netstack
Texas is freedom land
No bio...
User ID: 647
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4d ago
I was using it in response to the OP. That tweet just says “fracturing,” so I’m not 100% sure what distinguishes it from Balkanization, siloing, or walled gardens.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4d ago
Sorry, I was using it as a generic Eastern Bloc stand-in. Really, any of the smaller countries. I don’t know the legal mechanism, but torrent or vice sites are stereotypically hosted on these more permissive domains. Kind of like how sci-hub.se currently has .ru and .st mirrors.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4d ago
Wait, aren’t those both things that happened to Raskolnikov?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4d ago
…there is one?
About 4 million Americans are on parole or probation, compared to something like 1 million in prison and another million in jail. They’re being monitored specifically to reduce the chance of recidivism. In the meantime, sure, they still get to ride your subway.
What’s your threshold for “manifestly incapable,” anyway? How should we decide when someone has crossed the line and gets (permanent?) exile instead of prison? I think it looks a lot like sentencing guidelines, probation, counseling, all these other interventions we already do—except at the last resort we boot them to the Montana Gulag instead of the chair.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4d ago
I was sure the “lacking value” argument was specifically addressed in a U.S. Supreme Court case. Is this taken from the pixiv announcement?
Edit: it is, but in exactly the opposite way that I thought. Miller v CA.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5d ago
Texas recently started enforcing HB 1181, a viewer-age-verification law. The sort which intends to make it very annoying to distribute pornography if and only if one intends to run a business in the U.S.. Hosting a server out of Czechoslovakia is, as I understand it, still untouchable.
Pornhub’s parent company responded by cutting all services to Texas. Should a Texan IP address make a request to their site, he will receive instead an angry letter about his lawmakers’ shortsightedness, questionable legal footing, and so on. Other sites have followed suit. The argument goes that 1) the law only hurts the most compliant companies, and 2) it fails a variety of Constitutional protections.
Naturally, it was wildly popular, passing 141-2. It has also survived legal challenges up to the 5th Circuit Court. Even though one of the provisions was struck down as improper government speech, proponents insist that the rest is perfectly above-board.
So far, it’s looking like another step towards pillarization.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5d ago
"access to the financial system writ large" has become so utterly critical to doing anything useful that it immediately has a totalizing effect on what anybody can do
Well, when you put it like that…what’s the alternative?
I met someone, once, who’d been working in Saudi Arabia when her employer switched from paying cash to paying checks. She explained that they used to bring in a giant sack of cash on paydays. Now they could turn it into a bookkeeping problem rather than a logistical one.
These enormous institutions developed by providing a valuable service. People wanted to store their savings. They wanted to distribute promises instead of cash. Eventually they wanted all the records generated automatically, without any humans needing to slow the process down. At what point did they move from a private to a public good?
Because the alternative to private banking, with its private right of refusal and freedom of association, is treating it like we do the roads. A central actor has to step in and say “we know this policy is irrational for any of you as individuals, but we’ve judged the total benefit to be greater.” And that’s not going to happen so long as the central “irrationality” is something unpopular as pornography.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5d ago
wokestupid
Come on, that’s just lazy.
Anyway, I’d argue that colleges still pursue the latter goal. Even for pie-in-the-sky pure science. But I suppose I’m rather biased, seeing as my sister and I both did our Master’s degrees in these kind of labs. There are two media narratives about university research. And neither “breathless futurism” nor “absurd political sinecures” captures the quiet tide of NSF and corporate money.
I don’t fully understand the incentives. Grad students remain cheaper than full-time employees; employing them on tangential research is a popular way to scout talent. It also interfaces into the reputation games of publishing, trendsetting, and attracting new students. Combine all these, and you get institutions which compete to be known for their pure science.
I have no idea what percentage of university research falls under this umbrella. My school probably had fuel for both media narratives somewhere on campus. But it is a lot closer to the ideal of a Research University than you might expect from a random state school.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5d ago
The first two get recommended on /r/rational periodically, but iI’m sad to say I never got around to them yet.
Is Expeditionary Force Craig Alanson? That one’s on the list. Eyes are open for a hard copy.
Never heard of Starship’s Mage. It does sound rad.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5d ago
Hmm. I’ll have to keep eclipse in mind.
My day job is mostly MATLAB, so on the rare occasion I need to do Python, I use Spyder or one of those similar wrappers. The read/execute/print window is the important bit.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5d ago
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5d ago
Interesting.
I could see US protests operating the same way, but I don’t really have any statistics. @gattsuru gave examples of larger groups which would credibly show up at, or at least contact the organizers of, protests across the country. Even though we’re much larger than the UK, a core of protest enthusiasts could be doing that.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5d ago
Then how do you know it exists?
The bailey, I mean, where these discord servers somehow distinguish their members from "a mob of dissatisfied individuals." Anyone can give out an email address. That puts them roughly on par with a local HOA. Scary.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5d ago
How old are you, roughly speaking?
Because this was famously, visibly effective in a few historical situations. The Civil Rights movement is in living memory.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5d ago
Hold on.
Are you suggesting Arab suffering is a means to some end? Or is it the goal?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5d ago
By whom?
I'm sure you can find any number of groups who are proud to participate. I don't think any of them deserve much credit.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5d ago
Something like that…maybe. Evidence: the number of alternate topics in this thread.
Calling it class interest or even a cohesive demand is a bit much, though. It’s not the same people protesting every time. I’d say there’s a background temperature of discontent which, this week, happened to be hottest around Columbia. Even if we had known that Iran’s launch would blow over, we could never have predicted that this was going to top the leaderboard for today.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5d ago
Ken state
The Barbie movie has left a lasting impression on our cultural consciousness.
In all seriousness, I don’t think protests have to have direct efficacy. The important thing is when people in power think about aiding Palestine/Israel, they think “people care enough about this to push the envelope of speech.” It’s literally about sending the message.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
6d ago
Burning Wheel, a roleplaying game manual. It’s incredibly pretentious. At the same time, though, there’s legitimately a lot of good material there? Notes about common pitfalls from RPGs. Systems which look like commentary on familiar games. I get the impression that this was created after a lot of long forum arguments and table experience.
Whether that actually makes a functional game…I’m not sure. There are lots of play-examples, but I’ve never heard of any random person playing it. The provided setting is an archetypal fantasy world which works fine to contextualize the rules, but leaves me cold. Burning Empires is better on that front.
Then again, I don’t usually play games like these. The theory is more fun than the practice. Which makes experimental, abstract books like this one more appropriate.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
7d ago
KBJ
Whenever the Motte discusses a court case, a few people always make sure to drop a note about how she's not very impressive and/or a partisan hack. So I assume she's doing more or less the same thing as every other justice.
For what it's worth, I felt the same way about Barrett, mostly on the weirdness of her concurrence in the Colorado judgment. Looking back on other opinions, though, she seems perfectly fine. Kavanaugh's been a pleasant surprise too. Turns out even getting consideration for the top job in the profession is a pretty good filter.
Less antagonistic, please.
You can make this observation—it sure does look like that was already implied by MartianNight—without turning up the heat.
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