nybble41

Or to put it another way, the "intellectual capital" argument presupposes that you aspire to become a bully yourself, and live among a society of similar bullies. There is no incentivising effect on someone who wishes to innovate without abusing the legal system to stop others from creating similar things.

To follow up on this, since we may still be talking past one another, I do not believe that the software design is deficient or that the disconnect between the implementation and actual use is nearly so large as the article makes it out to be. Taking the examples one by one:

First ask yourself what we mean when we say “is your topic branch up to date?”

Does your local ref identify the same commit as the upstream ref?

“be sure to fetch the dev branch”

Be sure to update your remote tracking branch ref to match the corresponding upstream ref and download all related commits.

“what branch did I do that work on?”

Which branch(es) (which refs) point to commits with trees which contain that work?

“is that commit on the main branch or the dev branch?”

Is that commit reachable by following the parent links from the main branch ref or the dev branch ref (or both)?

“Has that work landed on the main branch?”

Is that work present in the tree of the commit identified by the main branch ref?

And then there is the last example which isn't even talking about branches in the version-control sense but rather the much older "split path" sense.

The documentation is fine. The way people talk about branches in the context of Git is (mostly) fine. It's only the author's understanding which is at odds with the reality of what branches are in the Git ecosystem. Which could possibly be due to trying to coerce Git into the mold of other version control systems with incompatible concepts of branching.

There are two concepts being confused here: Git branches and what I'll call "logical" branches.

The mutable object in the Git data model known as a "branch" is really just a ref and nothing more. Traditionally it points to a commit, though it could point to a blob or tree or tag object, in which case commit-oriented commands won't work on it (while other commands which wouldn't work on commits may).

A logical branch, on the other hand, is a particular commit, its parent commit(s), their parent(s), etc.—not a sequence per se but rather a tree. The logical branch concept captures the "structure" of the branch. Logical branches are immutable, but new commits can refer back to them to create a new, larger tree.

The logical branch has no intrinsic name, but may optionally be identified extrinsically by one or more named refs, including but not limited to Git branches.

Commands which modify branches generally create a new logical branch composed of one or more new commits referencing zero or more existing commits and also update the Git branch—the ref—to point to the new commit(s). A few commands, e.g. "git reset", update only the ref without creating new commits. It is possible, though awkward, to work exclusively with nameless logical branches and never even create a Git branch referring to those commits.

Contrast this with version control systems like Bazaar where all commits actually do belong to specific named branches, with the branch name recorded in the commit object.

https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#...

The current holder of the domains and trademarks was elected as the custodian for a limited time (through the end of 2022). The terms of that election included an agreement to hand over custody to their eventual elected successor. But they've instead created this for-profit company and transferred it ownership of the assets.

What happens when a new custodian is elected by the community who is not affiliated with this new company? Will the company give up control of the assets as previously agreed?

What you are describing is a full-reserve bank.

Yeah, like I said: an honest bank.

It's an open secret that money "in your bank account" isn't actually in your account waiting to be withdrawn—the banks will openly acknowledge that if asked, though it's not something they like to draw attention to in their advertising or when you're opening an account—but they aren't so open about the fact that this practice comes with investment risk, including the possibility of losing any money you've deposited with them, or at least being forced to wait longer than usual to get it back because the bank is having cash-flow issues. (Which, naturally, causes even more severe cash-flow issues for the depositors.) They have the mandatory insurance, of course, but the FDIC is more of a placebo to prevent bank runs than actual protection against systemic issues affecting many banks at the same time. The FDIC can bail out any one bank easily, but if everyone wanted their deposits back there wouldn't be nearly enough to cover the banks' obligations. The only way to avoid bank failures in that scenario would be to print more money, which would drive inflation and penalize those who put their money in less risk-prone, higher-reserve banks.

Users include both buyers and sellers.

Slow settlement and reversible transactions are a boon for buyers (and for fraudsters abusing chargebacks to get free stuff). For sellers they're a bit of a nightmare since you never know when money you thought you had been payed in good faith might disappear from your accounts with little or no recourse.

Now, an L2 service could go lower but then they're taking on more risk which they'll want to be paid for and it's basically reinventing Venmo or Square Cash.

It feels like there is a subtle misunderstanding here: Credit cards are at least L2 systems, not L1. Physical cash, the foundational raw-unit-of-account layer most comparable to Bitcoin or Etherium, is the L1. Something like Venmo or Square Cash would be L3, built on top of the credit networks or electronic bank transfers which are themselves a layer of abstraction over transacting in cash.

