Notices by The Doctor (drwho@mastodon.social), page 9

@AmyJade “money doesn’t buy happiness “ is what rich people say to poor people so we don’t start building guillotines

Here's the list of who voted against the maintenance of NN rules yesterday... and when they are up for re-election.

2 of them are my senators.

I'm going to be doing my part... I suggest you look at the list and do yours.

https://gizmodo.com/heres-the-name-of-every-senator-who-voted-against-net-n-1826085987

#netneutrality

Trump says, regarding illegal immigrants, and specifically transnational gangs like MS-13, "You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people, these are animals."

The danger in denying basic humanity to a certain group of people is twofold:

1) It's too easy to use that to justify TREATING them as non-human, and

2) It's too easy to start spreading that non-human category to include other people you don't like.

"They're not people, they're animals" is how people start getting put in concentration camps. They're not people, so you don't have to care about them. They're animals, so you don't have to offer them due process or the protection of law. And once you've done that once, it's really easy to justify doing it again to suppress another group you don't like.

The power to dehumanize is inherently corruptive.

"By late next year, #bitcoin could be consuming more electricity than all the world’s solar panels currently produce — about 1.8 percent of global electricity, according to a simple extrapolation of the study’s predictions. That would effectively erase decades of progress on renewable energy."

https://grist.org/article/bitcoins-energy-use-got-studied-and-you-libertarian-nerds-look-even-worse-than-usual/

Something occurred to me today.

There's a lot of (valid) criticism of capitalism. But not a lot of advice on how to survive in capitalism, especially lower class survival techniques.

You have to give people the tools to deal with the oppressive systems they live in until alternatives are in place, not just yell at them to delete FB or that credit ratings are evil.

When your glib, overwrought glee at the destruction of human beings hits a fever pitch that would seem excessive in a shitty comic book, let alone real life.

@envgen

Me: so uh, couple of questions about character design, do uh, wheels? Exist in D&D?
DM: yes
Me: and um, physical combat?
DM: yes, obviously
Me: one last thing, do boots exist?
Dm: yes
Me: okay so that's all the conponents of roller derby, here is a roller derby elf.

Your daily dose of dystopia...

Google's thought experiment of the "Selfish Ledger."

Understanding the user so completely as to change the behavior of that user, then applying that at scale to change the behavior of entire populations.

#Google #DeleteGoogle #FuckGoogle #Privacy

https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/17/17344250/google-x-selfish-ledger-video-data-privacy

There’s this thing called the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Everyone should read it.

http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/

@Riley It's a lot easier to know "oh, PARC solved this problem already, so I should see what they did" than to try to solve a problem that the most brilliant minds in CS spent six months on from first principles in a weekend.

@mmu_man Yeah, free software for sure isn't immune. Much less immune, too, now that a lot of the old guard has been replaced with 'open source' people from industry who don't know the lore and don't know that there *is* lore.

@enkiv2 even happened in Free Software.
Like linux devs: "Oh we found this nice thing, we called it 'tickless'"; BeOS did it 20 years ago, IRIX probably 25 as well.

@mareklach No, I mean actual things actually built in the 1970s, with academic papers written about them.

Hot take: The past 40 years in tech have been characterized primarily by a slow titration of ideas from the 70s into an industry with no familiarity with history, who then claim to have invented them.