cherrycherry98

My understanding of the philosophy of open source is different. I believe it was always more fundamentally about freedom and specifically encouraging a marketplace of ideas.

Going back to the early days with Stallman and the GPL it was about making software more transparent and empowering users. You can see how something is implemented, modify how it works for your own needs, etc, just like if you were to buy a physical machine like a car.

Competition is not a waste, it is the means by which free actors improve society. In theory there if there's one provider of everything, there is less waste, and that may be true for certain periods of time but not in general. Power structures ossify, become bloated, corrupt, and inefficient. If you have a monopoly, even if it's the most benevolent, open one in the world, the incentives to improve are diminished. The most powerful incentive to improvement is the threat of those you depend on for money, power, or status, freely choosing against you, which requires competition. You need people that are able to look at the status quo and decide that they can do it better, creating the next generation of whatever it may be.

The OSS community has lots of competition and is better for it. Linux competes with the BSDs and private OSs. There's tons of distros building off each other trying new ideas. Forking is expected. It doesn't always lead to the next great project but it moves the needle.

My objection to the parent post is the notion that a business which can't pay a living wage shouldn't be in business. It insinuates that businesses should be responsible for paying a living wage out of some sense of it being morally right, which is ignorant of how economics operates. Wanting people to be able to meet basic needs and have some financial security is, I believe, universally desirable. Please do think that I don't want this as well. To expect it to come via altruism is idealistic.

> Are you suggesting that minimum wages are bad because it sets a minimum for employers to pay as though without a minimum wage they would pay a rate more in line with value?

Yes, that's basically what I'm saying. Most literature focuses on people being priced out of the labor market (see https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/negative-effects-minimu..., for one such analysis).

I'm also suggesting there could be other effects due to loss of agency over one's labor price, similar to how collusion of employers to fix wages harms employees. Maybe someone has studied it, maybe not.

>If folks earning a minimum wage today, in a world with a minimum wage, can't afford basic living expenses, would you expect more people to afford basic living expenses without a minimum wage?

Ultimately prices are fluid based on what people can afford, especially so for local markets like housing. If minimum wages increase one would expect increased housing prices as those prices were set in line with what people could afford. If they make more, now they can afford to pay more. If you were making marginally above minimum wage you now also want an increase to protect your increased buying power.

W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research found that modest minimum wage increases have minimal affect on prices increases while larger ones can create price increases. This makes intuitive sense, based on market theory. https://research.upjohn.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&htt...

This is nothing but a platitude that attempts to shame businesses for not meeting some idealistic vision of how the world ought to be.

There's no hard rules about what wages should or should not be, as with any other market price. A business will pay however much they need to attract and keep the labor they need. If no one wants to work for them they need to increase the wages they offer, which may in turn result in higher prices for customers which is also an undesirable outcome. If what they provide is of enough value that customers will continue to pay for it then the higher costs can be absorbed, if they don't, they will fail. If they can't attract workers they will likely also fail. Delivering value at prices people are willing to pay while still covering costs is ultimately what keeps a business in business.

I sometimes wonder if minimum wages are a net benefit at all as it creates several distortions. Some laborers aren't worth paying a minimum wage, they wind up earning nothing from not having work instead of what their true worth is and being able to build up skills. I think it could also remove some negotiating power from laborers. Businesses can peg their wages at the minimum and balk at those asking for raises, they pay the legally mandated price for that tier of work after all. Try to find a new job and you would also find other businesses doing the same, not paying an iota more than legally necessary instead of a more fluid labor market with people switching jobs for marginal gains, driving wages up. What may more naturally be a range of prices, both higher and lower, gets compressed to the minimum, unless that minimum is so low as to not have any effect on wages at all because no one would willingly work at that price.

