Hegar

The only way this gig is ethically justifiable is if the support act is a guillotine.

That headline really is a thing of beauty. It’s like finding out that your trash is piling up because the city retasked all the sanitation workers to lie in fields of filth and create a heavenly host of garbage angels.

I can’t not read that in a garbled south african accent.

Uber is a bad faith actor, their business model is entirely monopoly-seeking. If they’re trying to expand into bus routes, the goal will be to reduce the choices available to just Uber.

I personally believe that preserving a false and misleading picture of reality designed to trumpet a deranged cult that is working to make the world objectively worse for everyone including themselves is not acceptable.

I would say, “Look mum I love you more than anything in the world but preserving some of these movies crosses an ethical line for me.”

Of course I grew up in a house of atheist jewish academics, so making and justifying personal ethical stances that contravene wider group stances is expected behavior in my family. And we take document preservation fairly seriously.

It’s very naive to think that a weapons dealer who also kills it’s commercial airline passengers for profit isn’t also killing whistleblowers.

Google was accused of enacting a policy instructing employees to turn chat history off by default when discussing sensitive topics

According to the DOJ, Google destroyed potentially hundreds of thousands of chat sessions not just during their investigation but also during litigation. Google only stopped the practice after the DOJ discovered the policy. DOJ’s attorney Kenneth Dintzer told Mehta Friday that the DOJ believed the court should "conclude that communicating with history off shows anti-competitive intent to hide information because they knew they were violating antitrust law.

It’s perfectly reasonable to see this practice of avoiding the creation of evidence of their wrongdoing as evidence of wrongdoing, which is 100% what it is.

It’s not the same as a person using TOR, it’s a company hiding evidence.

Yes, getting sued for stepping on a mine like rounded corners is so good for inventiveness.

It’s so strange to me that people buy this BS line about IP laws having anything to do with why we get cool new things.

Either competition fosters innovation and therefore IP laws stifle it, or protecting monopolies fosters innovation and our IP laws make sense.

There has been a centralized bureaucratic autocracy in china since the legalist reforms of qin, a couple thousand years ago. Yes, the empire once united must divide but even during the long disunity before the sui and tang, there were multiple centralized autocratic states. Unity across all of the territory called modern china is not necessary to have a centralized state, and you’ll notice I never once used the word united.

forcibly “united” by external forces, such as the Western powers in the 19th century, dividing up and ruthlessly controlling economic spheres of influence

Wait were western powers dividing or uniting china? You’re claiming both in the same sentence. But that’s kind of immaterial to my point that the centralized autocratic state has existed in china for a couple thousand years and that many important new technologies came out of the cultures governed in that way.

I wouldn’t be looking for ‘game changers’ - that’s a marketing phrase with no firm meaning and very low applicability to reality. All invention is just iterating on existing ideas.

We didn’t see much cutting-edge tech coming out of China while they were recovering from the collapse of the imperial system and the colonial period, but now that they have more resources to throw at new tech, we’ll see new tech.

China has been a centralized autocratic state for a couple thousands years and has invented almost everything in that time.

More seriously though, it’s just not true to suggest that collectivist societies or autocratic states can’t invent new things. The briefest glance at history shows it’s just not true.

New things come from people having the time and resources to sit around and think about how to improve on the things we have. IP, social mobility and individualism just don’t really come into it.

Plenty of idiots using a cruise control system and trusting their lives to beta software.

Using it exactly as it was marketed doesn’t make you an idiot.

Why?

Who buys a new peripherals? You can get 100% functional peripherals for a couple of bucks from any thrift store.

justified authority

I think ‘organization without authority’ would be a better way to put it.

It sounds like you probably mean that, I just think that for a lot of anarchists ‘authority’ is a bad word. I don’t call myself an anarchist, but I agree with a lot of anarchist thought. Certainly to me ‘justified authority’ sounds like a contradiction in terms - all authority is based on artificial and unjust hierarchies, so could never be justified.

Most anarchists i’ve met tend to be focused on the practical and spend most of their lives thinking and talking about the ramifications of their actions and political action in general.

If you’re seeing similarities between ‘rightist nihilists’ and anarchists, you’re looking at stereotypes and not reality. They’re world’s apart. Anarchism requires a core of burning optimism about human capacity for co-operation and self governance. Depending on what you mean by ‘rightist nihilists’ you’re talking about no strong beliefs or diametrically opposed beliefs, goals, organizing structures, etc.