BeautifulMind ♾️ @ BeautifulMind @lemmy.world

Late-diagnosed autistic, special interest-haver, dad, cyclist, software pro

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2 yr. ago

wtf is “the Administrative State”

It's the part of the government that regulates things like business that used to be regulated by private entities like trade associations and guilds. When congress established regulators for banks and for food and drugs and environmental policy, the private associations that used to regulate those things didn't like it much- they saw it as a usurping of their domains. When today's right talk mad about the 'administrative state', they're telling you they want to hand regulatory authority over banking right back to the banks, environmental decision-making to the people who will save money by dumping pollution in the drinking water, etc.

This is a long and well-sourced primer on the history of the democratizing of regulatory authority in the modern democratic state, one that also discusses the rapid reversal of that trend we're seeing today

The issue with this is holding tech companies liable for every possible infraction

That concern was the basis for section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which is in effect in the USA but is not the law in places like, say the EU. It made sense at the time, but today it is desperately out of date.

Today we understand that in absolving platforms like Meta of their duty of care to take reasonable steps to not cause harm to their customers, their profit motive would guide them to look the other way when their platform is used to disseminate disinformation about vaccines that gets people killed, that the money would have them protecting Nazis, that algorithms intended to promote engagement would become a tool not just to advertisers but to propagandists and information warfare people.

I'm not particularly persuaded that if in the US there is reform to section 230 of the Communications Decency act, that it would doom nonprofit social media like most of the fediverse- if you look around at all, most of it already follows a well-considered duty-of-care standard that provides its operators substantial legal protection from liability for what 3rd parties post to their platforms. Also if you consider even briefly, that is the standard in effect in much of Europe and social media still exists- it's just less-profitable and has fewer nazis.

On the one hand, that poor devil

On the other hand, fuck that guy

my opinion is this (rejecting cops) will only make things worse.

Giving them the benefit of the doubt because if you don't they will punish you isn't really giving them the benefit of the doubt, it is a backhanded acknowledgement that if they are not collectively appeased and given unwarranted grace, they will behave badly.

That's not an argument that they're not bullies, it sounds like an acknowledgement that they're bullies and it would be better to appease them

Fair point about hosts, I'm talking about platforms as if we held them to the standards we hold publishers to. Publishing is protected speech so long as it's not libelous or slanderous, and the only reason we don't hold social media platforms to that kind of standard is that they demanded (and received) complete unaccountability for what their users put on it. That seemed okay as a choice to let social media survive as a new form of online media, but the result is that for-profit social media, being the de facto public square, have all the influence they want over speech but have no responsibility to use that influence in ways that aren't corrosive to democracy or to the public interest.

Big social media already censor content they don't like, I'm not calling for censorship in an environment that has none. What I'm calling for is some sort of accountability to nudge them in the direction of maybe not looking the other way when offshore troll farms and botnets spread division and disinformation

Well, yeah. Everyone has the right to make bad decisions

This was 100% predictable

I'll agree that ISPs should not be in the business of policing speech, buuuut

I really think it's about time platforms and publishers be held responsible for content on their platforms, particularly if in their quest to monetize that content they promote antisocial outcomes like the promulgation of conspiracy theories and hate and straight-up crime

For example, Meta is not modding down outright advertising and sales of stolen credit cards at the moment Also meta selling information with which to target voters... to foreign entities

Y'know, if you're going to spend the money anyways, just subsidize the sellers for the season and let them cut costs to the point that demand tips up. That way they'll make some money themselves and learn for the next season where the price point is.

All paying to destroy it in order to keep prices up does is... keep it expensive above what the market will bear and cost the taxpayers while making them thirsty and sad

Also, far right groups recruit cops and ex-military. The venn diagram of law enforcement to right-wing militia groups has a lot of overlap.

There were families that made Bezos-class money at the height of slavery, and those families' descendants are still rich today.

At the very least, these families shouldn't be anonymously rich, they should be infamously rich, notoriously so. Even if a truth-and-reconciliation process is 'too much', let us at least have the truth out, and loud.

Wow, just wow. I liked Zoom when it was an upstart company making good tools for remote work When it got big, ugh.

[...] says a great deal about the moral and ethical foundations of [...] republicanism

That's just it. There are no moral or ethical foundations to it, just devotion to whatever the party or its talking heads hand down

That's what makes the GOP so fragile and so monstrous- it's all followers, none with ideas of their own and most willing to resort to (or accept) political violence over fealty to tribe or sect

Once you've got a critical mass of productivity online, it's time for utilities to get out of the business of burning hydrocarbons and selling steady-state electricity- and into the business of capturing daytime surpluses, selling it back to the grid at night

The point, of course, is that there's never been a shortage of energy- only scarcity of readily-available stored power at a given place or time, sometimes

If you're going to bring in Occam's Razor, it's probably less tenable to argue the 'a conspiracy is more complex than the alternative' argument when there's obviously a set of shared motives driving labor costs down while at the same time pushing up profit margins. The fact that profit margins are up does a lot of damage to the 'it can't be greedflation' theory

I'm on vacation r/n, the rental car is a Y. It's all right, but not as fancy or premium as I was led to believe

also the decision to route every feature of the car through the touchscreen console is fucking awful

There are decisions I don't want software taking away from me as a driver and this thing does too much of that

This has been a thing the mobile carriers (AT&T in particular) have demanded of handset makers- that they give the carrier the ability to lock down the tether feature so they can sell an upcharge on your plan (or a piece of hotspot hardware they can charge you a whole separate line for) so that they can un-cripple it and pretend they didn't take that away to begin with. This ought to be regulated like the taking-away-of-the-feature-in-the-phone-you-paid-for that it is.

Meanwhile I'm lowkey worrying because most of the talk I'm hearing out of Dem circles is barely-warmed over Bernie-trashing. If that was a winning electoral strategy, Clinton would have won. I'm hearing folks from the neoliberal center accusing the left of being nazis- there's so much wrong there it makes my head hurt

First, the price point is stupid

Second, I don't trust a folding monitor to last

Third, every other time I've gone to a platform that's different from what 99% of apps are written for, I've felt frustrated because the apps didn't take advantage of that and here I was with support for that but no benefit to me.

LOL if the algorithm can't tell republicans from nazis and they back down when republicans complain... the result is that it caters to nazis hiding among republicans because the goddamned GOP shelters its nazis