As someone who got onto the web in HTML 2.0 era I can feel the appeal of Gemini, although I disagree about their attitude towards static inline images. In day-to-day world that's what separated HTML from the earlier text-based hypertext systems that you could run over a terminal connection (or in a window, like AmigaGuide). You could actually have real documents from the internet, on your own screen, without loading up a word processor. White pages, black text in different sizes, blue links, and color images! Cool!
Obviously, Gemini is a niche that's as futile as it can be. It's like going back to living without a running water because once there was a peaceful village, then first came running water, then electricity, and then the whole village was rebuilt into a big city, and the old village is now gone. But the logic goes: if they didn't get running water in the first place, the people who wanted electricity too wouldn't have moved in, and the city wouldn't have been built. So, reverting back to living without running water now will, if it doesn't maybe demolish the city, at least remind me of the good old days.
The problem with the current web is that before, maybe just 10 years ago, you could use a good browser to remove and disable all the user-hostile cruft aimed at you on websites, and maybe browse pages in relative peace. Now the fight has moved to removing and disabling all the user-hostile cruft aimed at you in the browser, that intend to remove the tools you could use to fight the websites, and given the de-facto monopoly of Google that's just incredibly sad.
What's more demoralising is that it's just one slice in the big trend to erode the concept of ownership alltogether. It's a matter of time until you can no longer even try to own your browsing experience. The web will have changed from a place where people could freely download and view other people's documents over HTTP to people using one-way thin-clients with attestation so that the producer can guarantee their website is interpreted correctly as intended. Good luck writing your own browser that does the right thing for you, it won't be served data off the web unless it can prove the client is unmodified and signed by Microsoft. That is, of course, assuming you could still write code yourself for your computer and actually run it on your own without asking permission from the vendor.
It seems that the 20's answer to what Gemini represents is probably something like asking an AI to load a web page, extract the real contents of the document, possibly with cues from accessibility hints, and reproduce the document as text and still images for viewing.
On the other hand, how the heck are they claiming to own any of that if they can't even produce the paperwork. A big enough developer would be able to remaster the game just enough to provoke a lawsuit from the "rights holders" and that would be the place to cross-check whether there's any meat in the deal. If they can't prove they actually own the rights, they can't sue. If they can, then they can sell/license it to the developer. Obviously this won't work for a small, independent actor because it's all going drown in the noise of legal billing.
I've always maintained that if we must have copyright then it should be something like a trademark where you have to actively defend it to keep it valid. If you have the "rights" to a piece of music, movie or game then, to validate the copyright's original purpose, you will have to actively exercise those rights to make gains from the "intellectual property". Copyright does not promote innovation if you're not required to gain from your creation: if you're just keeping your work in a drawer there's no point in granting you a temporary monopoly over the right to copy the work.
> It feels like we are in a weaker position then ever: militaristically,
> economically, scientifically, and so on. Meanwhile the threats of China
> and Russia and what could happen in the next few years are quite concerning.
On the other hand, it's not only USA really.
Russia with their czarist structure of power and control hasn't really had an economy that's more sustainable than USSR ever pretended to have, and their government keeps digging the country further in the grave as we speak. Russia can be a nuisance to its neighbours by their size alone but as their failing offensive in Ukraine shows they don't really give much to worry about in their peer countries of similar size and position.
Europe is running around like a group of headless chicken pecking eachother with minimal ability to make decisions cohesively and in unison, and many larger European countries are trampling knee deep in the mud when you compare to their heydays.
China is indebted, lacking energy, yet wants to expand their projection of military power but having enough to do with their current neighbours and desperately needing to maintain trade relations around the world means that, at best, the ruling party can only think about it. Unlike some other peer nation states I think they just might ultimately be wise enough to understand their position themselves, too, despite the desire to posture hard.
Further, I can name many countries that are, in relative terms, doing similarly stupid things now that they didn't do before and few that have actually managed to preserve some common sense but they're either small enough to not matter a squat on the global stage or they aren't interested in global power in the first place.
Not that USA isn't actively destroying the very relations that did help them extend their power across the globe cheaply through allies, working to weaken the dollar, and in internal affairs shooting themselves in the foot at a rate that could make even Russia jealous, but USA is still pretty good in comparison to their competition. There's no serious contender for USA at the moment and won't be any time soon even if USA keeps hitting even lower and lower bars of statehood.
I'm more pessimistic than optimistic about the future but the reason is that it seems the world as a whole has enshittified themselves down to a level that would have seemed even theoretically impossible by the key players only a few decades ago.
In my eyes China seems to have a very strong position. They have invested so heavily in optimizing their industries, regulations, etc. that they really seem to operate many orders of magnitude more efficiently than anyone else.
They also have a great advantage in their communistic structure. If they decide on a big project, pivot, allocation of resources for long-term strategy, they just do it. You don't have to convince citizens or states. They just do it if it makes strategic sense.
