People outside of tech have no concept of what the algorithm does and in general take what’s on their feed at face value. How could they not? The news very often runs stories about tweets and Twitter trends as if they represent the real organic sentiments of the citizens.
Small government means not making laws which otherwise interfere in the citizens' ability to make their own choices about how to live. It doesn't have anything to do with the size of the military, whose missions are mostly abroad to protect trade routes anyway.
>ultimately it is an illegal annexation of public land that belongs to the taxpayers and has other intended uses (even if that use is just greenspace or empty land).
This is exactly how I feel seeing the homeless camps in Austin. Primarily, the first question I had was: what happens when one homeless person wants to spot of another? Neither has a legal right to it; are we not encouraging interpersonal violence by refusing to enforce the property laws that separate us from the state of nature?
>my experience has been that most are not locals, despite what surveys say, because the surveys always rely on volunteered answers about origins, rather than proven identity
Right. Why would anyone tell a volunteer they're from out of town? Seems like the first rule of being homeless: get a story that appeals to people. "Born here and down on my luck" is much more compelling than "Where I came from is worse than this place so I hopped a ride here."
Basically, we can spend all the money in the world and build all the housing that people need, but the personal liberty that this country espouses -- personal liberty I agree with! -- means that no one is obligated to take it. There is already a myriad of excuses I hear in these threads for why the homeless don't go to the shelters, participate in the programs, etc. "They don't allow my dog." "They would make be get sober", etc. Until we accept that there is a significant population of unhoused that prefer it that way, and then decided what we want to do about that, all the little villages and things won't scratch the surface of the problem.
> are we not encouraging interpersonal violence by refusing to enforce the property laws that separate us from the state of nature?
The tradeoff is that we definitely have to use violence to evict people from these spaces and force them back onto the streets or into other open spaces. And with fewer places to camp, they'll likely be exposed to more physical disputes than before. It's not as if the residents of these camps will go "well, time to buy a condo". They'll still need somewhere to live.
> Basically, we can spend all the money in the world and build all the housing that people need, but the personal liberty that this country espouses -- personal liberty I agree with! -- means that no one is obligated to take it.
The east bay has hundreds of people on a waiting list just for shelter space. There aren't enough beds for the night, let alone supportive housing, so we haven't even come close to trying the "build all the houses that these people need" (and make they available) strategy.
>The east bay has hundreds of people on a waiting list just for shelter space. There aren't enough beds for the night, let alone supportive housing, so we haven't even come close to trying the "build all the houses that these people need" (and make they available) strategy.
That's because people come from all over the country, since the bay area is homeless friendly. The best solution is to make project room key permanent.
I listened to that too, and in the final episode, you hear exactly what I'm talking about. In the interview with K.C., the narrator mentions that she had been in a shelter, but they didn't allow dogs and she didn't like the lack of privacy. Some people won't take the help you give them, and not preferring the solutions offered doesn't give you an absolute right to public land.
Simple solution is enforce the law.Remove the housing and charge those who build or assist in building on public land with a criminal offense - same as would happen to anyone else who illegally builds on public lands.
It's past ridiculous that this behaviour is applauded and endorsed by elected officials.
There are no simple solutions here. I do believe the homeless ought to be assigned housing by making California’s Project Room Key permanent and national. If you can prove some connection to the location where you’re sleeping rough, you get first crack at local housing. Otherwise it’s back to where you have that connection — could even be where you were born.
These motels will be slums. There will be prostitutes, and drug dealers, and crime. But it will also be a central location for service outreach without the prerequisites of other places.
What is the reasoning for giving them a criminal offense? Not “because they broke the law” but like, what are we hoping to get out of sending them to jail/giving them a fine? That they choose to stop being homeless? That being in jail makes them not homeless anymore?
I think it’s a fools errand to jail homeless people. It seems like a waste of money to me but I don’t have a better solution or idea on how to spend my tax dollars so am really interested in hearing more on the positive side of jailing them.
Putting them in jail prevents them from doing things that the taxpayers don't like: building fires under overpasses, leaving needles and human waste in the streets, harassing passersby, etc. It also puts them in contact with social services, in some cases.
It's not a perfect solution, or even a good one. We can and should develop a more compassionate alternative.
> It's not a perfect solution, or even a good one. We can and should develop a more compassionate alternative.
I'm guessing you don't see providing cheap shelter in empty areas that have no other good use (like a highway underpass) as a more compassionate alternative then?
Jail costs 80k a year per prisoner in California on average. That's a hell of a lot of money, and it clearly doesn't work to keep people from being homeless.
I think a more compassionate alternative really just is a cheaper shelter for homeless than what Jail costs us, and programs that actually show some level of success at reentrance into society.
