HN user
If it's the same woman I'm thinking of Office365 is underselling it a bit - she's fully sanctioned by the US. She can't use debit/credit cards, any Apple/Google device or service, Amazon/eBay, etc. She's completely digitally crippled by sanctions. And she's one of several people.
As a European I really hope we create an entirely separate homegrown tech sector, and fast.
Adding TS types to Nix would make it so much easier to write Nix code. Which string do I need here? Oh the type system knows, the language server shows it inline - I don't have to look at the source. I've used NixOS since 2018 and written nixpkgs derivations and it would've saved me so much time.
I'm glad that TypeNix exists but it really should just be officially supported or even the default.
Wero is a private effort, the digital euro is closer to Pix but it keeps being stalled (given the article in question, one could make some guesses as to why).
It's not quite as bad in Sweden, look at the graph at the bottom of this article by John Burn-Murdoch[0] for a glimpse into we're faring compared to other European countries, and also how other European countries don't necessarily have it as bad as the UK or even Sweden.
Yeah, Brexit is a factor, but it's also one of many and it's important we tackle all of them. The private finance initiative (PFI) in the early 00s, is another[0]. Our government's lack of funding is also another ("The UK has spent around 20 per cent less per person on health each year than similar European countries over the past decade")[1]. Privatisation has been linked to not treating otherwise treatable deaths[2], so that's likely another. Then there's unwillingness and delay in many areas, to tackling air quality by reducing local pollution from car wheel breakage (linked to bad health)[3] by building more cycling infrastructure so that people don't have to be afraid of getting hit by a car[4] (and actually end up cycling). And disincentivising unhealthy diets[5] that are linked to hospital admissions, and amusingly urban planning like more cycling lanes can help people exercise without even really thinking about it like people already do in the Netherlands.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/sep/12/nhs-hospita...
[1] https://archive.ph/UDtZo/again?url=https://www.ft.com/conten...
[2] https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/nhs-privatisation-health-so...
[3] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/health-matters-ai...
[4] https://usa.streetsblog.org/2019/05/29/protect-yourself-sepa...
[5] https://digital.nhs.uk/news/2021/one-million-admissions-link...
Depending on what type of video you're watching (pay depend on variables), your one view is probably worth a whopping $0.01. At that point you might be better off asking nicely for Patreon subs, considering about 0.5-2% of your followers convert to Patreon subs (and tiers usually start at or above $2), instead of annoying your viewers with horrible ads. Even creator-made shoutouts to products are more pleasant than the jarring built-in YouTube adverts, and that's before you consider that they're immediately skippable. And when you consider all the awful things advertisers are forcing YouTube to do in order to make the platform better for themselves and worse for users, it gets even more spicy.
Funnily, it is generally true given that net resource transfers to the global south have been negative for most countries... with the big exception being China[1], so China has benefited off global trade deals like these, but their income inequality isn't exactly something to look up to either (but despite that, they manage to beat the US on this stat). The other poor countries are mostly falling behind in a relative sense, and have been since the 80s, so we should certainly be thinking about disincentivising borderline slave labour because right now it isn't worth it for those countries, they simply aren't benefiting off doing it.
But also, we are moving (slowly) in the direction you'd likely prefer: Norway and Germany are now doing supply chain due diligence[2]. Hopefully we continue moving in that direction so we can push the floor up and perverse human rights violations become more of a thing of the past.
[1] https://gfintegrity.org/press-release/new-report-on-unrecord...
[2] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/business-and-human-r...
Cooperatives have a higher survival rate, both in general and during crises.
A 2013 report published by the UK Office for National Statistics showed that in the UK the rate of survival of cooperatives after five years was 80 percent compared with only 41 percent for all other enterprises.[5] A further study found that after ten years 44 percent of cooperatives were still in operation, compared with only 20 percent for all enterprises.
