more than that.
Run me through, in simple terms, how much worse it could get? I suppose they aren't trying to kill me, which is a nice minimum standard? These people have no respect for my rights. They don't think my rights rate on the scale of their objectives. And they want to spy on my mail - possibly to figure out from my phone if I've gone 6km from my home? I would quite like strong encryption by default and a weak government, please.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Switzerla...
In the my US Midwest jurisdiction, the truly restrictive lockdowns closed indoor business, and discouraged gathering, but to my knowledge it was never illegal to travel. And indoor gathering restrictions didn't last more than a few months in private spaces. Although, certain behaviors were strongly discouraged for quite a long time.
I'm assuming based on your units you are not in the US, however.
And I wish our government had taken a light-touch approach like yours. Dare I say I wish they'd adopted a philosophy of weak governance and respecting people's rights by letting them make their own choices.
Oh, so the law shouldn't be the same for everyone. Not making exceptions for celebrities is "bureaucratic, pointless, vindictive".
That's one way of looking at it. Seems to be yours.
* People who do not have COVID should be allowed to do whatever they like.
* People who are currently known to have COVID maybe should get treated differently.
Banning people who don't have COVID, who likely have immunity to COVID and who have more than enough money not to be a drain on the hospital system is really stupid. Spiteful behaviour just to make a point.
All these restrictions didn't stop 1.1mil ... so far & rising ... cases in NSW in 2 months. They are completely pointless. They didn't do anything. They are a waste of time that do no good and that we do not need. Anyone who cares can go worry about their own personal lockdowns.
There are single digit travellers daily who have COVID. 10,000+ daily local cases. Restrictions on tourists are literally meaningless. And didn't even stop Omicron crossing the border.
This has descended into farce, there is no justification beyond bloody-mindedness at this point.
BTW, I wish you guys luck in opposing your government. Hope our don’t follow.
Thankfully they have also implemented a nationwide vaccination scheme and a vaccination pass which is accepted pretty much anywhere worldwide.
If I were being uncharitable towards people who basically put me under a form of house arrest - which I am - I might note that the government will only revoke my rights in a way justified by your poor grasp of the figures some of the time. Which is hardly comforting when people argue that strong governments will somehow protect me from a threat that only emanates from government. This "strong governments protect rights" argument is weak. Nobody has ever threatened my rights as profoundly as my strong government.
Maybe "rights" is too strong a word, they're only applicable for about 90-95% of the time. "Privileges which only get stripped when they feel it is a good idea" is a mouthful though. The dust hasn't even settled enough to tell if the interventions worked.
Anyway, they shouldn't be reading my mail. These people clearly don't represent the interests of a big chunk of the population. And me.
Nobody has ever betrayed my trust quite like my own Government, either.
I live in the UK, which (for now) has Boris Johnson as its Prime Minister. This means that while they were fining people for having Christmas parties, going outside, and forcing people to stay indoors, he had a string of parties (12) which did not follow the COVID rules.
It's honestly sickening to watch (the Jacob Rees-Mogg video, too), and it's a great example of how the Government really doesn't stand by the people who put them in power. How would you even go about fixing this?
Macron had a huge party at the president office, with people chanting and dancing, not wearing masks, while people were still supposed to take extreme precautions.
The only original thing about boris johnson is that he put minimal numbers of restrictions on his population for as long as he could. For that you can thank him.
There's a 10-fold increase in deaths when those with COVID can't get the medical care they need.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_...
And the idea that the US is going to roll over and shrug when their hospital system falls apart is nonsensical. It is one of those sounds-scary-not-likely scenarios that doesn't play out at scale. The part people were initially worried about - ventilators, which can't be quickly scaled up in an emergency - turned out not to even be especially useful in managing COVID.
There are basic questions about whether the hospital system would have been overwhelmed in practice. People keep saying the response was bad, and yet there aren't any instances anywhere in the world I'm aware of where the hospital system really crumbled under pressure. There were lots of instances I heard of where where some people didn't get treated, and that is bad, but not so bad that death rates more than doubled to like ~1% in a local area. And even if the hospital system literally vanished, an order of magnitude worsening from 0.6% still wouldn't get death rates to 10% of the population.
It has been 2 years. We have the data now. 10% was never a possibility although that was less clear in the opening months. Even 1% appears not to have been reached in practice with the worst response policy response of any country in the world.
The hospital system being overwhelmed looks like what you said, "some people didn't get treated". Triage assigns resources to patients based on need, if there are more patients (because there are more COVID cases) or less resources (because medical staff are getting sick too), that still doesn't mean no one is getting treated, just that people who would have gotten treated sooner before now have to wait. And while they're waiting, some of those people would die. People were worried about ventilators, but medical staff can't be quickly scaled up in an emergency either.
