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balls: USA, Geolibertarianism, Virginia, Bisexuality, Atheistic Satanism

  • 3 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • What’s your point? That people organize themselves to commit crimes? That risky behavior is more dangerous when it’s amplified by concentrated capital? None of this justifies the phenomenal leap you made to say that an employer is responsible for the lives of their employees. None of this is precedent for the further corruption of the justice system into subjectivity and emotional bias.

    Can’t you see that you’re actually making it worse? You go after organizations whose bread and butter is legal entanglement, using legal entanglement as your only weapon. You make the regulatory environment more difficult for startups and SMBs to compete in, and you do nothing but give your (supposed) worst enemies more political tokens with which to negotiate advantageous positions in that environment. Why do you think these corporate elites flush hundreds of millions of dollars sponsoring progressive media outlets? Do you think they’re stupid?




  • Individual data points like “I take pilates”, “I work nights and weekends”, and “I live in Smalltown, ST” might not mean anything on their own, but if you can connect this data to a single person, then realize there’s only one pilates studio in Smalltown, then look up their hours and notice there’s only one day class on weekdays, you can make a reasonable guess as to a regular time when a person is away from home. This is called data brokerage.

    This is a comically contrived example; the real danger is in the association of countless data points spread across millions of correlated identities. It’s not just your data, it’s the association of your data with that of your friends and family. Most people are constantly streaming their location, purchases, beliefs, and affiliations out to anyone who cares enough to look. Bad actors may collate their data and use it to take advantage of them, and the only move they have is to ask for prohibitive legislation. As if we don’t already have prohibitive legislation.

    Anonymity is expensive, inconvenient, and fragile, but it’s the only mechanism that protects individuals from the information economy, which I would put right next to ecology in terms of critical 21st-22nd century social problems. It also helps us resist censorship, but that’s a different essay.





  • First of all, all hail the pirate kings who release exploits to the public. Private property is the root of all natural rights. You have the right to do as you like with your property. Because of this, so do powerful jerks like Elon Musk.

    In The Overcriminalization of Social and Economic Conduct, which is well worth the hour read, Paul Rosenzweig describes how industrialization changed the definition of crime in the United States. Roughly, proof of criminal intent is no longer required to convict those who supervise negative outcomes of industrial processes. This trend has two main sources of support: the general public, whose fear of new ideas is sauved by splashy performances of strong legislation and decisive justice, and the established industrial titans whose business in this country has been defined by legislative entanglement since the beginning.

    When The Zucc went to Congress and asked Fed Daddy to pwease wegulate him harder, progressives and reactionaries congratulated each other on their bipartisan agreement that we should give him what he wants. Mark even mentioned that he was only asking because Meta has enough lawyers that it doesn’t make a difference to them. Meanwhile, the inherent complexity of a bloated regulatory environment is startup pesticide. So, the left gets to say they regulated a corporation, the right gets to say they cleaned up the internet, Congress™ gets to write a bunch of precedent for more Congress™ later, and Meta gets to do the only thing it ever cared about: grow.

    Back to Piracy vs. Tech Dad. Everywhere I look, I see calls to warp the law in order to get socialish revenge on this cartoon character. Isn’t is possible that we’re stuck in a cycle of injustice? I don’t like tehniques like secure boot, soft locks, or DRM, and it’s scary as hell to see them being introduced to automobiles packed with always-online cameras, but let’s be honest with ourselves. Every time something goes wrong, we call for criminal code. Batteries not working as advertised? That’s a tax penalty, somehow. You coded integration between your car company and your social media app? You’re a trust now: bend over and prepare for nationalization. Elon is not relatable, yet it’s too easy to sit back and say you would open yourself up to the public in his place. Meanwhile, both sides go on banning everything they dislike.

    We owe it to ourselves and our fellow citizens to be rational about the business environment we create in a democracy. By all means, jailbreak your shit, but also strongly consider whether your comments contributed to the lock in the first place.