A 2012 report published by The European Confederation of cooperatives and worker-owned enterprises active in industry and services showed that in France and Spain, worker cooperatives and social cooperatives "have been more resilient than conventional enterprises during the economic crisis".[47]
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative#Economic_stability
True, but coops are also more selective about firing and hiring. So if you're a bad fit, you're less likely to end up in a coop, and if you do end up there, you will have more stable employment because coops generally don't fire people during crises, they collectively cut their salaries by a certain percentage, or give up yearly bonuses, and when things get good again, they reinstate their old salaries or bonuses.
Cooperatives aren't nonprofit entities – they can be, sure, but many of them are profit-driven.
The claim that cooperatives act irrationally (and the implication that they're less efficient) requires some factual data to back that claim up, otherwise it's just that – an anecdotal claim. Here's academic data to dismiss those claims:
Labor-managed firms are as productive as conventional firms, or more productive, in all industries, and use their inputs efficiently; but in several industries conventional firms would produce more with their current input levels if they organized production like labor-managed firms. On average overall, firms would produce more using the labor-managed firms’ industry-specific technologies. Labor-managed firms do not produce at inefficiently low scales
Source: Fakhfakh, F., Pérotin, V., & Gago, Mó. (2012). Productivity, Capital, and Labor in Labor-Managed and Conventional Firms: An Investigation on French Data. ILR Review, 65(4), 847–879. doi:10.1177/001979391206500404
Similar results were also found to hold in an older study by Craig and Pencavel in 1995.
That's an odd critique considering coops exist to solve the friction between unions and businesses by building the democratic control into the business itself, avoiding the need for a union.
Especially when you consider all the union busting tactics used by leadership at traditional businesses – how are you even supposed to form a union when they won't let you? Coops come at that from a different angle: you get democratic control, straight up. Don't like your leadership if you choose to structure the business that way? You can actually vote them out of their role.
Plenty of companies offer product samples or free services upfront
Sure, but a startup using VC money to offer you something for free is very different from "I will personally volunteer to help you".
Also the entire point of sharing articles is that they're being read, so there isn't any way to avoid implying they're doing "self-promotion" – should people just stop writing and sharing articles?
Sometimes people aren't after some self-serving goal, and I think it's a little dangerous to think everyone is – charities exist. Cooperatives are more ethical businesses because they build democracy into their structure unlike traditional businesses, why would I assume whoever is talking about them isn't just hoping to see more of that in the world? Or do we reduce that to "that's just the author being selfish again"?
I got the distinct feeling I was being sold something while reading it, and the last paragraph confirmed it.
You mean the last paragraph where they _volunteer_ to have coaching sessions with people? "Selling" usually implies an exchange of money or an expectation of something in return, but there's no product here – the author is offering their time for free to help others start or join cooperatives. Is it fair to dismiss that as "being sold" something?
Not really, systems affect our behaviour. We created the system that is our current market economy, and we have the ability to construct new systems that encourage better behaviour. For example, studies show that cooperatively ran businesses are more ethical and more stable:
[...] Additionally, "cooperative banks build up counter-cyclical buffers that function well in case of a crisis," and are less likely to lead members and clients towards a debt trap (p. 216). This is explained by their more democratic governance that reduces perverse incentives and subsequent contributions to economic bubbles.
The cooperative banking sector had 20% market share of the European banking sector, but accounted for only 7 per cent of all the write-downs and losses between the third quarter of 2007 and first quarter of 2011. Cooperative banks were also over-represented in lending to small and medium-sized businesses in all of the 10 countries included in the report.
[...] in France and Spain, worker cooperatives and social cooperatives "have been more resilient than conventional enterprises during the economic crisis".
Public trust in credit unions stands at 60%, compared to 30% for big banks and small businesses are five times less likely to be dissatisfied with a credit union than with a big bank.
In other words, this behaviour doesn't happen everywhere. It's specific to certain types of businesses.
Paragraphs from here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative#Economic_stability
There are also interesting instances like social.coop that are run like a cooperative – you join and are expected to donate monthly, as little as $1, and in return you get democratic control over the instance. It can be a cool incentive to "donate"/invest in the instance.
By that same logic you'd make the argument that "94% of abusive work places" exist in poorer countries with far less worker rights. Is that something you want to happen to the US, third world country like working conditions just so corporations are more likely to hire Americans? Or maybe we should be working on upping the baseline standards surrounding workers rights?