Also, of course, all the statistics you're mentioning are with the response.
This was just a trainer pandemic. :-) Imagine one where the children and young people are dying instead of seniors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_...
No it isn't: the USA already rolled over and shrugged when their hospital system reached the state (mainly with regards to financing) it was in pre-pandemic.
My elderly father fell in December and broke his hip. Luckily, he got a bed.
A month later, when he fell again in January, there were no beds available. Luckily, he didn’t need one as the fall was more mild. But had he needed a bed, there were none at all.
Nothing was oversold. If we just allowed a free-for-all, the system would buckle and break.
Normally the pandemic would have been considered an increased risk of life: restriction of basic freedom would have been cancelled by any court. However, we saw triage like situations in countries around us. At the beginning of the pandemic France supposingly had people dying in elderly care because the hospitals were overloaded. Italy and Portugal were close to a failure of their hospital system.
Now with many people vaccinated and omicron in the game the situation is different. But I also see this slowly acknowledged by political decision makers. This does not excuse the often really messy and not consistent, often randomly changing rules. There were prepared protocols for (influenca) pandemics but they were not enacted when the WHO announced the pandemic. We IMHO never got ahead of what was happening since.
I am currently having COVID being healthy and boostered, I am quite happy that I did not catch it earlier.
Because the people who didn't want to be vaccinated take up all the hospital and intensive care beds, leading to many postponed surgeries.
E.g. in The Netherlands in October, unvaccinated people took 70% of the intensive care beds allocated to COVID patients, while only being ~16% of the 18+ population. [1]
[1] https://www.rivm.nl/nieuws/ongevaccineerde-COVID-19-patiënte...
For the last 2 years, these same officials have telling us that we have no choice but to give up our freedoms, civil liberties and bodily autonomy because there aren't enough hospital beds. This was a manufactured crisis (even beyond the likely manufacturing of the virus in a CDC-funded Wuhan lab).
1975: U.S. population: 219 million Hospital beds: 1,465,828 Ratio: 1 bed per 149 people
2019: U.S. population: 334 million Hospital beds: 919,559
https://www.statista.com/statistics/185860/number-of-all-hos...
It’s a bit hyperbolic at this point, don’t you think?
It’s a bit hyperbolic at this point, don’t you think?
As the statistics show, no. Though luckily, things are changing now that Omicron is dominant, so I think all limitations are lifted pretty soon here.
[1] https://www.rivm.nl/nieuws/ongevaccineerde-COVID-19-patiënte...
All because the hospitals and IC are full of people who chose not to vaccinate but who do get priority for medical care.
The amount of yearly cancer deaths is similar, but higher, than Covid.
I’m more familiar with hospitals giving cancer patients ultimatums to face icu, surgeries, and intensive treatments alone - and I saw this in an underwhelmed hospital well before there were vaccines.
Those are independent properties. If you don't see the distinction you will be hopelessly lost in these discussions.
If the majority wants the government to outlaw and ban opposing viewpoints or speech I think that although that is the government doing the will of the people, that is undemocratic.
To tie that to what the OP post is about, it mentions censorship that goes beyond what the stated purpose of the law is. I think most here are aware that that is probably intentional.
If you want to ensure very basic rights, small government is fine. If you want affirmative action and all that jazz, then you’ll need big government. That will likely abuse tools meant for good to make society not free anymore.
I would agree with you that a free society is one that protects peoples rights. But... somewhere along the lines of social media and virtue signaling, protecting peoples right slowly transformed from the 'No-Harm principle' to 'Comply with X_Dogma or be canceled!'. This tendency has stiffled debate, taken away rights and shown the deep flaws in the democracy of a mob. Atleast in the US and the UK, these power structures that we have put in place are not for the people but are for the politicians within that government. If you are a democratic aspiring politician showing you can enforce paternalistic arguments among your populace is the key path to power.
in Democracy, as soon as you put someone in 'Power', the path instantly diverges between 'By the people' and 'I think therefore i am'. With the creation of an institution, it becomes an entity in it's own right. It believes that since the people bestowed this power upon them, it is their moral responsibility to protect the people.
Case in point - Smoking cigs are bad for your health and 80% of the people agree... So lets ban cigarettes!
While we are on this topic, everyone agrees that endlessly scrolling instagram is also bad, so let's put a time limit on social media - Everyone gets an hour a day!
Since this pandemic thing can happen again at any time, we might as just wear our masks forever. It's a minor inconvenience, but think of how many lives you can save!