Those benefits often seem to outweigh the issues of citizen happiness, cohesion, government support. China has gotten incredibly good at controlling their citizens such that dissent seems like a pretty small issue for them to deal with.
As I understand, China is facing some difficulty scaling up food production for strong food security. I'm not familiar with their issues regarding power generation, but I'm curious to know more. While I'm not surprised they are indebted, like almost every other country in the world, I don't see that stopping them from ignoring the rest of the world when they don't think anyone else can stop them. Whenever tensions reach a breaking point.
On top of all that, China seems to have a lot of good talent, particular in the technology sector. We are at the precipice of an AI and drone-enabled world war, and if a country were to make vast strides in that technology to get ahead of peers, the power differential could be quite scary. And if any country has the industry and resources to produce tons of such weapons at scale, I'd expect it to be China, maybe with some help from their allies.
China has been a rising star for a long time, albeit not without its share of problems obviously. I heartily agree there's a lot of momentum in China to the direction of things getting better whereas traditional western countries lack much of that, and might even ride a momentum for the worse. And China's centrally-led government can be very effective and more sophisticated, in a way most other dictatorships simply aren't. But China is still too weak to make moves. Their domestic policy and handling of their internal affairs eats up their resources of force, and they also have a long border full of territorial skirmishes they can't just ignore while acting out militarily. It's hard to see China being able to make a move that would be a threat to West and that wouldn't cost way too much. China can certainly posture threats left and right, but I think they understand they don't necessarily need to consider carrying out those threats for real. They also know the art of patience, and together with that and some effective propaganda they can just sit, wait, and slowly move the piece towards their favour, and there's some calm wisdom in that that I greatly appreciate. The constant talks and news we see about a threat posed by China is likely a significant part of just that.
> Government actions that restrict the ability to privately...
This seems weirdly backwards. The main problem is not generally what government can and wishes to restrict, it's all the proprietary/private restrictions such as not being able to run whatever code you want on hardware you own. The bill does nothing to address the actual rights of citizens, it just limits some ways government can't further restrict the citizens' right. The government should be protecting the citizens' digital rights from anyone trying to clamp them down.
Yeah, the whole concept of rights in the US are, in the main, about restricting what the federal government and states can do individuals.
Whereas in Europe our concept of rights include restrictions on the state, but also also might restrict non-state actors. We also have a broader concept of rights that create obligations on the state and private actors to do things for individuals to their benefit.
It’s kinda good the planet gets to run both experiments, and more.
The EU approach seems to want to insert government in to contracts between private individual and those they do business with, and the US approach seems to want to maybe allow too much power to accumulate in those who wield the mercantile powers.
The optimal approach probably lies in the tension between multiple loci.
It's one experiment because both systems are competing at the same time for global resources both in cooperation and competition with each other and other actors. Additional both systems exist in such widely different contexts that any comparison would be inaccurate because other factors such as geographic and historical have a large impact on any measured results.
The US approach is more than that, for instance if every employee in a business pushes for a contract that says workers will negotiate as a block and pay new union dues, and the contract says new hires will be bound by that too, that's illegal in many states. Not just the normal "right-to-work" restrictions, the contract isn't valid even if unanimously agreed on by every current employee (union security agreements). But for shareholders they all set it up like that, with votes weighted by dollars. A new shareholder can't buy someone's shares and government says it's illegal for him to be bound by the voting structure.
And secondary strikes are also illegal in the US under Taft-Hartley.
The optimal approach appears domain specific and granular, too.
As for domain specificity:
I don't know any Europeans who'd prefer to have American healthcare.
I don't know any European technology companies that hold a candle to the sheer breadth and depth of capabilities brought into the world by Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, AMD, Intel, OpenAI, or Anthropic.
Yes, Mistral, Nokia, OVH, and SAP exist, but compared to the alternarives, they exist in the way the American healthcare system exists compared to its alternatives.
As for granularity:
Perhaps we want American style governance for building the tech, but then European style governance for running it?
The American model of governance was created for a world with very distant nation-state threats but a large number of colonial threats, which is why it's centered around "every man for themselves" (in spite of FDR's best efforts). On the contrary, European governance was basically developed during the Revolutionary Wave, which was sweeping all across Europe, that monarchies found that the only way to appease the people was to give into their reforms - and often rapidly because of the domino effects of revolutions. In other words, American governance was built from the ground up, while European governance had to be adjusted within the existing environment and monarchical government frameworks.
In fact, European governments weren't even well-defined in their current state up until the end of WW2, in spite of how much Europeans like to take potshots against USA for being a "young" nation.
This does make the American form great for working with uncharted territory (how to handle new tech, how to exploit the earth in new ways, etc.) while the European form is more reactionary (how do we keep the people appeased, how do we provide a better standard of living, how do we alleviate hardship).
Perhaps the ideal mix of the two, between the frontier-style governance and European-style reactionism, like the Swiss model.
> I don't know any Europeans who'd prefer to have American healthcare.
