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It’s funny, because I googled “why women pants no pocket” to figure out why this is the case and the first result says that it’s because men who dominate the fashion industry don’t want women to have pockets.
Why don’t all the women who want pockets get together, start a company to make highly-pocketed pants, tap this unmet demand and make billions? You know, scratch your own itch and all.
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Since when it’s that easy to start a company? Not any kind of company, a factory of mass production.
That’s a very immaterial look at the subject.
Our status quo is patriarchal. Besides an 8h job, which pay less compared with men, women are the ones that do the housekeeping and child care. Now women should simply start a factory to make these billions.
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Oh come on. There are plenty of women who own and operate their own businesses. And women are having kids later and marrying later, meaning more free time to start a company.
And you don’t have to start with a giant production. In fact, men don’t start that way either. You start small and grow.
And the wage gap has been debunked so many times that it’s absurd to even bring it up.
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Oh come on. There are plenty of women who own and operate their own businesses. And women are having kids later and marrying later, meaning more free time to start a company.
And you don’t have to start with a giant production. In fact, men don’t start that way either. You start small and grow.
The logic you are using is women should sacrifice even more of their time to solve, in local scale, a global scale systemic problem.
And the wage gap has been debunked so many times that it’s absurd to even bring it up.
It’s not absurd to bring it up at all, because it’s real:
Gender gap per country, The Global Gender Gap Report 2017, World Economic Forum, page 8
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The logic you are using is women should sacrifice even more of their time to solve, in local scale, a global scale systemic problem.
Well, yes. That’s how businesses on average work. This is also how local change tends to go…ye olde “make a cup of tea instead of boiling the ocean”.
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The logic you are using is women should sacrifice even more of their time to solve, in local scale, a global scale systemic problem.
Are women unable to solve their own problems? Why do you need men to solve it for you? Why do you think that men have some amount of free time that women don’t? The lack of availability of a product you want is not a systemic problem. Men are not keeping you from making this product in any way.
Regardless, women can use market pressure to solve the problem, if the demand is as high as some say it is. If a small business proves the demand for these jeans, the global retailers will quickly follow suit. Seems simple enough.
It’s not absurd to bring it up at all, because it’s real
I took a look at the report. The plot on page 8 does not show a wage gap, rather it is a chart showing the Global Gender Gap Index, an index which takes into account many more factors than income/wage. The index that you should have pointed me to was The Economic Opportunity and Participation subindex, described on page 5. From the name, we can already tell is is too broad to determine whether or not there is a wage gap for people doing the same job at the same level of experience. If we look at the definition of this subindex, we find that we are actually interested in the remuneration gap. However, the term “remuneration” and variations thereof are only mentioned in 3 places in the article, and there is no data on this gap specifically.
If we look at the page on the United States, we find a section called Wage Equality for Similar Work, which may be what we are looking for. This data comes from the WEF Executive Opinion Survey, 2017.
From the intro:
the Executive Opinion Survey is the longest-running and most extensive survey of its kind, capturing the opinions of business leaders around the world on a broad range of topics for which statistics are unreliable, outdated, or nonexistent for many countries.
So we see that this data is merely the opinion of the people who run these companies, and is not hard data (this much was admitted in the Gender Gap Index as well). If you want to be sure of this, here is link to the survey itself, which shows that it is only a survey of opinions. Check out question 11.18.
So I don’t think this report contains proof that men and women doing the same work at the same level of experience earn a different amount of money.
While it is true that the average man earns more than the average woman globally, this is explained by many factors, some of which are listed on the wikipedia page. Here is an article that explains how these various factors affect the pay gap. There are many others like it.
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It is a systemic problem, because historically women have been restricted from economically dominant positions, for being women. The factors (discrimination, motherhood penalty and gender roles) in the Wikipedia article that you linked are examples of this systemic problem. But, I could’ve been more clear is that I’m not saying that women can’t solve their own problems, but that the first post “Why don’t all the women who want pockets get together…” has an intonation that completely disregards the responsibility of men and patriarchy in this. And put the whole responsibility on women.
I know the index is not only wage, but I wasn’t mentioning only wage in my previous posts. I agree with you this study is not the proof. But, it covers more countries than any other study that I’ve seen, especially Global South, which have a completely different reality than Global North countries, and why the “if you want to change this, you should just open a company that does the way you want” argument lack materialism.
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tbh TLD as a concept is as alien to end-users as IP address.
people want to go to facebook, so they try facebook.com because .com is the ‘go-to’ for websites.
Now whenever i want to order pizza i just google “dominoes” so i can sidestep the domain guessing completely.
so google is a second level dns system and it’s how the whole thing should work in the first place
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people want to go to facebook, so they try facebook.com because .com is the ‘go-to’ for websites.
Probably but in non US countries there is a mix of tlds used. About 50% of websites here will use the ccTLD and there is a good mix of .org and .net used as well as .org.au and .net.au. Also a lot of new websites are using .io and .tv
But like you said, I doubt many people type domains names anymore and just search the website name.
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tbh TLD as a concept is as alien to end-users as IP address.
I agree.
people want to go to facebook, so they try facebook.com because .com is the ‘go-to’ for websites.
… in the US.
Now whenever i want to order pizza i just google “dominoes” so i can sidestep the domain guessing completely.
You don’t search your app store for a “dominoes” app? 😉
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Now that PEP 572 is done, I don’t ever want to have to fight so hard for a PEP and find that so many people despise my decisions.
I use Python, but don’t follow its development very closely and had no idea what he was talking about. Here’s a recent summary of the PEP 572 controversy for anyone curious.
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Design choices where there are multiple options but none are clearly better than the other is where having a dictator is useful. You can sit around arguing forever whether green or yellow is a better color tone for the room, since it’s entirely subjective.
But even deciding what tie-breaker to use to end the stalemate is itself a never-ending process.
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LibertarianLlama
1 month ago
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link
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Forced Labor Is the Backbone of the World’s Electronics Industry
In a slavery, the ultimate threat is the threat of violence. You can beat a disobedient slave. You can beat the gulagees or the prisoners in reeducation camps.
