Fabio G.

Game theory for the left. Se habla español.

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Last Notes

2026-03-05 16:40:37 UTC

As a non-coder there's something i've been wondering about.
For some time i've been noticing “manager of free software project does something undesirable” issues. And in my head i always ask, why not just fork the project?
If things are too difficult to fork, doesn't that kinda defeat the purpose of them being free software?
A piece of software that's too difficult to fork sounds to me no better than “source available” software.
How do coders feel about this?
#foss

2026-02-06 22:18:11 UTC

I'm looking for TV show recommendations. I want something with good role models for conflict resolution. Hopefully something cozy and easy to watch.
In place of TV shows, i suppose movies or books also work, as long as they involve characters modeling good conflict resolution skills.
Any ideas? (boost for reach, please?)

2026-02-02 22:16:55 UTC

Hey, i get that people are suspicious of #anarchism when they ask “what will we do about the bad people...?” and are unsatisfied by the answer...
... but surely anything, ***anything*** would be better than making them the richest people in the world and the heads of state of nuclear-armed nations, right...?

2026-01-31 21:06:23 UTC

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Oh goddamn this is sweet.

2026-01-24 11:38:37 UTC

When people do bad things to people, it's usually not because the government doesn't do enough to protect people, but because the government does too much to stop people from protecting each other.

2025-10-20 23:31:03 UTC

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The KKK wasn't literally the government, but it operated within a system with a government, and often in coordination with the government, and even under its protection.
@npub1xja…69y4

2025-10-17 23:58:49 UTC

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Sure, communities can have institutions, but those are far removed from my moral *intuitions*. Of course i have positions on how an institution ought to work, but i don't draw those from intution, i draw them from analysis.
Sure, call it an employment contract, but the co-op's options are to sign it or find a different state to rent capital from. If you have no moral objection to worker co-ops renting state capital, you have no moral objection against this.

2025-10-17 19:58:25 UTC

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Responsibility, yes, just not legal or institutional responsibility. No, a community is not the same thing as an institution.
Workers would get as much of a democratic say as the rental contract said they get.

2025-10-17 17:59:09 UTC

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More accurately, legal or institutional responsibility is not how i go about framing ethical problems.
I think you may be conceding the admissibility of an arrangement that is materially equivalent to labor contracts under a sort of state capitalism.

2025-10-17 12:43:37 UTC

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I haven't watched the whole video, but the argument that the presenter seems to be setting up is not one that's intended to address one's moral intuitions. (And i have no moral intuitions about “legal responsibility”, no).
Regardless, i'm interested in your moral stance on a setup where all productive firms are worker co-ops with no productive capital while all capital goods are owned by private individuals. No labor contracts, only rental contracts for capital goods.

2025-10-16 17:07:18 UTC

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I have no idea what “the right to appropriate the positive and negative fruits of one's labor” even means. It does not appeal to my moral intuitions in any sense.

2025-10-16 09:15:40 UTC

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I'm aware. I don't think there's anything automatically wrong about labor contracts as such. The problem here is that labor contracts are embedded in a greater system that is founded down to its core on violations of consent. I've been trying to point out that Georgist/UBI institutions are capturable. That means an attacker can impose their will against the polity's consent.

2025-10-16 01:13:44 UTC

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Yes, you've said you don't regard it as morally equivalent. They are materially equivalent because their material outcomes are the same: an exchange of a vote for an economic benefit.
«I don’t think this attack is permissible because people holding the same financial instrument are economically coordinated.» I'm not following. Would you clarify?

2025-10-16 00:57:27 UTC

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Materially, they are equivalent. A sufficiently wealthy interest group can engineer a financial instrument that lets them chase any sufficiently favorable electoral outcome. If this type of arrangement is permissible, then full institutional capture is permissible.

2025-10-16 00:34:02 UTC

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Of course, but the point is that you don't have a moral argument against that type of manipulation. “Very expensive” ≠ “fraudulent”.

2025-10-16 00:24:34 UTC

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That's what an option contract does: it lets the holder buy an economic interest in the venture. Venture becomes unprofitable = the option becomes worthless. For the holder to cash in, the venture has to stay profitable, thus the holder is economically interested in the outcome of the vote.