Selfishly I think my American healthcare is better than anything I ever had in the UK. I can see a doctor within 2 weeks even a specialist, I can actually get a sleep study, my doctor will actually listen to me rather than tell me I'm just getting old, go home and take an ibuprofen.
In terms of health outcomes, the UK generally has higher life expectancy and lower maternal mortality rates than the US - but that said, even the richest Americans face shorter lifespans than their European counterparts.
The real focus and point of contention should be that the US healthcare system is exponentially more expensive per capita than any European model, but is worse for almost all health outcomes including the major litmus tests of life expectancy and infant mortality. In some cases, the wealthiest Americans have survival rates on par with the poorest Europeans in western parts of Europe such as Germany, France and the Netherlands.
Americans average spend on inpatient and outpatient care was $8,353 per person vs $3,636 in peer countries - but this higher spending on providers is driven by higher prices rather than higher utilization of care. Pretty much all other insights in comparing the two systems can be extrapolated from that fact alone imo.
This is probably incredibly naive so apologies if so - are things like differing obesity or other health problem causing conditions accounted for when looking at overall outcomes of the system?
The higher cost makes perfect sense to me but calculating an apples
to apples comparison of health outcomes between potentially very different populations seems potentially very difficult? Again sorry it's probably a solved problem but figured I'd ask :)
The lower life expectancy in the US is almost entirely down to young people dying at a much higher rate than Europe due to car accidents, murder, and drug overdoses. It skews the averages pretty badly. If those individual risks don't apply to you then life expectancy is actually pretty decent.
There is a wide variance in the general healthiness of the population depending on where you live in the US, which does affect life expectancy. Where I live in the US my life expectancy is in the mid-80s despite the number of young people that die.
That's because mortality rates are only weakly correlated with healthcare quality. The US has much higher death rates in some young demographics, which skews the average, but those people didn't die due to lack of medical care.
You can have exceptional healthcare quality and relatively low life expectancy in the same population.
The Brown study I cited above concludes differently, and is strictly a longitudinal, retrospective cohort study involving adults 50 to 85 years of age.
Within that 50-85 cohort, among 73,838 adults (mean [±SD] age, 65±9.8 years), the participants in the top wealth quartiles in northern and western Europe and southern Europe appeared to be higher than that among the wealthiest Americans. Survival in the wealthiest U.S. quartile appeared to be similar to that in the poorest quartile in northern and western Europe.
This is likely very regional. As a single data point, raising the family in the Boston area for the last 25 years I do not recall not being able to see a doctor the same day for the regular scares, from ear pains and high fever to falling and later vomiting (is this a concussion?).
A few times when we needed to see specialists, we often saw them within 24 hours; occasionally longer but I would say with a median of 48-72 hours. Even things that are clearly not urgent (for dermatologist "hey, I have forgotten about skin checks for the last 2 years, can we do the next one now", for ENT "hey, my son is getting nosebleeds during high intensity sports; can you check if there is a specific blood vessel that is causing problems"?) always happened well within two weeks. Three caveats to this happy story:
1. This is Boston area with likely the highest concentration of medical practitioners of all kinds in the US. I had good insurance with a large network, decent out-of-network coverage and for most cases not needed a pre-approval to see a specialist.
2. Everyone is generally healthy and our "specialist needs" were likely well trodden paths with many available specialists.
3. Our usage of the doctors, as the kids became generally healthy teenagers and adults, dropped significantly in the last 5-7 years. I hear post-covid the situation is changing and I may be heavily skewing to the earlier period.
At least from what I can see, COVID and the changes in attitudes towards medical professionals are driving a lot of burnout and leaving the profession; and since then economic pressures are squeezing private practices out of existence and a lot of specialists end up working for private equity now.
I think you should also balance your take by asking people who recently lost their job what they think about their healthcare. I’m sure you’re aware of that, and my point is rhetorical, but that’s the trade off here, it isn’t only about what it looks like when things go right, you should also consider what happens when things go wrong. It’s also enlightening to see what happens many times when people “did everything right” and still got shafted by the US system. See: Sicko for instance https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YbEQ7acb0IE
I suspect the time it takes to see a specialist in the UK depends on how urgently the issue needs to be addressed. The real advantage you have is that you can be seen by a specialist within two weeks even for non-urgent stuff. That’s not to dismiss your need though. The definition of medical urgency and comfort don’t align well.
That's ridiculous. Nobody gets healthcare equivalent to a third world country unless they just don't try. (Think, an addict or mentally ill person, which is still not a good thing, but much smaller of a carve-out than you've represented)
If you cough up for private healthcare maybe, when it comes to the NHS if it's not going to kill you immediately it's more or less 'take a spot in the waiting list and God will sort it out' these days.
That's largely due to austerity effects and not the inherent model of UK healthcare. That's what happens when political appointees and ministers bully civil servants and doctors that the best minds all leave, while the government significantly cuts funding to the NHS while forcing it to move to AWS.
> I don't know any Europeans who'd prefer to have American healthcare.