Also, this whole Covid thing really showed that there are deadly things out there that we don't understand, and since vaccine effectiveness does not seem to resonate with people we are going to break into your house and force jab ya! Oh, Vaccine effectiveness waning... Well we designed this cocktail of immunities! Mandatory for any employees in a company over 1!
Also, since we are on the discussion of democracy... Do you think we can slide in alittle bill that says all mexicans gotta go back to Mexico? Think we can get 51% of the population to agree with the "We have put a man on the moon, we can build a fence!"
... Default::default("more racist, paternalistic, irrational arguments that democracy can concoct")
Smoking is kind of a bad example here. Smoking has obvious secondary effects, i.e. secondhand smoke. I have no problem with tobacco smoking being banned from shared office spaces and other common public spaces. Sure, maybe make it possible to get somewhat easy permits to allow for things like smoking lounges, certain kinds of bars, etc. but overall I still consider it a positive that nobody is smoking at my office, movie theaters, practically all restaurants, on the train, etc.
You should have the right to inhale whatever the hell you want. But you don't have the right to force me to breathe whatever you're wanting to inhale.
This position puts you far to the liberal side of any existing internationally recognized democratic government; all of them currently place restrictions on what you are allowed to inhale, and contrary to vkou's point in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30230039, that doesn't seem to be the only alternative to ceding power over what you inhale to undemocratic, unelected oligarchs.
Yes, please.
> While we are on this topic, everyone agrees that endlessly scrolling instagram is also bad, so let's put a time limit on social media - Everyone gets an hour a day!
Wrong conclusion. (What, you wanna cut my HN procrastination by three quarters?!?) Correct conclusion: Just ban all that endlessly scrolling shit.
Huh? How does that follow? I don't think so. Seems at least as likely that "the government" is just collecting and codifying some of the populace's pre-existing norms.
TL;DR: [Citation needed]
> historically what you see in the death throws of an empire.
Throes.
Fuck knows if that's etymologically just a weird old spelling of 'throws' that has survived only in this particular usage or WTF it's all about, but nevertheless that's how it's usually spelled.
Piet Hein, who coordinated the Danish Resistance (which was, arguably, the will of the Danish people, though even today the Dansk Folkeparti has seats in parliament) satirized the situation in this grook, entitled Majority Rule, in 01969:
His party was the Brotherhood of Brothers,
and there were more of them than of the others.
That is, they constituted that minority,
which formed the greater part of the majority.
Within the party, he was of the faction,
that was supported by the greater fraction.
And in each group, within each group, he sought
the group that could command the most support.
The final group had finally elected,
a triumvirate whom they all respected.
Now of these three, two had the final word,
because the two could overrule the third.
One of these two was relatively weak,
so one alone stood at the final peak.
He was: THE GREATER NUMBER of the pair
which formed the most part of the three that were
elected by the most of those whose boast
it was to represent the most of most
of most of most of the entire state —
or of the most of it at any rate.
He never gave himself a moment's slumber
but sought the welfare of the greatest number.
And all the people, everywhere they went,
knew to their cost exactly what it meant
to be dictated to by the majority.
But that meant nothing, — they were the minority.
⁂
The idea of limited government I described, which is fundamental to liberalism, comes essentially from Locke's Two Treatises of Government in 01689. Rousseau responded in 01762 with the idea you so ably summarize, the absolute sovereignty of the "will of the people", in The Social Contract, calling it "the general will": https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/roussea.... Rousseau already recognized the failure mode Hein skewers in the grook above, but he hoped to avoid the formation of political parties.
Condorcet's paradox showed that the will of the people was incoherent in 01785: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_paradox
In 01793, the will of the people decreed that the streets of Paris should run red with the blood of France's greatest and most honorable; Robespierre the Incorruptible carried out this Terror justified by Rousseau: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Terror
In 01850, the will of the people established the Fugitive Slave Act, requiring all government officials throughout the US to assist kidnappers of fugitive slaves, sending them back to the most abominable system of slavery humanity had ever known, a system itself established by the will of the people of the Southern States: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugitive_Slave_Act_of_1850. A few short years later, the will of the people of the US decreed that those people should start killing one another en masse, ending with about a million dead, but four million delivered out of bondage.
