Frondo

One note: I didn't say anything about the language they speak, and what language other people speak is none of my business.

I don't think it's crazy to expect assimilation.

What's that mean to you? In my city, immigrants work, run businesses, pay taxes, have kids and send them to local schools, ride the bus, complain about the weather, practice their religion. I guess the only thing they don't do is complain as loudly about the government as (many of) the rest of us. What more could they be doing to assimilate?

This should be the top comment.

Encryption will not keep you hidden from an authoritarian government for long, and certainly not for long if you're trying to build a movement with any sort of wide-spread support.

Sunlight only works reasonably well for waterborne pathogens, and only when you've got time.

As with disinfecting anything, and especially for societal issues, we need more than sunlight alone.

Life in an authoritarian hellhole almost by definition means technology won't save you. If they can haul you off when you're walking down the street, who cares whether your stuff is encrypted? They'll make something up.

Even if you're innocent, they'll make something up. I lived for a year in one of those authoritarian hellholes and in that time knew two people who were arrested and hauled from station to station til someone paid a bribe- these weren't the dissidents either, just some guys. The dissident was stabbed to death on his doorstep.

Encryption is good to save us from marketing, from megacorps making our lives hell. Laws and norms constrain the rest.

Most users don't care about the alignment and spacing and so on in isolation, but they do get a sense of quality from the overall impact. This stuff really matters in aggregate.

Red Letter Media has a great phrase that rolls around in my head to describe situations like this (they use it for media analysis), "You might not recognize it, but your brain did."

Where you might not be able to point to a problem, but you instinctively know something is off.

Organizing and demanding pay collectively seems to help in negotiations, so good for them for taking this approach. It's not like Stanford can move its grad programs to Mexico like a US car maker and its factories.

Democracy isn't perfect, but checking out is the quickest route to ensuring your interests are only minimally represented. True at all levels of democratic organization.

I don't think you'd find a single woodworker anywhere who, if they could afford it, wouldn't prefer a table saw with Sawstop. How much are your fingers worth to you?

Or as the great Stafford Beer put it, the purpose of a system is what it does.

I would rather businesses take a hit on efficiency and have our 15-hour work weeks. Maybe that'd provide an incentive for businesses to pursue making project management and hand-off among staff more efficient.

I'm not being snarky--in the context of people wanting a place to make jokes and have fun with their friends, how is that a problem?

There seems to be an assumption in your writing that people should use social media to challenge themselves, be exposed to different views, to "discourse" and so on. Nearly everyone I know via social media wants to hang out with their friends, not debate people. Whether something is an echo chamber is sort of beside their goal, they want to have fun.

If one seeks out something that explicitly isn't an echo chamber, I'm sure there are many places for that. I'm just not seeing that as, really, at all desirable for a lot of people.

As someone who just tried to schedule an appointment with a new PCP and being told my first available appointment would be in August, I'm not at all sold on the idea that long queues are unique to public health care systems.

I'm not sure what kind of health insurance I could buy in the US that would give me short queues. Lower deductible, more ancillary services, sure, but what's the plan that says "no more than a week to schedule any kind of appointment you need"?

As for can't be tracked, does anyone else remember that website you used to see stamped on dollar bills, WheresGeorge.com? Early internet goofiness, crowd-sourced tracking of cash.

people need to roll up their sleeves and do legit work.

I don't like this kind of Calvinist attitude toward work. Increasing productivity via technological advancement should free us all up to do more of what we want.

Very true and well said!

My sister is an accountant and she genuinely enjoys working with the numbers. She finds it, not exactly fun, but kind of fun? She describes it like every situation is a puzzle she gets to solve, and then maintain. She also likes working with her customers and enjoys those interactions, like she gets a good feeling from helping her customers out. That's enough for her.

Not the vocation for me but it's very interesting to talk with her about her experiences, because they're so remote from mine...

Actually, threatening physical harm to a con man has a long and storied tradition in this country; but more than that if SBF had mugged this guy I don't think anyone would call a physical response a bad thing, but because he mugged him with words you're going to posture about this is "just not ok"? Come on.

Yeah, I guess things might have been different then. I was 3 at that time, and in doing occasional trade shows for the last 7 or 8 years (so, from mid 2010s on), I've just never experienced it; not in Seattle, San Diego, Baltimore, nor a handful of smaller cities in NY and DE.

Maybe the world has changed in the last 42 years, and it'd be helpful to qualify stories like these (where the original poster says he is not allowed, present tense) with where and when they've happened.

I've done about a dozen trade shows and have done both of those things, from personal experience. (This anecdote comes up frequently in these discussions and I always wonder where from, because it's not anything like I've seen...)

They had been warned by locals in both Burma and Sri Lanka for many months that violent rhetoric was spreading like wildfire through users in those countries, and did nothing about it -- seldom even responding to the people pleading for them to do something.

When Sri Lanka pulled the plug on Facebook as violence was starting to erupt, Facebook did then reach out...to ask why their Sri Lankan traffic had dropped off.

This is documented in a variety of places, but for an excellent write-up of these tragedies I'd recommend The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher.

Also in a similar situation now (well, in the B2B space, with ~20 corporate customers around the country) and the times it's come up, people have been more concerned to see a business continuity plan than a big office full of people who can take over.

You can find lots of examples for a BCP on any search engine, and in my experience so far it's more important to show that you've thought about it and at least have a plan in place to take care of business continuity, should something happen to you, in the future.

Another thing to keep in mind is, even if you had staff who could keep a platform going, until you're running quite a large operation, even finding someone who'd want to take over should something happen to you is going to be difficult. I'm eyeing a buyout by a large competitor in the distant future for that, because this is a really niche space and requires a lot of technical knowledge and people skills.

There's a podcast I listen to sometimes called "The Perfect Scam," sponsored by the AARP but, I suspect, is intended more for the kids of elderly people who are more at risk for these kinds of things:

https://www.aarp.org/podcasts/the-perfect-scam/

They have quite a few stories about "virtual kidnappings" and interview the people involved -- it's quite interesting, and has given me a lot of insight into how typical it would be for people to hear panic and react with panic...precisely how these scams are intended to go.

This is a fictitious legal theory advanced by sovereign citizen movements. You can find many hours of entertainment watching sovcit courtroom insanity videos on youtube, and many of them try this legal theory with entirely predictable results.

What is the point of this? Who are these people who are making excuses and claiming to be victims -- and victims of what?

If there is a grievance you're making, can you elaborate on that?

possibly even make money

Hate to say it, but I think this is the only reason why.

Thank the absurd copyright laws that grant a piece of work two lifetimes of money extraction (70 years after the death of whoever made it) for whoever "owns" it.

The real act of cultural vandalism is the copyright regime that keeps these trust fund descendants of the Dahl estate in cash for something they did not do, for however many more decades that all his works will be locked up.

"Updating" these works is gross, but only because it's nothing but a cash-grab for them, selling and re-selling this material to new audiences just by tweaking a few words here and there.

There is consent to taxation -- your parents consented for you on your behalf when they had guardianship over you as a child, by choosing to have your citizenship here. You implicitly maintained that by retaining your citizenship at the age of majority.

We probably agree in many ways on how badly tax money is spent, but that there is "nothing moral" about it is a statement that does not make sense.