Probably depends a lot on where you are in Europe. Some countries have long waiting lists for surgeries (life saving ones) and access to doctors is very limited (too few, months to get an appointment) so it sucks as well if you are in such a situation
Ok, so about 0.0134%, Parent comment’s point is that -the average European- absolutely does not want the US healthcare system in Europe. Simply due to our shared believe healthcare is a basic right and should be universally available to everyone.
Those who have the financial means to travel to the USA for medical treatment do so largely due to running out of conventional options at home, experimental treatments or specific doctors who are regarded as the best in their particular field.
Most of the US outbound medical travel is due to treatment at home being too expensive and risking pushing entire families to bankruptcy.
The fact that 100k europeans fly to the US for medical treatment is factual, but does not equal them wanting the US healthcare system in Europe.
Idk .. I injured my knee playing soccer (tore a bunch of ligaments) a few months ago. Wasn't life threatening. Still, got care after waiting for about an hour, xray and all. On a Saturday. In Sweden, single payer insurance. I paid only about $20 out of pocket.
This is mostly to obtain cheaper care. In general America does seem to have some of the best care in terms of quality. It’s just also some of the least affordable.
US is not the only destination for Europeans, they also go to Thailand and wherever. Few Americans go to Europe. It's not affordable, but when money is not the issue you go to the US.
i'm one of the Americans. went to South america for a dental procedure that was 12k in the US, 2.5k there. very modern facilities, they had some better tech than my american dentist. if you can speak a bit of spanish, i highly recommend looking into it for expensive dental stuff.
Most people prefer healthcare they afford over healthcare they can’t. (Most, not all. There are a surprisingly large chunk of Americans who seem to vote
Against their best interests in a lot of areas.)
I don’t want to rain on your parade, but you would be more fair by replacing these companies with VCs, because they’re the ones lifting real weight here.
That's because in the US we don't give non-state organization power over other people. At least not in the European way where you have to give your life to an org. A US citizen has the freedom to disassociate with any organization at any time for any reason.
Of course this comes with a social cost, offset as this allows people who are discontent with their arrangements to forge a new path
States like California have high job lock, so most innovation comes from side-projects as people checkout from work.
> That's because in the US we don't give non-state organization power over other people.
How are credit ratings maintained again?
> At least not in the European way where you have to give your life to an org.
I have to what!? News to me.
> A US citizen has the freedom to disassociate with any organization at any time for any reason.
Maybe, but the EU is more militant in enforcing that right. Some US states are working on "right to be forgotten" laws, but they've got a lot of catching up to do, and I don't think there's a federal law in the works yet.
I don't agree with that at all. If anyone else tries to infringe your rights it's either voluntary i.e. you've consented to this, or it's involuntary in which case you can sue them or the state will prosecute them on your behalf.
What you’re missing is that the set of rights European countries recognize and the set of rights that the American government recognizes are not the same set.
In Europe they recognize a right to be forgotten that simply does not exist in the US. Europe recognizes personal data rights that the US does not. These data rights impose requirements on the way companies manage your data and specifically do not allow, e.g., Facebook to get you to consent that your rights do not apply. The European government protects imposes citizens’ rights on businesses in several ways that the US government does not.
On the other hand, US free speech rights are generally stronger. And of course no one else except US citizens have an inalienable right to sleep on a bed made of loaded handguns.
Obviously the rights that the state grants are different in the US than Europe, but the rights of individuals are protected versus other individuals, corporations, and general organisations; just as they are in all civilised countries. To the extent you can have famous cases where people sue large coffee franchises for selling coffee that's too hot.
So the statement that "the whole concept of rights in the US are, in the main, about restricting what the federal government and states can do individuals" is far from reality, and I felt it necessary to ground this conversation back in reality.
> but the rights of individuals are protected versus other individuals, corporations, and general organisations; just as they are in all civilised countries
Kind of. In the US there is no protection of free speech when posting in Twitter or Facebook, for example. There isn’t even a consent issue here. There’s no need for you to consent that Facebook can sensor your speech because you have no right to free speech in that context at all.
This is exactly what the poster was presumably referring to. Many rights in the us are in fact only protected from infringement by the government.
What I said is a very general statement that broadly applies to all civilised countries, reiterated because the parent comment was very incorrect suggesting that rights are mainly protecting citizens from their state in the US. It's simply not true.
It is oddly funny that people in my town are ferociously protesting the police force's adoption of Flock surveillance cameras when everyone already carries total surveillance devices (smartphones) on their person at all times.
You can (generally) tell when a person around you is filming, and you generally don’t have to worry about tons of random individuals bringing together footage of you for tracking and surveillance.
Most of the cameras are attached to either Apple or Android devices. The companies that control these ecosystems could use them for mass surveillance. The government could 'politely' ask these companies to do that for them. Or they could just directly order the phones.
Sort of except for the fatal flaw that you are talking about battery powered devices that mostly live in peoples' pockets. The reason Flock cameras and Ring doorbells both serve well for mass video surveillance is consistent predictable location and power.