I provided the quote which I thought most concisely communicated his thesis in this passage. The immediately proceeding lines I believe clarify it:

"Great labour, either of mind or body, continued for several days together is, in most men, naturally followed by a great desire of relaxation, which, if not restrained by force, or by some strong necessity, is almost irresistible. It is the call of nature, which requires to be relieved by some indulgence, sometimes of ease only, but sometimes too of dissipation and diversion. If it is not complied with, the consequences are often dangerous and sometimes fatal, and such as almost always, sooner or later, bring on the peculiar infirmity of the trade. If masters would always listen to the dictates of reason and humanity, they have frequently occasion rather to moderate, than to animate the application of many of their workmen."

This is all from Chapter VIII: Of The Wages Of Labour.

I always found this quote from The Wealth of Nations to be quite insightful and was one of those surprising moments reading the actual text:

"It will be found, I believe, in every sort of trade, that the man who works so moderately, as to be able to work constantly, not only preserves his health the longest, but, in the course of the year, executes the greatest quantity of work."

I question whether such a law is really necessary. It's costly to hoard property and leave it unproductive. Even if it's owned outright, there's pressure to rent, sell, or otherwise use it productively due to property taxes, insurance, and maintenance costs, as well as opportunity costs of missed rental income or selling to divert capital towards something that actually yields return.

Any vehicle which gives me more control I find preferable. A pension is great if it's competently managed and the entity it's tied to is stable. The problem is that it exposes you to counter party risk you can't reasonably mitigate.

Is the pension fund making sound investments? Will the city, state, or corporation be sound decades from now or will they be bankrupt or struggle to pay obligations made by their priors that were maybe inflated?

Private investment vehicles are independent of your employer. If they go bust your balance is sound if it wasn't in their securities, which is again ultimately the investor's choice. If I make bad investment decisions I can live with it. I can't live with promises others couldn't keep, I'm at their mercy.

I would prefer eliminating 401ks entirely and expanding IRAs. IRAs allow choice of broker and much wider investment options. If I know what I'm doing I can take more risk. Otherwise I can play it safe with mostly index funds and sensible asset allocation. If I don't know where to start I can hire an advisor or multiple of my choosing to handle it for me. It also would eliminate vesting periods which keep people in jobs they're unhappy with.

> nobody reports on someone's 401(k) fund vanishing during a recession

Recession dips are temporary. If you're well diversified and don't panic sell the balance should recover. Whatever balance you're relying on near term should not be in something volatile like the stock market.

Mark Zuckerberg has been pushing for regulation for years. He wants this for two reasons:

1. Abdicating responsibility so that when the public or politicians complain about Facebook hosting or not hosting some content he can say it's not his problem, he follows the law.

2. The second is for regulatory capture. Once a social network gets a stigma of being uncool, people move on to the next thing. His status and net worth are tied up in an entity he must aggressively defend against becoming the next MySpace. If he can't buy out upstarts anymore because of antitrust then the next best protection is to make it so difficult to build a new network without a team of lawyers and moderators that no one would even think about doing it.

An MoU is not legislation, it's agreement to work together on a common goal. It can be helpful but isn't binding. From the MoU:

"The Signatories retain the right to withdraw from this MoU at any time with immediate effect."

I was demonstrating convergence on USB-C across digital devices. An MoU from 2009 of phone manufacturers agreeing to use microUSB can only partially explain that. Maybe it helped give the idea of USB charging additional momentum. Maybe it would have happened anyway as microUSB was only itself introduced in 2007, and the phone landscape was transitioning to smart phones at this time.

Ports types have been converging naturally without government intervention. Even for iPhones, the writing is on the wall for the the lightning connector. It was introduced nearly 10 years ago under different market conditions (no equivalent USB standard existed). Apple is gradually converging on USB-C, MacBooks contain only USB-C ports, the iPad Pro uses USB-C instead of lightning. The rest of the product line can't be far behind given their propensity for simplicity, being able to use one cable for everything fits well with that.

To answer the EU Commission's question, "Are your chargers piling up in a drawer?". No, I have far less chargers than 10 or 15 years ago when my laptop, digital camera, game system, and phone all had different connectors. Now my laptop, game system (Switch), and phone all use USB-C (phone has absorbed the digital camera). My Kindle is microUSB but newer ones are USB-C as well.

