I can’t wait until private equity companies are exposed as the exploitive side of our current system that needs to be corrected. At the heart of so many good companies are bad decisions driven by PE structures and personalities, most of whom seem very toxic and short sighted. Surely there is a better model of capitalism — I am not so vapid as to turn against the obvious advantages of the system. But I am also not willing to endorse the current approach as anything but exploitation with extra steps.
We need to cut spending. Spending is OUT OF CONTROL.
You can’t make up in taxes what you keep spending, and deficit spending is insane right now.
Why is this not part of the conversation? I have no problem paying higher taxes, but without responsible spending it’s just pouring gas on an out of control fire.
This is just a social credit system designed to control behavior, but attached to your workplace instead of your person.
The proof is simple. If you move this system from a single workplace to multiple workplaces with an ID for the worker, you get social credit.
This is a system that many governments and corporatists are in love with, as it generally “punishes troublemakers” without having anyone who’s a lawsuit target get overly involved. In my opinion, social credit systems are repression and totalitarianism masquerading as systems of personal responsibility.
Something like "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated"
Eh it's kind of a technicality that passwords are protected at all. It's not a privacy thing.
If you keep incriminating documents in a safe, the police have every right (with a warrant) to cut it open and get the documents. If the safe has a code, you don't have to share the code, but only because SHARING the code requires you to be "a witness against yourself" in violation of the 5th amendment, not because you have a right to privacy in the safe.
It's hard to justify giving a fingerprint as being a "witness against yourself". So with a warrant or other relevant due process it's hard to object.
I disagree with this idea myself. I believe that any compelled action that leads to your incrimination should be considered being a witness against yourself. I realise this isn't the established caselaw, and I already have some obvious potential reasons bubbling up in my mind as to why. For instance how can you give someone a breathalyser test if they refuse? It defnitely creates problems.
That said, I think bigger problems with this standard are coming down the line eventually.
"any compelled action" would also preclude giving ID at a traffic stop. Maybe even stopping for police at all. A line needs to be drawn somewhere, and I think it must be a balancing of the various interests rather than a hard and fast rule. For example privacy vs successfully convicting wrongdoers vs preventing convicting the innocent vs preventing abuse of power vs public safety etc etc.
We should not. It should be provided unconditionally to anyone needing it. Homo sapiens can do better than letting its pairs who can't pay die (slowly).
And care givers should be very well paid because they have hard jobs and critically important ones.
> It should be provided unconditionally to anyone needing it.
Correct me if I'm wrong but in many/most countries including the US, hospitals legally will treat emergency patients regardless of whether they can pay or are homeless-levels of broke.
Mad respect for live demoing in a talk on conference Wi-Fi. There is something to authenticity and embracing potential failure that flies in the face of the well manicured presentation culture we have today that needs to come back. As long as the talk can be done, or there is a plan b, why not? I think a lot of concern stems from wasting other people’s time: which is valid. But presenting is also a deeply culturally engrained performance art that sometimes sacrifices authenticity for appearances.
The trick is to assume conference WiFi does not exist and work against an all-local setup. Cache all the things :)
The other trick is to make material available to everyone, post-haste. This is especially important for remote talks [1].
Apropos embracing failure. I work hard to set up a smooth path. I don't want things to fail. Yet, I actively chose to be open to it because undoing the failure has a habit of creating a learning moment for someone among the dear listeners (they too try to debug in their head, and arrive at their own insight).
[1] In 2022, I gave a talk as a live demo at a remote conference. Three different networks at three different locations in my area flaked on me. My home network because of digging in my area, another mid-way through my talk because of power failures, and an otherwise-pretty-good wireless network because it lost packets exactly over my presentation and was just fine ten minutes after.
I think people don’t understand how important just being there for your family actually is. Sometimes it’s enough just to be reliable, stand for good and just be present. Sounds like he really knew it.
"" Now, I hate the movie The Big Chill, let me make that clear, and
I hope I can’t be sued for hating a movie, I hate The Big Chill,
because it’s about members of my generation, all of whom have
become swine. The only person in the movie I like is dead when
the movie starts, and they are having his funeral, and the old
preacher says something quite profound. He asks the crowd of
young yuppies, he goes "Isn’t our common life together and just
being a good man enough to sustain us anymore?" And the answer to
that is 'No, it’s not'. ""
Enjoyed that very much, as I do all small blog pieces written with
heart. Good to read your contrast of Big Chill with Roderick's
take. (He's a serious joker, for me a kinda Bill Hicks who took the
job title philosopher instead of stand-up comedian)
> they are only honest with themselves about this in the private setting
I'm sure you're aware of the phase "social cooling" [0] TBH I am
astonished by the extreme difference between the thoughts I hear
expressed in real life, and those "safe" ones people put online
now. Things have completely flipped. 20 years ago we put our edgy
personas online and kept IRL reserved and acceptable. Other than on
4chan etc, which are performance dramas, people have it the other way
about now. So you're right; there is a "big chill" in blogging, but a
counter out there in the streets and bars.
> I feel a chill coming over my desire to write and publish freely on
the internet
Seriously, don't let the bastards get you down :) Don't get me wrong I
love code (python too :) and I love writing about my own corner of
comp.sci (DSP), but in 50 years if anyone's still here to read, which
are the essays they will still care about? That thought only gives me
more courage, in a way what I'm writing [1] is for "the survivors",
not the audience out there now.
I am struggling a bit with this right now. Being a provider in the modern age means less than it used to. It feels like paying all the bills and being reliable isn’t valued much.
Your feelings are correct. The role of provider and protector has been largely taken over by the state. And fathers are much maligned at this point in most popular media.
We should pass a law that any company that tries to outsource their trademark and copyright costs onto the public loses them in reaction to this ongoing waste of money and time.