Maybe, yes. On the other hand, there's lots and lots of people running around with these things, so you get pretty good statistical coverage, especially in cities.
Unless we are trying to do the "conspiracy theory" route: there is not "thinking" here. You can at least sniff traffic or whatever and tell if your phone is ringing back to google even when you tell it not to.
And the discussion above is about a different kind of surveillance. Notifying Google (or state) that I'm sitting in front of my PC is one thing. Sending photos of videos of me jerking off is different.
In Germany it's (very roughly speaking) illegal to film people in public. (Importantly, not the same as filming a thing or event and having people incidentally in the frame)
I'm pretty sure the point parent was trying to make is that you can't get other people to leave their phones at home and there is very little recourse if a private citizen decides to record you without your consent from their phone in a public space. There's of course a difference in the powers involved, but people have had their lives ruined because somebody captured a video of them out of context or in their worst moment.
That's the notion of "rights" we have in the US though. It's the same with the Bill of Rights. It's true some states do go further and bestow more affirmative rights. But it's deeply ingrained in US political thought that "right to do X" means "government won't stop you from doing X", not "government will stop anyone who tries to stop you from doing X".
> The main problem is not generally what government can and wishes to restrict, it's all the proprietary/private restrictions such as not being able to run whatever code you want on hardware you own.
But those come from laws, like DMCA 1201, that prohibit people from bypassing those restrictions. The problem being that the DMCA is a federal law and Montana can't fix that one, but at least they couldn't do state one?
Although this language seems particularly inelegant:
> computational resources for lawful purposes
So they can't make a law against it unless they make a law against it?
The proprietary restrictions are an extension of government, because the government grants private actors protection of their IP and enforces that IP. The only issue is that because we take IP protections for granted, we see it as an issue of the private actor rather than the state which has increasingly legislated against people's ability to execute code on computers they themselves own. But it should be simple. The government grants a monopoly in the form of IP to certain private actors - when that monopoly proves to be against the interests of the citizens, and I believe it is, then the government should no londer enforce that monopoly.
This seems to have the positive effect that patching applications on your own device (a la Revanced patching Spotify) appears blessed, since government prosecution would need to demonstrate a public interest case, if I'm reading this correctly.
No, the problem is the extent to which private parties can use the power of law to legally restrict your usage of property you own. And that's the reason it's a right.
If you don't like the restrictions a product has you can simply not purchase the product, no "right" has been infringed.
The issue is societal lockin - aka network effects. People can't afford to "not buy one" because then they are "the one without".
Banking apps, delivery apps, public transport apps, utilities apps, insurance - so many services have been captured by the big two phone oligopoly that modern life revolves around your phone. The assumption is that you will have one.
Sure, you could decide not to, but you are instantly a societal pariah as every business finds it s so much harder to deal with you - and you don't have enough time in the day to deal with the secondary processes these businesses employ, for every aspect of your life.
Maybe it's country specific - here in Canada I don't feel like I need a smart phone for anything crucial. There is a trend where people including zoomers such as myself switch to dumb phones for a "digital detox". So it seems perfectly feasible to do so.
I was called a luddite for not wanting to follow the "official" schoool Whatsapp group. Online banking is practicably unusable without the bank's own 2FA app.
Many things can still be done in a web browser, but the rest of society is going the smartphone route and it's increasingly difficult to avoid it.
Any non-digital options are aimed at elderly and handicapped individuals; not people who don't want smartphones.
Some people can do it. I'd also ditch my smartphone if I was living in the woods, or had a personal assistant handling my daily needs, or lived in an Amish community etc.
But I don't see the vast majority of people to be able to ditch their smartphone, that's just not a reasonable proposition.
A few people can live with just phone calls, but a sizeable majority use some additional apps for texting. Dumb phones won't work here.
1. Many people use a virtual text number, like google voice
2. Maybe even more folks use one or more app based texting services. I bet many users here have several on their phone:
Signal
What's app
telegram
There are probably 50 texting type apps in this category
These are dangerous attack vectors for people trying to remotely control your phone, but also important to talk to your friends.
I think we need a solution for these types of apps for a popular usable solution. I don't know how to solve the safety issue when running these apps, and I can't just "forward" text messages to my dumb phone.
But 30 years ago there were also no government services or major companies who require you to interact with them using an app on a major smartphone platform.
Nothing has changed, there are no government services or major companies who require you to interact with them using an app on a major smartphone platform.
There are many that do require SMS or a phone number of some sort at this point.
We are mostly saved by the part of the 70+ crowd who is completely computer illiterate and own significant investment resources. But that will only last 10-20 more years.
How does (great) past suffering justify (mild) modern suffering?
And my forefathers probably fought in wars against your forefathers. The world would have probably been better off, if they all had just stayed home. Nothing glorious about that.
