Hacker News: drewmcarthur

New comment by drewmcarthur in "Ask HN: What books have been worth your time?"

drewmcarthur — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 14:14:43 +0000

i just picked up an edition of “The Evolution of Cooperation” that has a foreword by richard dawkins. was cool to see his take, from writing the selfish gene, on axelrod’s contributions to the study of cooperation. by any chance, did your edition of his book mention those cooperation studies? dawkins said he updated a later edition in this foreward i just read

New comment by drewmcarthur in "Mondragon as the new city-state"

drewmcarthur — Tue, 03 Sep 2024 21:18:48 +0000

> democratic governance rather than ownership

yes and no, i’d call the distinction collective ownership. you can sell your shares (by quitting), or you can stay and participate democratically. but you can’t do both, and that protects your say in the company, preventing investors from overruling worker-owners.

> i have no influence

neither do the current workers. the issue isn’t retail investors, but the ones with board seats. if boards only had one seat for an investor, that’d be one thing, but usually workers only get a single seat, if any.

> protect current workers’ democratic governance

you could do this with preferred shares, voting shares, etc. investor shares are non voting, voting shares can only be owned by workers, etc. you still have to counter their concentration though.

New comment by drewmcarthur in "Airlines are running out of 4-digit flight numbers"

drewmcarthur — Sun, 04 Aug 2024 20:21:49 +0000

the problem with comparing these things by their ticket prices is that markets don’t consider externalities. making and fueling a plane might allow me to sell tickets cheaper than a train, but only if we ignore the cost of the carbon output (since neither the flyer nor the airline pay for this, but society at large does)

i wonder how this comparison would shake out if you included a carbon tax that effectively measured the cost of these trips on the globe.

New comment by drewmcarthur in "Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes"

drewmcarthur — Thu, 11 Jul 2024 20:38:12 +0000

I would support patents that could only ever belong to the actual inventor.

New comment by drewmcarthur in "The Enshittification of Open Source"

drewmcarthur — Thu, 11 Jul 2024 20:14:52 +0000

> "Enshittification" describes the process by which something becomes degraded or corrupted.

I feel like many get this wrong, it’s not just “when things get worse”, the term was coined specifically around the phenomenon of investor-owned companies putting profit ahead of user values, leading to a degradation of service, combined with platform stickiness keeping users locked in.

That isn’t what’s happening here, if anything selling open source code without contributing back more closely aligns with enshittification, which is what these licenses prevent.

This is really a conversation around positive vs negative freedom. Is your freedom to profit off my code greater than my freedom to benefit from your modifications of my code?

New comment by drewmcarthur in "Ask HN: what are examples of successful "open-source alternatives"?"

drewmcarthur — Mon, 01 Jul 2024 19:14:10 +0000

this is what i’m thinking. HTTP itself only overtook Gopher when it was released into the public domain, to compete with Gopher’s proprietary licensing.

New comment by drewmcarthur in "German public broadcasters open source their streaming platforms"

drewmcarthur — Tue, 07 May 2024 02:50:45 +0000

that’s incredibly silly

New comment by drewmcarthur in "German public broadcasters open source their streaming platforms"

drewmcarthur — Tue, 07 May 2024 02:48:42 +0000

signed, thank you for posting!

New comment by drewmcarthur in "German public broadcasters open source their streaming platforms"

drewmcarthur — Mon, 06 May 2024 17:34:19 +0000

public means public, if something is paid for by tax money, it should be licensed for public use

New comment by drewmcarthur in "In the AI Economy, There Will Be Zero Percent Unemployment"

drewmcarthur — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 02:51:13 +0000

exactly, the only reason to hire someone is because you’re making money off their work.

New comment by drewmcarthur in "I spoke with a Google worker fired for protesting $1.2B Israel contract"

drewmcarthur — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 21:29:59 +0000

I appreciate this reply - you’re right direct democracy is inefficient, and that our governments aren’t exactly a model of efficiency either.

that being said, and I think you agree this is important when it comes to government, I think we deserve to have a say in decisions that affect us. Whether that’s direct democracy or a republic, not my point, although an important discussion to be had.

First step though, is pointing out that I don’t want to live in a top-down autocratic country, nor do I want to work for a top-down, autocratic company. Then we can talk about how a democratic workplace might work!

New comment by drewmcarthur in "I spoke with a Google worker fired for protesting $1.2B Israel contract"

drewmcarthur — Fri, 19 Apr 2024 21:38:24 +0000

good point. why did all these countries become democracies in the first place? we should revert to autocracy /s

New comment by drewmcarthur in "I spoke with a Google worker fired for protesting $1.2B Israel contract"

drewmcarthur — Fri, 19 Apr 2024 18:00:40 +0000

i agree companies shouldn’t have political sway, but why shouldn’t the place you spend so much time and effort for be democratically governed? what’s the argument that government should be, but industry shouldn’t?

that’s the whole basis of Elizabeth Anderson’s “Private Government”

New comment by drewmcarthur in "I spoke with a Google worker fired for protesting $1.2B Israel contract"

drewmcarthur — Fri, 19 Apr 2024 17:58:48 +0000

well, only if you ignore the court rulings by the ICJ

New comment by drewmcarthur in "I spoke with a Google worker fired for protesting $1.2B Israel contract"

drewmcarthur — Fri, 19 Apr 2024 17:52:14 +0000

> your corporate job isn’t a democracy

why not? shouldn’t it be?