I grew up with the puritanical mindset of: "Your intrinsic worth as a human is the money you earn; because the money you earn is from how hard you work; and how hard you work is a reflection of your intrinsic Virtue."
Thus I grew up in a family that loathes the unemployed. I really hope -- though I have grave doubts -- that this event gets through to them, so that they can have some personal growth, too.
I think loathing the unemployed (especially if it isn't caused by health conditions and isn't temporary, like in this case) is commonplace in any society. There are many studies which show unemployed people are more likely to commit crimes. e.g. [1]
Unemployed people, by definition, are net consumers. [2] Unless society as a whole actually produces wealth, there is nothing to tax, and the government doesn't have any money to spend. And how does wealth get created without people in employment? Unless you are the country with the reserve currency, which effectively gives you the ability to keep printing money until the world catches up to the con. Which doesn't still change the underlying economics, it is just that at any given point in time there is always some country which will be using the reserve currency status to make it appear like you can create wealth by printing more money.
Aiming for more employment is a net positive to any society, and I think that is what conditions people to loathe the permanently unemployed.
[2] I remember reading an essay by PG about how getting employment is when you go from being a "net consumer" to become a "net producer", cannot find the link.
> I think loathing the unemployed (especially if it isn't caused by health conditions and isn't temporary, like in this case) is commonplace in any society. There are many studies which show unemployed people are more likely to commit crimes. e.g. [1]
> Unemployed people, by definition, are net consumers.
How do you define a "net consumer"? The only resource to consume on this planet is its ecosystem. Are unemployed people consuming more of our ecosystem than employed ones? I don't think so.
A lot of free software has been created by people not in employment. So the idea that unemployed people cannot be contributing value to society is false.
I've encountered exactly two people in my life who were perfectly healthy, both mentally and physically, but just sat around all day doing nothing for years on end.
> It simply isn't possible to shut down the economy and then pay people, businesses to sit idle for an undetermined amount of time.
The Swiss Federal Council is setting aside billions of CHF (I think the total is currently at 32 billion) for exactly this: some relief for small and medium sized businesses. They've recently announced a process to have 80% of your salary insured up to a certain high cap, between 150k and 200k CHF.
There might be vastly different political and scale differences between the USA and Switzerland that make this infeasible for the USA. But Switzerland is showing that in principle it can be done. Making your blanket statement for the whole world, false.
42 billions total now, the 32 billions just announced is on top of the 10 billions already put aside last week.
And yes with these measures essentially any income is now assured: Salaries, salaries of SMB owners (normally excluded from unemployement benefits for obvious reasons), hourly workers, limited contracts, internships/apprenticeships, self-employed (i.e. without being employed by an LLC or something else like that) business like artists. Also daily stop-gap money if you have to stay home for more than a few days to figure out how to take care of your homeschooled kids.
Plus like 20 billions in credit guarantees for small businesses to avoid a cash flow squeeze.
All measures use existing infrastructure for paymenet (commandeering the banks for the cash flow squeeze credits) to guarantee the money has arrived by end of the month, latest. And that it will continue to flow, like regular pay check.
- Learned to bake my first loaf of bread from scratch. Wife and I celebrate by eating some of the bread together.
- Germinating my seeds in seed trays for the first time. Food stuffs like corn and bell pepper plants, in addition to flowers. Taking pictures every day as the corn and red cabbage sprouts.
- Playing with our dog extra, since he is depressed I'm home and ignore him for most of the morning and afternoon to WFH.
Roche is a Swiss company [0]. My neighbor here in Canton Zürich works at a lab that uses these machines. She's been testing coronavirus, and she's having to go in on Saturdays now to deal with the backlog. Not Sundays though. Labor on Sundays cost an arm and a leg in Switzerland.
I'm sorry someone promised you the Fediverse as if it is "free speech heaven". It isn't. Which is fine by me.
To be honest, I think your view of what "free speech" is, is a ridiculous extreme. Go use FreeNet. If I don't seem compelling, I've put together an essay to address this in more detail [0]
> As you are somebody who is responsible for stewarding the ActivityPub specification
I am not associated with the W3C in any way, and had absolutely no hand in creating ActivityPub. Chris Webber and many others deserve that credit. I don't attend the SocialCG meetings either (which are open to all).