I'd be willing to change my tune if good data showed that Jails were both cost effective, and actually acted as a deterrent for homelessness, and was a good pathway to reentrance, but everything I looked at seems to indicate it's terrible at all of these, and ends up just being a very expensive shelter.
Ah, so it’s not about directly a consequence to them for their actions but a way to appease people/clean up where tax payers live? I disagree that’s a good move but it makes sense that we would need to do something similar.
My anecdote is that people that are homeless are not really disincentivized by these things. They’re shitting in the street and sleeping in an underpass. I don’t think three hots and a cot is really an issue they want to avoid with any serious meaning.
Similarly, any fine will not get paid because, how would it?
I think we might disincentivize the “hippies” that are choosing to be homeless and care about these things. For sure that is possible. Do we think that the % of people that are choosing that lifestyle is high enough that it will be cost effective to tax payers? I don’t think so but it’s definitely something to look into more closely.
> a criminal offense - same as would happen to anyone else who illegally builds on public lands
Are you sure this is the case? Any lawyer out here?
Is building on public land a criminal offence? What kind of penalty can you be looking at for doing so?
I assume this must often happen where one building potentially extends slightly beyond it's lot lines, so could you get criminally charged in those cases?
If you build over your lot lines, or build more than allowed by a conservation agreement, or build without securing permits, or violate local building laws in any number of other ways, your local government (when they find out) will ask you to tear it down. If you don’t, you will be compelled (fines, probably). If you refuse, your structure will be torn down, and you might go to jail.
Really? I recall netbooks being pretty bad. Cramped keyboards, short battery life, weak processors... the worst of all worlds, really. What attracts you to them?
Not the parent, but back then they had longer battery life than conventional laptops, 93% size keyboard, were really cheap (great for me as a student) and were fine for browsing the net (for about a year, then the websites became suddenly a lot more complex) and remote work.
I remember trying to buy an eeePC in a computer store and when I said it is for programming the guy there didn't want to sell me one but tried to sell me a 17" monstrosity. But I needed it for travel and to do office and coding work and most of the time I used SSH to a more powerful PC anyway.
The only stupid thing was that Microsoft artificially limited netbooks to low resolution and low RAM. You could apparently either build a netbook, or a fully-featured laptop, but not a small-format laptop without getting some kind of license penalty. Same a couple of years later when Intel and MS mandated that Ultrabooks have glossy touchscreens and motion sensors and could be maxially X mm thick.
I'm writing novels outside in my spare time. Unfortunately, for people like me there are no reasonable options, especially since I need Windows (special software). The SunBook were too expensive to me (+tax and international delivery). I've given up by now and just buy the cheapest smallest laptop I can find, plus a power pack. It makes continuous backups so if it explodes in the sun I wouldn't lose too much work.
My EePC was better than what I have now, at least it had a matte screen and 12 hours battery life with a replacement battery, but unfortunately was stolen.
This was written by a person, not the editorial board of NYT. Could you please back your claims of antisemitism? That is a serious accusation that is unfortunately overused to apply to anyone who criticizes Israel.
Your statement follows a pattern of, ‘the person was doing X therefore the unjustifiable response was justified.’ This fails the commonly adopted Rawlsian theory of justice (Veil of Ignorance), and it is known as victim blaming.
If you're not trying to justify it, then no, it doesn't make sense at all. The media failed (or purposefully sought not) to deliver information in a useful form.
Delivering such information is supposedly the reason the media exists. There's no merit or utility in extending that abject failure to the information source or destination.
A public option for social media is exactly what I want. Townsquare.us, run by the government, where all speech except that which is literally illegal is allowed. Supreme Court for challenges. No ads or tracking allowed. Post illegal content? Feds come knocking.
The point is that it settles, once and for all, the role of government in policing social media. If social media really is the replication of the public town square, then one that has the same operating model is called for.
Doesn't matter if people want to go there. The point is that it exists, and the model is governed by the taxpayers.
The issue at stake: governments telling private businesses what they can and can't host on their servers.
Impact of a government social media: If you get banned from Facebook, you have the option to post your non-illegal content on townsquare.us. Therefore, your free speech rights are not being impacted. The right to speak is not the right to be heard by the audience of your choice.
> There are already tons of sites you can move to if you get banned from a platform, so there is no functional difference.
But none of those platforms draw a direct line between the constitutional guarantee of free speech and implementation of that speech. That’s the idea behind the public option: it’s the constitution with teeth, freedom in its purest form, while leaving corporations open to experiment with restrictions as the market demands.
If social media is the public square then the government would just seize the servers just liked they seized all the public squares/roads/areas from private people.
It would be unusable. Porn is legal, gore is legal, hate speech is legal, as is any threat that’s not likely to cause “specific and imminent lawlessness”.
The bar for the government being able to legally suppress speech is purposefully very, very high. This is good when it comes to keeping the power of the state out of matters it shouldn’t be involved in, but this is bad when you’re trying to make a social media platform usable by anyone but the absolute dregs of society.