What is going on here is that some people who have terrible starts at life, were given an opportunity to make their lives relatively better. But these opportunities are relatively worse from the position of a western developed worlders. So these westerners then complain about the from-their-view-poorer conditions.
Do abuses exist, yes. But I know a teenager who works at a retail store who’s not realising his full leverage as given by the laws. His parents also let it slide, because they think it’s good for him to learn ‘how it is like in the real world’. So from a full-on lawyer perspective, one could say the guy is being abused.
The workers have to work a low paying job with bad condition because her financial situation, the relative wealth of her birth country and other factors reduce her negotiative power. But despite any of that, she’s better off working in these poor conditions with low pay than she would be back at her village. She is better of being given this opportunity.
The labour of developed countries back when the countries were developing had to endure such conditions too. And their leveraged that to give their children and themselves better lives in time. Every society has got to go through this process. If you try to impose enforced better pays and conditions, the employers will move to another country or another labour pool, and these poor workers will lose their chance to improve their lives. The surplus of poor people will always ensure that there’s some people ready to be ‘abused’ for $2 a day, because the alternative is even worse.
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I think your comment could be a valuable historic source in the future.
It shows pretty well the kind of rationalization “western developed worlders” do of the oppression they foster and benefit from. Teenagers abused in retail stores learn “real world” just as girls that were abused in Nigeria.Just because criminals do it, it’s not something we should teach.
In a slavery, the ultimate threat is the threat of violence.
Some consider tortures as a form of violence. And starvation is a form of torture, you know?
Just because it’s inflicted by a community instead of a deputed soldier, it does not means it’s less violent.She is better of being given this opportunity.
You should really read more carefully.
These people pay for this “opportunity”. They literaly take loans on their house to pay for it.
And, it turns out, they pay to be enslaved. The product does not match the promises. They are tricked.Because you know, when private people have the power to remove your civil rights if you don’t do what they want, you are a slave. And if they can remove your civil rights when you get pregnant, you are a slave. And they can force you to pay for a job, you are a slave…
Every society has got to go through this process. […]
The surplus of poor people will always ensure that there’s some people ready to be ‘abused’ for $2 a day..Honestly I find this argument pretty disgusting.
Exploting people weakness just because you can is not something that have a place in a civil world.As someone who claim to “fight for freedom”, you should really consider what kind of freedom you are supporting. The freedom of western consumers? The freedom of western IT companies? Who’s the freedom you care about?
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It shows pretty well the kind of rationalization “western developed worlders” do of the oppression they foster and benefit from.
So how do you rationalise all the stuff you consume that were produce through this process?
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Why should I rationalise?
I actively minimize the blood footprint of my purchease. And I only buy what I really need. Often used.
Also I actively teach people to be “Ads Adverse”: the more people try to convince me to buy something the less I’m going to buy it. Culture, knowledge and critical thinking are the key to freedom.
Indeed each marketing campaign convey (at least) two message:
- one is specific to one product: you need this shit to be happy (whatever it means to you)
- one is general capitalist propaganda: you are the shit you own
Both are ridicously false! But propaganda’s goal is always to make the oppressed internalize the oppression so that they cannot challenge it effectively. As you can see in yourself, it’s pretty effective.
I do not rationalise the means of oppressions that oppress me, you and Malasian immigrants.
I study them. And I actively fight them through culture. I make them evident.I do not think that the solutions to the bloody issues of Capitalism can be found in free market.
That’s groupthink. The solutions are in culture, knowledge, understanding.Meanwhile I call people with their name, be it “murderer” at Uber and Tesla, “slavist” at Apple and so on…
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I actively minimize the blood footprint of my purchease.
Do you?
Because the very fact that you are capable of replying to me, shows that you have not minimised your blood footprint.
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I know it might seem impossible to people used to represent all values through the same unit, but in fact you can optimize several dimensions at once.
Also, in a complex system you have leverage, multipliers and so on to consider, so that you can have a zero (or even negative) sum over a dimension while having non-zero magnitudes all over the other dimensions.
But if all this math seems too complex for you, consider I have legally free access to several internet connected public and private computers that I did not buy and I do not own.
I let you as an exercise to guess how it is possible… :-)
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The rule is suspended. https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2018/06/19/27874178/godwins-law-suspended-by-godwin
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The surplus of poor people will always ensure that there’s some people ready to be ‘abused’ for $2 a day
I know that I won’t convince you to change your worldview by typing into a text box on a website where you have put your very worldview into your username, but please consider the possibility that poverty is intentionally created and sustained to maintain a cheap labor market.
What would that look like? Who would benefit? What would they say to keep it going? Does that imaginary world match what you see in the real one?
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Have you ever needed to publish an article in twitter?
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Publishing on Twitter is great. You’re forced to make every 280 character tweet stand on its own and support your overall point. You have to be concise, organized, and direct. And everyone engaging is also forced to be concise. It’s a great medium.
I don’t think this article worked out as a tweetstorm, but a lot of ideas do really well in that format.
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If you find that imposing a 280-character limit on your paragraphs improves your writing, then impose such a limit on yourself while writing. However, I don’t see any benefit to actually using twitter to deliver the content. Indeed, this article is interrupted part way through by a discussion of the limitations of twitter:
Sadly, this one is too long for a tweet…
As with any rule guiding writing style, it should be possible to break the rule occasionally.
Personally, I do find that this article is rather disjointed in places, with sentences that should follow on from the previous sentence separated into their own paragraph instead.
(There is also the risk that any discussion about the article gets distracted by people like us arguing about whether twitter is a good blogging platform instead of discussing the content.)
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If you know how to organise your thoughts and write well, you will do so.
If you don’t, then you will instead just spew out useless deluge of words over multiple tweets.
If you put garbage in a box and read it 280 chars at a time, you will still be reading garbage.