Won't these new services require rather significant increases in taxes? Not to mention government takeover of industry to impose price fixing and rationing raises some red flags for me.

> But if I see that they have 10 restaurants and make $750,000 per year, well, f the f out of them. But, business owenrs, show me your financials. You don't want to? Fine. Do it yourself. But I'm not going to work for $18,000 with zero benefits, while you're making $750,000. You say your contributions is worth more? Good. Do it yourself. I, and everyone else, don't accept that wage anymore, so do it yourself and go out of business, and you won't get that $750,000 per year anymore anyways.

How did the owner get 10 restaurants? They likely started with one and carefully scaled up over time as they could afford to, each time taking on risk that they fail and wind up with less than what they started despite all the effort. The business exists to benefit them, not to provide a place for people to work, that's a consequence. One reason employees make less than owners because there's less risk involved. They show up and do a job in exchange for money. Most employees have no equity in the business.

If you want to become a big shot owner making hundreds of thousands then you need to do it yourself and put your capital at risk, become a partner, or get a loan. There's no guarantee it will pay off but there's incentive to, which is why people do it. If there's no incentive or it's not great enough and the risk won't be taken. That means less people opening or expanding businesses, which leads to less opportunity for workers as there are less demand for their labor, and less wealth for society as there is less stuff to spend money on.

If you're not comfortable with the risk of being an entrepreneur and someone is willing to pay more for the same labor you're well within your rights to work for someone else.

My spouse and I did these tests and the results have changed a fair amount over the years. Where initially there were some surprising, albeit trace, amounts of DNA detected from certain ethnic groups, the results have now normalized down to what I would expect given my family history. If I had not checked in since my initial results I very well may have considered my ancestry to be something it's not.

However, I increasingly question why I should care about my ancestry and what it says about me. I'm generations removed from those who arrived from foreign countries. I know less about what it means to be some of the ethnicities in my blood than those those that I'm not. I feel greater fellowship with others based on common interests than I do race.

Next census I'll probably write in "American" or "Human", since these stats just seem to be used to advantage or disadvantage people based on group identity, regardless of their actual individual situation.

Same situation Matchbox 20's Yourself or Someone Like You, one of the most popular albums of the 90s. The guy on the cover apparently never consented to his photo being used and went after them years later.

This assumes a whole lot. How do you know for certain that the person is treating you differently from others because of your background? Depending on the person and the prevailing culture it may be perfectly normal to more or less ignore someone outside the office. If you're constantly on the lookout for some nefarious activity you may start to interpret it where it doesn't actually exist.

I've definitely done the same and have had the same done to me even with people who I am rather friendly with in the office (across all identity characteristics). I'm more introverted than most and generally shy away from a lot of social interactions unless I have to or would obviously come across as impolite. The prevailing culture in my location is to generally leave people alone outside the office as engaging in smalltalk can come across as being annoying when they probably just want to get where they're going, indulge in their phone, or are mentally preoccupied with what they should do for dinner that evening.

Smith's specific example is somewhat dubious given the tendency of corporations to off shore work to cheap foreign locales or purchase from foreign suppliers. It actually winds up being governments and not individuals who acknowledge the necessities of protecting domestic industry from foreign competition. For market actors (individual consumers to big business) the short term price advantage winds up dominating the self interest calculus rather than consideration of potential long term ramifications of being dependent on foreign producers.

Regardless, this passage (if you expand it a bit) most concisely sums up one of the main themes of the book, which is why it's so often cited. The main takeaway here being that intentions don't always match outcomes. Governments often intend to improve society by intervention but make things worse. Free actors don't intend to improve society but often do so anyway (as an aside, despite this, Smith is actually LESS laissez faire than many expect).

Shortly after where your quote ends he makes this clear, "By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it." This is reiterated in various ways as I recall and he's merely trying to apply it to this specific topic of importation here, though in hindsight what he considers the outcome of the self interest calculus is a bit wrong.