In 01918, the will of the people created the Solovki prison camp, which grew into GULAG over the next decades, through which 18 million people would be forced to labor for the will of the people; some 1.6 million died: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%93%D0%A3%D0%9B%D0%90%D0%93
In 01933, the will of the German people passed the Enabling Act, making Adolf Hitler dictator; before the war was out, the will of the people would murder ten million people in concentration camps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act_of_1933
In 01951, Kenneth Arrow published his Impossibility Theorem, showing that the idea of the "will of the people" was incoherent in a far more comprehensive sense than Condorcet had ever imagined: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow's_impossibility_theorem
In 01958 the will of the Chinese people manifested in the Great Leap Forward, which Mao justified by explicit appeals to Rousseau's ideals. The largest famine in human history, or possibly the second largest, was the result. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward
In 01974 Hayek was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for explaining how voters and government institutions are unavoidably laboring in ignorance of much of the information needed to make the decisions that are optimal for the general welfare, while the price system can approximate those optimal decisions more closely: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Use_of_Knowledge_in_Societ...
⁂
The list of atrocities justified by the will of the people goes on and on: the Killing Fields, the Holodomor, the US system of mass incarceration, the Tutsi genocide, the Congolese civil war, the North Korean dictatorship, and on and on. You might protest that these atrocities were not in fact popular, that dictators were lying about what the people wanted; but by and large you would be incorrect. In other cases the policy of establishing limitless state power was popular, but the atrocities in which it inevitably culminated were not.
That is the policy Rousseau advocated, and it is the policy you are advocating in your comment. In 01762 the idea that the will of the people could never err and would always promote the general welfare was an understandable error, but today we have ample evidence, evidence written in rivers of blood, that shows otherwise. Liberalism—giving individual people great freedom to dissent from the will of the people—works less badly. I know it's not very inspiring to chant "Our system works less badly!" but that's the best we can do so far.
This does not necessarily imply "shrinking government", but it does imply strong limits on the powers in the hands of that government.
> in 01689.
> in 01762
> in 01785:
> In 01793,
> In 01850,
> In 01918,
> In 01933,
> In 01951,
> In 01958
> In 01974
> In 01762
You do know that this affectation makes you look pretty darn ridiculous, don't you?
Well, if you didn't, at least now you do. HTH!
YHBT. HAND.
OK, thanks for the admission that you're a troll.
> HAND.
POAD.
But we all know that giving excessive power to good guys turns them rather reliably into bad guys.
It chafes me a little to see this so often phrased as something "everybody" thinks. There are enough people who feel otherwise in my social circles that it's pretty easy for me to consider this as a shockingly dumb assumption for a person to hold.
Though I do acknowledge that you're probably close to right from a purely numerical perspective.
Though from your response, I think you probably understood what I meant despite the ambiguous phrasing.
Excepting the approval of end to end encryption and residential zoning, pretty much every problem thread on HN is littered with comments about how we need more regulation and laws to solve X or Y or Z.
Wanting the "good guys" to have more power is pretty much the default response on here nowadays. I remember earlier- including before I had signed up for an account- when HN was much more libertarian, compared to the relative minority it seems to be now.
The alternative to giving a democratic government power isn't 'nobody has power'.
The alternative to giving a democratic government power is ceding it to undemocratic, unelected oligarchs.
When a democratic government has it, you get some say in how it is used.
Then there is a third class of power, where it's useful for the government to have it, but abuse of it can be really bad. So you need to make it really hard to abuse that power. Maybe using the power requires a lot of people to agree. Maybe a list of difficult-to-forge and difficult-to-abuse conditions need to be met before that power can be used. Maybe the power is designed so a lot about how it is used ends up being public, so people can audit its use. And so on.
But I think if there's a power that is likely to be abused by government, and really hard to put checks on that (ab)use, then the government just should not have that power, no matter how useful that power might be.
The problem with assuming that last bit isn't a big deal because they're the "good guys" is that even if they genuinely are the good guys, you never know who is going to get elected during the next cycle (or the next-next, or the next-next-next, or...). They might not be the good guys, but they still get to use that power, and certainly won't pass laws to take that power away.
For example, we might give a democratic government the power to tap everybody's phone calls at once, but if we don't, that doesn't necessarily imply that undemocratic, unelected oligarchs, or anyone else, is tapping everybody's phone calls at once. There might just be nobody who has the power to tap phone calls, as is the case with secure free software running on trustworthy hardware, or there might be many people who have the power to tap only a few phone calls.
And we might give a democratic government the power to assign workers to jobs, for example, as the Soviets did. Alternatively, undemocratic, unelected oligarchs could assign workers to jobs, as in a coal-mining company town; but an additional possibility is that workers and employers, or unions and employers, negotiate with one another, each limiting the power of the other.