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Given I’ve never seen you write a technical article, post someone else’s technical article, or comment on the technical aspects of someone else’s submission, I’m going to guess you have no interest or experience in technical writing. Once you’ve done some of that you’ll see why twitter is such a good medium.
I used to think the same way you did about this, until I began writing myself.
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This is appeal to authority.
If your experience in technical writing shows you why what you used to think and what I now think is wrong, then why don’t you use your experience in said technical writing to write an explanation of why I am wrong instead of using secondary heuristics to explain why I must be wrong.
Once you’ve done some of that you’ll see why twitter is such a good medium.
Whenever I wanted to learn something technical, I look for an online article or a tutorial, or if more indepth, a text-book.
Should I instead start searching on twitter for a tweet chain?
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The underlying factor that caused the github purchase to be a problem was that github was free. As long as the service is free, then selling out is always a risk.
Why not take the total server costs at the end of the month, divide by the number of users, and charge that as a monthly subscription to keep the lights on? If the system is even marginally profitable, that makes any kind of selling out (via acquisition or selling user data) less attractive.
If the system is costing the administrators money, then they have a high incentive to sell out.
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Why not take the total server costs at the end of the month, divide by the number of users, and charge that as a monthly subscription to keep the lights on?
Nah, charge them based on use like in mainframe and cloud models. That’s more fair. Safer, too, for the host. There probably should be a baseline fee that covers administrative overhead or at least contributes something to it. The usage charges go on top of that. There could be some usage that comes with the baseline fee, though.
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That’s an interesting point, and I’ll have to consider it. Though, I don’t see the user base growing enough to make selling out a possibility. My philosophy is that there should be many services like this one to prevent any one from growing too large and making selling out a possibility (that’s why the goal is to make everything open source - if someone wants to clone Asymptote they have my blessing).
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True. In that circumstance I would run a cheap ($2.50/mo) VPS to keep essential services running (such as email) while fundraising.
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Asymptote’s existance isn’t because of fear of what Microsoft might do to GitHub. I made it to test out a midpoint between large, centralized services and everybody self-hosting. I don’t think Microsoft will screw up GitHub, it’s just that the discussion around the purchase prompted this idea.
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We can just make sure that the admins publish inappropriate stuff like ‘women are weaker then men’ or ‘women make less money because they make different choices compared to men’ on its blog every month. Then the site would be ‘unbuyable’ because of the outvogue apparent social position of the owners. The people in the know would know to ignore such posts, but the bad-headline potential of these blogs would poison the site against any future buyouts.
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This is a rather sarcastic way of making a reasonable point - what sorts of rules about host content will Asymptote Club (or other similar “middle-ground” services) enforce, and how resistant will it be to social/political pressure to censor content? What if I want to use Asymptote Club’s gitea/CI service to actively develop machine-learning software that’s illegal in some jurisdictions but not others? What if I want to use their matrix service to host a misogynist chatroom because I believe that the accusations that the content of the chatroom actually constitutes misogyny are complete bullshit? If something hosted on Asymptote Club got into the news and invokes a social media shitstorm against it, how much can I trust that Asymptote Club will keep hosting it, and how much do I have to know about the personal politics of zebMcCorkle in order to ascertain that?
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I’m actually surprised at the overwhelmingly positive responses to this.
There are many weak points in this particular ‘moral’ decision. First of all, if one moral culpability transfers to anybody that one does business with, you are essentially incapable of doing anything without being implicit in all kinds of things. Everything you use has had filthy hands on them. Minerals from African warlords abducting and coercing child-soldiers. Oil from middle eastern regimes, all of which are unsavoury. Everything you buy is taxed by the US government, so buying a candy from the petrol station means im contributing to the drone bombing of people on a low-res screen.
Does having children protect you from criminal liability? Do we forgive criminals because they have children and putting them in jail would be separating children from their parents? If we do, this is simply discrimination against non-parents
And how much sleuthing must one do to protect oneself conscience here? If it’s just a simple google of whomever one does business with, how do you convince yourself that you are not ‘turning a blind eye’ when enough money is on the table? The alternative of course means that in every transaction one must also be a dedicated detective, making sure that the person who’s buying your bike on craigslist doesn’t actually download unlicensed music. Clearly this level of burden is not reasonable, yet the opposite is simply ineffectual and everywhere in between is just a tradeoff between the two.
The more lenient one approaches the illegal-immigration issue, the more you tip the balance in favour of people coming. This exposes them to all kind of abuse and risk. It also discriminates against law-abiders. Why should people who follow the laws get punished by having to wait years while those that do not can just sneak it and benefit from the infrastructure, culture and all the other benefits of a developed country?
If a hobo family squats on your house right now, and you want to kick them off your property, but are willing to keep the kid in your home so he doesn’t freeze to death, you are actually a war criminal according to some people here.
It truly boggles the mind.
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I think the argument is that just because you can’t prevent all evil doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to prevent some evil. That seems sensible to me. Certainly, it’s something I try to live by.
I do somewhat agree with the gist of your argument though. I find a lot of the moralizing and attention around this issue to be pretty inconsistent. But that’s nothing new and is true of a lot of other things too. With that said, trying to tell people that they should be exercise boycotts and be outraged in a properly proportionate and consistent way is just never going to go over well.
Harping on the inconsistency might seem like a trite affair given what’s happening, but it always comes back to tribalism. It seems inescapable.
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Whether (any policy involving different treatment for carers of kids) is discrimination against non parents depends on perspective. Every person benefits (once, as a child) from them, after all - unless you manage to spring fully formed from the earth.
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We are talking about benefit to parents not to children. While everyone was a child once not everybody will become or are parents.
You are confusing the benefit derived from being a child and one derived from being a parent.
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I don’t think the two are so separable; I think it’s reasonably clear (demographically) that advantages held by parents typically accrue to their children.
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thank you for your well thought out and elaborated response.
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It is impossible to explain basic human decency to someone who finds the whole concept stupid. Your glib argument that there is no point in taking any moral stand at all because there is no perfection in the world is self-refuting. Your claim that not ripping babies from the arms of parents is “discrimination” against non-parents is ugly. Some people don’t have moral sense. Ok.
