Catzilla. Truly a loaf incarnate.

deleted by creator

With due respect, it is time to go outside.

Removed by mod

You’re right. I’m sorry for taking my frustration with the forum out on you.

Yes, if you throw democracy in the trash, ignore the rights of the unpopular, and pass any law that appeals to today’s public morality, then you’ll have lots of options. I just don’t want to hear you guys complain after this idealism gets spun to fuck you over by corporate lawyers more skillful than your populist politicians. But fuck me for pointing out the logical inconsistencies in the useless seething groupthink machine, I guess. Apparently I only have rights if the public likes me.

We’re talking about criminal law. Can you clearly, objectively, without arbitrary valuation of goods or services, define a legal principle which identifies the point at which a health plan cut becomes a crime?

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?

I’m going to ignore the insane part of your point where you equated layoffs with murder.

Greed, like hate, is subjective. It is therefore, like hate, a terrible prerequisite for the activation of the criminal justice system. The idea that motivations for crimes should change the definition and/or penalty of those crimes has fostered popular corruption of the justice system since its inception. Industrialization has accelerated the adoption of human fears into that justice system, to the point where we can no longer even count the number of infractions under the law.

Adding more subjective emotional consideration to a punitive system which is already weighed down beyond the ability to enact swift justice is the opposite of helpful.

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.

My pet theory is that NGINX was designed by a pen-tester who realized that all they needed to do to make the majority of SMBs expose their web servers to the internet was outperform Apache

That’s a good thing. Discord is chugging its way through the last half of the Web 2.0 service to social media pipeline. It’s a VC-funded multimedia enterprise extended around a novel technology core optimized for its original service offering, real-time voice/text. Nobody is immune to bloat, but because Matrix is a protocol standard, not an app, users have the option of sticking with minimal clients and servers that won’t (necessarily) get destroyed by feature creep.

If you’ve tried Element and thought “ah, slow Discord,” maybe have a scroll through https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/. I don’t want to get off topic but all my favorite software is standard/specification-based.

I think I enjoy the feeling of committing algo to muscle memory more than I do actually developing them. Whenever I get my hands on a new form factor I’m always frustrated by the process of getting used to the new mechanisms. For me it’s about the flow state. Does any of this resonate with you?

All it is necessary to do is to abolish all other forms of taxation until the weight of taxation rests upon the value of land irrespective of improvements, and take the ground-rent for the public benefit.
~ Henry George, Social Problems

Home slice I respect the grind but I gotta be real with you I haven’t bought a GPU since the Obama administration

Oh my God! That’s awful! Which ones?! Which sites, specifically, though?! You know, so I can call for bans.

It’s also not clear how the law will be enforced or to what extent.

No shit. Isn’t that the point? Use outrage to justify the growth of an impenetrable body of law addressing all social and economic behavior, then selectively enforce subjective interpretations to satisfy powerful groups and remain in power. So it goes for any population center whose rapid growth creates the illusion of independence.

Can we sell NYC to Canada yet? We’d make a bundle, they wouldn’t even be mad, and I’d sleep a lot better with the border of a superpower between me and a stack of nine million people who think privacy is a sin.

The issue isn’t the composition of the object but rather property and contract. The prosthetic limb comparison isn’t bad in my opinion, except this would be an experimental prosthetic limb that patients agreed to test with full knowledge and consent that it could be removed without their permission.

Again, I would hate to be in that position, but if I agreed to it, I understand my legal options would be limited. Again, this isn’t a company ruining someone’s life over a little money, this is a corporation unable to continue operating. Again, please consider the fact that a corporation which can treat epilepsy went backrupt because it couldn’t afford to do business in the regulatory environment of the health industry. I don’t understand how adding more subjective laws with hand-waved economic foundations is supposed to help this situation.

I can’t imagine what it’s like to live with epilepsy, nor to have a debilitating disease reenter your life after you’d become accustomed to its management. In her position, I imagine I would be doing everything I could to regain access to life-changing technology. Sympathy for Rita Leggett doesn’t make this story “dystopian,” nor is it a violation of anyone’s rights.

It was a trial! All participants agreed to have the device removed. If they didn’t, they’d be walking around with unsupported hardware in their brains, because the system that hardware was connected to was dissolved. Representing this legal outcome as a human rights violation is a predictable dilution of human rights.

Ienca likens it to the forced removal of organs, which is forbidden in international law.

There’s a vital difference between the removal of a body part and the removal of a tool you agreed to host, on condition of its release, before changing your mind. NeuroVista used novel technology to make meaningful progress in the treatment of epilepsy! Our response to this should be to encourage others like them, not to build bureaucratic restrictions hindering new innovators.

Companies should have insurance that covers the maintenance of devices should volunteers need to keep them beyond the end of a clinical trial, for example.

Who would insure this requirement?! Indefinite support of novel technology? Be serious. This article absolutely breezes over NeuroVista’s bankruptcy like it’s a little inclement weather. The fact is that biotech research is nearly illegal by default. Try to restrain your distaste for industrialization long enough to imagine starting and running this company:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6763675/