We might give a democratic government the power to decide what's for dinner each day, which sounds ridiculous but is exactly the standard practice in kibbutzim and in school lunch programs in democracies. Conceivably, undemocratic, unelected oligarchs could decide what's for dinner each day, though I don't know of any examples; the usual alternative is for each family to decide what's for dinner each day independently, though in many cases this degenerates to an undemocratic, unelected head of household deciding. Often enough, some household members prefer school cafeteria foodoid products to the results, despite having no say in that decision-making process either.
Edit; As I said I’m a libertarian and a group of whatever people talking what ever where ever is totally fine with me but manipulating people with intent is not protected by the First Amendment And shouldn’t be confused with free speech
Was it a problem a couple centuries ago, when offline media emerged and blossomed? It was the same effect, just smaller scale. Yet, free press is valued as essential for democracy.
Trump it can be argued went so far to break basic things like US mail, and encourage corporate monopoly, the course correction in the other direction is not only reasonable but expected...turns out divisive (fascist) wannabe dictators are not a good recipe for freedom either...
I think all these start around Trump's administration. Trump start calling some media/social media as fake news, and some media/social media start censoring his supporter.
After seeing the worse effects of misleading information, many free-speech-supporter back off alot.
Rather democracy supporters back off…
It is ironic that we should trust government to be an arbiter of truth, given that our government has been a source of "misinformation" for years (a.k.a. blatantly lying to support an agenda).
Trump is a correlation to (not cause of) both the left and right in America turning sharply populist and inward looking in recent years. Populists tend not to be concerned with principles like freedom of speech, or the concerns of the global community.
Then along came Bulletin Board Systems and then the Internet, and all that changed.
We had a society in which all media was controlled by a handful of corporations who dictated what people saw and thought.
Not that I disagree that populist internet media are really contributing to the betterment of mankind /s
I don't know what I was playing at, I have no need for making bombs, but at the time it was the coolest thing--media outside of the machine.
I can't remember what the rest of my media experience was like (aside from text adventure games over telnet) but I'm pretty sure that the BBS-sourced material stood out to us for a reason.
The Anarchist Cookbook is an interesting study: prior restraint was never exercised against it because Hoover's FBI decided it was protected by the First Amendment, and it was published by the same (commercial) publisher as Charles Bukowski, The Sensuous Woman, and The Turner Diaries, selling some two million copies in all. But it's so famously terrible that many actual anarchists have questioned whether it was really a false-flag effort aimed at getting would-be terrorists to blow themselves up, and its author was admittedly never an anarchist!
In 01999 many people in the US could read The Anarchist Cookbook entirely without leaving a government record simply by walking into an open-stacks public library and reading it off the shelf. Even if you checked the book out from a library branch, librarians did not enter that fact into a centralized database, and were famously reluctant to cooperate with the thoughtcrime-surveillance aspects of the PATRIOT act after 9/11.
Today this level of freedom from surveillance is much rarer: you can probably get a copy of the book in 45 seconds, as well as far more reliable and trustworthy information on how to do many terrible things, but there's an excellent chance that the NSA will store a permanent record that you did so in the Utah Data Center. (Even if you use TLS they will probably decrypt that once their quantum computing effort succeeds.) If you walk to the library, Verizon probably stores that fact permanently, unless you leave your cellphone at home; if you drive there, license-plate cameras, wireless toll systems, and possibly OnStar and Tesla record that fact.
We saw both of these futures in 01992, but so did the FBI and the NSA.
In many countries outside the US, BBSes were in many cases a bigger hole in official censorship regimes than they were in the US.
Which is unfortunate, as they do have some interesting thoughts that are now masked by insisting on their own edgy year format.
you know how its annoying asfuck to reed shit without punctuatuin and capitals and possible misspeeled and those fuckers who never use the shift period or comma keys get read a lot less than they might just because its too much drudgery to shlep through their texts? your abit like that and i dont think thats what your going for
One would think you write to be read; to inform, argue, hopefully convince (and possibly even entertain?). This silly affectation is jarring; it breaks up the reading flow and often makes at least me give up. I may be more sensitive than most to sh...tuff like this, but surely I can't be all alone in it.
So what you're doing is just robbing yourself of an audience. Is that really what you want?
OK, maybe it is: We're "unthinking conformists". So... Why do you use correct spelling, punctuation, and capitalization? The nitwits my first paragraph imitates all say that's the real, you know, sign that you're, like, square. Are you perhaps more of an "unthinking conformist" than you'd care to admit -- above all, to yourself?
I can sympathize with a sensitivity to things that others take in stride: for example, TVs in public spaces, jumping and cutting frenetically, impossible to really ignore.