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Your only argument is calling mine “self-refuting” and “ugly”. There’s absolutely no substance in any of it.
If you don’t like my argument but cannot logically refute it, then I think it is YOUR position that need a good reconsideration.
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There is nothing logical or illogical about morality. It’s as logical to be sociopath as to be a decent person. But it’s telling that “libertarians” who find affirmative action to be the authoritarian bootheel of the armed state find lawbreaking by heavily armed ICE thugs in the cause of openly proclaimed terrorism plus enormously profitable no-bid government contracts for dog cages for human beings to be fair and reasonable. It’s almost as if your libertarian principles are just a bogus rationale for creepy selfishness and nothing like a coherent political idea.
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find lawbreaking by heavily armed ICE thugs
It’s not illegal to stop criminals from entering the country illegally.
Additionally, if you allow people to bring in children to be used as essentially immigration hostage, then they will keep doing it, subjecting even MORE CHILDREN to the dangerous and inhumane condition of people smuggling.
Don’t just consider only local effects. That would be short-sighted and stupid.
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They are not criminals. Particularly the children are not criminals. Many of the parents are attempting to apply for asylum under US law. I love how you “libertarians” don’t give damn about rule of law or due process when you feel a little uneasy. At that point, you are on your knees begging the armed police, at taxpayers expense, to commit any brutality.
Do you think people come over the border leaving comfortable homes? These people are fleeing the most desperate conditions. Our policies can make us despicable, but they can’t make parents not take even the slimmest chances to save their children.
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The US can only take in so many people. There must be rules on how to choose who gets to go in. These rules must be followed, otherwise, you might as well have open border.
Do you want open border?
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There are rules. Those rules are not being followed by the administration. But again, it is striking how libertarians will find that laws like taxes to pay for health care are impermissable violations of basic human rights, while taking children away from their parents and sending them to dog kennels is apparently ok outside any framework of law at all. Great moral system.
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Whenever I read about the legendary programmers and inventors, these people sought out programming by themselves.
So I don’t have much hope that pushing these things onto kids would give such good return. The top tier potentials will already find their own ways.
You don’t need to know how computers work to operate in a modern society just as you don’t need to know how a car works to drive. It’s good to know but not necessary.
Given the availability of computers, the extra ‘discovery’ of potential, I think would be small.
So the whole ‘teach xyz to program’ seems like a mostly cost-ineffective boondoggle to me.
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We can safely drop mathematics, physics and literature from school curriculums then. Most of the students aren’t ever going to be good at it, and talent will find the way.
Learning programming by yourself does not necessarily make you top talent, though we’d all love to entertain that idea. It’s certainly not worse with a self motivated learner who is actually aided by school system. Besides the “self learners” of old days didn’t come from Amazon jungle to a running PDP rack and started hacking. They still had the fundamentals of logic, maths and reasoning taught in the school.
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If school failed me back then the same way it’s failing kids today, it’s by teaching students idiotic facts beyond the basics of reading, writing and math. Introduce kids to as many matters as you can in such a way to cultivate curiosity and you’ll have won.
The whole ‘teach xyz to abc’ is ultimately pointless if what you’re seeking is innovation. It’s super good if you’re raising cattle-citizen though.
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This seems orthogonal to what @varjag is and @LibertarianLlama are saying. Llama seems to be arguing that being great at programming is innate and we shouldn’t bother teaching kids programming because they’ll never be great because if they were great they don’t need to be taught. And varjag is pointing out that education, historically, has not been about making the greats. Whether or not the quality of education is any good seems quite different than the question if if we should educate.
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I’m not responding to @varjag, although there is a relationship between what we both say. What I’m saying is, teaching programming for the sake of teaching programming is indeed pointless, but then again, so is pretty much everything beyond basic math and reading skills (then again, there’s the case of the enormous amount of functional illiterates so I’m not sure even that is technically necessary).
You’re correct, of course, both matters are vastly different. I think they’re ultimately connected, especially if you’re after cost-effectiveness, which I don’t agree should be the target of education, but that’s also another matter.
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“Idiotic facts” is a very curious term.
Are you referring to history? Facts about how society is structured and how laws are made?
The last time I checked our local education directives “innovation”was just one facet of the welll-rounded citizens it was aiming to educate.
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My bad, I did not correctly express my idea. I mean every part of my education which required the absorption of data for the sole purpose of regurgitation at a later date. I’ve lived that through many different subject matters. If you’re just pumping facts into brains so that you get graded on the quality of your repetition, it’s not really productive, and the students end up losing much of what they “learned”.
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The great thing about this game is that as a child it’s just fun to put random stuff together and see a ball bounce around. It has high ‘sandbox potential’.
Although i could never figured out most of the puzzles past the early easy ones.
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There’s basically nothing interesting here. You just change the last few significant digits of a number around until you get a prime. This is only fascinating in the same way magic tricks are, only to people who don’t know the trick behind it. Once you pull back the curtain it’s just boring.
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What I don’t really understand is how Andrew has a comfortable standard of living in NYC on $600 per/month.
https://www.patreon.com/andrewrk/overview
I’m guessing that there must be another source of Zig donations aside from Patreon?
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Oh woops, I misread the first paragraph, I thought it stated that Zig was supporting him entirely, when it’s actually about his programming supporting him.
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Note that this isn’t his first attempt at doing this. But the project he was working on before Genesis didn’t find the same traction as Zig has. BUT, if I recall correctly, he also didn’t live in NYC the last time… Anyway, he’s got experience with living frugally, so I’m sure he knows what he’s doing here.
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What I don’t understand is if you are not working in NYC anymore, and only working on your own and getting donation, why doesn’t he move to anywhere but NYC to minimise his personal expense?
I’m sure there are cities in the US with 80% the fun of NYC at lower than 80% of the cost.
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I work remote, and there are places I could move that are < 20% of the cost.