Still, market actors acting in their own self interest of foreign trade do indeed produce the unintended consequence of enriching those trading partners.

I also doubt that it's a large segment of users but count me as one among the millions who dumped Firefox in 2020. I knew it was going downhill when they started purging words from the project. When your inclusion efforts start alienating moderate users it might be time to rethink them.

* Removing "meritocracy" from the governance docs - https://blog.mozilla.org/careers/words-matter-moving-beyond-...

* Changing "master password" to "primary password" - https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/primary-password-replac...

* Removing "crazy" from the codebase - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1675987

* Removing words deemed as reference to mental illness - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1675986

The difference in the project from 15 years ago is stark.

The Mozilla mission 2005:

"Established in July, 2003, with start-up support from America Online's Netscape division, the Mozilla Foundation exists to provide organizational, legal, and financial support for the Mozilla open-source software project."

The Mozilla mission 2021:

"Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent."

Where they once were just supporting a software project they're now a political movement. They spout "equity", "justice", and "advocacy" all over mozilla.org. No thanks, I just want a decent software.

I agree that there's absolutely a cycle and don't intend to diminish that or imply that those left behind don't matter or are to blame for their situation. There's clearly reasons why people decide to riot or protest, even if it doesn't necessarily bring about the desired outcomes.

White flight and red lining tend to get thrown around without any attempt to tackle reasons why these things happened beyond some surface level talk of not liking people that are different.

To blame this all on racism is to miss the true motivation which is safety of person and property. It is something I never truly understood until last year's protests/riots, which I think are also at least a factor in people moving out of urban areas again (though few will admit it). When there's unrest which results in arson, looting, and vandalism, those with means will seek safer locales and erect physical and institutional barriers to keep out potential threats. Venice is a historical example of this, built on the water for protection from barbarians.

There are knock on effects such as dimmer prospects for those left than in the more integrated communities that proceeded as investment flees. People rightfully don't want to invest in areas deemed unsafe, where those investments would be at risk.

To be clear, where such barriers manifest in ways where people are judged or treated differently based on immutable characteristics or group identity instead of their individual character, this is wrong.

This is a pretty good take on the ramifications of race riots: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/racism-riots-economics-...

Is this not reading too much into it? How many sports teams in the US use Vikings, Spartans, or Trojans as mascots? To my knowledge "we" (whoever that is supposed to mean) never defeated these people. They are generally associated by the public as having been fierce warriors.

Same with 401ks and vesting periods and employer sponsored healthcare. It gives leverage to the employer to keep people working a job they otherwise wouldn't. Jobs should pay cash and in some cases equity. Expand tax advantaged accounts for retirement (IRAs), do something with healthcare (maybe single payer, idk).

The fundamental difference between the relationship between individuals and businesses and individuals and government is that one is voluntary, the other is not. Businesses need customers to survive, it is a very powerful motivator to providing good products and customer service if people are free to do business with someone else instead. Rapid changes in consumer habits, usually due to new options becoming available, have doomed many incumbents. Government agencies don't need you, you need them through force of the law.

Even if you are an employee, it's a voluntary relationship. If you feel you're not being treated fairly, you can try to complain, your leverage being that you are free to leave. The exception to this is monopoly situations which is why maintaining competitive environments is so important. We still haven't quite figured out the best way to do this. Regulations, in the broad sense, can help or hurt competition.

It's a romantic idea that we can change government through democracy but these agencies are quite removed from the democratic process. We elect representatives but they can't do anything unilaterally. Their priorities will not align with each individual's priorities at any given time. Even if it does align with your specific needs they need to build some kind of consensus with other representatives about what to change. It's a slow and imperfect process.

This resonated with me a lot. Windows 10 is a bit of a mess but mostly still tolerable. Once it's EOL I'll replace my current PC (from '09) but I'll try to avoid Windows 11. The MS account requirement really annoys me. I'm currently playing with Pop!_os in a VM and like it so far. I also like that I can pay for it, which I plan to. Developing a quality desktop needs resources, paying directly is far preferable to me than paying indirectly through ads or data collection.