But here's another example: in the 80s there was still a live issue of the convention that 'he' could cover both genders, and so on. I'd been reading long enough, with enough older writing, that I can remember how attempts at nonsexist writing could be jarring and awkward -- arresting the reader full stop for the sake of a cultural-politics position completely irrelevant to the point being written about. (Especially since those newer conventions had to evolve.) For people to come over to the newer way took time (and I wasn't won over instantly myself) -- maybe it's useless to say this, but the Right Answer to How We Should All Talk is not divinely revealed.
"But this isn't for liberation! It's dumb!" Maybe. The point is that in a dynamic free culture you get comfortable with genuine differences and you learn it's pointless to make a fuss over such a harmless eccentricity. And a dynamic free culture is the type that can learn to get better over time. I think seeing so many complaints, so consistently, about this eccentricity, is a real (albeit trivial) signal of a cultural problem. (Admittedly I dunno, maybe it's just that HN has a lot more commenters and the fraction who do this is a big enough number now. But it's part of a broader pattern.)
I hope this helps you see my point of view, starting this thread. Can't speak for Kragen.
Still is, AFAICS. And I'm not entirely unsympathetic to the traditional view that it can.
> I'd been reading long enough, with enough older writing, that I can remember how attempts at nonsexist writing could be jarring and awkward
Still are, sometimes.
> For people to come over to the newer way took time (and I wasn't won over instantly myself)
Long before me, it seems.
> the Right Answer to How We Should All Talk is not divinely revealed.
Kind of isn't -- and kind of is: It's informed by lots of things, like prevailing usage, history, social upheaval, fleeting fashions, and... Simple logic. From a single speaker's perspective, most of those are pretty much "divine revelation"; none of us can single-handedly change these phenomena.
Especially for numbers, which more than most other aspects of language are governed by mathematical logic, which less than all the other governing phenomena changes over time.
> "But this isn't for liberation! It's dumb!" Maybe.
No "maybe" about it; it just plain simply is dumb. That's not how numbers work. Also, to the extent that Kragen wants to promote a "long now" perspective: Why just one prefix zero? Bah, that's still practically the day after tomorrow! That should be at least three zeros! Or, heck, why not six -- or fifteen?
See where that gets us in the end? Yeah, exactly: Nowhere. It's just ridiculous.
> I think seeing so many complaints, so consistently, about this eccentricity, is a real (albeit trivial) signal of a cultural problem.
Yup. And when one person persists in being "a cultural problem" that is sometimes a sign that something is wrong with the culture... And far, far more often a sign that something is wrong with that person. Shaving this situation with the oldest(?) of the philosophical Razors, I'm leaning towards Kragen's affectation.
> (Admittedly I dunno, maybe it's just that HN has a lot more commenters and the fraction who do this is a big enough number now. But it's part of a broader pattern.)
I think it's just simply that the HN readership is above-Internet-average literate and STEM oriented, and therefore tends to get annoyed at illiterate -- and innumerate! -- writing more than you might be likely to see elsewhere on the Net.
> I hope this helps you see my point of view, starting this thread.
Sure. Are you getting mine?
> Can't speak for Kragen.
If only they could speak for themself.
We are all of us more wrong than we can imagine. I believe cultures that tolerate weird ideas (and there's a difference between tolerating and embracing them) learn faster than conformist cultures. My 80s anecdote was about how an idea I now see as good appeared at first as pointless convention-breaking of negative value, and how you can't tell the difference at first. Such changes generally don't happen by conspiracy, but by someone having an idea and doing it, and others running with it or not. The policy you seem to be pushing instead is that ideas to be tolerated must come with social proof. ("none of us can single-handedly change these phenomena. ... one person ... something is wrong with that person.") In putting it that way I'm probably exaggerating what you really think, but directionally this does seem to be our difference.
> [zeros are dumb]
As I said, I don't care about this at the object level. In my native culture we shrug and move on.
If Long Now dates end up materially helping to make our culture more farsighted, it wouldn't even be all that surprising. For instance, if it caught the attention of one particular nonconformist and inspired them towards some project that set off another cascade which you didn't see as silly.
> the HN readership is above-Internet-average literate and STEM oriented
That hasn't changed in this interval.
Maybe something in that direction, but OTOH maybe not quite: I just think it's counterproductive if by running with one's idea, one also actively antagonizes people with it. And Kragen's way of advocating the "Long Now" perspective comes off, at least to me (and apparently at least a few other posters), as equally disrupting to fluent reading as people advocating for other new perspectives while demonstrating their "non-conformist" creds by writing in lower-case-only, skipping punctuation, ignoring (or, likely, more often just not knowing...) the rules of grammar or spelling. (Admittedly, not equally as bad as the arseholes doing all of those at once; just in that direction.) That feels likely to put as many or more people off one's message as it wins converts, so recommending them to drop it was really just honest advice for the good of their own cause. (At least originally, before they apparently confessed to not actually having a cause but just be trolling.)