My friends aren’t going to move with me, and I have enough money to live where I am. Why be wealthy and lonely?
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Didn’t know your city is the only source of friends in the world. That must be good for the economy.
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I know that this is very hard for some people to believe (seems to be harder the more western the society is), but some people don’t consider their friends a replaceable commodity. Not that I don’t want to make new friends, but these are my friends right now and I am more loyal to them than I am to a meaningless job or to money.
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There’s a shit-ton of them. Even Memphis TN that’s close to me with all its problems is low cost of living with all kinds of fun stuff to do. Just don’t live in or shop around the hood. Solves most of problems if you don’t have kids going to school or college.
There’s plenty of cities in the US that similarly have low cost of living with plenty going on. One can also live in areas 30-40 min from cities to substantially reduce their rent. The fun stuff still isn’t that far away. The slight inconvenience just knocks quite a bit off the price.
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I don’t remember the details, and I can’t find the link, but a few years ago someone did some research here in Berlin where they compared the cost of rent in more-or-less the city proper, and the cost of rent + public transportation tickets when you lived in the outskirts. It ended up being not much of a difference.
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This is a thinly veiled ad.
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They should use a log scale. Otherwise the difference at the top of the chart is perceptively too big.
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I absolutely understand the economic motivations behind this move. I’m concerned because it seems that if other smaller players do the same (migrate over to established players like Reddit) then it’ll drive more users to incumbent companies. Someone in the thread included a link to an instruction how to deal with GDPR trolling which I’m bookmarking right now just in case.
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If you get a data request and it’s reasonable to do so, simply answer it. “Hi, my online identifier is ‘geocar’ what information do you have on me?” - I only have the information you already know about1. If that’s true, it’s easy. If you’re building a profile of me, likes/preferences and whether you sell them individually or in aggregate, then you have to tell me that, but if it’s just my own comments and my own email address (which I entered) then I should already know about that.
If it’s worded in legalese, or you find it otherwise difficult, you can ask for administrative costs to be posted with the request to you. That way you’ll know they’re at least serious too. You’re not required to figure out what information might be connected to the person2, so if you buy some audience data from somebody like Lotame to show targeted ads to your users, even though you have a online identifier (username) you aren’t required to link them if you don’t ordinarily do this, and only very big websites will do this.
Finally, if it’s onerous, you can ask for further “reasonable fees”. Trolls will get bored, but if you need to pull logs out of your s3 glacier and it’s going to take a week (or more) without paying the expedited fees there’s no reason you have to be on the hook for this.
Right now, all this seems scary because it’s “new”, but eventually it will become normal, and we’ll realise the GDPR isn’t the boogeyman out to get us.
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The link I posted above also suggests another solution which might be a better fit for smaller companies and projects: provide a self-service interface for users where they’ll be able to access all GDPR-related stuff. I’d love to see this approach gain traction so that we’d avoid centralization.
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In other words: “pay us money or the government will shut you down”.
All to “protect the consumers” of course. The very same consumers who willingly put all their information up on facebook.
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That’s what Im thinking. Lets them pool resources on legal and maybe operational side. Even an existing seller of forum software might make it an extra servicevor differentiator. Alternatively, this stuff might get outsourced to specialized firms.
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LibertarianLlama
3 months ago
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Microsoft’s new Xbox controller is designed entirely for players with disabilities
I know you get a lot of pat-on-the-backs when you implement stuff for the disabled. But I just feel like it’s rarely worth it unless you are at a large scale where the disabled population will offset the man-hours. Not to mention that different segments of the disabled have different requirements and the same special interface will not couple with all of them.
So to me, I can’t help but think that whenever some megacorps implement these solutions, it’s more likely virtue-signalling rather than altruism or legit economic advantage.
The problem of course, is that if we could solve this problem economically, then we would have solved it forever, but if it is virtue-signalling, then the incentive isn’t really to provide solutions, but to provide the appearance of caring, and so the mismatch will eventually result in the problem not really being solved long-term.
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I don’t understand this comment at all. If it’s not profitable, why do you think companies are “virtue signaling” and not caring? ISTM you’re reading an awful lot into their behavior, under the odd belief that doing something good has to be for egotistical reasons, and not because you want to help someone out.
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To expand on what I believe @LibertarianLlama is saying is, it’s possible this comes out of their marketing budget as a kind of loss. The upside of this would be that the PR leads to other sells, not necessarily of this product, but others.
In the end it doesn’t really matter. It’s a local choice of the company, not trying to solve a problem globally in an economically sustainable way.
It should also be remembered that helping people can be egotistical, in which case it’s a win-win! I find it personally strange when people sometimes boycott beneficial things because they’re suspicious of the underlying motives, when the motives clearly aren’t arming belligerents in a foreign war, or something else clearly evil.
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why do you think companies are “virtue signaling”
because they think creating an image will give them financial rewards.
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I’m truly sorry you’ve never had the opportunity to work somewhere that prioritizes results over optics.
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I think you’ve put your finger on a significant contradiction in libertarianism. You want to judge the worth of the enterprise by economic returns: success is denominated in dollars and the market is the only neutral or efficient judge of value.
However, the other name for “to provide the appearance of caring” is marketing, and of course good marketing enormously multiplies the returns of a product, the world being annoyingly reticent to beat a path to the door of entrepreneurial mousetrap makers. Even in the very unlikely event that sales of this controller wouldn’t cover the costs to design and manufacture it (given that video gaming is measured in the tens of billions for the U.S. and this product looks overwhelmingly superior to competitors for the mostly-untapped wallets of tens or hundreds of millions of humans with motor control injuries), Microsoft could get a positive return on investment just from the increase in warm, fuzzy feelings from the majority of the market with no need for this product if they go on to buy ever-so-slightly-more copies of OneDrive or Office. The existence of marketing and cross-promotion means that the value of these products can’t be judged solely by the invisible hand of the market discovering prices for goods and driving firms out of business. You make this point in reverse; the long-term existence of marketing points it being economically valuable. There are externalities not on the books of a single product, just like how, in reverse, the market overvalues a polluter because the externality of cleaning up toxic waste or reversing climate change isn’t charged to the company and so can’t be reflected in the stock price.