You do fractional reserve banking with BTC the same way you do it with any other currency: You only keep enough BTC on hand to cover the projected worst-case withdrawals, and take the risk of needing to shut down or possibly declare bankruptcy in the event of a bank run. There is no "lender of last resort" to bail you out, but banks were doing fractional reserve banking long before the creation of the FDIC. It wasn't quite so extreme in the Free Banking era, of course, compared to the state today where no bank holds much more than the legally-mandated bare minimum of reserves.

Of course you also have the option of running an honest bank, one which simply holds its customers money (for a fee) without lending it out, and perhaps offering separate investment products for those who are interested with full disclosure of the risk involved should the investments fail.

due to leaked credentials (in this case the card number + CVV + exp date)

That information is practically public already, since you have to provide it to everyone you purchase from online with your card. If you regularly buy things online with your credit or debit card it's less a matter of if the credentials will leak than when. Regular checking and savings accounts are at least as bad given the existence of Direct Debit, a system where practically anyone can take money out of any account just by knowing the routing number (public information) and account number (printed on every check).

Cryptocurrency aside, just compare that to something like PayPal, where the authorization happens directly between you and the payment processor: the merchant never gets your credentials and can't take money out of your account without your express permission. The traditional banking system has the worst security procedures; the design is reminiscent of the early days of the Internet where plaintext passwords were commonplace in protocols like rlogin, FTP, SMTP, and unencrypted HTTP, when authentication was used at all. The only thing keeping it from complete collapse is the absolute fortune they spend on statistical anti-fraud analysis, which completely coincidentally requires them to have deep insight into every transaction passing through their network. Not that they would ever think of using that immensely valuable data for their own gain, of course. Perish the thought.

In any case, Bitcoin and most other cryptocurrencies weren't built to replace credit cards, but rather to replace cash. If someone steals your cash or you somehow manage to hand it to the wrong person or simply destroy it you can't just call up the U.S. Treasury and expect them to put things right. Holding cash and transacting in cash has its downsides, and yet those same risky properties can be extremely useful if proper care is taken. Escrow and human-mediated reversible payments can be implemented on top of a system of irreversible transactions. The reverse doesn't work; you can't very well run an escrow service where the payer can reverse their payment into the escrow account without following the escrow procedures after getting the goods.

Compared to physical cash, as a digital good crypto has several advantages and a few disadvantages. In the latter category you have the obvious risk of hackers compromising the wallet; IMHO a separate, secure, hardware wallet is mandatory if you keep any significant amount of self-custodial crypto. On the flip side, however, it's not all that difficult or expensive to make your crypto more secure against would-be thieves than the gold in Fort Knox if you're willing to put in a modicum of effort, and the possibility of geographically-distributed encrypted backups makes it much harder to separate you from your money if you plan ahead a bit.

you have no explicit right to privacy in the US

According to the 4th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the People have the right "to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures". That is an explicit legal right to privacy, even if it doesn't use the literal word "privacy" in the text.

My employer is known to pay for jury duty, so I always get picked.

Wouldn't that unduly bias the jury selection? In effect the employer is being allowed to buy extra representation.

If we did some sort of perceptual hashing to each video, would it not be logical to assume we'd all be flagged?

Flagged for what, exactly? The perceptual hash would show that all three of you uploaded the same video, but not that any those uploads were infringing. Nothing should happen unless someone (either one of you, or another party) tries to claim that they're the copyright holder for that video. Which ought to require at least some hard evidence.

Ideally[0], if that were to happen, YouTube would manually investigate the claim to determine whether it was reasonable, and the parties accused of infringement would have a chance to challenge the claim or offer another reason why the uploads are not infringing, such as prior permission or fair use, before anything permanent was done. Since the video is in the public domain, the claim should be rejected and the video marked as public domain in the content database after the investigation to preempt any further false claims.

Of course investigations like this require actual work. It's always going to be easier to just take down the video—especially since they're hosting it for free. Ad revenues won't cover the cost of investigating claims, much less protracted legal fights.

[0] Ideally ideally, copyright would simply be repealed and we'd all be much better off. But short of that…

if you have 51% of the bill or such you can get it replaced

What if it's the middle third of the bill that's missing? Does the 51% need to be contiguous? The links suggest that you only need 51% in total, even if the bill was shredded.

Concretely: Could you take 1/3 from opposite ends of two different bills and present the pieces as 2/3 of three different bills to turn two old bills into three new ones? Putting aside the fact that this would be fraud, of course. Someone must have tried it at some point.