2025-10-15 19:02:09 UTC

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You have no moral argument against the sale of voting rights, because you've said that manipulation of a vote by distributing option contracts is admissible to you, and that is materially equivalent to the purchase of voting rights.

2025-10-15 09:31:11 UTC

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The whole point i'm making is that trading votes under the table violates consent, specifically other voters' consent, because it deprives them of critical information for an informed choice. There is nothing consensual about trading votes under the table. It is fraud.

2025-10-14 18:18:03 UTC

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When it comes to a socially binding vote, yeah, information is paramount because the goal is social good. It's why manipulability is such a concern in social choice theory.
People would be alarmed that someone were going around trying to negotiate others' voting rights. This would carry an enormous risk of retaliation.

2025-10-14 17:48:25 UTC

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Nonconsensual contracts are void.
We're talking about an attacker trying to purchase a decisive share of the votes. This would not happen in the open because the attacker would not risk social retaliation. Thus it would happen under the table, hence violating informed consent.

2025-10-14 17:36:38 UTC

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Voting rights are an institutional fiction that is only preserved with consent. When consent is violated (such as when one actor tries to appropriate power by purchasing vast amounts of votes), the members are free to rearrange the institution to restore consent.

2025-10-14 17:00:41 UTC

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That's a silly idea. Consent is reversible. There's no such thing as “too late” for a significant mass of voters to take back their voting rights.

2025-10-14 16:24:45 UTC

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Under egalitarianism, political parity is valued roughly equally by all agents, i.e. even if the agent who valued it the lowest were to trade it with the one who valued it the highest, the surplus would be very low.
Social norms impose a high transaction cost, higher even than the surplus. Thus the transaction is not mutually beneficial at any price point.

2025-10-14 15:44:17 UTC

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Reciprocally, from a level playing field the incentives are small enough that social norms keep them harmless.

2025-10-14 08:57:33 UTC

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Why wouldn't there be a social aversion even if there is nothing morally wrong with selling voting rights? Breaches of etiquette are morally fine yet socially skeevy. Social norms are not the same thing as morality.

2025-10-13 22:10:57 UTC

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Social aversion to concentration of power.
When you start buying votes, that draws skeptical looks. Other people's voting rights have a social cost that no one's willing to pay.
If you don't have inbuilt social mechanisms against the concentration of power, if political power is just another commodity that can be bought and sold without raising eyebrows, you don't have an economically egalitarian society.

2025-10-13 18:26:21 UTC

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Of course there would still be incentives, but not mutually beneficial ones. Under egalitarianism, no seller would be willing to sell at any price point that any buyer were willing to pay. This is all assuming no circumstances invalidating consent (fraud, coercion, obfuscation, overreach).

2025-10-13 14:37:05 UTC

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Under the gold standard for consent, it is specific, informed and reversible. Self-sale and coverture require one to unconditionally give away all rights forever: not specific, informed or reversible. They cannot be validly consented to.
Even supposing the argument against the sale of voting rights failed, it is only concentration of power that creates the mutual incentives for such a sale. Economic egalitarianism = the sale ceases to be mutually beneficial even if morally permissible.

2025-10-13 12:29:17 UTC

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More to the point: if i adopt a moral framework without inalienable rights, that's a loss to your argument, not mine. My argument against capitalism follows from consent, not inalienable rights.

2025-10-13 12:27:02 UTC

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“Rights-based” is a misleading way to describe deontology. Deontology is often duty-based: rights can be defined downstream from duties, as what others have the duty not to infringe. What appears as a “right” is a matter of framing, not necessarily the core ethical concept. Structurally, rights and duties are dual to each other.

2025-10-13 02:53:30 UTC

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I think you're confused. Consequentialism is not only compatible with a theory of rights, it can even be based on rights. In consequentialism, too, rights can be defined downstream of consequences (“it's better for people to have these rights”) or vice versa (“the better outcome is the one where rights are less violated”).

2025-10-13 01:18:53 UTC

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That the notion of a right is definable within the system doesn't make it “rights-based”. It is consent-based because consent is the primary focus. One could forget about “rights” and the system would lead to the same material conclusions. You can frame it as a matter of “rights”, but that makes no essential difference.

