adderaline

listen. even if we disregard the fact that lots of legal experts, including the peers of the people who put this ruling in place, believe this is an existential threat to democracy, in practice, the ruling puts the authority for determining what is an official act into the hands of the judiciary. the supreme court is the ultimate authority in making these determinations. its a power grab, plain and simple, which grants the president immunity for “official acts”, and places the authority to determine what is and isn’t an “official act” in the hands of the same people who granted him that immunity.

the fact that Roberts is making vague gestures towards some kind of accountability means less than nothing. considering how Trump is behaving, what he and his crowd seem to believe about the breadth of this decision, we should not assume that a room full of people Trump put into power have any interest in ensuring Trump doesn’t “get away with everything”, and we shouldn’t assume that these people are even nominally interested in telling the truth about their intentions, considering just how much of their personal comfort is guaranteed by the institutions that Trump represents, and how resistant they are to accountability for their extremely well documented lies.

your personal confidence in Trump’s eventual, eternally forthcoming guilt relies on the trustworthiness of liars and the moral fiber of bigots. good luck with that.

or maybe you don’t have some especially well considered, enlightened perspective, and people here believe the things they do for reasons that align with their life experience and education, just as with yourself. taking a centrist stance is not some objectively superior position from which to view politics. you aren’t endowed with special insight for choosing the midpoint between ideologies that contradict each other.

Open models is the way to battle that.

This is something I think needs to be interrogated. None of these models, even the supposedly open ones are actually “open” or even currently “openable”. We can know the exact weights for every single parameter, the code used to construct it, and the data used to train it, and that information gives us basically no insight into its behavior. We simply don’t have the tools to actually “read” a machine learning model in the way you would an open source program, the tech produces black boxes as a consequence of its structure. We can learn about how they work, for sure, but the corps making these things aren’t that far ahead of the public when it comes to understanding what they’re doing or how to change their behavior.

same. audio accounts for so much of the friction i’ve experienced on linux its crazy. it works fine for general computing (after tons of troubleshooting), but it kind of convinced me that i’d probably need to dual boot if i wanted to try music production. i’d love to be proven wrong about that.

plenty of people?

its from the DMX track “X gon’ give it to ya”. it came out in 2002.

beardown

did… did you make this account just to insert racist bullshit into the bear meme?

Typical woman

as always, the people most upset about the bear thing just so happen to also be sexists.

cop got on the news and used a bike lock chain that was used to barricade the building as “proof” that the protestors were infiltrated by professional agitators, because it was an “industrial chain” or something like that. its the bike lock that Columbia University itself recommends to students.

i’d like to see how you’d be measuring “performance” in this context, or what you consider to be worthy of merit, because those things are not the objective measures you seem to think they are.

people who are contributing to open source projects are not a perfect Gaussian distribution of best to worst “performance” you can just pluck the highest percentile contributors from. its a complex web of passionate humans who are more or less engaged with the project, having a range of overlapping skillsets, personalities, passions, and goals that all might affect their utility and opinions in a decision making context. projects aren’t equations you plug the “best people” into to achieve the optimal results, they’re collaborative efforts subject to complex limitations and the personal goals of each contributor, whose outcome relies heavily on the perspectives of the people running the project. the idea you can objectively sort, identify, and recruit the 50 “best people” to manage a project is a fantasy, and a naive one.

the point of mandating the inclusion of minority groups in decision making is to make it more likely your project and community will be inclusive to that group of people. the skillsets, passions, and goals that a diverse committee contains are more likely to create a project that is useful and welcoming to more kinds of people, and a committee that is not diverse is less likely to do so. stuff like this is how you improve diversity. in fact, its quite hard to do it any other way.

there isn’t a problem to solve. the fact legislators want to do this is the problem. quibbling about how exactly they’re gonna implement the torment nexus is secondary to the goal of resisting the torment nexus.

like, if your whole thing is “this is happening, its self-evidently about surveillance, and we can do nothing to stop it” and you start proposing ways for us to be surveilled “safely, securely, and privately”, you are pro-surveillance. you are supporting the bills, right now, with the rhetoric you’re using. like, imagine doing this about any other political issue.

