websites420

há 5 anosdiscuss

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.

websites420

há 5 anosdiscuss

Americans eat too many calories already. Let us eat some vegetables for a few weeks, it won't kill us.

websites420

há 5 anosdiscuss

>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.

>EDIT: FWIW I learned about the waitlist problem while listening to this podcast: https://99percentinvisible.org/need/

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.

websites420

há 5 anosdiscuss

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.

websites420

há 5 anosdiscuss

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.

websites420

há 5 anosdiscuss

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.

websites420

há 5 anosdiscuss

>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.

websites420

há 5 anosdiscuss

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?

websites420

há 5 anosdiscuss

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.

websites420

há 5 anosdiscuss

I made no statement about whether anyone's actions were justified, only that they made sense given the state of affairs.

websites420

há 5 anosdiscuss

This is a the consequence of having an administration that transparently lied at every turn. Even if they were right, no one would believe them.

websites420

há 5 anosdiscuss

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.

I'm not sure I follow the code-as-free-speech argument, or how it would apply to a government website. The government banned the use of cookies in 2000. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2000/10/24/r...

It certainly could again.

Of course it would be taxpayer funded.

websites420

há 5 anosdiscuss

>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.

websites420

há 5 anosdiscuss

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.

websites420

há 5 anosdiscuss

> 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.

websites420

há 5 anosdiscuss

Sure! Your account is going to be linked your driver's license. It's your space. Go nuts!

websites420

há 5 anosdiscuss

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.

websites420

há 5 anosdiscuss

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.

websites420

há 5 anosdiscuss

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.

websites420

há 5 anosdiscuss

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.

Then, let FB/Twitter etc do whatever they want

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