Content moderation is very, very hard, but people actually want it. There’s a reason why people stay on Twitter while whining on Twitter rather than going to 4chan or 8kun
>It would be unusable. Porn is legal, gore is legal, hate speech is legal, as is any threat that’s not likely to cause “specific and imminent lawlessness”.
Such is the nature of living in a free society. Certainly there are ways, in even the most basic social media platforms, of un-following / blocking certain posters. And if the content isn't targeted by algorithm, should be fairly easy to avoid content you don't want to see.
Any if not, well, there's always Facebook and Twitter.
The only useful purpose of Facebook for me is using it as a somewhat modern phone book. It’s a great tool for tracking down old or new acquaintances and establishing a line of communication. It’s kind of what Facebook used to be before the newsfeed and like button. I wish there was an alternative to Facebook without the tracking and advertising, run by something not profit seeking. Maybe an organization like NPR or PBS?
I wouldn’t be surprised if people got paid to spam ads on the website. People who don’t have any money (or care what Google indexes on them) would gladly send spam on behalf of their drivers license.
A more generous interpretation is "no ads allowed" means the platform is not funded by advertising, but by public dollars. That way the system design does not become so maliciously driven by engagement/addiction metrics
The roads used to be full of spammers, but governments started banning stuff like prostitution and street peddling to reduce it. And the difference between government and a social media platform is that the government will go to your home and fine you dollars or put you behind bars if you run a professional spamming agency. So I think a government run option would have way less spam in the long run, but almost surely less freedom as well which might not be what people want either. We already see people getting arrested for relatively minor comments they post on social media in UK.
To be clear, in my vision of this, people would be allowed to advertise however they want. Businesses could have accounts. But having a space for ads and then using behavioral ad targeting would be out.
In your vision of it, perhaps. Citizen's United, however, has already decreed that corporations have free speech rights like everybody else. By creating a distinction between commercial and personal speech, the government would be interfering in the 1st amendement rights of personal and commercial entities.
My vision doesn’t create a distinction between commercial and personal speech. In fact, it does the opposite, by not privileging commercial speech and giving it a special space on the page. If you want to advertise you wares, do so, but you don’t get to pay to get attention. Get people to follow you because they like what you have to say.
When you wrote "having a space for ads and then using behavioral ad targeting would be out", I understood it to mean that you did not want any space at all for ads and not just a lack of designated space for ads.
With that being said, the only way I see this happening is if the government builds its own ISP and /or IXP, secures its own peering agreements (with the understanding that another ISP can refuse), hosts the website on its own servers, and accepts all potential spam that comes from all of its users.
In addition, none of this will stop tracking by ads using tricks like the Facebook Pixel, obfuscated analytics, or fingerprinting scripts as code is also free speech. In fact, none of stops any tracking on server-side by government agents either. Any IP logs or information that's gleaned from user access of government services is understood to be self-incriminating and will be treated as such as in the case of a drug dealer in Massachusetts.[1]
All in all, who is expected to pay for all this (and on what grounds) and how do you intend to stop ads or any tracking at all with these factors involved?
Oh the users would most certainly be tracked by the government. In fact, that's part of the point. One of the unfortunate byproducts of Parler getting shut down was the loss of visibility of right-wing terrorists.
>but it seems like there's at least some indication of how she feels about it.
This is not true. The judge's job is to follow pertinent line of inquiries to the case and get responses from the plaintiff and defense. Not pursuing a line of questioning might indicate that the questions were already resolved in briefs, and are therefore not needed in open court. Open court is a very, very small part of these trials, so trying to get a read on what a judge thinks based on questions in open court is spurious at best.
It applies to anything said by the judge in open court. It is intended to elicit a response from the parties. Judges don’t make comments on their thoughts out loud for the benefit of participants.
(1) Tech demands a lot from its employees. We are dedicating a significant portion of our waking hours. They expect us to believe in their mission, and so we also expect that mission to align with our values.
(2) Technology itself is much more far reaching than any other industry. These corporations are massive, and with them massive budgets for lobbying etc. Not demanding that they reflect the values of their employees and customers would be a massive waste of that power or worse — letting them actively use that power to make the world worse.
>we also expect that mission to align with our values.
"we" do? personally i expect my employer to provide financial compensation in exchange for me doing things for them. beyond that i don't really care about whether the giant corporation i work at is truly reflecting my core beliefs. i suspect that they probably aren't.
> reflect the values of their employees
do all employees truly feel the same way about every issue? do employees with a minority opinion feel comfortable expressing those views?
You left out an important part of the first sentence you quoted. Companies that expect employees believe in the mission end up with employees who expect a mission they can believe in.
Talking about employee values in aggregate doesn't imply all of them feel the same about every issue.
