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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • It’s always a contest between security tools and penetration tools. The problem comes when law enforcement can do this without fair protections of privacy, say if they can easily establish probable cause ( My detection dog is signalling you have illegal data on your phone ) or they are allowed to get a warrant post-hoc for an otherwise illegal search.

    …Or they do the illegal search and then engage in parallel reconstruction e.g. make a fake story about following up on an informant.

    Once the police just seize and crack your phone on a whim, then the state no longer respects your privacy and autonomy, which means you can no longer consent to be governed, rather are controlled by gunpoint (surveillance and use of force). This is one of the critical ingredients to autocratic rule, since it does a lot to neuter the capacity of discontent turning into revolt.



  • Sure. Which is why autocrats turn to fascism (that is a mythical history of an in-group and out-groups) to redirect that outrage against other races, other ethnicities, other religions, women, LGBT+, countercultures, teenagers, immigrants, etc. And it works because the naked ape is already frustrated with society being too big (hundreds of thousands rather than dozens), and is always looking for common traits among bad drivers and untidy neighbors.

    And it works every time, since it takes effort to be rational and practice tolerance. Mostly the lumpenproletariat (simple folks who are not politically savvy) are the driving force behind hate campaigns, but the rest of us start wondering if so many people are negging on the Jews, maybe there’s a point. And rumors like blood libel and groomers helps those feelings along. 24-hour propaganda on FOX News and OAN helps too.


  • It’s similar to 10 year olds being allowed on Facebook, only there’s money and sexual activity involved.

    This reminds me of Russia after the Soviet Union fell, in which nine and ten year olds were offering sexual services for lunch money, because they literally had no other means to eat.

    In the States today, those jobs that were once a place for teens to get work experience and spending money are now occupied by people paying rent. Competition for fast food cashiers and grocery baggers is fierce.

    And yeah, teens who are very pretty find they control their own means of production when it comes to telecommunications sex, so it’s natural they too would want to bypass regulations to get some of that sweet, sweet lucre that defines your power and privilege in this society.

    She’s got a ticket to ride, and she don’t care.



  • I don’t see how this is enforceable.

    Large AI providers will also have high caliber legal teams to fight any incident and demonstrate it it wasn’t the AI’s fault, but the stupid people who gave it control.

    Smaller projects won’t have the same warchests, and eventually they’ll become the target.

    In the meantime, yeah, Zuckerberg and all the other flank-speed-ahead investors will not be slowed in making the AI that will smooth talk our billionaires into a failed trip to mars.



  • Until we can find a better way to enforce civil liberties, the striking of illegally obtained evidence in the prosecution of terrible criminals is necessary. That they get to walk free is the point first as a penalty to the state (that now a monster remains at large) and second as a penalty to the public for allowing the state to let its agents abuse their power.

    If neonazis and terrorists aren’t protected by our Bill of Rights, then you aren’t either. And it informs how the massive extrajudicial surveillance state got formed in the first place, as the US state believes national security (in all its ambiguity) is valued more than American lives.



  • I think you are misrepresenting the take. I’m only describing the situation, which, yes, may lead to some people giving up.

    I’m skeptical of just doing something even if it’s useless, but that’s not to say there is nothing to be done.

    When it comes to solving the rise of authoritarianism and movements towards autocracy, we don’t know what to do. The things we usually do (protest, escalate to violence) either don’t affect change, or can wreck society. But that means figuring out what to do, even if it means trying what hasn’t been done before.

    In the case of the US, ours is a huge society that teams with the chaos of complexity, so we will have plenty of opportunities to sabotage the transnational white power movement’s takeover through local action seizing on this vulnerability. Think of the dinosaur clones on Isla Nublar breeding, migrating to the mainland and finding enough lysine to survive, despite all the efforts to keep them in control. (The infighting and brain-drain within the organizations trying to seize power may eventually drive them to collapse as well, but we have to give that time to fester).

    In the case of the climate and plastic crises, we are fucked. The global food supply infrastructure will collapse and people are going to die. Few people like to look at those models (so most scientists just say this will be bad if it gets to here), so the few estimates suggest that if we act now to mitigate climate effects and drastically drop greenhouse emissions, we might be able to get the world to continue to sustain one billion people on the long term.

    Do note that is seven billion people less than we have, and people who are alive today will get to experience this drop. Famine is going to become the new in thing, and it’s the sort of death we don’t wish on our worst enemies… unless we’re Benjamin Netanyahu.

    Sophie From Mars has a long form discussion video The World Is Not Ending where she discusses the range of outcomes, noting that the concentration of wealth and power to people who cannot think rationally about it, except to hoard it, decides whether we figure out better how to organize and cooperate, or exist in a Mad Max future with far fewer cars and more cannibalism.

    I don’t indulge in opinions, except to say I’m afraid of the cannibal famine future, and I’m afraid we might well kill ourselves, and not in a cool way like AI takeover or robot apocalypse. But I also recognize that we naked apes are not rational and have to be clever even to choose to govern ourselves by logic rather than feelings. We do tragedize any commons we come across, and that’s a habit we will have to break. I don’t yet know how.