But whether or not the economics work, perhaps in this instance we can settle for helping make an entire art form accessible because it’s a small act of basic human decency and we’re not unthinking monsters.
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I’ll probably get downvoted, but here goes…
I think you’ve put your finger on a significant contradiction in libertarianism. You want to judge the worth of the enterprise by economic returns: success is denominated in dollars and the market is the only neutral or efficient judge of value.
However, the other name for “to provide the appearance of caring” is marketing […]
Libertarianism is actually about the freedom to property and its action, where the individual is his or her own property. Economics is more a description of the market that emerges from action and property. Be it a free market or not, depending on the freedom to the underlying rights.
So when you point out a contradiction, there really is no contradiction. It barely exists on the same plane of reality. Anyone in business, who wants to stay there, knows about marketing, cross-promotion and all that. It’s a business strategy.
PS.
Libertarianism is not a game of winners and losers where money is how we keep score.
But in a hypothetical world where it were, Microsoft would likely end up winning with this device. As would the customer demographic.
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I think you’re right, but I SO don’t care!
As a partially blind person, there is SO much of the gaming world that’s closed off to me. That’s OK. I still sleep just fine at night knowing I will never be a Call of Duty GOD :)
However, when game developers and console makers bother to make adaptations available to allow me and others with disabilities to enjoy the beautiful mix of art and science that is most modern video games, I really appreciate it.
So, virtue signaling or not, this is a laudable move on Microsoft’s part, and I for one think we should all recognize that.
Almost makes me want to own an Xbox again. Only problem is that I haven’t had time to play a game on any platform in ~6 months :)
-Chris (Aside from iPad gaming in waiting rooms sometimes)
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Even if I disagree with you, I don’t understand why you are being downvoted for this argumenter opinion of your. Anyway… thank you for expressing yourself on the topic.
To me it’s mostly about having a customizable solution for gaming controls, that can be used for players with disabilities. If you look at Nintendo, they recently launched this thing with customizable objects in paper to enhance the gaming experience, this is just how the Microsoft gaming team is implementing it! Bold move from them!
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Even if I disagree with you, I don’t understand why you are being downvoted for this argumenter opinion of your. Anyway… thank you for expressing yourself
Because it’s incorrect, and baseless bloviating in order to shit on the idea of not needlessly excluding the marginalized.
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LibertarianLlama
3 months ago
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Running FFmpeg on AWS Lambda for 1.9% the cost of AWS Elastic Transcoder
How do people even pronounce FFmpeh? fuh-fuh-em-peg?
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tl;dr literal corners
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What happened?
The problem is AI-hard so people decided to just use forms instead.
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LibertarianLlama
4 months ago
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Richard Stallman: A radical proposal to keep your personal data safe
I disagree with Stallman here.
If you surrender your data, then you do not have any right over them. If you upload your photos to facebook, then facebook has them.
For public utility, it is fine to restrict the collection and usage of personal data. But for private corporations, the private individuals should be able to decide for themselves if giving a corporation access to your entire search history for wifi access at the coffee shop is worth it.
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More and more we are getting forced to use services that spy on us. Cash is being phased out for credit cards and mobile payments. I can’t even pay for parking at my uni without installing their mobile app. We need laws to protect us from these companies because they are impossible to 100% avoid.
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Not anymore… at least here where I live, Government is composed of people and people will have their own agendas which might not include protecting other people or even obeying the laws they’ve passed. I see government as an instrument of power, some will use this power to help society, others to accumulate wealth at the expense of society.
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That is true but still, you can probably agree with me that when dealing with the real world, the creators intention has very little bearing in whatever usage people do of something. For example: the web was a way to share scientific hypertext and now we’re doing crazy stuff with it, or, tide pods were supposed to be used for laundry… governments, much like many other human creations happened over time, in different places, with different purposes. Monarchy is government but one can argue that historically it was not meant to protect people, dictatorships also work that way. We can say that the “platonic ideal of a pure and honest government” is to protect people but thats just us reasoning after the fact. There are no “letter of intention” about creation of government which all governments across time and space need to follow. What we perceived as “purpose” has very little meaning to what actually happens.
Personally, I find most interesting when things are not used accordingly to the creators intention, this creative appropriation of stuff by inventive users is at the same time what spurs a lot of cool stuff and what dooms us all, we here in Brazil have a moniker for it “Jeitinho Brasileiro” which could be translated as an affectionate version of “the brazilian way”. Everyone here is basically born in a fractal of stuff whose real world usage does not reflect its ideal purpose to the point that it is IMHO what makes us creative and cunning.
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Monarchy is government but one can argue that historically it was not meant to protect people…
Well, monarchy was actually a simple protection racket. It enabled a significant growth of the agricultural society through stabilization of violent power — no raids, just taxes.
We can say that the “platonic ideal of a pure and honest government” is to protect people…
That’s unreasonable. Establishment of a democratic government is just a consensus seeking strategy of it’s electorate. A move from a simple racket to a rule of law that is a compromise of various interests.
In feudalism, people choose other people to follow. In democracy, people chose policies to enact. Both systems are very rough and fail in various ways, but democracy has evolved because it just makes more people a lot less unhappy than an erratic dictator ever can.
… people will have their own agendas which might not include protecting other people or even obeying the laws they’ve passed…
You seem to be alienated from the political process and perceive your government as something that is not actually yours to establish and control. That’s a very dangerous position for you to take, since government has a monopoly on violence. Of course others won’t take you automatically into consideration. That’s what you do every time you do virtually anything — you never take the full situation into account.
But you just can’t quite ditch the government… otherwise your neighbor might try building a nuclear reactor using whatever he got from the Russians, which is something you (and perhaps a few other neighbors) might be against. Then on the other hand, he might convince a few others that the energy will be worth it… so you meet up, decide on some rules that will need to be followed so as to prevent an armed conflict and in the end, some who originally opposed the project might even join it to ensure it’s safety and everyone will benefit from the produced energy.
