Is this really better though? First-party community maintenance is more direct, cheaper, and doesn't rely on fragile central authorities (granted, it _does_ rely on a difficult pattern of community discussion and collaboration to satisfy tribal consensus, etc).

I'm broadly OK with cameras being in public, but I have much more trust in direct action than I do in elected "officials".

On medium time-scales, it seems to me that a great solution will be to have community-maintained cameras kinda all over the commons, but such that the camera eye can be accessed publicly (ie, removing the information asymmetry which gives the undesirable actors (police, etc) greater view than the actual community participants).

A year when police were relatively rare, and quite new in the western legal experience, having only emerged from slave patrols in the United States and from the founding of the 1829 Scotland Yard in the United Kingdom. This is a year with living memory of a time when the state did not employ people to do what was ostensibly the civic responsibility of every person to quell crime and protect others.

Flock cameras... I mean, look: our society, without any central organization at all, has the capacity to record nearly every crime that occurs, just by dint of our camera phones and private surveillance systems. So Flock really just gives the police more information, creating a an asymmetry with the rest of society.

Given that we can already record all that we need to, and call for help from each other at a moment's notice, what good can police do for the next few centuries? And what possible hope is there that it will outweigh the bad?

I have the Gasland IH77BFH. If someone has made a hack to modify this by adding physical dials, I'd be tickled.

Everything that we want to do can be done through ordinary collaboration with no need for the state. The special services which the state provides (violence and threats of violence, imperialism, inhibition of movement of people and goods across imaginary lines, etc) are the kinds of things that are really only interesting to the kinds of people who are already spending their money on lobbying.

Why do you care about Disney's emotional outbursts in the first place though?

> The problem is that it is now explicitly reserved for the rich.

That's not new - it has always served entrenched interests at the cost of actual artists and entertainers. John Perry Barlow laid this out with great clarity throughout his time with The Grateful Dead, perhaps best here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLbqgG6o1n8

That's like, elite literary territory though. Let's stick to the discussion on books.

You can accept it or not. But it's going to be a lot easier if you do.

But I think they got this particular political decision wrong, both ethically and factually. Looking at what seems to have passed for "deliberation", it's hard not to walk away with a very poor impression of codeberg (or at least, their process for deciding on such bans).

The crux of the argument appears to have been that blockchains are environmentally destructive - obviously a critique aimed at Proof-of-Work blockchains. Then, many commenters pointed out that the environmental argument doesn't apply to proof-of-stake projects in the same way.

The responses then become just inane and immature. For example, "The dominant cryptocurrency is still Bitcoin and they have no plans to move to Proof-of-stake." - I can't fathom how this statement has any bearing on the impact of other proof-of-stake projects using codeberg as their VCS host.

Through these issue threads leading up to the vote, the arguments in favor of continuing to host blockchain projects are far more reasonable and sober and better informed than the detractors.

If anything, this discussion seems to reinforce the (and my) view that, on long time scales, blockchains are likely to be an elegant solution to humanity's problems of economic inequality and inefficiency.

FWIW, this is not an unreasonable ask either.

No it's not. We'd _much_ rather you steal our music if it means we are part of a free, permissionless, seeking-to-be-comprehensive library of the traditions of humankind.

We don't give a fuck about whether you get our music according to the prescribed notions of some particular state or corporation.

I'm a bluegrasser, so maybe my lens is pretty shifted (given that our tradition is one of passing on copyright-unencumbered tunes from time immemorial). But this view is very widespead - essentially universal - in bluegrass. There's a reason that every IBMA and bluegrass grammy has gone to a drm-free record the past bunch of years.

https://pickipedia.xyz/wiki/DRM-free

I think a darker possibility also looms: that there is ongoing astroturfing across the internet in defense of what turned out to be ludicrous policies.

In real life, there seem to be so few people who stand by lockdowns in the face of all the data that's now available. Vanishingly few serious epidemiologists continue to contend that lockdowns were helpful. All five of the big five medical schools have published multiple papers concluding that lockdowns were more harmful than helpful.

So what, are these people just chronically online and uninformed? I mean, we're on HN, where there's typically a more informed and data-driven conversation. What makes this topic different?

Here's a talk from the Collateral Global conference (there are several other talks that address the intersection of labor, lockdowns, and profit motives): https://collateralglobal.org/article/panel-2-the-impact-of-c...

Heh well of course I don't deny that there's a dramatic decrease in pleasure. But I don't think that's on the same order as the mortality / morbidity that comes from a mishandled pandemic.

> If only by “measurable” you set a bar to mean that we would require a parallel universe where no lockdowns were in place, especially in the cold-weather, low sunlight climates.

Not at all - there are plenty enough data to draw solid conclusions, as many reputable scientists have. And while it's true that many places in the world that eschewed lockdowns were tropical and have less developed economies, there was also a wide variety of policies in place in temperate regions, from the many parts of the USA which closed schools for a year, to the many more moderate policies in Europe, to Sweden, which had no lockdown at all.

I believe the data available are sufficient to draw a conclusion, and I think it's beyond dispute that, if you do find the data to be sufficient, the only plausible conclusion is that lockdowns were associated with increased incidence of adverse outcomes, with no measurable benefit.

Not only did lockdowns not prevent spread of the virus, but they increased spread between generations within households, which in turn was a direct cause of morbidity and mortality.

I understand if the argument is about civic duty or something, but on the actual data, I just don't think there's remaining room for reasonable dispute. It's clear.

Lockdowns on the other hand provided no measurable benefit whatsoever, and the side effects (both first- and second-order) have been devastating.

This is an unserious comparison.

I see it being used both ways.