The most I can say is I've implemented a library implementation in Go (there are other Go projects), and I voice my opinion in the community.
> I am seriously disappointed by this dismissive attitude.
Dismissive? My apologies, that's not what I am going for. I'm precisely showing how certain folks' expectations in the free speech community were unrealistic and showing a mature technology that precisely delivers what they want.
Consider what ActivityPub is not: it is not a way to physically get your free-speech in byte form forcefully delivered to others on the network. That's what multiple free-speech folks have repeatedly drawn the line at when I poked and prodded what their disappointment stems from. Instead, to get this technological capability, one needs to switch to blockchain or FreeNet protocols as this is what they do. The former actually requires consensus whereas the latter doesn't! ActivityPub as a technology does not guarantee any of this.
I think free speech is important (I wrote a whole damn blog post about it, and here I am writing more), and I think there are important conversations to be had around it. But complaining about ActivityPub not being a censorship-proof technology ("I got banned from one instance for being too conservative") is not a productive discussion to be had. There's better ones out there.
Careful with this. A lot of communities don't like scraping of their public content. There was a guy who got booted from archive.org I think for trying to archive an instance that had a lot of under-18 folks' content.
I'd encourage you to build a federated app instead. :)
I think you are making the assumption that I am scraping content based on the fact that I am developing a free software content scraper that anyone is invited to use.
Yep, just like I assume countries that enrich plutonium to weapons grade levels and stick it on the pointy end of an ICBM are threatening others with nuclear weapons, even if they're never launched.
If you think developing web spider software is akin to developing nuclear weapons, I think you might want to go have a talk with some larger, well-known companies who have not only half-developed not-yet-working software (like my activitypub spider, which doesn't even have a storage backend at the moment), but who have fully developed advanced web spiders that have actually downloaded and archived exabytes of data from the web, to be saved privately for all time. Frequently they even let anyone who wants search the full text of it, usually without authentication!
If you don't want second parties to have copies of your data, configure your webserver not to send it to them when they request it. You can't force someone to do something with an HTTP request.
Your first statement looks like it should be logical, but when read for soundness, the consequent ("[then] I think you might...") makes absolutely no sense following the antecedent ("if you think..."). I only mentioned nuclear weapons to try to really emphasize to you that a technology's existence is enough to cause fear in people and communities, which does have real world consequences. But I don't think you care about that.
Anyway, I work at one of those companies. You know what they have? Ways to let users opt out (ex: ROBOTS.txt), ways to ensure they're not DOSing people when scraping (which uses material resources: compute time, spindles, electricity, etc), ways to track the copyright of the source material (which belongs to the author, usually), and ways to respond to second-party requests (legal and non-legal notices) who want to know how much of their data has been scraped or exercise their rights over their material. These technological features are because this is what human societies have found to be a decent balance between scrapers' rights and internet users' rights. Your solution lacks this due consideration and gives internet users a giant middle finger.
In your last paragraph it is pretty clear you are doing this because of some ill-conceived "ethical" notion that "because HTTP responded with this payload, it is now mine with an 'ethical license' to do anything". There are other ways to point out security flaws in ActivityPub that are way more constructive and less asshole-ish, but it seems you're pretty keen to erase a lot of moral and legal nuance to prove "because I have a technological capability means I have the moral ought and the legal right". Sorry, but no: the world is a lot more complex than this.
Just because I have the technological capability to transmit the message "you're being a dick" from the comfort of my home doesn't automatically mean it would be ethical for me to, so of course I am not going to tell you "you're being a dick", and normally I wouldn't type this sentence at all but in this special case I am because it shouldn't be a problem with your ethical system since I'm not actually saying it despite having the technological capability, so it should have no impact on you (and if it did, it should give you pause to reconsider that maybe you need to do more self-reflection on discovering your actual reasons for doing this ill-advised project).
Because you have not cared to clarify your ethical view in the last 3 responses to me, nor in your ethics statement of your project.
Your system is designed to download and save information in an unaccountable manner on behalf of anyone, "unaccountable" literally is a doorway to "for any further purposes", so it's a very safe assumption.