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Friend, lets agree to disagree. What you say do make sense, I am not saying you’re talking bullshit or anything like that, on the contrary, I find your arguments plausible and completely in tune with what I’ve learned at the university buuuuut my own country has been a monarchy, an “empire”, a monarchy again, a republic, a dictatorship, a republic again, an who knows what will happen before 2018 ends.
Our experience, is vastly different than what is explained above. I haven’t said we’re out of the political process, heck, I’ve organized demonstrations, helped parties I was aligned with, entered all the debates I could long ago, I was a manager for a social program, and am married to an investigative journalist. I am no stranger to political processes, but it is a very simplistic approach to say “(…) your government as something that is (…) yours to establish and control”, this sidesteps all the historical process of governments here and how the monopoly of violence is used by the powerful (which might or might not be actual government) with impunity on anyone who tries to pull government into a different path. Couple weeks ago, one of our councilwoman was executed by gunshots to her car (where a friend of mine was as well as she worked for her), killing our rising star politician, and the driver, and forever traumatizing my friend. I have tons of stories about people dying while trying to change things. Talking about the root of feudalism is meaningless to whatever is happening today. Today people die for defending human rights here (and elsewhere).
Academic and philosophical conversations about the nature and contracts of government are awesome but please, don’t think this shit is doable, lots of people here died trying to improve the lifes of others. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a place like here, those conversations don’t really apply (we still have them though).
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I clicked at your profile with absolute certain that you’d be from Brazil. Now I’m kinda depressed I was right.
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I can feel your pain (and I admire your courage for talking in a public space about the issues you see in your government).
But @Yogthos is right: we should not be afraid of our governments, at least not of democratic ones.
In democracy the government literally exists to serve people. If it doesn’t, it’s not a democracy anymore.
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@soapdog @yogthos @dz This is an interesting discussion for me (though not appropriate for lobste.rs). Any interest in discussing this together, say over email or something else. I’ve always wanted to discuss this topic of government vs individual corporations but it’s a complex subject and hard to keep devolving into a bar-fight.
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Why do you believe that is the purpose of governments? Can you imagine a situation where something recognized as a government doesn’t protect it’s citizens in some cases?
Is the government supposed to protect you if you put your hand in a garbage disposal, slip in the shower, or attempt suicide?
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Governments aren’t there to protect you.
They’re definitely there to protect us. However, they’re also their own separate entity. They’re also a group of ambitious, often-lying people with a variety of goals. They can get really off track. That’s why the folks that made the U.S. government warned its people needed to be vigilant about it to keep it in check. Then, its own agents keep the individuals or businesses in check. Each part does its thing with discrepencies corrected by one of the others hopefully quickly. The only part of this equation failing massively is the people who won’t get the scumbags in Congress under control. They keep allowing them to take bribes for laws or work against their own voters. Fixing that would get a lot of rest in line.
We have seen plenty of protection of individuals by laws, regulations, and courts, though. Especially whenever safety is involved. In coding, the segment with highest-quality software on average right now is probably group certifying to DO-178B for use in airplanes since it mandates lots of activities that reduce defects. They do it or they can’t sell it. The private sector’s solution to same problem was almost always to lie about safety while reducing liability with EULA’s or good legal teams. They didn’t produce a single, secure product until regulations showed up in Defense sector. For databases, that wasn’t until the 1990’s with just a few products priced exhorbitantly out of greed. Clearly, we need a mix of private and public action to solve some problems in the marketplace.
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Governments shouldn’t impose speed limits, people should just drive at reasonably safe speeds.
Just because a particular behaviour might be most beneficial to a person, does not mean they will do it. Because consumers’ behaviour has not changed (and will not), this type of surveillance has proliferated to the point it’s nearly impossible to escape, even for the most dedicated privacy advocate.
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Funny you should mention that…the setting of speed limits to drive revenue irrespective of actual engineering and human factors is pretty well documented at this point.
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For public utility, it is fine to restrict the collection and usage of personal data. But for private corporations, the private individuals should be able to decide for themselves if giving a corporation access to your entire search history for wifi access at the coffee shop is worth it.
But that’s precisely what fails when dealing with Facebook et al, isn’t it?
No matter how assiduously you or I might refuse to sign up for Facebook and its ilk, block their tracking scripts, refuse to upload our photos, our text messages, our data – other people sign up for these things, and give these services permission to index their photos and text message logs etc, and Facebook builds a comprehensive shadow profile of you and I anyways.
There is no avoiding or opting out of this short of opting out of all human contact, at this point, and the “simple”-sounding solution of “let every individual decide for themselves!” completely fails to engage with the collective consequences that everyone is losing privacy regardless of what decision they make individually.
When your solution doesn’t engage with reality, it’s not useful.
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But for private corporations, the private individuals should be able to decide for themselves if giving a corporation access
This will be true when everybody will be able to program and administrate a networking system.
That’s the only way people can understand what they are giving and for what.
Till then, you must protect them from people who use their ignorance against them.
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You can’t protect people from their own ignorance, long-term, except by education.
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The technology we use today is too complicated to understand all of it.
The entire field of engineering is predicated on being able to do things without understanding how they work. Ditto beer brewing, baking, cooking, and so forth.
That’s why generally everything needs to be safe by default.
Bathtubs are not safe by default. Kitchen knives are not safe by default. Fire is not safe by default. Even childbirth isn’t safe by default, and you’d think that would’ve been solved generations ago by evolution.
No citizen can foresee the effects of all their actions.
Then why would we trust policies enacted by a handful of citizens deemed able to create laws any more than individual citizens making their own decisions? That’s a far riskier proposition.
~
We can’t make the world safe for people that won’t learn how to be safe, and efforts to do so harm and inhibit everybody else.
