throwawaysea

There are definitely constitutional boundaries. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Connor_v._Donaldson

Most states define laws of their own around this, and usually a longer involuntary stay requires a court hearing. But I wouldn’t be surprised if even those are operating in a legal gray area that would get shot down upon a SCOTUS hearing. More realistically, the Supreme Court wouldn’t hear these cases due to higher priorities, but I think the “right to liberty” has only very few exceptions.

In a free society, businesses shouldn’t be able to suppress or punish customers for their political views. We already require businesses to not just do whatever they want in many ways. That’s what anti discrimination laws do, for example. We just need to make political viewpoint a protected class as well.

Apart from that, we also regulate a lot of private companies to be neutral. Your power utility may be private but can’t deplatform you. Telecom carriers are similar. Social media companies are just common carriers and public utilities that have avoided regulation so far with careful political donations. Payment companies (Visa, MasterCard, Stripe, PayPal, and yes, GoFundMe) are all just basic payment utilities and should also be treated as public utilities in many ways even if they remain private otherwise.

Apparently Elon Musk also got involved and called GoFundMe “professional thieves”, because they were going to redirect donations intended for Canadian protesters to other (likely left leaning) causes: https://nypost.com/2022/02/05/elon-musk-gofundme-professiona...

He also called out their double standard for claiming to not support protests that aren’t peaceful after they funded so many violent riots and illegal actions like CHAZ back in 2020.

I can be a proponent of free markets and against constructs that are anti competitive. When products are bundled (like with Microsoft’s Office subscriptions or Spotify), or when products have network effects (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter), or when they have a large number of users, or a large market cap, the free market already no longer exists. Choice becomes limited and barriers to entry become higher. These companies’ products start to become as important and influential as any public space or service. That’s where regulation is needed. And with all of the big tech platforms, they need to be regulated to not allow users to be denied or discriminated against due to their political views. The alternative is they are split up. But the free market definitely doesn’t exist right now.

Take a look at what happened with Parler. It was a rare successful challenger, although small by comparison, to big social media. Then AOC pressured a few companies to ban Parler and they all complied - whether to build favor with legislators that might regulate them or because it aligned with their politics. The claim that people can just build their own platform doesn’t work in a market this distorted.

As for your redefinition of censorship - I disagree. Legal or contractual allowance doesn’t change what it is. This is censorship.

This is also basically true for Amazon’s search results.

I guess I’ll be putting Delta on my “no fly” list. It’s incredible that corporate overlords seek to recreate authoritarian schemes like social credit scores as a cartel.

It’s unclear what tenure means. Usually it means time at a company not time in industry. But performance ratings also matter and the type of company matters. It would be best to see this normalized by years in industry, company size (revenue or market cap), and ideally with performance ratings accounted for in some way.

The fact that they collect them at all is what seems illegal to me. They know full well they don’t intend to pay these funds out when their politics disagree with the cause. So they’re soaking up the momentum of the movement and time of donors and then locking it away until it is irrelevant. It’s plain old political warfare.

Note that the government has actually likely pressured GoFundMe in this case, which is a chilling and tyrannical suppression of the right to protest, especially after how accommodating they were with mass rioting in 2020.

See https://www.foxnews.com/world/canadian-leader-deletes-tweet-... or https://www.newsweek.com/truckers-protesting-covid-rules-has...

> On Wednesday, before the fundraiser was suspended, city councilor and chair of the Ottawa Police Services Board Diane Deans said that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson should contact GoFundMe and tell them to not distributed the money raised to the protesters.

Let’s not forget the benefits side. I feel like these days the urbanist crowd and (activist-minded) academia love to disproportionately focus on the negatives, while downplaying or outright ignoring the numerous positives of a car. For me, the convenience of fast point to point transport on my own schedule simply can’t be beat. In all but the largest cities (which are simply overbuilt), nothing else comes close, and you can get a lot more done in any given day with a car. Transit and slow modes like walking or biking simply limit choice and use up more time, and there is no getting around that. And then of course there’s the benefit of being able to carry cargo and people and being shielded from weather.

Apart from copying Slack, they also copied Notion: https://www.fastcompany.com/90692715/microsoft-loop-notion-c...

Copying the innovation of smaller players and bundling it with existing subscriptions is a pretty despicable practice and so obviously anti competitive. I can only assume politicians look the other way since they rely on MS PAC donations.

As for the anti competitive UI dark patterns in this article - it is just very incredibly sleezy and people need to go to jail for it.

Thanks. This all sounds so complicated and frankly scares me away from using these technologies. I would be worried about making this kind of mistake or worse.

These seem fairly advanced, so I don’t know if I would call them “common”. But maybe I am out of the loop. Are these concepts and very specific sounding beliefs actually widely known to math majors or CS majors?

Thanks - I hadn’t seen that thread and will check it out.

Doesn’t the Roku software spy on you and don’t they track what you are watching?

> Seems like the rents were probably within their means, and they're being forced out because now they're not.