“i don’t support the death penalty, but we can’t stop the government from implementing it, so here’s the way I’d murder prisoners.”

“we can’t stop them from banning abortion, and I hate that, but I’ll suggest we put the limit at 10 weeks. that seems reasonable, right?”

your idea for “solving the problem” involves doing the thing that both restricts what information people can access, and tracks their legal identity, but in a way that is maybe marginally less stupid than tech illiterate legislators can manage. the fact that you would be fine with the bills if the intent was just to ensure kids can’t access “pornography” in a private way kind of reveals your biases here. it would not be a good idea even then.

what counts as pornography is socially defined. a tool which allows the selective restriction of pornography is also by definition a tool that encourages the redefinition of pornography to encompass whatever it is governments don’t want people to learn about. especially in the US, it would become a tool for the censorship of minorities, the banning of books, and the removal of queer people from the internet. that’s why these laws are being proposed. its not ambiguous at all. like, even if it is inevitable it will pass, the priority doesn’t then become “how do we make this bad idea more efficient?”, it becomes “how do we subvert this unethical restriction on our communications?”. assuming that we can do nothing to stop this ensures that we won’t. its a good thing nobody’s buying your bullshit.

if you think bills like this aren’t at their core designed to erode user privacy, you’re fooling yourself. there is no “privacy based approach” to destroying user privacy, and the ultimatum you’re proposing is not real. stupid laws fail all the time. the fact that people are trying to make ID verification a thing doesn’t make it inevitable it will become a thing, and in fact, opposing it is the best chance we have at making it fail.

your argument to the inevitability of shit-eating just makes you an advocate for the legislators who want us to eat shit.

because adopting open source software is a societal good? the idea that it won’t grow is kind of bleak. the industry standard for android device OS is dogshit for user privacy and a private monopoly and that’s something we should want fixed. unless you like living under constant corporate surveillance.

Eh, can’t win em all. I will say, just as a parting thought, the things you’ve been saying are also ideological. Believing clean separations between ideas and concepts are possible, appealing to existing systems as a way of validating the moral rightness of other systems, even believing that there is an objective “good and truthful answer” is an ideological position. I’d say one of the more pernicious ideological positions a person can take is to believe they do not have an ideology. It makes it very difficult to think about or discuss why you believe the things you believe.

Separating different things to figure out their role in an overall system is a completely normal and useful thing to do. […]

that isn’t my point. my point is that rent has always existed within unjust systems, and is itself a tool for those systems to accumulate wealth. if we’re taking gears out of a meatgrinder and trying to identify just how much that gear contributes to the problem of grinding people into meat, we’re missing the point. in practice, the system in which rent operates is built to deprive people of resources. but even then your framing is not agreeable to me. we aren’t talking about a machine, we’re talking about a complex socio-cultural phenomenon that developed organically over generational time spans. the idea that we could even rip the word “rent” out of the context it exists in and get anything worthwhile out of analyzing it like that is not reasonable to me. like, cultures and economies don’t have parts like an engine do, they have trends and policies and outcomes, and those things can’t reasonably be reduced to cogs in a machine.

That’s not an argument against rent, that’s an argument against students having different means and having to pay for things in general. Why do students have to pay for food themselves? Why do they have to do their own house work when others can afford to hire someone? Those are all good questions, but they only concern rent in so far as it’s also a thing people pay money for.

you’re doing the thing again. separating rent out from the system its built into and analyzing it only as the act of exchanging currency for housing itself. i’m trying to engage in a systemic critique, not a stubbornly isolated look at a single piece of a larger whole. the problem of students “having different means” is not the point. you have to look at the larger picture. on a population scale, how does the requirement to pay your resources into the pockets of wealthier people for basic housing affect a society?

rent is, in the case of the university student, a material obstacle towards getting an education. those who do not have money or home ownership are more likely to be denied an education as a result, and will have less access to money making opportunities in the future. the money they could have been saving for themselves goes into the pockets of richer (whiter) people, so they are less likely to be able to pass on money they make during their lifetime onto their kids. non-white people are much more likely to be renting than white people, and that is historically because non-white people were restricted from home ownership in the past, and were not able to build the kind of generational wealth that comes from home ownership. rental arrangements reinforce existing social stratifications by providing the means by which the wealthy (and white) can continue to extract resources from the poor (and brown), as they have done for generations past.

like… sharecropping was rent, and its sole purpose was to explicitly ensure that freed slaves continued to provide wealth to their former masters. the actual observable impacts of rent are to transfer wealth from people who have no resources to those with resources to spare.