Mostly people are living longer. When SS first started only 55% of males and 60% of females who made it to age 21 would have survived their working-age years to retire at age 65 in 1940. By 1990 that figure had risen to 72% and 83%, respectively. Life expectancy after retirement also increased, from 12.7 (M) or 14.7 (F) years in 1940 to 15.3 or 19.6 years in 1990. (https://www.ssa.gov/history/lifeexpect.html)

If you have no flexibility as to location then you have no bargaining power; of course the prices will be sky-high. So you plan multiple potential routes (the road or rail doesn't need to go in a perfectly straight line) and make the purchases through intermediaries, just as with any large-scale commercial project.

Hey, my answer is actually to eliminate the position and put no one in power. I don't trust all idealists myself, though I'm not convinced corruption is better. But the OP was pinning for the rose-tinted days of yore when great politicians ran for office to do good and not to make money, so I suggested a scheme designed to encourage exactly that.

In 1945 there were 42 workers paying SS taxes for every retiree collecting benefits. For equal pay / retirement income after SS taxes, each worker only needs to provide 2.3%.

Today (actually since 2009) that ratio is three workers per retiree. Each worker has to provide 33%. By 2050 the ratio is projected to fall to two-to-one.

You can find the historical ratios here: https://www.ssa.gov/history/ratios.html

I didn't mean to imply there was anything like voluntary consent involved. I'm on your side here. But there is popular support for this program which wouldn't exist if it were presented purely as a wealth transfer with no upside for those forced to pay in. They gloss over the fact that paying SS taxes doesn't formally entitle you to any future benefits, but in practice cancelling it without offering some compensation to those who paid so much in would amount to political suicide.

No one with a profit motive would be interested, which is the whole idea. You'd get idealists and people seeking to make a name for themselves instead. (I'm not saying this is a perfect system BTW. I even called it a "crazy suggestion".)

I know Americans hate politicians but we treat mass murderers better than that.

The point is not to punish politicians but rather to ensure that there can be no conflicts of interest, or at least none rooted in a quest for material gain.

if (I assume, given the tone of this premise) they get so much as a parking ticket.

"Malfeasance" goes a bit beyond parking tickets. What I had in mind was more along the lines of bribery or corruption, not simple mistakes.

You are correct. Nonetheless, those paying in to the system today acquiesced to the plan under the assumption that they would one day be able to take their place as beneficiaries. They gave up significant amounts of money which could have been invested toward their own retirement to pay those SS taxes. Simply ripping it away without compensation is neither fair nor realistic.

Now, the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction -- no project can be built because no one is willing to step on anyone's toes.

I don't see this as a bad thing at all. We could do with fewer "megaprojects" unapologetically stepping on people's toes. Frankly, if the project isn't economical after accounting for what it would cost to buy up the necessary property at market rates--which is to say, rates the actual owners will voluntarily accept without any threat of coercion or eminent domain--then it simply isn't worth doing.

Crazy suggestion: Bar politicians from owning property or having any income (including gifts of goods or services) apart from the stipend for their appointed position. For life. Everything owned beforehand has to be given away as a condition of holding political office. They can retain a small allotment of personal items officially owned by the government but left in their care for their own personal use. No stocks, bonds, mutual funds, or any other investments. A pension for retirement is included, of course, provided they manage to avoid being convicted of any malfeasance during their tenure.

See how many career politicians you get under those conditions.

That's easily solved: Just don't announce who was selected until after the vote.

You cannot go on someone else's property and start yelling because they have the right to kick you off, violating your right to freedom of speech.

No, that does not in any way violate your right to freedom of speech. You aren't being punished for the speech. It doesn't even matter whether you were speaking. You were violating their rights with respect to their property by trespassing, which is exactly why they can kick you out. As I said before—any action which infringes on another's rights is forbidden. That includes actions which involve speech, when they also infringe on others' rights. It's not a right to speak, it's simply recognition that speaking, per se, does not infringe on others' rights and consequently is not a just basis for punishment.

That's the natural right to freedom of speech. The 1st Amendment, of course, adds extra constraints against the government interfering with speech, which shouldn't even be necessary in the first place but that's what happens when you grant some privileged entity the power to "legitimately" infringe on people's rights with impunity–natural rights just aren't enough any more, you have to spell out when you're going to respect them and when you're going to ignore them. That's not something you have to worry about when you just do the right thing and respect natural rights all the time without making special exceptions.