    It’s not to say we’re doomed. Rather it’s to say the odds of us coming out of this are really bad, considering the path of least resistance. We better start figuring out how we’re going to cleverly emerge from this fine mess.


  • We’re dealing with multiple imminent great filters that not only make the ecosystem way less inhabitable but will drastically slow the rate of recovery to where it will sustain diverse life again.

    We’re already seeing agriculture fail, water supplies dry up, people migrate due to intolerable climate, evacuation of islands due to sea level rise, and so on.

    If we succeed in mitigating the crisis and reaching net zero emissions, it’ll still be damage control rather than preventing disaster.

    A massive population correction is inevitable. Our society, our culture, our way of life will all be radically altered into something unrecognizable. And we may be due for millennia of iron-age life if not a return back to migratory survival.

    And that’s assuming we survive the next few centuries at all. Our existential risk is no longer insignificant.


  • Infringement of IP is a crime according to specific states, but if you make art, and I replicate it, it doesn’t affect you.

    If you write a story and I read it without paying you, it doesn’t affect you.

    The only reason IP is a thing is because short-term monopolies on media (or inventions or methods) were enshrined by specific states as law, and then spread through trade agreements, and they were expanded on without concern for their original purpose or for the good of the public. In fact, we’re seeing fair use rights fade since states aren’t willing to enforce them, and platforms like YouTube over censor.

    So at this point, in the US, the EU and the eastern market, no IP law would be better than what we have.

    So no, you have not demonstrated any reason I should have respect for your IP.

    However, if you’re going to insist, and be an IP maximalist, there is one thing I can do for you /to you (or Sony, or Time Warner, or Disney) that is worse than pirating your product.

    And that, of course, is not pirating your product.





  • Not in the US or the EU. If you make music in the States, then RCA or Sony owns your content, not you, and when they decide they’ve paid you enough (which is much less than they’re getting) then they still own your stuff. Also, if you make an amazing film or TV series ( examples: Inception, Firefly ) and the moguls don’t like it, they’ll make sure it tanks or at least doesn’t get aftermarket support, which is why Inception doesn’t have any video games tie-ins, despite being a perfect setting for video games.

    Artists are empowered in their ability to produce art. If they have to worry about hunger and shelter, then they make less art, and art narrowly constrained to the whims of their masters. Artists are not empowered by the art they’ve already made, as that has to be sold to a patron or a marketing institution.

    No, we’d get more and better art by feeding and housing everyone (so no one has to earn a living ) and then making all works public domain in the first place.

    Intellectual property is a construct, and it’s corruption even before it was embedded in the Constitution of the United States has only assured that old art does not get archived.

    I think yes, an artist needs to eat, which is why most artists (by far) have to wait tables and drive taxicabs and during all that time on the clock, not make art. The artists not making art far outnumber the artists that get to make art. And a small, minority subset of those are the ones who profit from art or even make a living from their art, a circumstance that is perpetually precarious.

    But I also think the public needs a body of culture, and as the Game of Thrones era showed us, culture and profit run at odds. The more expensive art is, the more it’s confined to the wealthy, and the less it actually influences culture. Hence we should just feed, clothe and home artists along with everyone else, whether or not they produce good or bad art. And we’ll get culture out of it.

    You can argue that a world of guaranteed meals and homes is not the world we live in, but then I can argue that piracy (and other renegade action) absolutely is part of the world we live in and will continue to thrive so long as global IP racketeering continues. Thieves and beggars, never shall we die.



  • When it comes to capitalist macroeconomics, as I understand it, wealth disparity is one of the big decay factors the government is supposed to monitor and correct for. Mind you, I learned MacEc in the mid 1980s but even after theory shifted from national economies to globalist economics (the free(-er) trade movement of the 1990s) wealth distribution, and the bow of that graph was supposed to be kept shallow.

    There are a lot of ways to restore some balance, such as taxing rich people and investing in welfare programs and social safety nets. In the case of freelance musicians (and freelance investments, which allowed people of lower income classes to invest sooner) these are just paradigm changes that allowed more people to participate, with the expectation that more people would be moderately successful rather than a few people being ostentatiously successful. Fewer Bruce Springsteens, more John Coultons. This wasn’t contrived by government though, so it’s more of a happy accident.

    And yes, Marx in Das Kapital notes that the ownership class invariably captures government and regulation which ends efforts to keep wealth more evenly distributed so we have situations like now (or like the Great Depression, a century ago) where a few people own almost everything and aren’t willing to let it go, even though the only thing they can do by hoarding their wealth is accumulate more wealth. And history has continued to bear this out, and to show that a well-regulated capitalist system is only temporary at best, which has driven me to believe we have to figure out something better.

    Post-scarcity communism would be ideal, but we haven’t yet worked out how to get there from here, and really I’d be happy for anything that doesn’t turn into a one-party plutocrat-controlled autocracy held together by fascism and a nationalist war effort.

    And sure, economics is a soft science so this is all just someone’s opinion, though the someones in this case are multiple smart historical figures who actually thought about it a bit. I’m not an economist, so I rely on experts who are.

    PS: This is my attempt to either find common ground, or to lay plain what my position is and where it comes from. I’m not invested in you adopting it, but if you want me to consider a different one, I’ll need cause to do so.