[…] If there are more houses than people wanting to live in them then houses are essentially “unlimited”, in the sense that you’d probably need to pay someone to take it off your hands. […]

i was being facetious. my point was more that these factors you seem to think are separable are interlinked. just as a wake up call, there are currently more houses than people wanting to live in them. there are many multiples of houses left unoccupied for each homeless person in the United States, and the price of housing hasn’t done the thing you’re saying it would. instead, homelessness is increasing as landlords continue to raise rent, and the prospect of owning a home is becoming more and more out of reach for more and more people.

Rent doesn’t require private ownership. Property can be owned and rented out by public entities, and that’s actually pretty common.

there is a rabbit hole i could go down about this, but i don’t really wanna. my position is relatively simple. housing is a human right. putting literally any barriers up that prevent people from getting a place to stay are wrong. imposing extra financial burdens onto the people who have the least money is wrong. rent is such a burden, even for public housing. nobody outside the people who live on the land should have ownership over the land, not wealthy folks, not the state. housing co-ops, self-governance, that is what we should strive for.

As an example, burglars require air to live, but the problem of burglaries cannot simply be reduced to the existence of air.

i don’t really know how to respond to this. air isn’t a socioeconomic phenomenon with a proven history of driving wealth inequality? it doesn’t interact with race and class in ways that structurally disadvantage people who are poor and brown?

And uhm … the universe is infinite as far as we know, but that’s another discussion entirely.

lol. disagree, but fine, ill be less hyperbolic. “the parts of the universe we can build houses on currently are finite.” is that better?

That might be what you’re calling personal ownership, while I’d just say that’s private ownership within healthy limits.

i’m just gonna end with this: i’m not prepared to expand upon the exact shape of why i think you’re wrong, and why i think your rebuttals fail to provide a compelling challenge to the ideas i’m trying to convey. (that is not to say there aren’t compelling challenges to socialist ideas, there certainly are.) i used to hold a very similar position. the idea of doing away with private property once seemed ludicrous to me. then i actually engaged with socialist and anarchist arguments for why they believe the things they believe, and i found them compelling. i’m not saying you will too, but i am saying that the reasons i believe these things are knowable and there’s plenty of media out there that explains it better than i ever could.

This is a completely useless stance when you want to figure out if rent itself is morally good or bad.

hard disagree. we have to examine things as they exist in the real world, not as we would like them to be. if we are only figuring out whether it would be good in principle, we’re failing to recognize whether that principle is actually founded on actual observable fact. and the observable facts say that rent has always been a potent tool for capitalists to extract wealth from people.

There is absolutely nothing wrong about this form of rent.

also disagree. why are these university students renting? schools could be providing housing to students if we invested public funds into that kind of project. what does the necessity of rent for students do in practice? well, the extra costs involved in having to rent space on the market in order to go to school structurally disadvantages marginalized students. students whose parents can cover the rent are able to maximize their time learning, take advantage of more extracurriculars, or save the money they make from a job for themselves, while students who can’t have to live in their cars, take jobs to cover costs, or just not get the education they want. the scale of the problem is smaller, but the nature of the problem is the same. those who have not must give their money to those who have in order to have a place to live.

rent + limited supply + capitalistic profit maximation + corruption

lets just go through this. the supply of available property will always be limited. capitalism is defined by the private ownership of the means of production. corruption implies a system not working as intended. capitalism is intended to maximize profit, capitalism requires private ownership, resources are always limited, and rent requires private ownership. you might as well just say “private property + the limitations of a finite universe + private property + the incentives of private property is a problem”. i’m kinda joking, but not really.