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The entire field of engineering is predicated on being able to do things without understanding how they work. Ditto beer brewing, baking, cooking, and so forth. … You can’t protect people from their own ignorance, long-term, except by education.
Try buying an oven that will spontaneously catch fire just by being on. It’s going to be complicated, because there are mandatory standards. And it’s a good thing they are this reliable, right? Leaves us time to concentrate on our work.
Then why would we trust policies enacted by a handful of citizens deemed able to create laws any more than individual citizens making their own decisions? That’s a far riskier proposition.
Because a lot of shouting from many sides went into the discussions before the laws were enacted. Much like you discuss your network infrastructure policies with your colleagues instead of just rewiring the DC as you see fit every once in a while.
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The entire field of engineering is predicated on being able to do things without understanding how they work. Ditto beer brewing, baking, cooking, and so forth.
No.
Engineering is about finding solutions by using every bit of knowledge available.
Ignorance is an enemy to fight or work around, but for sure it’s not something to embrace!
That’s why generally everything needs to be safe by default.
Bathtubs are not safe by default. Kitchen knives are not safe by default. Fire is not safe by default. Even childbirth isn’t safe by default, and you’d think that would’ve been solved generations ago by evolution.
I agree that we should work to make programming a common knowledge, like reading and writing so that everyone can build his computing environment as she like.
And to those who say it’s impossible I’m used to object that they can read, write and count just because someone else, centuries before, said “no, it’s possible to spread this knowledge and we have the moral duty do spread it”.
But all your example are wrong.
They are ancient technologies and techniques that are way simpler than programming: humans have learnt to master them and teach each generation how to do so.
We have to protect people.
The states and laws can help, but the first shield of the people against the abusive use of technology are hackers.
We must spread our knowledge and ethics, not exploit the ignorance of others for a profit.
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I don’t really think that you should be allowed to ask the users the sign a new EULA for security patches. You fucked up. People are being damaged by your fuck up and you should not use that as leverage to make the users do what you want so they can stop your fuck up from damaging them further.
Patches only count if they come with the same EULA as the original hardware/software/product.
Sure - you’re welcome to refuse the EULA and take your processor back to the retailer, claiming it is faulty. When they refuse, file a claim in court.
Freedom!
This suggestion reminds me of the historical floating point division bug. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug
There was a debate about the mishandling by Intel. Also, there was debate over “real-world impact,” estimates were all over the charts.
Here, it seems that the impact is SO big, that almost any user of the chip can demonstrate significant performance loss. This might become even bigger than the FDIV bug.
They are being sued by over 30 groups (find “Litigation related to Security Vulnerabilities”). It already is.
As for replacing defective processors, I’d be shocked. They can handwave enough away with their microcode updates because the source is not publicly auditable.
The defense could try to get the people who are discovering these vulnerabilities in on the process to review the fixes. They’d probably have to do it under some kind of NDA which itself might be negotiable given a court is involved. Otherwise, someone who is not actively doing CPU breaks but did before can look at it. If it’s crap, they can say so citing independent evidence of why. If it’s not, they can say that, too. Best case is they even have an exploit for it to go with their claim.
A variation of this argument goes that security issues should be backported or patched without also including new features. It is not a new or resolved issue.
What is different here is that this microcode update also requires operating system patches and possibly firmware updates. Further not everyone considers the performance trade-off worth it: there are a class of users for whom this is not a security issue. Aggravating matters, there are OEMs that must be involved in order to patch or explicitly fail to patch this issue. Intel had to coordinate all of this, under embargo.
This reminds me of HP issuing a “security” update for printers that actually caused the printer to reject any third-party ink. Disgusting.
I had not considered the case where manufacturers and end-users have different and divergent security needs.
It’s worth thinking on more broadly since it’s the second-largest driver of insecurity. Demand being the first.
The easiest example is mobile phones. The revenue stream almost entirely comes from sales of new phones. So, they want to put their value proposition and efforts into the newest phones. They also want to keep costs as low as they can legally get away with. Securing older phones, even patching them, is an extra expense or just activity that doesn’t drive new phone sales. It might even slow them. So, they stop doing security updates on phones fairly quickly as extra incentive for people to buy new phones which helps CEO’s hit their goalposts in sales.
The earliest form I know of was software companies intentionally making broken software when they could spend a little more to make it better. Although I thought CTO’s were being suckers, Roger Schell (co-founder of INFOSEC) found out otherwise when meeting a diverse array of them under Black Forrest Group. When he evangelized high-assurance systems, the CTO’s told him they believed they’d never be able to buy them from the private sector even though they were interested in them. They elaborated that they believed computer manufacturers and software suppliers were intentionally keeping quality low to force them to buy support and future product releases. Put/leave bugs in on purpose now, get paid again later to take them out, and force new features in for lock-in.
They hit the nail on the head. Biggest examples being IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle. Companies are keeping defects in products in every unregulated sub-field of IT to this day. It should be default assumption with default mitigation being open API’s and data formats so one can switch vendors if encountering a malicious one.
EDIT: Come to think of it, the hosting industry does the same stuff. The sites, VPS’s, and dedi’s cost money to operate in a highly-competitive space. Assuming they aren’t loss-leaders, I bet profitability on the $5-10 VM’s might get down to nickles or quarters rather than dollars. There’s been products on market touting strong security like LynxSecure with Linux VM’s. The last time I saw price of separation kernels w/ networking and filesystems it was maybe $50,000. Some supplier might take that a year per organization just to get more business. They all heavily promote the stuff. Yet, almost all hosts use KVM or Xen. Aside from features, I bet the fact that they’re free with commoditized support and training factors into that a lot. Every dollar in initial profit you make on your VM’s or servers can further feed into the business’s growth or workers’ pay. Most hosts won’t pay even a few grand for a VMM with open solutions available, much less $50,000. They’ll also trade features against security like management advantages and ecosystem of popular solutions. I’m not saying any of this is bad choices given how demand side works: just that the business model incentivizes against security-focused solutions that currently exist.
I think you have to be presented with the EULA before purchase for it to be valid anyway