IOW, TL;DR: Not so much "must come with social proof" as that this seems in practice to be disproving / having disproved itself; while not necessarily as to the validity of the concept itself, but as an effective method of advocacy.
> > the HN readership is above-Internet-average literate and STEM oriented
> That hasn't changed in this interval.
Yeah, I was only speculating about why a quirky way to write numbers, specifically, comes off as innumerate and might therefore be seen as (approaching-)equally annoying here as bad spelling / grammar / punctuation / capitalisation is elsewhere, in other below-average-illiterate corners of the 'Net.
Our systems initially supported this. But we found an extremely popular and widely used date parsing library has terrible bug. For some reason (if forgot what) as part of its logic it checks something about the date after the date it’s parsing.
So for users of this extremely popular library the 9999 crisis will actually happen a day early.
I kept trying to alter the non responsive maintainers that there was going to be a major crisis with their product in about 7000.
They never got back to me.
While English from 1000 years ago would be unintelligible to most of us now...
And how long is HN gonna keep these threads? I was worried about the NSA but now I'm worried about dang.
"My opinions are always wrong but some times less wrong than others."
There, FTFY. Now it makes sense: Some times they're less wrong than other times.
In eight thousand years.
As a student you have a far more limited right to free speech in school. See Morse v. Frederick, 551 U.S. 393 (2007), the famous BONG HITS 4 JESUS case. Those students weren't even technically on school grounds (across the street) but were a part of a school function. A school definitely has the right to suspend a student for distributing material deemed interruptive to the learning environment of a school.
Any links on reading more about this?
I imagine they went on to affect change in the lives of those around them even if in a small way.
Grass roots, even small, is still an important catalyst for change.
And we still do. Some of the corporations have changed, some are the same. What else is new?
> That is not by any means a free society.
And it still isn't. No "EARN IT Act" needed for that.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/05/how-the-robber-b... (also referenced in Tim Wu’s The Master Switch)
A telegram was sent offering the position to a well liked military officer named William Rosecrans.
Roseceans agreed, and sent a telegram back. But the telegram never made it.
It’s assumed the Secretary of War used his censorship powers to prevent it from reaching its destination.
The result 18 months later was President Andrew Johnson.
Any device plugged into the ptsn phone system which can display caller id has to have v23 dial up modem protocol facilities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caller_ID#Regional_differences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITU_V.23
This means _anyone_ with access to the ptsn can upload malicious firmware to a telephone, ATA gataway or dialup modem if the hardware is designed to allow it, & firmware space permitting!
I do find govt legislation somewhat lacking though, for example porn sites now have to have "are you 18 or over", but social media like reddit or twitter does not and regularly on reddit illegal porn (child & animal) is making the front page of reddit before moderators take it down.
Social media sites like reddit or twitter are exempt from the 18year old porn checks because the porn content is not the bulk of their content, it covers many things like jokes, darwin awards, Karens having a psychotic episode and other things like that.
So would parents want their kids seeing illegal porn or mental health breakdowns on social media sites like Reddit, Twitter, Facebook/Whatsapp groups because the current legislation allows the "are you 18 or over" checks to not be applied to facebook, reddit, twitter, whatsapp and other social media platforms?
I know the flip side argument for illegal content is its supposedly stopping an adult from doing it to a child, but I'm not convinced on that point considering how many parents and siblings are behind child abuse and dont post online, but use fraternal networks like the masons and religious organisations to abuse under the pretence of teaching people life lessons!
The religious stance, at least new testament, is to prevent the spread of STD's and to avoid mental health issue when cognitive dissonance sets in during middle age, but Govt's and education needs to tackle this problem to avoid people being exploited through lack of knowledge of the law, because the whole population doesnt even get taught a TLDR of law for life which makes it possible for clever people to exploit less knowledgeable people, which isnt on in my books either.
I am on reddit multiple times a day for years and I have never seen this happen.
Two blokes in a Whatsapp group, someone sent some animal porn and because they were part of the group they got convicted of downloading.
I accept I can be done for downloading animal and child porn from Reddit's front page, but I think its the legislators way of facilitating animal and child porn distribution whilst convicting those who spoke out to report it.
Thats why I sometimes think criminals are running the world in plain sight masquerading as good guys!
The laws are not fit for purpose.