And I would definitely not go as far as saying that private property in general is bad, expecially not very limited private ownership like a person owning the house they live in or part of the company they work for. Too much concentration of ownership is a problem, not the concept of ownership itself.

this is a problem of terminology. generally when socialists or other lefties are talking about private property, they’re talking about land and the economic abstractions of land ownership. socialist politics makes explicit distinctions between personal property and private property. i hear this argument alot, honestly, and if you find yourself making it as an argument against criticisms of private property more than once, i’d just recommend learning a bit more about what socialists believe, because its kind of just talking past what we think the problem is, and how we propose to solve it (democratically, instead of at the whims of rich folks).

you’ve talked about corporations a couple times, so i do wanna just say that those aren’t necessarily reasonable structures in and of themselves. it isn’t a given that the owners of a corporation should earn a profit, or that owning shares in a company is something beyond critique. there are more democratic organizational structures that don’t concentrate power towards those who have the most stuff.

rent doesn’t exist in principle, it exists in practice. and in practice, the history of rent is a history of wealth extraction. if its “perverted” today, it definitely was 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago. if you aren’t aware, this is a pretty basic leftist thing. if property can be held privately, those who own the property can use that ownership to extract wealth from people who need water, food, and shelter, but do not themselves own property. they can use that extracted wealth to buy more property, depriving ever more people of places in which to live their lives without paying somebody else for the privilege. and so on. thus “private property is theft”.

in any case, rent isn’t an uncontroversial example of how to fairly pay people who do things. rent is deeply political, and has been for most of modern history. it isn’t just common sense that we ought to allow people who own things to make money off that ownership, that’s a political statement, and one that should require some justification, considering its material impact on poverty, homelessness, and the accumulation of wealth.

if you feel like rent as it currently exists even vaguely approximates the kind of model you claim you haven’t been paying attention. rent is, at its core, having other people pay for something because you own it. landlords are infamous for not paying for upkeep and repairs. the incentives behind owning property that other people live in lead to bad outcomes for people who can’t afford to own.

ugh. you’ve pressed enough of my buttons to warrant a response.

We’ve come a long way from cave drawings and hieroglyphics

the idea that hieroglyphs are in some way inferior to modern writing systems in an objective way is flawed. hieroglyphs were a diverse writing system comprised of phonograms, logograms, and ideograms, and they could be used contextually to record a rich and complex language as fully featured as our own. the ancient Egyptians wrote their dreams, legends, and histories in this text for over 4000 years. the idea that our modern languages are somehow “better” than ancient languages is to misunderstand what language is.

And yet there is a whole new wave of people unable to use those languages correctly or even rudimentarily who drag civilization backwards by returning to hieroglyphics

the idea that there is a “”“correct”“” way to use language is flawed. the field of linguistics recognizes a vast diversity of languages, dialects, sociolects, and even idiolects that vary from each other in many interesting ways. collapsing that diversity into a single “correct” way to use language is nonsense, and has historically served to exclude those whose dialect is not supported by powerful institutions. just because people aren’t speaking like you are doesn’t mean they’re speaking wrong, or “rudimentarily”.

instead of catastrophizing about how new ways of communicating might end the world, as people have done literally since we started to write down things, linguists have studied how and why emojis exist, and, unsurprisingly, its not because people are getting stupider or something like that. its because they’re useful for conveying non-linguistic social information in informal written communication. without the non-verbal queues, vocal tone, and other contextual information that exists in spoken language, emojis are one of many ways to add context that can’t be represented through text alone. tone indicators and emoticons serve similar roles.

And things like emojis are leading the charge.

this is cringe. small changes in the structure of our informal written communication are never going to be the big, important thing you seem to think they are. if you’re this passionate about language that you think it can be ruined by funny little pictures, learn some linguistics. nobody who knows anything substantive about language shares your concerns, because they’re too busy studying the interesting new cultural phenomenon and what it might mean for our understanding of human communication.

i mean, at the state level blue states are both not trying to get queer people killed, and are expanding access to resources. blue senators aren’t voting with the anti-queer positions on the federal level. they aren’t safe, but complacency and support are not the same thing, and the outcomes for actual people are materially worse in places where republicans have control.