To be clear, network costs represent a tiny fraction of WMF’s expenses. Much of WMF’s budget goes to social programs, not technical upkeep.

anarchocristianism

To me this means Dorothy Day or Tolstoy. What does it mean to you?

For a start, look at the history of major companies traded in the first stock markets, such as the Dutch East India Company (VOC), the British East India Company (EIC), the Hudson’s Bay Company, etc. These were colonial ventures, but they raised money through the sale of shares traded publicly.

However, they were not subject to competition in the market, as they enjoyed legal monopolies and used military force. They also frequently employed slave labor.

Too many American right-wingers use “freedom” to mean “I get to impose costs on you; you don’t get to impose costs on me.” It’s not equality; it’s strictly positional. Look at the association of “freedom” with shitty driving for a little example: “I get to threaten you on the highway, pollute your air, tear up the land with my off-roading … but taxing my gasoline is on offense to the Founders.”

Thing is, the economists are right about free markets being a good idea; and free markets depend on a certain kind of regulation to exist. The trouble with capitalism is that it’s never been a reliable ally of freedom of any sort; going back to the origins of capitalism in the private funding of colonial slaver monopolies. The association of capitalism with free markets is largely propaganda; capitalism started with colonial slaver monopolies like the VOC; to a first approximation every firm wants to be a monopoly, and a great way of doing that is political corruption; see today’s USA.

But there’s a reason every government since ever — from empires to democracies — has done things like standardize weights & measures, build public goods like roads to enable trade, and establish courts of law to enforce contracts and fair dealing. Those things are really good ideas! And I’m not sure I can credit the left-anarchist proposals to replace them any more than I can credit the anarcho-capitalist ones.

Mutualism sure has some nice ideas though.

I use an Iris split keyboard from keeb.io. it’s comfy. Actually I have two of them; the heavy clicky custom one with steel plates stays home; the light quiet one is for travel.

I drifted slowly from right-libertarian to a more leftish position: pro-union, pro-social-programs, skeptical of the compatibility of unregulated capitalism with individual freedom. Still no fan of tankies.

This wasn’t from anyone sitting down and trying to convince me, though. Part of it was discovering how close right-libertarianism had always been to white-supremacism: some old Ron Paul newsletters were unpleasantly enlightening. Part was seeing people who called themselves “libertarians” line up with the far right to support state violence, especially against black and brown people. And heck, part was from getting richer and seeing how that worked.

I have a lot of sympathy for the frustrations that get young men into right-wing positions and occasionally I try to puncture some of the nonsense they’re being fed.

This goes back to the days of AOL chat rooms, where they shut down forums for breast cancer survivors because they said “breast”.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/1995/12/02/america-online-admits-error-in-banning-word-breast/

The 45 RPM adapter is this already, between generations.

Fascists lie.

As a reminder, Eich was turfed from Mozilla for joining an anti-LGBT hate campaign (and thus alienating a whole lot of developers, sponsors, and users); and his So Brave browser pushed NFTs and stole money via referral fraud.

exploiting the fact that literacy among blacks was lower

That wasn’t the exploit. The exploit was twofold:

1. Whites didn’t have to pass the literacy tests. For instance, in some states any man who could show that his grandfather had voted, was assumed to have the right to vote, without having to take a literacy test. This is the origin of the terms grandfather clause and to be grandfathered in.
2. The literacy tests were rigged with trick questions, geometry puzzles, and outright nonsense questions; so they did not effectively test literacy anyway!

Levitating. Ballistic. Catastrophe. Incandescent. Shivering. Sultry. Sauté.

Congratulations … you’ve trained a generation of junior product managers.

First step: Find a country with a navy competent to defend your undersea cables.

If you don’t want to be treated the way Stalinists treat dissenters, don’t voluntarily put yourself in places where Stalinists set the rules.

Tankies are against good things, because good things make the world more pleasant, and if the world becomes more pleasant then the people are less likely to want to destroy it.

Call me basic, but Captain America has been beating up Nazis for a long time.

Case in point, Microsoft’s water use shot up from 6.4 million cubic meters in 2022 to 7.8 in 2023, in large part due to the “construction of more data centers.”

By way of comparison, the California almond industry uses 3.5 billion cubic meters of water per year. Describing datacenters as using “astronomical amounts of water” is a plain and simple lie.

Moreover, datacenters can be cooled with water that’s not suitable for most other uses. Google’s Finland datacenter is cooled with seawater, for example.

Zuckerberg has a moral defect. Evil is not a medical problem.