2025-10-13 00:23:41 UTC

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“Consent is primitive” in this context means that the notion of a right is defined in terms of consent. For example, “one has a right to X if one's absence of consent for not-X compels others not to deprive one of X” is a definition of rights in terms of consent.
(It is an objectionable definition, but i'm just giving an example)
One could then define consent in terms of further primitive notions, or take consent itself as a primitive.

2025-10-12 19:28:33 UTC

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Sure, you can frame it like that, but all you're doing is defining rights in terms of consent. There's no particular reason why rights should be the primitive notion and consent the derived notion, instead of the opposite.

2025-10-12 16:46:24 UTC

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Consent is about power. It is to forgo opposition to what you could oppose. A violation of consent occurs when you're denied the power to meaningfully oppose. Rights are not involved in it.

2025-10-12 15:53:22 UTC

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The concept of consent is not based on rights, to the best of my understanding. To argue from consent is not to argue from rights.

2025-10-12 15:34:29 UTC

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“Moral rights” are the very thing the existence of which i'm questioning when i say rights have to be enforced by the state.

2025-10-12 15:20:57 UTC

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Yes, which is why basing opposition to capitalism on human rights is a silly idea. Someone's rights are always being trampled one way or the other.

2025-10-12 12:26:57 UTC

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That's a silly idea. The US constitution recognizes a right to bear arms. It is the existence of the right, not its violation, that makes people's lives worse, through unfettered gun violence.

2025-10-12 03:26:10 UTC

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Rights look good on paper, but the argument is not complete without the matter of enforcement. I don't oppose capitalism out of an abstract commitment to human rights. I oppose capitalism because it makes people's lives worse.
Employment contracts are no more, no less state-enforced than any other kind of contract. I don't get that part.

2025-10-11 20:11:57 UTC

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I am skeptical by default of arguments that rely on human rights, because it takes a state to enforce rights. To make an argument against employment from human rights is to argue that the state should ban employment. And that's an absurdity. States are value-extraction machines, and it will never be in their interest to ban the institutions that enable value extraction.
@npub1kft…akf5

2025-10-11 19:18:22 UTC

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I do not unconditionally approve of contracts to purchase groceries, especially if all the groceries are provided by one producer such that you can only starve if you don't buy from it.
Consent goes as far as the outside option goes. If the outside option is death, consent is meaningless.
@npub1kft…akf5

2025-02-13 11:56:35 UTC

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I believe part of the reason why voters stop protecting democracy from fascism is that democracy inherently sort of sucks.
How democracy works is it takes away people's self-management and hands it over to elected representatives. Even when those representatives do a perfect job, that loss of control eventually leads to unhappiness, which in turn leads to people no longer caring about the protection of democracy.

2025-01-31 13:08:32 UTC

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(Governments are not for protecting people's human rights and they have never been. People protect people's human rights.)

2024-11-20 13:45:13 UTC

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The OP @npub1hv5…xq0v's blog post uses the word ‘thresholds’ and i think that describes this better than ‘boundaries’ does. Thresholds that trigger self-protective action when crossed. It makes sense to me, what about you?

2024-11-19 01:58:33 UTC

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Talk about an “are we the baddies?” moment...

2024-09-26 02:42:05 UTC

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For real. Every System of a Down song has aged like fine wine. I've found myself returning to “Deer Dance” and “Holy Mountains” over the past year. @npub1z5w…akgg

2024-09-23 12:48:00 UTC

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Money can't buy freedom.
It can, at best, buy privilege.
The privilege of one at the expense of another is not freedom, it is oppression.
@npub1l27…zpk4 [@DavidM_yeg](https://mstdn.ca/@DavidM_yeg ) @npub1k7t…uthl

2024-08-25 00:39:19 UTC

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Why not? It's true, if you read it as “best move isn't to vote” (though that's not how @npub1l85…v56x intended it).
The best move isn't to vote. The best move is to organize for resistance. Sure, you can vote, but if you're not also organizing then you're not making the best move.

2023-12-27 18:49:52 UTC

I don't mention it a lot, but i'm a mathematician by training.
In mathematics you learn to appreciate the act of constructing a theory by spinning a few simple assumptions into a beautiful edifice of deep results.
Thus i have some appreciation for the methods of economics. An economic model is in many ways a mathematical model, thus susceptible of the same kind of emergent beauty.
The “free market” is one such model. It's been on the discourse lately, so i wanna talk about it for a bit.
1/🧵