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Last Notes

2024-09-09 23:35:22

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"Writing petitions to politicians is meaningless and useless.
Those are NOT your "representatives" in any way."
This is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If they have no idea what we think or know, they can't possibly represents us. Neither can the public record, which is useful when politicians pushing agendas claim they didn't know their policy would have predictably bad results.
It's also demonstrably untrue. E2EE message scanning in Chat Control was voted down by EU politicians, as @nprofile…3pnh says, because of all the experts who communicated with those politicians. Net neutrality was restored in the US for the same reason.
So anyone who says communicating your views to politicians is pointless is a) wrong, or b) a shill or Useful Idiot for the people who want to push stuff like Link Taxes and Chat Control through legislatures without resistance. Or both.

2024-08-27 03:23:26

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/08/26/trump-orange-pilled-by-three-bitcoiners-in-puerto-rico-100-million.html
"Hoyos-López added that many miners are former Wall Street executives."
That one sentence tells you everything you need to know about how mixed the motives are among people pushing blockchains.
Like YouTub and NetFix, the concept of "cryptocurrency" really only works if there's one platform used by everyone. With blockchains, everyone can embed that platform in a ring they wear, but whoever controls 51% of mining (or stake, or whatever comes after Proof of...) has the One Ring to rule them all.
Every Wall St banker and Vulture Capitalist wants to get control of that One Ring. Now the Orange Felon too wants to be the lord of the rings ( hmm, maybe there's a story idea there 😋).
This isn't unique to blockchains as payment systems, and it's not inherent to them. Online payment gateways (PayPal, Stripe, etc), credit card companies and banks have been fighting the same zero-sum war for decades. This war to control 'the payment system' is just financialisation at work.
There's a clue to a way out of this in the way we avoided AOL or CompuServe being 'the digital network', by adopting TCP/IP, and forming a network of networks. The right set of protocols could enable a peered network of payment systems, including but not limited to blockchains. So what could be the TCP of payments?
ILP (InterLedger Protocol) is one example, and I'm borrowing heavily from their elevator pitch here. But many protocol stacks were tested in early internetworking before TCP/IP emerged as the Mt Doom that prevented any one company holding the One Ring of networking. Are there any proposals competing with ILP to be the Mt Doom of payments? What are their pros and cons?

2024-08-23 10:53:18

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FYI Amethyst on Android can delete posts. At least I can delete my own.

2024-08-23 06:04:34

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... and I ought to add, given the inclinations of many of Nostr, that it would also allow right-leaning libertarians to vote for candidates who actually reflect their views, without handing the election to the authoritarian centre-right (Dems).
In either case, STV in local and state elections would diversify representation at those levels of government. Which would likely filter up to Congress and the Presidency, whether STV voting was used at that level or not. Making electoral reform there more likely to happen.

2024-08-17 01:57:57

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I don't either of these statements are fair comment. One could equally argue that electing Congress or the President by popular vote is to treat the people of the smaller states as less important than the 15 largest states. Which would easily determine the outcomes of those elections, giving a person who moved to one of those largest 15 states far more electoral power than if they moved to one of the smaller ones.
But this whole debate misses the point. Regardless of whether the President is elected by popular vote or not, under the current system the Presidency will always be controlled by the Republicrat party, whether its centre-right neoliberal wing, or its hard-right neoconservative wing. Breaking that duopoly is where proportionality matters most in the US system.
Replacing FPP (First Past the Post) vote counting with STV is how you do that. So people can vote for a left-wing candidate without splitting the vote and handing the election to the hard right.

2024-08-16 02:44:40

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> 51% shitting on the 49%
... is a big improvement on 1% shitting on the 99%.
> Tyranny of the majority
... is not great, but it's much better than tyranny of the minority.
Anyway, those who've lived in China (eg me, 2 years near Shanghai) know that majority-rules elections are not the definition of democracy. The CCP use majority-rules elections. That doesn't make China democratic.
The real differences between democracy and autocracy are more subtle. They're found in things like freedom of expression and association for citizens. Media freedoms for publishers and telecoms services. Due process under the law, which applies even to people in the highest levels of governance. A permeable border, so people can vote with their feet, rather than being effectively prisoners of the state.
A society could lack officials elected by majority vote, but if it had all those, it would be democratic.

2024-08-16 02:28:32

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I'm not sure I agree. In Aotearoa, a tiny country where government is fully integrated across the whole country, balancing representation according to the popular vote makes sense. But when electing a head of state in a federal system, where state governance is functionally independent in many ways? Does proportional representation makes sense in such an election?
My 2 cents for pro-democracy campaigners in the US is look into Single Transferable Vote systems. For elections at all levels of government, but particularly for Congress and the Presidency. Breaking the centre-right/ hard-right duopoly over electoral politics seems much more urgent than making sure whichever right-wing candidate wins the popular vote gets the President chair.