Citizens don't need to be aligned with eachother, but they should ensure that the government is aligned with the citizenry as a whole. Everyone should have the freedom to polarize in different directions and hold different opinions as each individual sees fit. The government is only supposed to implement the laws that most people want in common, not enforce alignment of opinion in the populace (that's an authoritarian regime). If people are allowed to freely misalign, then they'll be misaligned in different directions, and their conflicting wishes will cancel eachother out like random noise when they vote, leaving only what most people want in common to be written into law.
As a simple example, Finland's national government just passed a smartphone ban in schools. That's fine by the criteria you brought up, but I think it's utterly moronic.
Not because I disagree with the Finnish people, or their elected representatives on the issue itself: that's for them to decide. I disagree that this should be handled at the national level at all!
> Subsidiarity is a principle of social organization that holds that social and political issues should be dealt with at the most immediate or local level that is consistent with their resolution. The Oxford English Dictionary defines subsidiarity as "the principle that a central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which cannot be performed at a more local level".[1] The concept is applicable in the fields of government, political science, neuropsychology, cybernetics, management and in military command (mission command). The OED adds that the term "subsidiarity" in English follows the early German usage of "Subsidiarität".[2] More distantly, it is derived from the Latin verb subsidio (to aid or help), and the related noun subsidium (aid or assistance).
In this case, I lack the imagination to see the reason why this issue couldn't have been handled at eg the city level, so that the good people of Oulo get the policy they want, and the good people of Helsinki get the policy they want.
Or even lower: there's no reason to even go as high as the city level, each school individually can decide what they want.
But just to give you the limits of subsidiarity here: I can see why you'd want to have a unified policy per school instead of per teacher or per class: the logistics are easier, and the individual teacher doesn't have to use their own judgement and authority on this. (Of course, individual schools should be free to let the teachers decide, if that's the policy they want.)
You can surely create your own example that cover more familiar territory, eg legal drinking ages in the US (which are ostensibly a matter for the states, but have been hijacked by the central government.)
I'm not sure if national legislation is the correct place for the ban either, but consistency is sometimes better than flexibility. The Finnish school system has always (well, since the 70s when the current system was designed) been big on equity and everybody following the same basic rules (though at the same time giving individual teachers quite a lot of freedom to organize their teaching – there are almost no standardized tests, for example).
Students would understandably think it's unjust if their school had a stricter phone policy than their friends in the next school over. On the other hand, the new legislation only forbits phone use during classes, and gives individual schools the authority to decide if they want to restrict it during recesses too, so there will in any case be policy differences between schools. shrug
Well, that just goes to show that national level for bigger countries is even more overblown than for Finland.
You can generate your own examples, if that convinces you more. Eg there's no reason to forcible coordinate national minimum wages in the US, when that can be handled at city level. (Or at most at state level.)
It could be because the general population is genuinely moronic in this matter, and actually do want to implement smartphone bans for kids at the national level, or it could be because their government is not a perfect democratic system so the bill has motives unrelated to its stated purpose that are designed to be convenient for the government at the people's expense.
Even if we assume all democracies operate the way they're supposed to all of the time, some moronic policies will still be favored over wiser alternatives when most of the population hold the same moronic opinions. That is just democracy working as intended.
One important difference between an authoritarian society and a democratic one is that the democratic one makes everyone feel like they're making very important decisions for themselves at the societal level. People with new ideas convince everyone else to voluntarily implement their ideas, rather than force everyone else to implement their ideas. Societal change in a democracy does not happen until the majority has internalized the ideas associated with those changes and want them to happen. And I think this is really nice because life is miserable if all you do is go through the motions. Being able to control your own destiny is a good feeling and source of motivation.
There are many pillars of democracy that must be supported by the majority of the population at all times, otherwise the democratic system will degrade or even collapse. But this is simply the people getting the government they deserve. The democratic system does not deny the populace the choice of replacing it with an authoritarian regime by voting that way. If the people regret it later, they will have to relearn what they forgot and rebuild what was lost through hardship.
Circling back to private ownership of computational resources: this is one of the many necessary conditions for online freedom of speech, which recently became a necessary condition for democracy to continue to exist. The recent surge of authoritarianism around the world is largely due to the centralized moderation and ranking mechanisms used on social media platforms, which encourage the formation of large echo chambers. If we want to reverse this surge, we must move filtering and ranking mechanisms to the client-side (so that each user can decide what they want to see without affecting what others can see), and then popularize decentralized protocols for social media. And that, coincidentally, would also address the root cause behind the smartphone ban you mentioned. These things are impossible to do if individuals can't own compute. Writing the right to own compute into law slightly decreases the likelihood of a dystopian future where every consumer device is a SaaS terminal that can't run anything on its own. And in that future, all democracies around the world would collapse or be severely degraded.
Well if you want to really get pedantic about it, it comes from the government enforcing those restrictions, like the DMCA, patent, or copyright, otherwise people would just do it willy-nilly for the most part.
I'm sorry you don't get it and that you feel they're excessively sensitive. On the behalf of the HN community would you like to share with us more about how you feel about it so that we can better understand your position. I'm sure we can help you find the best possible phrasing to better express the excess of said sensitivity. We're sorry you've had to encounter such a wording and attitude on our forum.