The lack of clarity also comes from ignoring the bulk of my previous message. Ball is still in your court. I am inviting you to make this exact clarification (plus far more), when all you seem interested in doing is dodging, delaying. The worst action you could possibly take is accusing me for assuming in order to fill in the very deliberate blanks you are leaving behind.
> Your system is designed to download and save information in an unaccountable manner on behalf of anyone
I think perhaps you have confused some source code that I have released with a service that performs a function on behalf of a user. I operate no such service.
All I have done is produced a tool that allows a user who downloads and builds and runs that tool to download data from a website, much like a browser or any other HTTP client. There is no "on behalf of"—it's just a tool for a first party to use.
I am happy to let you keep showing off your circular reasoning to the world, and will happily repeat myself pointing out all my counterpoints you did not engage with and ignored.
For example:
- I claimed a technology's existence is enough to cause real world consequences. You ignored this point.
- I mentioned you are not including safeties to building a tool to protect its user[0] (the "first party" user of your tool) and its targets ("second party" people the tool-users are subjecting to your tool). That makes it legally/morally unappealing to use as a tool(puts self in danger), and morally unappealing to be subjected to. Why build a tool this way to be completely legally/morally unappealing, unless you want to cater to users specifically that do not have such legal/ethical concerns? You ignored this point.
- I have invited you to clarify your ethical view. You are circling back to a previous non-argument.
- You simply refuse to verbalize your implicit moral stance -- that your role as a "toolmaker" absolves you of all the moral consequences of its use[1]. If this is incorrect, I welcome clarification from you.
[1] This moral position has long been well-criticized and is not a sufficiently nuanced moral stance in this day and age. For an old example, consider Tom Lehrer's criticism of von Braun: "'Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department', says Wernher von Braun." [2].
Are you talking about the philosophical idea of critical theory? Because I find the internet rotten with it, but probably in a way contrary to your ideological viewpoint (which also makes my critique a critical one, and so round we go). For example, your comment critiques a whole ideological category of people and offers no concrete solution towards action to remedy or alter this viewpoint. You fit into critical theory very well, as do I. Unintentionally or not.
It's probably at best an unproductive line of thought or at worst virtue signalling, so probably not a valuable discussion to have, really.
I've never thought that a black or a Hispanic should be treated or thought of badly because of his or her race. Nor do I think that my thoughts and experiences should be discounted because I am a white male. Everyone should just be treated as an individual. Is that so controversial or retrograde?
Let me guess... the "younger people" whose "insanity" you're referring to all happen to share a specific political and social alignment, which you yourself do not?
It used to be that the right to freedom of speech, something essential for liberty, was a baseline everyone could agree on.
A growing vocal minority has been "deconstructing" that to say that your freedom of speech should depend not on the fact that you are a human, but instead into which ideological, racial, biological, economic, or social groups you can put yourself.
When presented with the argument that this damages the protection of freedom of speech, and hence endangers basic liberty, the counterargument is either that a) you are identifying yourself as a member of an out-of-fashion group and therefore should be silenced, or b) that the whole concept of freedom of speech came from one of these out-of-fashion groups and is therefore inherently bad.
Neither one of these responses is reasonable. They're both ad hominem arguments, and usually arrive peppered with red herring arguments to bolster the "you are bad" perspective.
Western culture, which, to varying degrees, has protected freedom of speech as a core value, is one of the most tolerant cultures on the planet today. It is that same freedom of speech that has been a key enabler for this tolerance. It most certainly is not perfect, and can most certainly be improved, but not by removing the mechanism most responsible for improving it in these dimensions.
It often feels as though one is confronting a screaming person who is accusing one of stealing his or her glasses, while said screaming person is wearing those very same glasses during the outburst.
I can understand how that would feel like the screaming party is "insane".
Granted, that may not be at all what the other poster meant.
Absolutely, because critical theory is a phenomenon of the Left. The right has its wackos too, but both the sane Left and the sane Right are quick to distance themselves from them. Critical theory lunacy seems IMHO to get a pass from otherwise sane persons on the Left even if they don't embrace it themselves.
> I've never thought that a black or a Hispanic should be treated or thought of badly because of his or her race. Nor do I think that my thoughts and experiences should be discounted because I am a white male.