But that’s the thing. If they have little tolerance or flexibility to accommodate those costs, then they were living too close to their limits. As for the rest of what you said…

I have lived in an urban environment for most of my life, and still do. But more recently I’ve come to feel that urban spaces are overrated - living in cramped apartments, huddled in wet and slushy subways, shadowed by tall buildings, is a certain kind of hell. You claimed that distributed populations are more socially isolated, but that’s not true. Having more space and slightly more physical isolation doesn’t mean you’re more socially isolated. Cities rarely have the sense of community and neighborly friendliness that rural areas have. Plenty of people are lonely in big cities in a fundamental way, and no, access to a collection of bars and restaurants does not make up for it. As for cost savings at scale - clearly that’s not true given we are talking about ballooning costs in cities. The environmental destruction is debatable - more people occupy cities, enabled by the model of living densely, and they still consume all the same plastics and electronics. Urban areas also have a massive amount of concentrated environmental impact, while less dense populations are more in line with their local environment‘s capacity. As an example, Seattle regularly has to dump millions of gallons of untreated sewage into the local waterways, leading to beach closures and marine life effects that are a result of the big concentrated impact (https://www.q13fox.com/news/heavy-rain-sends-11-million-gall...). As for dependence on motor vehicles - that feels like a positive to me, as cars are fast and convenient and let me get to where I want when I want, instead of being restricted to the timetables and destinations of public transit.

I get that there are other perspectives on all of this. But I wanted to share this perspective because it would be a mistake to take the alleged superiority of urban lifestyles as a foregone conclusion.

Is no one going to blame the unconstitutional seizure of private property that is eviction bans? Some cities previously banned background checks (https://reason.com/2017/08/18/seattle-bans-landlords-from-ru...) and many are considering banning banning use of credit scores. Seattle also instituted a number of laws these last few years that restrict landlords in a number of ways (https://www.seattlepi.com/local/politics/article/seattle-cit...). I imagine rents are going up in response to such laws and policies, which increase costs, and in response to inflation.

Personally I see a mass move to lower cost areas as a good thing. People should move to cheaper places and live within their means instead of barely making it in high demand high expense locations, and then complaining when the costs outrun their means. A more distributed workforce means a more distributed economy and that’s great for everyone. We would have a more resilient society and people wouldn’t have to live packed densely like sardines either. And instead of having a handful of cities monopolize the economy, we will see a revival among otherwise downtrodden areas.

Is this a real issue? I feel like the real issue is that colleges use race based admissions and discriminate against Asian students. This seems like a distraction.

Can someone explain this in plain English for a newbie that isn’t familiar with these complicated crypto technologies?

To explain the reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blueberry_Hill

I was a fan of Bookshop (because of their mission) until I noticed they aren’t politically neutral. For example they ran a campaign to get their customers to fund sending copies of the 1619 project, a widely debunked book by extremist Nikole Hannah-Jones, to schools across the US. It’s hard for me to trust such a platform will sell books of all political persuasions in the future and I don’t want to lend them more power because of it. Not that Amazon is better - they have also begun practicing book bans and cave to employee activism regularly. I just wish there was someone with a neutral book store.

You don’t view asking an unsupported leading question as a weak handed attempt at misinformation or seeming state-media corruption? Reporters are representatives of their employer. And a reporter at a state owned media floating a conspiracy theory about citizens who are legally protesting seems a lot like propaganda. We would definitely call it that if it was done in a country outside the Western hegemony. I haven’t seen the CBC or government officials discredit this yet, so I assume they are happy to stand by and let it circulate.

The Hill did a segment on the media blackout around the truck convoy protest. It’s pretty dark that so many media outlets can all act in seeming coordination with the government and each other: https://youtu.be/ArYtup2o_qU

Trudeau saying that a portion of his citizens protesting are holding “unacceptable views” was chilling. It’s always telling when someone in power holds free speech or any opposing view in contempt.

https://globalnews.ca/news/8539610/trucker-convoy-covid-vacc...

CBC is now literally claiming that Russia is behind the truckers protest. It’s a drastic pivot from claiming that it was a fringe minority, which now seems like a total lie considering the scale of it and the tens of thousands of people that came out just to stand on the side of highways and cheer on the protesters.

https://thepostmillennial.com/cbc-suggests-russian-actors-be...

Even though I see all the visuals and understand the process, this operation seems very complicated and more like science fiction.

Within their legal rights? Sure. But they are advocating for others to be silenced in the same breath, not just silently pulling their content. In other words, they are using power (financial power, celebrity influence) to silence others. That is incompatible with the ideas underlying a classically liberal free society.

There are also other pro science reasons to be against GMO crops. A couple example. GMO based industrial farms grow monocultures that ultimately reduce the variety of foods people traditionally grew and ate, leading to less varied diets and loss of culture. GMO crops also have yields that are unsustainably high, leading to disruption of water cycles (see Ogalalla aquifer depletion).

I view it as a freedom of speech issue because one side is advocating for another side to be silenced. These musicians aren’t just pulling their content - they’re trying to use power to shut someone else down. To me that is clearly a freedom of speech issue.

On the topic of intellectual openness, a nonprofit doing great work in this area is Heterodox Academy (https://heterodoxacademy.org/). Their definition of the problem evident in Western academia (particularly the US) is worth checking out: https://heterodoxacademy.org/the-problem/