2024-08-15 05:46:57

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Bastiat sat in the left side of the French assembly, with the Jacobins. Against the aristocrats and would-be plutocrats on the right. Which side are you on?

2024-08-15 05:44:42

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"The government is the number 1 CAUSE of monopolies. It does not prevent them."
As I said, it can do both. All that trying to make the state "minimal" for the last 4 decades has done is strengthen certain monopolies (eg "IP", "anti-circumvention" to enforce DRM). While undermining its capacity to prevent monopolies (using policy tools like net neutrality and antitrust).
Fortunately the needle is swinging the other way. Useful Idiots who complain about this, and defend the interests of the monopolists, will benefit along with the rest of us.

2024-08-14 02:46:46

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"Voluntary cooperation and private markets- without government enforced monopolies everywhere you look."
Read Adam Smith. When he said "free markets" he was talking about markets free from economic rents, not from regulation. In fact, he believed democratic regulation was a crucial hedge against the power of Old Money to re-impose monopoly rents, on otherwise free enterprises.
The history of the internet proves he waa bang on. The only regulation has

2024-08-14 02:40:25

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So if wall-building is a sign of autocratic tyrants, what does that say about Drumpf?

2024-08-13 23:11:26

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How are so many people even literate enough to dribble this 100% fact-free gibbering nonsense at us? Oh yes, because of the public education that does it best to make sure everyone can read and write, regardless of their parents' income or class position.
I'm no fan of the state and I doubt @Rabble is either. But here's the tricky thing about states; trying to make them minimal tends to a) have the opposite result, and b) make them worse at doing anything publicly useful. I'll give you two examples.
Actually-Existing-Communism (eg Soviet Union, China today) came about because of an attempt to create a minimal state, which Marx called "the dictatorship of the propletariat". Whose one job was meant to be stopping the Czarists from restoring the monarchy, or any other attempt by aristocratic elites to reimpose top-down rule. Every attempt to keep it minimal and focused on that goal made it bigger and more monstrous (normalised surveillance etc).
The state you grew up under (if I'm right in guessing you're under 35) also resulted from an attempt to create a minimal state, which we could call a 'dictatorship of the entrepreneuriat'. Whose one job is meant to be defending businesses from burglars, mobsters, fraudsters and foreign invasions (cops, courts, prisons, military, nothing else). Every attempt to keep it minimal and focused on that goal made it bigger and more monstrous (normalised surveillance etc).
Both the GoP and the Democrats have subscribed to this minimal state doctrine since Reagan. Drumpf is the ultimate expression of it.
But the administration that's been running the US for the last four years while Biden dribbled into his coffee, has been strongly influenced by a totally different doctrine. One that understands that the we need to judge the state not by its size, but by whether its operations make our society more functional and our lives better. Also that the dictatorship of the entrepreneuriat has been a total failure on *both* measures, just like its Soviet/ Maoist counterpart.

2024-08-05 21:13:02

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Why do I ask? Like I said, your story resonated. As you say, a label is not the point, although I've found with both my ADHD diagnosis and being recognised by fellow autistics, it can help with self-understanding and self-acceptance.
> Have you dug as hard at trying to figure yourself out?
Oh yes. All the usual stuff. Years of counselling. Self-help books galore (I do like The Power of Now). Mysticism, meditation and martial arts (both Eastern and Western) and shamanic practices, including psychedelic drugs.
> It is very rewarding at times, frustrating at others. I wish you success on your journey!
Sure is. Thanks, and the same to you 😊

2024-08-05 21:04:08

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Sorry, stupid question in hindsight, but none of my friends with endo have ever had it leave their reproductive system and grow on their back. Woah! Sounds very unpleasant.

2024-08-04 00:19:25

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Have you ever considered the possibility you (and maybe one or more of your parents) might be autistic? Not trying to do remote diagnose or anything, but this backstory kind of reminds me of my own, and those of other autistics I know.

2024-08-04 00:08:45

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Endometriosis? Or did you mean melanoma.?

2024-07-28 21:31:27

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It's not on the same level, but I get very nervous about having dental work done. What helps me is to focus my attention on a spot just below my navel, and listen to my breathing without trying to control it. This helps from when I'm waiting room right through until it's over. Might help before a procedure too, to deal with the anticipation.

2024-07-28 21:26:38

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Sings: Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam...

2024-06-21 07:50:44

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> It would be nice to have play controls in the notification area
My Android can do this, but only some apps make use of it, and even then the support is a bit patchy.

2024-02-22 00:07:13

Getting more and more frustrated with the cyber-stalinists dominating fediverse discourse. Trying to get my head around Nostr.

2024-02-21 23:50:58

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Have you evaluated the new protocol the ManyVerse team are working on?

2024-02-21 23:27:39

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Any idea if this video is available on PeerTube of LBRY? If not, why not?