In keeping with the grand traditions of corporate communications, perhaps we should all jump on a call to explore these issues in an unaccountable and likely adversarial way.
I'm not part of Mozilla or any of the communities and I understood the situation by reading the damn post, on the first time.
In the follow-up, any words concerning how the person feels, words on how to talk about this further, and wanting to truly understand what he just wrote in plain and simple terms simply reek strongly of "we really won't change anything, we've made our decision, we are disagree with you but we want you to agree with what we're already doing".
I can hear the exact same tone in exact similar situations with various customer service reps, HR, corporate smooth-talkers, public officials/politicians where the decision is already written in stone and they just pretend they're listening to the customers/employees/citizens affected to quiet down the criticism.
To add to this fire. I recently left my 'recently bought by private equity' workplace of 8 years to work somewhere else not-yet-ruined-by-PE (yet..)
A major part of my decision to quit was this communication pattern.
The whole organisation was very efficiently structured with two separate layers of managers - those who had actual decision power, and a separate layer whose task was to 'deal with us employees' but no decision power.
All communication flowing one way, the same way shit drips (the only resource following 'trickle-down' mechanics).
The only time I got into contact with the former level, was after I had put in my resignation; then they suddenly wanted a 1-1 to "see if there was anything they should learn from this" (presumably to sharpen/hone their skills in mistreating the employee level more efficiently in the future).
it's american english for "oh this must be hard for you. how can we help you to cope?" and no intent to change.
a better response would rather be:
"We're sorry, we were not aware. please can we meet and you help us understand? so we can fix this situation? We'd also like to share our intentions and we hope together we can improve the situation."
> That's just means you're effectively acting as a moderator yourself, only
> with a whitelist. It's just your own direct curation of sources.
That's exactly how a useful social information system works. I choose what I want to follow and see, and there's no gap between what moderation thinks and what I think. Spam gets dealt with the moment I see something spammy (or just about any kind of thing I don't want to see).
This is how Usenet worked: you subscribed to the groups you found interesting and where participants were of sufficient quality. And you further could block individuals whose posts you didn't want to see.
This is how IRC worked: you joined channels that you deemed worth joining. And you could further ignore individuals that you didn't like.
That is how the whole original internet actually worked: you were reading pages and using services that you felt were worth your time.
Ultimately, that's how human relationships work. You hang out with friends you like and who are worth your time, and you ignore people who you don't want to spend your time with, especially assholes.
>This is how Usenet worked: you subscribed to the groups you found interesting and where participants were of sufficient quality. And you further could block individuals whose posts you didn't want to see.
Your explanation actually proves why USENET doesn't work anymore because that client-side moderation is unusable these days. I was on Usenet in the 1980s before the WorldWideWeb in 1993 and continued up until 2008.
Why did I quit Usenet?!? Because it worked better when the internet was much smaller and consisted of universities federating NNTP servers. But Usenet's design can't handle the massive growth of the internet such as commercial entities being allowed to connect in 1992 and "The Eternal September" of massive users from AOL. Spam gets out of control. Signal-to-noise ratio goes way down. Usenet worked better in a "collegial" atmosphere of a smaller internet where it's mostly good actors. It's fundamental design doesn't work for a big internet full of bad actors.
This is why a lot of us ex-Usenet users are here on a web forum that's moderated instead of a hypothetical "nntp://comp.lang.news.ycombinator" with newsgroup readers. With "https://news.ycombinator.com", I don't need to do extra housekeeping of "killfiles" or wade through a bunch of spam.
Whatever next gen social web gets invented, it cannot work like Usenet for it to be usable.
>Spam gets dealt with the moment I see something spammy
Maybe consider you're unusual with that preference because most of us don't want our eyeballs to even see the spam at all. The system's algorithms should filter it out automatically. We don't want to impose extra digital housekeeping work of "dealing with spam" ourselves.
I think most users that have not ran the systems themselves really have no clue how bad spam really is. It can quickly spiral to the point were 99.9% of the incoming posts on a system are spam, porn where it doesn't belong, or otherwise illegal content. Simply put even if you as the user filter 99.5% of the spam the system is still majority spam.
IP blocks and initial filtering typically make a massive difference in total system load so you can get to the point that the majority of the posts are 'legitimate'. After that bot filtering is needed to remove the more complex attacks against the system.
Incorrect when accounts are free. Usenet providers are forced to police users changing their email addresses or signing up multiple times, or else they get de-peered. IRC networks do IP address bans.
For at least the past 20 years, Usenet has been so full of spam that it’s been made virtually unusable. If de-peering is an option, then why haven’t the providers that allow spammers to operate gotten de-peered?
I don't want the obscure artists to get more ― or less, for that matter. I want the artists I listen to to get my money, obscure or not. That's a simple transaction and has worked forever. If I buy a CD from artist X, I know I won't be supporting artist Y with my money, just X. If I then want to listen to Y, I can support them as well. But in any case Z won't be getting any of my money because they make noises I don't consider music.