Some people do enjoy their work and can be said to live for it. Marissa Mayer had an interesting take that burnout wasn't necessarily about working too much but resentment that they'd rather be spending more time on something else (like family). To paraphrase a similar view someone once told me: there's no such thing as work/life balance, it's all just life.

That being said I think it's easier to live to work if you feel that your efforts are going to yield greater results. Putting time into study to get good grades and learn new skills, anticipating that this will yield better job opportunities? Sure! Working long hours on my startup that is taking off and could make me rich? Great! Having to work long hours and skip vacations to finish a project in a salaried corporate job? That'll burn you out because you're not directly benefitting from the sacrifice, which probably leads to some resentment towards your employer.

A reasonable explanation other than McConnell is a "mean guy" would be that he doesn't feel the federal government should bail out states for making promises they can't keep. After all, if they get bailed out once, it only further enables state and local politicians to keep promising generous future benefits that they won't be responsible for figuring out how to fund.

Come work for us, we pay less than the private sector but future generations will figure out how to pay you a nice retirement package! Oh, I won't be around to be held accountable if they can't, but don't worry Uncle Sam will pick up the tab!

Who's based in Russia? Fastmail seems to be Aussie/American and Protonmail is Swiss.

I think you proved the parent comment's point with this statement by accusing a whole class of people of being guilty of something the vast majority had no part in and would find abhorrent.

It's understandable that they would resent such blanket statements. No one alive today participated in slavery, the vast majority of their ancestors did not participate in it. Many families hadn't even immigrated yet and may have had their own discrimination issues to contend with.

> This is more "both sides are the same" rhetoric that is only used to empower the fringe beliefs and extremism in the American right.

This is exactly the sentiment the parent comment is alluding to. I think the American left is more guilty recently of avoiding introspection and dismissing criticism, to the detriment of advancing their mostly positive goals.

Adam Smith argued that free workers are superior to slaves because they have greater incentive to want to better themselves for their own benefit and to innovate their processes to show they are worth more wages. Slaves, by contrast, he argues will perform the bare minimum work to avoid repercussions. They are also far from free, they cost money to purchase and there is a cost to providing them with necessities of life as they don't have the means of providing for themselves.

Mozilla has increasingly become more of a political organization than a technology one. Where it used to focus on stewardship of the Mozilla code, its scope has now shifted to broadly "building a better internet".

The Mozilla mission 2005:

"Established in July, 2003, with start-up support from America Online's Netscape division, the Mozilla Foundation exists to provide organizational, legal, and financial support for the Mozilla open-source software project."

The Mozilla mission 2021:

"Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent."

This shift has manifested itself in different ways which broadly align with American left politics. The homepage and blog are speckled with articles promoting diversity initiatives, endorsing BLM, calling for systemic change, endorsing net neutrality, and fighting misinformation.

Mozilla is also one of the organizations at the forefront of sanitizing language it deems problematic in any way:

* Removing "meritocracy" from the governance docs - https://blog.mozilla.org/careers/words-matter-moving-beyond-...

* Changing "master password" to "primary password" - https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/primary-password-replac...

* Removing "crazy" from the codebase - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1675987

* Removing words deemed as reference to mental illness - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1675986

Some like this sort of thing and see it as positive, to other it's alienating.

The difference between the current social justice movements and the previous civil rights movements is that they're more about changing culture than policy. Voting rights, marriage rights, desegregation, abortion rights, these are things with concrete laws that could be changed.

If anything, the protests should have been about police reform. Change qualified immunity, change police training to avoid inadvertent deaths. That's something that a lot of people could support because more than just Black people get harassed by cops.

Instead, everything from master bedrooms, to math, to western civilization itself has been called "white supremacist", "racist", and "problematic". It's diluted the ability for these movements to make real substantive progress and is creating growing animosity towards themselves.