Which is my entire point: It doesn't matter if you explicitly say bodily autonomy is sacred in a constitutional amendment because ultimately the supreme court is whom interprets that.

If you assume from the start that the court will ignore the text of the law and the intent of those who ratified it and simply rule whichever way they want based on their personal feelings then I don't see any point in even having a Constitution. Or a legislature, for that matter. Or this discussion. So let's assume the court at least pretends to do its job and take the text and intent of the amendment into account. Anything less is just defeatism.

The only way you could in theory do something like this would be to have an amendment that outright says abortion is legal, but that wouldn't pass for obvious reasons.

No, it doesn't need to mention abortion at all. An amendment stating that no person can be compelled to provide life-saving medical support to another against their will would have that effect without being specialized to just abortion. Sure, motivated individuals would try to argue their way around it, but there is no way to reconcile forcing a mother to continue a pregnancy with the mother not being compelled to serve as involuntary life support. Would the SCOTUS do their job and enforce it? Who knows. I don't have that much faith in them, to be honest. But if not, an amendment explicitly stating that abortion is a legal right wouldn't fare any better.

What's happening in Texas is equally absurd, of course. I fully expect it to get struck down eventually, if only because it involves interstate commerce and threatens the federal government's exclusive prerogatives, but it hasn't been in effect long enough yet to work through the system.

You're thinking of Bitcoin. In the RSA blinded signature scheme the token holder doesn't need a private key, so there's nothing to reveal. The tokens are signed by the issuer (i.e. the bank), using the issuer's private key, and the blinding ensures that the issuer can't see the actual tokens at the time they're signed—that's revealed only when they're redeemed. The tokens themselves are just unique random numbers and not associated with anyone's identity. The issuer keeps track of which ones have been redeemed so that they can't be claimed twice. That's the risk you take by not turning them in immediately: anyone who had the token before you could claim it first, and then your copy of the token would be worthless.

Edit: In the case of off-chain exchange of Bitcoin wallets it would reveal the private key (naturally, since that's what you're exchanging) but for that reason you would only trade a wallet with a unique private key not used anywhere else. The only thing that key is useful for is spending the funds in that wallet. It's not linked to your identity. This is exactly like the "physical bitcoin" model (BitBills, Cascascius coins, etc.) except there is no tamper-evident hologram to prove that the private key hasn't been accessed—you're taking that on trust until you empty the wallet or hand it off to someone else.

argue that the rights of the fetus supercede the rights of the mother

The whole point of the amendment is to make it explicit that they don't. That isn't how rights work anyway; it's never a matter of priority, one right vs. another. Any positive action which would infringe on someone else's rights is forbidden, including in particular using someone else's property, including their body, without their consent. But merely not doing anything for them--non-action--is always an option. The fetus is the one taking from the mother--that's the action. The mother merely wants this to stop. There is no conflict of rights. The fetus's rights, such as they are, are not being infringed.

even though the mother has a right to bodily autonomy she would be committing murder

This line of argumentation would prove far too much. Refusing to serve as someone else's life support system is not murder. And again, the point of the amendment would be to make that explicit.

But, the youtuber would have no way to send them to a third random person.

Nothing in the Digicash blinded RSA signature scheme would prevent the tokens from being traded person-to-person any number of times before being presented back to the issuer. It requires some trust in the previous token holders, much like exchanging BTC by trading private keys in place of on-chain transactions, but it's perfectly doable given some other means of discouraging defection. And of course the blinding system itself ensures that the tokens being deposited can't be linked to any particular withdrawals.

Lots of people are negatively impacted by these regulations, even if you personally didn't feel as if you were making much headway in enforcing them. The difference is that you only see meaningful results if you can enforce the regulations nearly all of the time, whereas the individual victims of these regulations are significantly harmed when they're enforced even once.

The point was that even if you take the absurd position that fetuses have rights, a constitutional right to bodily autonomy would--among other things--make it obviously unconstitutional to force the mother to continue to serve as a host against her will.

The fetus clearly has no right to control the mother's body, only its own[0]. Extricate it without otherwise injuring it and see if it can survive on its own, or with whatever degree of medical intervention the "pro-life" crowd is willing to pay for.

[0] Assuming fetuses had rights, of course, which is obviously absurd. That requires the capability for deliberate action and the ability and willingness to take responsibility for the effects of your actions on others. Without that you may be alive and biologically "human" but you're still more an animal than a person--at any age.