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People have different ideals. A lot of people really care about free speech and freedom in general.


Sure but that's the fun thing, you can support this and believe in free speech. After all, free speech does not mean freedom from consequences to most people. Nor are other people forced to not react to your speech in any way since that would impede other freedoms like freedom of association. And publishing this information is also free speech. You could argue that there should be an expectation of privacy but that's different than freedom of speech or freedom in general.


Freedom of Speech means Freedom from (some) Consequences.

The constitutional right to Freedom of Speech means, at the least, Freedom from legal Consequences. If it does not mean that, then it does not mean anything. The same argument then extends to the informal meaning of free speech.


Being fired isn’t a legal consequence.


And Freedom of Speech isn't just the First Amendment.


Sure.

The issue is that you’re implicitly trying to find a way to say that these people’s speech should be protected, while the free association rights of their bosses and colleagues should not be. There is no principled way to consider racist trolling free speech, but not also those calling for their firing to also be considered free speech.

I think Popehat says this best.

> Private consequences are something else. Speech is designed to invoke private and social consequences, whether the speech is "venti mocha no whip, please," or "I love you," or "fuck off."1 The private and social consequences of your speech — whether they come from a barista, or your spouse, or people online, or people at whom you shout on the street — represent the free speech and freedom of association of others.

> But speech has private social consequences, and it's ridiculous to expect otherwise. Whether sincere or motivated by poseur edginess, controversial words have social consequences. Those social consequences are inseparable from the free speech and free association rights of the people imposing them. It is flatly irrational to suggest that I should be able to act like a dick without being treated like a dick by my fellow citizens

> Finally, I should note that one social consequence is employment-related. In many American jurisdictions, employment is "at will" unless the parties have a contract that says otherwise; an employer can fire an employee for any reason not prohibited by law. Private employers can generally fire private employees based on their extra-curricular speech. That's private action, not government action; it's an exercise of such free association and free speech by private entities as the law allows. Employers may face social consequences — particularly in a social media age — for exercising that right in a way that angers the public, which is in turn the public's free speech right.


> the free association rights of their bosses and colleagues should not be

I'm not sure "free association" applies to employment. If someone chooses not to have any friends that aren't the same race as themselves, racist as that might be, it's not illegal.

But if they start a business they cannot filter either customers or employees based on race; in that sense they aren't free to choose who to associate in a business sense.

> There is no principled way to consider racist trolling free speech, but not also those calling for their firing to also be considered free speech.

I wouldn't say firing someone is merely an "expression" of speech, it's also the ending of an actual contract.


> I'm not sure "free association" applies to employment. If someone chooses not to have any friends that aren't the same race as themselves, racist as that might be, it's not illegal.

> But if they start a business they cannot filter either customers or employees based on race; in that sense they aren't free to choose who to associate in a business sense.

This is not an argument that businesses don’t have free association rights; this is an argument that they have limits that the state has a compelling interest in.

This argument is like saying that we don’t have free speech rights because there are laws against incitement. It’s obviously silly; “free” never meant “without any limits whatsoever” in either case.

Furthermore, while I agree it wouldn’t be legal to make employment decisions based on protected characteristics, forcing businesses to keep nazis on the payroll against their will strikes me as both absurd and a socially undesirable outcome.

> I wouldn't say firing someone is merely an "expression" of speech, it's also the ending of an actual contract.

Given the nature of at will employment, this actually weakens your argument.

I’d also consider terminating someone for their behavior to be a matter of free association, not free speech. I thought I’d made that clear.


It's an argument that "free association" wrt a business is nothing like personal FA.

You don't FA with coworkers because you don't (generally) get to decide who to work with, except in the sense of quitting.


> The issue is that you’re implicitly trying to find a way to say that these people’s speech should be protected, while the free association rights of their bosses and colleagues should not be.

Yes, that is what I am saying - I personally value right to choice of business association lower than right to speech.

> There is no principled way to consider racist trolling free speech, but not also those calling for their firing to also be considered free speech.

You can call for anyone's firing. That too is protected speech. Of course, firing is not speech.

Re Popehat, there is a difference between legal obligation and moral obligation.


I find the idea of being forced to associate with someone whose speech I find repugnant because you value their speech over my free association rights disconcerting.


Yeah well I find the idea of being fired over speech outside the workplace corrosive to democratic society.


Not freedom of consequences: that is a bit too vague. What if the consequence is that somebody shoots you dead if you say the wrong thing? According to you, they still have free speech? Actually I think some real world dictator was literally making that joke, proclaiming that there is freedom of speech in his country. He just can't guarantee for the outcomes.


Then the murderer broke the law and will be prosecuted for that. If the government doesn’t prosecute them as they support the action then there’s no freedom of speech. This is why freedom of speech is generally discussed within the context of the government as the government enforces other laws.


I mean if the government kills them, obviously. Would it then be free speech? Everybody could say what they want, it's just the consequence could be a death sentence.


What about people who proclaim they didn't want to get the vaccine because of their freedom, and then die from covid as a consequence? Did they still have their freedom when forcibly intubated while in a medically induced coma?

Maybe people consider death as the ultimate freedom, freedom from interference of society.