Money is fungible. Where “your” money went means nothing, just what the final payout the artist got at the end of the month.
It doesn’t seem obvious that smaller artists have audiences who stream music less than listeners to Taylor swift. Because that’s the only way the current system might rip people off.
> If I buy a CD from artist X, I know I won't be supporting artist Y with my money, just X.
That's not entirely true, since by buying X's CD you're also giving money to the label/publisher of that CD, who may be allocating that money to Y if Y is also one of their artists. However, overall I agree that the buy-a-CD model makes it more clear where your money is going.
> Customer-Support is usually happy to have a clear-cut criteria to reject
> support-requests as "officially out-of-scope".
All they needed was criteria at which point they can tell their customers "Please test if this reproduces with genuine Synology drives, and if they do we'll file an internal bug to fix your issue."
“We only support Synology-branded drives” would have gone over a lot better, because we could have used non-symbology drives without support. Instead they actively prevented non-Synology drives from working.
It would have been way better than what they did, I agree. However, it would've been pretty shitty from a user perspective still. I'd be pretty angry as a customer if customer support just refuses to help me with anything unless I buy Synology-branded drives.
Plenty of companies support products that work with third-party components. It's not realistic for them to support those components. The standard approach is to support the aspects they can control, and the customer is on their own for problems that involve the third-party component. Your phone won't charge? Is that our charger? No? Try one of ours. It works with ours? OK, our job is done, go talk to the company that made your charger.
> Plenty of companies support products that work with third-party components.
Exactly. And they typically help you with issues even if you do use third-party components.
> Your phone won't charge? Is that our charger? No? Try one of ours.
That's not really how it works. If I have tried 5 third-party USB-C chargers of different brands, and they all charge all other USB-C devices perfectly but not my phone, my phone vendor will hopefully be more helpful than "sorry, can't help you, you've only tried with third-party chargers".
That really depends on the company. Comcast would tell me to reboot my computer even after it was clear their modem wasn't getting a signal. Any decent company will help you out if you've made a good case that the problem is on their side, as in your example. But if your phone only fails on one charger made by somebody else, and works otherwise, they're not going to help you fix the charger.
> Any decent company will help you out if you've made a good case that the problem is on their side, as in your example.
Not if they follow yason's guidance of:
> All they needed was criteria at which point they can tell their customers "Please test if this reproduces with genuine Synology drives, and if they do we'll file an internal bug to fix your issue."
---
Whenever there's a reason to suspect a drive issue, Synology's support should obviously ask you to verify that your drives are good. Maybe provide a drive testing feature in the Synology software which tests for common failure modes. Maybe ask you to try connecting the drives to other machines. Maybe try to put in another drive. That's fine.
But a blanket policy of "we won't help you unless you test with our branded drives" is what I'm arguing against.
2. Support provided: Somewhat decent tested models that meet x features
3. Unsupported but works: list of drives
4. Does not work: list of drives.
There is no shortage of models of drives that do crappy crap that totally suck completely. Like lie about things going wrong in the drive. Or take a long break when dealing with failed sectors. Putting down a list of well supported drives is a must in that market. This said, only supporting branded drives sucks.
There's a lot of difference between "we don't officially support X" and "we will programmatically prevent you from using X". Even "using X will void your warranty" is actually significantly better for the user than just straight up preventing the use of non matching proprietary drives.
Obviously, Gemini is a niche that's as futile as it can be. It's like going back to living without a running water because once there was a peaceful village, then first came running water, then electricity, and then the whole village was rebuilt into a big city, and the old village is now gone. But the logic goes: if they didn't get running water in the first place, the people who wanted electricity too wouldn't have moved in, and the city wouldn't have been built. So, reverting back to living without running water now will, if it doesn't maybe demolish the city, at least remind me of the good old days.
The problem with the current web is that before, maybe just 10 years ago, you could use a good browser to remove and disable all the user-hostile cruft aimed at you on websites, and maybe browse pages in relative peace. Now the fight has moved to removing and disabling all the user-hostile cruft aimed at you in the browser, that intend to remove the tools you could use to fight the websites, and given the de-facto monopoly of Google that's just incredibly sad.
What's more demoralising is that it's just one slice in the big trend to erode the concept of ownership alltogether. It's a matter of time until you can no longer even try to own your browsing experience. The web will have changed from a place where people could freely download and view other people's documents over HTTP to people using one-way thin-clients with attestation so that the producer can guarantee their website is interpreted correctly as intended. Good luck writing your own browser that does the right thing for you, it won't be served data off the web unless it can prove the client is unmodified and signed by Microsoft. That is, of course, assuming you could still write code yourself for your computer and actually run it on your own without asking permission from the vendor.
It seems that the 20's answer to what Gemini represents is probably something like asking an AI to load a web page, extract the real contents of the document, possibly with cues from accessibility hints, and reproduce the document as text and still images for viewing.
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