Relative measures are important because it's an indicator of how fairly domestic resources are being allocated. You can be a poor country but have resources fairly allocated among the population, and you can be a rich country and have resources unfairly allocated among the population. It's a good indicator of how well people at the bottom are being taken care of, and the ideal scenario is a rich country with low income inequality, which the Nordic countries are probably the best examples of.
You can use measures that are less country-specific like the Gini coefficient and UN R/P to measure domestic inequality between countries:
The UK has a Gini coefficient of 35.1, a UN R/P 10% of 13.8
India has a Gini coefficient of 35.7, a UN R/P 10% of 8.6
For reference, Norway has a Gini coefficient of 27.7, and a UN R/P 10% of 6.1
(higher = more inequality)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...
In absolute terms, yes we are seeing advancements in tech/medicine and the like and that will always help more and more people, but in more relative economic terms it's questionable whether the gap between poorer nations and richer ones is actually closing, because there is economic evidence that the gap is actually widening:
Net Resource Transfers (NRT) for all developing countries have been mostly large and negative since the early 1980s, indicating sustained and significant outflows from the developing world (see graph below)
https://gfintegrity.org/press-release/new-report-on-unrecord...
Basically, the “are we the baddies ?” answer would be “yes” for a huge chunk of us, and I don’t think that’s how we see it personally. Companies have to make money, but the evil label needs way more nuance.
The answer to this is that if it's nearly impossible to find a more ethical job (e.g. a non-profit medical research worker cooperative) when the system you're under doesn't economically incentivise ethical job creation. If your probability of finding one is incredibly slim, you're practically excused – you're just doing what's needed to have a normal life.
This model is already proven to work via Kickstarter, Gofundme, and Patreon. Users already have interest in investing in ideas that _don't even allow them to retain ownership_, like Star Citizen -- it's still a copyrighted piece of work despite taking a ton of money from users to fund their game.
Or take the AGPL, for instance, sponsored by now-defunct startup Affero. There are many people (myself included) who believe the AGPL is a restriction on use, freedom 0, because it prevents you from using AGPL software in certain contexts where the requirements cannot be fulfilled.
The GPLv2 itself starts by saying, "To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions" - there is a coherent political view that this is contradictory.
There will _always_ be such restrictions. For an extreme, but derived from the same philosophical core, example: the act of murder is an individual freedom, but it imposes on other peoples' freedoms. So we have to make a choice between which freedom is more important: that of the person whose life is at risk, or that of the person who wants to take lives. The formal concepts are referred to as negative liberty (freedom from murder) and positive liberty (freedom to murder someone).
The modern world leans heavily towards negative liberty because we recognise that freedom isn't some absolute individualistic freedom, but rather that it is better to balance freedom in favour of most people. That's why stealing, killing, sexual assault, and many other things are freedoms we deem unethical and unnecessary.
Some people say, "well, it's just software" which is dismissive of the idea that software can have very bad effects, indirect and direct, on the world, so we must empower ourselves.
Or, in the left-libertarian direction, consider the folks who want to abolish copyright entirely.
There are also those on the left who want this, but also to go _beyond_ simply abolishing. If you abolish copyright without requiring code and build instructions to be open source as well, you just end up with people and companies who instead keep their code secret.
It's why, when slavery was abolished, it wasn't enough. The former slaves were free, but were now in a world where the power structures were not in their favour, meaning they could still be taken advantage of and treated like slaves and were still being oppressed.
Libertarian views are usually rejected by the left as right wing, instead when you talk about leftists with less authoritarian views, they call themselves anarchists (or even reject that label, and say they're "doing anarchism" rather than being "anarchists").
- Can't build with nix-build. After long time searching it seems like you're supposed to run nix-build -E 'with import <nixpkgs> {}; callPackage ./default.nix {}' - shouldn't there be a simpler way for this common case?
This is because the default.nix you have is exporting a lambda that expects arguments to be saturated, `callPackage` does this for you automagically hence why you have to use it.
