half

half , 2 months ago

Catzilla. Truly a loaf incarnate.

half , 3 months ago

A mild cigar.

half , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

Individual data points like “I take pilates”, “I work nights and weekends”, and “I live in Smalltown, ST” might not mean anything on their own, but if you can connect this data to a single person, then realize there’s only one pilates studio in Smalltown, then look up their hours and notice there’s only one day class on weekdays, you can make a reasonable guess as to a regular time when a person is away from home. This is called data brokerage.

This is a comically contrived example; the real danger is in the association of countless data points spread across millions of correlated identities. It’s not just your data, it’s the association of your data with that of your friends and family. Most people are constantly streaming their location, purchases, beliefs, and affiliations out to anyone who cares enough to look. Bad actors may collate their data and use it to take advantage of them, and the only move they have is to ask for prohibitive legislation. As if we don’t already have prohibitive legislation.

Anonymity is expensive, inconvenient, and fragile, but it’s the only mechanism that protects individuals from the information economy, which I would put right next to ecology in terms of critical 21st-22nd century social problems. It also helps us resist censorship, but that’s a different essay.

half , 10 months ago

WHERES MY FUCKIN SON

half , 10 months ago

He cannot protec
Nor can he attac
But he is a little hat

half , 11 months ago

That’s a good thing. Discord is chugging its way through the last half of the Web 2.0 service to social media pipeline. It’s a VC-funded multimedia enterprise extended around a novel technology core optimized for its original service offering, real-time voice/text. Nobody is immune to bloat, but because Matrix is a protocol standard, not an app, users have the option of sticking with minimal clients and servers that won’t (necessarily) get destroyed by feature creep.

If you’ve tried Element and thought “ah, slow Discord,” maybe have a scroll through matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/. I don’t want to get off topic but all my favorite software is standard/specification-based.

half , 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

All it is necessary to do is to abolish all other forms of taxation until the weight of taxation rests upon the value of land irrespective of improvements, and take the ground-rent for the public benefit.
~ Henry George, http://www.wealthandwant.com/HG/SP/SP19_The_First_Great_Reform.htm

A hundred and fifty years ago, a journalist, sociologist, and economist from San Francisco asked a simple question. Why does wealth seem to create poverty? Henry George figured out the underlying economic limitations and corrupting social influence of the English Model of internal revenue. Roughly, this is a taxation system based on nationalizing the resources of the productive and the “sinful” (whatever that means to you), which works really well when your principle form of expansion is inter-continental colonialism, but not so much when it evolves into urban industrialization. He proposed a simple, logical alternative: a single tax on Economic Rent, which is the value added to land by the growth of society as opposed to the contributions of labor and capital. Unfortunately for the United States, he died before he could be elected Mayor of New York.

The United States is now too culturally polarized to collectively realize that the basic inefficiency of our internal revenue system exaggerates healthy asymmetry to a point of desperate conflict. When the right wing deregulates markets and cuts social programs, they ignore the tyranny of the monopoly, giving established industry free reign over individuals. When the left wing steals from the rich and restricts property and trade according to committee morality, they fail to differentiate between productive and unproductive application of capital, and create perverse incentives for the wealthy to insulate themselves from the reach of the public. Both of these political paradigms are characterized by subjective justifications for violations of individual rights.

Henry George did not invent anything. He simply put aside the cultural fervor of his day and looked deep into the system, at the underlying purposes for the components of the system. As the United States evolves into the post-industrial era, we have an opportunity to do the same.

half , 1 year ago

I can’t imagine what it’s like to live with epilepsy, nor to have a debilitating disease reenter your life after you’d become accustomed to its management. In her position, I imagine I would be doing everything I could to regain access to life-changing technology. Sympathy for Rita Leggett doesn’t make this story “dystopian,” nor is it a violation of anyone’s rights.

It was a trial! All participants agreed to have the device removed. If they didn’t, they’d be walking around with unsupported hardware in their brains, because the system that hardware was connected to was dissolved. Representing this legal outcome as a human rights violation is a predictable dilution of human rights.

Ienca likens it to the forced removal of organs, which is forbidden in international law.

There’s a vital difference between the removal of a body part and the removal of a tool you agreed to host, on condition of its release, before changing your mind. NeuroVista used novel technology to make meaningful progress in the treatment of epilepsy! Our response to this should be to encourage others like them, not to build bureaucratic restrictions hindering new innovators.

Companies should have insurance that covers the maintenance of devices should volunteers need to keep them beyond the end of a clinical trial, for example.

Who would insure this requirement?! Indefinite support of novel technology? Be serious. This article absolutely breezes over NeuroVista’s bankruptcy like it’s a little inclement weather. The fact is that biotech research is nearly illegal by default. Try to restrain your distaste for industrialization long enough to imagine starting and running this company:

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6763675/