Theres a lot more going on behind the scenes than most people realise. There is a lot of data sharing taking place between businesses behind the scenes and there is a resistance for different entities to admit this but GDPR is slowly prizing open those dark pools of data.
The government had de-facto control of all mass media before the internet. They could control the narrative to a degree they didn’t need tight surveillance. They lost control of that with the internet and are desperate to get it back.
It was a complex system and I wouldn't want to describe it all here, but the fact that you and I can talk to each other in front of anyone who wants to listen in, is far ahead of anything that existed then.
What? You're really arguing that, to put a year on it, in 1990 we didn't have a free society and democracy?
From jailing anti-war protestors (WWI) to jailing anti-war protestors (Vietnam) to allowing corporations to put serious, nearly life-ruining heat on whistleblowers, to the way the media largely operates by uncritically republishing press releases and communiques, I would say it's pretty clear that we're living in a closely managed society with a severely manipulated democratic process.
Today we enjoy many freedoms nobody had in 01990, largely thanks to the internet, but those freedoms are probably not going to last much longer, also thanks to the internet.
Yes, distracting from your main point by intentionally attracting attention to something completely unrelated is bad.
And it's good to know who those griefers are before that becomes a life-or-death question, as it eventually was for Turing, Swartz, Assange, and so many others.
BTW it is also useless in any other scenario.
edit: maybe if you say it 3x fast I wouldn't have had to have vaccinations to attend public school when I was a kid?
But if the internet had been developed earlier, we would have debated something like this in the past.
Strong disagree. A good government protects freedom from big private companies that feast on it. Antitrust laws cannot be enforced by a weak government, and without those, there can't really be freedom.
if only absolutely everyone could totally agree on one single definition of "good"...
I thought the protestors turned out to, by the numbers, prove to be not Canadian and not Truckers.
Meanwhile, I'm not sure why you would pick that example. There seem to be more relevant protests in the US you only have to go back a short while.
Meanwhile, it's difficult to assess if the US government has a great track record at dealing with terrorists. We're unsure of how many incidents are prevented.
I think it's pretty clear why the parent poster choose that protest as an example of government tyrrany, and not the, uh, couple of months of gassing, rubber-coated bullets, and beatings that preceded it.
Every day, police officers and prosecutors go to work and spend much of the day worrying about criminals, and a few of them are assigned to worry about terrorists too. When they go home, they have to keep worrying about criminals, too, because their job makes them tempting targets for revenge. I'm not saying people don't seek employment as police officers and prosecutors in order to have free reign for their sadistic urges --- they do --- but that's not the majority and it's never the whole story.
Terrorism can have extremely large effects, just not desirable ones. When the people think the government is doing a bad enough job of protecting them from criminals, terrorists, and protests, that government is at high risk of losing its power entirely, which is something almost nobody in the government wants.
Even anarchists often don't want it, because there's no guarantee that what replaces the government will be better. You may not like the FBI, but if the alternative is the Proud Boys, better the devil you know. Remember who won the elections after the overthrows of Mubarak, the Shah, and the Tsar.
A mostly liberal-democratic provisional government that was violently overthrown eight months later by a Bolshevik coup because it refused to deal with the same problems (war and famine) that caused the Tsar to be overthrown?
Have we all forgotten the February revolution..?
And they did lose it in no time, yes
Protestors by default must communicate in the open, and to each other. They are much more disorganized.
You can't really think that some politicians are knowingly and deliberating proposing an existential threat to "free society and democracy."
Why not? Many people oppose free society, and democracy has never been popular among elites.
Most of them probably aren't malicious, they're likely just entirely ignorant and easily manipulated, making them just as bad as the malicious ones, given their job is supposed to be to make informed decisions for the benefit of their constituents.
Im not going to list a bunch of politicians... but Flynn will say it outright. So your assumption is clearly wrong.
edit: Found this. He meant the opposite. Of course.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/01/us/politics/flynn-coup-go...
The existential threat this bill poses to free society and democracy is exactly why they're supporting it. It's not some accidental side effect.
They're opposed to the existence of free society and democracy because it limits government power, which means letting criminals and terrorists run free. They want the police to have all the power they can get because, as far as they're concerned, they're the good guys, and giving the good guys more power helps them win against the bad guys.
Free society means limited government, and the only way for the government to be in favor of that is for the government to vote against its own interests. That requires the people in the government to identify more strongly with the people living under the government than with the government itself. This is precarious at the best of times. Why would the governing party want to make it easy to organize dissenting political parties and alternative centers of power? Power might fall into the wrong hands.
I know that sounds sarcastic, but try to see it from their perspective, even if you don't agree with it.