Instead you probably want the nixpkgs import line _inside_ default.nix, either in a let-in binding or using the `?` operator to default a lambda argument to something, usually nixpkgs itself bound to a `pkgs` argument so you can use `pkgs`[0].
Even better, you can use Niv to pin nixpkgs to a specific nixpkgs commit so that it doesn't change as you update your system's nixpkgs channel with the `nix-channel` command because `<nixpkgs>` is special syntax referring to what's stored in your $NIX_PATH[1].
[0]: see the default argument section: https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Nix_Expression_Language [1]: https://nixos.org/guides/nix-pills/nix-search-paths.html
If the creation is the part that matters why would they want to keep selling instead of taking a page out of indie game dev collectives or open source projects like Godot and Blender who earn salaries through Patreon-like monetisation strategies? Then piracy basically becomes a non-issue because it's the labour that matters, not paying for an artificially scarce digital copy. This seems like a pretty easy "best of both worlds" approach, no?
The term for this "communal freedom" rather than "pure individualist freedom" is Negative Liberty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_liberty
It's one of the core tenets of modern freedom, for example: you're free to say what you want (Positive Liberty) as long as it's not a threat of violence that would silence someone else, so that other person is free from your threat of violence (Negative Liberty).
This is a little bit overdramatic, given that they only exert that kind of control over the frameworks that they wholly own and control.
Would you be fine with being taxed for breathing if two or three companies hypothetically bought all the forests in your town or even state? After all, they own the things producing the oxygen you breathe, it only seems reasonable that you'd pay them.
Sometimes, maybe it's not reasonable for companies to justify their bad behaviour simply because they "own" something.
Nobody ever accused Microsoft or Sony of "getting to decide what games were allowed to be made" because they strictly controlled what works are allowed on their platforms. There are always other platforms one can publish on.
I often just see the "consoles aren't general purpose" cop-out here but I'd go further and say: we should -- we should accuse them of being anticompetitive too.
It's intrinsically linked to "free speech" exemptions through being violent, because violence doesn't have to be physical, here's an excerpt from Wikipedia's opening paragraph on violence[1]:
Other definitions are also used, such as the World Health Organization's definition of violence as "the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened[4] or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, which either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment, or deprivation."[5]
There's no doubt that hate speech _does_ commit psychological harm, for example, but the article contains way more nuance than I have time for in this post so I implore you to read the article -- "violence" is just not as simple and limited as physical harm.
"Free speech" is not a good example in my opinion when we already have so many exceptions to it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
I'll reconsider not defending free speech from getting a "hate speech" exception when so called "free speech" proponents start talking about getting rid of the copyright exception instead of just wanting to say racist stuff.
It makes complete sense to want to expand the scope of terms that are associated with laws if you don't believe the law is accurate enough. Language evolves through social changes, and so do laws.
Yeah, when public transport is done well, people _don't want to drive_. I live in London, I have a driver's license, and I haven't driven a car since I got it years and years ago. Why would I? Instead of having to focus on the incredibly menial tasks of staring at a road or being stuck in traffic, I can browse Hacker News and Reddit, read a book, or even play video games, while I ride a nice double-decker bus, or get from A to B in half the time it takes to drive, with the tube (underground trains). We have 24/7 buses all week long, and some trains run 24/7 during weekends. While London is pretty good, it isn't even the best example of trains, there are several Asian countries with better train systems than we have here, and we're like the only(?) Northern/Western European country that doesn't publicly fund our capital city's public transport organisation, TFL -- it could be both cheaper _and_ better if we followed their lead.
What random accusations am I "spreading so wildly"? The fact that Stallman is being accused of various kinds of sexual misconduct is a fact. I did not anywhere claim they were true. I'm pointing it out because it makes the points above stand on shakier ground.
The article you shared also fails to defend many of the accusations against Stallman and completely ignores them, for example the "Emacs virgin girl" situation.
Linux with Linus, who famously had to change his abusive tone? GCC with Richard Stallman, accused of various kinds of sexual misconduct? Python, which felt it necessary to impose a CoC eventually?
Your counter examples are questionable at best.