That's nice, but in what way is that not a non-sequitur.
Yeah, it is kind of a non-sequitur. On the other hand you have to admit that I was responding to a rather amorphous comment. My intent was to merely given an example of where I draw the line between sane and insane.
> I've never thought that a black or a Hispanic should be treated or thought of badly because of his or her race. Nor do I think that my thoughts and experiences should be discounted because I am a white male. Everyone should just be treated as an individual. Is that so controversial or retrograde?
I'm with you on this. I don't think it is controversial.
On the other hand, your sweeping comment on "young people" being "insane", seems to do a categorical kind of "discounting" based on their age (as opposed to race). As if they haven't "grown up enough" to shed bad ideas. Which is by definition an shifting of the goalpoasts because by the fact of life, the cohort of "younger people than you" will always keep growing in size and there's no mobility: there's nothing a younger person can do to be older than you. A fair comment to call "younger folks" "insane" then? I found it unfair, even if our political ideologies align.
This is an example of a lack of self-awareness that I meant to capture by saying "critical theory rotting out the internet". I'm not claiming you're a part of this group, by the way, for all I know you may change your mind or reinforce the deliberate nature of your comment. I appreciate you giving me a concrete example, though. From my point of view, people are too free to be critical of the ideas they want at any time, courtesy of the internet, without actually having an in-person, stimulating, and productive discussion with real human beings that share a different view, and therefore do not learn how to adapt themselves to new ideas, and therefore have a stunted/warped/non-existent way to introspect, and therefore are free to shout out products of criticality theory (which can be for any ideology, conservative or liberal[0]) without the feedback and nurturing of personal growth through genuine intellectual humility (it is performative intellectual humility[1]). So here I am, challenging you, hopefully in a positive way, as you've challenged me (perhaps less explicitly and more gracefully).
In my personal experience it happens in "all sides"'s internet communities based on politics or political philosophy. Which is expected since the largest participants are not there to have their minds changed, and this hard-headedness then becomes this mirror which is what people model themselves to become. And cannot recognize this cycle for what it is. Huge net negative all around.
[0] Note I don't use "criticality theory" as a politicized term like Jordan Peterson and other right-leaning folks like to use it, for reasons I don't care to discuss here.
[1] This blur between genuine and performative can get into some weird postmodern ideas, but again, even exploring ideas like that has become politicized by the Peterson camp, so I don't care to discuss here.
Well, I did say "a lot" of young people, not all. I have three adult children and I wouldn't say any of them are in the thrall of critical theory, despite having graduated from public universities in California.
By the way, what is an example of critical theory being used by partisans of the Right?
The "deep state" and "tech giant bias" ideological movements of the Right sit firmly within the broader definition of critical theory. Whenever the Right appeals to freedom from corruption or freedom of speech for those specific issues, they are appealing to the narrow definition of critical theory (emancipation/liberation from being subject to another's dominant position of certain liberties).
You obviously know the ins and outs of critical theory much better than I do. You've also cited two ideological movements of which I am completely unaware. Thanks for your time.
> I fail to see any evidence for how 'direct democracy' is the primary, or even relevant social artifact which drove the special directive highlighted in the article (i.e. cancellation of public events), or even any evidence that such 'direct democracy' provides superior social organization.
The thread you're commenting on so far has gone like this:
OP: "See a democracy can institute sweeping authoritarian-like bans, but with the will and blessing of the people"
Next: "I'm Swiss and it's because the government isn't our enemy, it is an extension of us"
You: "Nope it's because y'all are wealthy, that's the only reason y'all will survive!"
Grandparent: "uh dude the government system has been around longer than the wealth"
You: "I don't see why the government system matters, it's the money!"
The reason you're being downvoted is because you came into a conversation specifically about how the democracy of Switzerland is able to act quicky with a decree that could be viewed as an authoritarian-like policy, but with the implied general will (to use Rousseau's term for Sovereignty in political philosophy) of the people, and said "I don't see the effectiveness of this quick decisive action of democratic government, instead it's about the money they have!"
Thus I grew up in a family that loathes the unemployed. I really hope -- though I have grave doubts -- that this event gets through to them, so that they can have some personal growth, too.