That is why people are supposed to have arrangements with other people who can decide for them when they are in coma. Usually it is family, but you can also designate other people.

At least in my country that is the case, not sure how the US handles it.

Certainly there are people who prefer to not be forcibly intubated. Or consider other cases where life supporting machines are even more gruesome.


Is this just the IQ debate, or "nature vs nurture", on another playing field?

It seems very obviously that some people operate on another level than others. If methods exist to boost the "normal" people to the genius level, they have not found their way into the mainstream yet.

Surely you could bog them down so that they don't perform better than the rest. You could simply only have boring software issues to solve in your company. In that sense, maybe you could get rid of the 10 times developer.

Or you could hire only very good people. But looking at the sea of developers, it seems clear that some are better than others.


Why would it need blockchains?


It's only a "blockchain" in a very literal "AES-CBC is a blockchain" kind of sense: there are things that are chained. It's really a Merkle tree. No bitcoin style implications of the word here. In fact the Manyverse website says "no blockchain".


In my opinion, the job of politicians is to free me from having to deal with politics. That is why they are called "delegates" (in my country at least), because people delegate that job to them.

Having to consider every minor political issue would be the opposite of what I want.

I agree that maybe some middle ground could be better, though. The parties are too coarse grained, there is no party I agree with on all points. I suppose others feel the same.


"The Wahl-O-Mat is organized by Germany’s Federal Agency for Civic Education, which describes itself as a “federal public authority providing citizenship education.” Despite the somewhat Orwellian language, the agency is widely trusted in Germany"

It is a very left wing institution, unfortunately. So it is only "widely trusted" in the sense that the majority of people still seems to be left-leaning.

I'm not a huge fan of the Wahl-O-Mat, because I feel the way the questions are phrased is often misleading or too simplified. Maybe it is better than nothing, though.


But if somebody downloads the data, and they can track the source to your computer, do they even have to decrypt it on your computer? (I mean does law enforcement have to decrypt it on your computer, or could they just indirectly prove you hosted the data).


The anonymized routing prevents them from tracking the source to your computer.

If someone downloads something on Freenet they don't know where it is coming from.


I think you can also import them in "light" wallets like Electrum. That way you don't have to download the whole blockchain. You may be leaking the information that somebody with your IP address has Bitcoins, though.


It's easy to configure Electrum to use Tor or any socks proxy if that's a concern.


He needs the public keys to check the balance.


Those random words are the master seed. Usually you don't enter the master seed to use your wallet. Your wallet encrypts the master seed and unlocks it with a password of your choosing. I suppose they are talking about the password to the wallet, not the Bitcoin keys.


So you have to remember two passwords?

The master seed and the wallet password?

How is the wallet password created?


No you don't have to remember the master seed. You should write it down and hide it somewhere, though. You need it if you lose access to your wallet. (It's a bit like a backup of the encryption keys for your hard disk, if you have enabled disk encryption).

The wallet password depends on the wallet of course. I guess you often create it yourself or it may even be optional.

I wouldn't recommend that approach for storing large amounts.


What I have heard is that Germany was kind of what China is today. First they produced cheap copies of the high tech coming out of places like the UK. Eventually they established quality standards (the TÜV, an organisation ensuring quality of products, still exists today), and eventually "Made in Germany" even became a marker of quality.


Yes the requirement for "made in Germany" was invented in the UK to protect the UK products from cheap knock offs from Germany. A similar thing happened with Japanese car makers initially, and more recently Korean ones, it seems to be a pattern that to get up to a certain level one has to copy the superior products of another country and after requiring sufficient knowledge one can surpass them.


You should read the book "How Asia Works" which makes the persuasive argument that's the case with every single rising industrial power. They are always considered "cheap knock offs" until they start producing stuff that's higher quality. Happened with Japan too.


It's not that easy I'm afraid. Chinese products were great quality until ~50 years ago, when quantity over quality became a thing.


“Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism“ is another one.


The TÜV has its roots in the prevention of steam boiler explosions to prevent loss of lives. Its application to other domains came much later, AFAIK.


But weren't the steam boilers also copies of UK inventions?


Probably. And copied sloppily, operated recklessly, and exploded spectacurlarly.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technischer_%C3%9Cberwachungsv...

Reading the article, the TÜV as institution was also a copy of something which already existed in Great Britain!

Circles withing circles :-)


Given the size and diversity of their industrial consumer output, I doubt they will achieve an average of 'marker of quality' for quite a while. Phones are probably these highest quality consumer goods produced in china at the moment.


Try most electronics.

Their problem is that "made in China" has a negative connotation and they produce a lot of cheap stuff, which inevitably breaks or doesn't work properly so people just go "damn Chinese shit".

It seems they're getting to the point where the cheapest stuff is made in other countries.

Have to wonder what happens when the world runs out of cheaper countries to outsource to.


I can only assume that, just like "made in germany" in the 19th century, after a while the "made in china" will transform from a sign of inferior, into a sign of superior quality. I think we're already seeing that.

Also, the increased assertiveness also led to military agression (2 world wars). China seems to be copying that too, alas.


Likely, "made in Japan" had the same journey (also I'll always remember that scene in Back to the Future).


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