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Joined 4 个月前
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Cake day: 2026年1月1日

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  • Yeah, it takes impressive dumbassery to pretend to know whenever a mobile device is recording when we have them everywhere. Dumber still to convince yourself that ain’t relevant to the same principle that no privacy is reasonably expected in public and whatever bullshit they’re fearmongering is already effective reality that they’re conveniently overlooking in defiance of basic sense. Sometimes a comment claiming another is a dumb take is self-indulgence poorly attempting to evade critical examination of their own dumb as fuck take like right there.



  • The breach pierced the education technology company PowerSchool – used by 80% of school districts in North America – and “put at risk the security of 60 million children and 10 million teachers,” the Justice Department said.

    With threats to expose social security numbers, dates of birth, family information, grades, and even confidential medical information, the breach cornered PowerSchool into paying millions of dollars in ransom.

    I don’t know: their getting caught may indicate less skill & more ease to break in due to irresponsible information security practices. Maybe companies like PowerSchool are shit & ought to have no business carrying that sort of information for 80% of public school districts. Maybe government is irresponsible for entrusting that information to these businesses with lax standards. Seems like institutional irresponsibility all around.

    Organized criminals see easy exploits & easy useful idiots to assume the legal risk of their ventures.






  • Yet another one who doesn’t understand primaries or getting better candidates on the ballot of a major party. Not believing this one simple trick: confirmed.

    Reality is not all rainbows & butterflies. Systems operate according to rules we don’t control no matter how much we stubbornly refuse to accept them until we work the system to change it. Denying the system exists doesn’t change it.

    Fact: the US voting system (plurality voting) lacks the sincere favorite criterion[1]. Fact: that means strategy exists to optimize outcomes, and not following it with protest(-non)-voting can functionally help elect the candidate you like least, directly backfire, and cause worse real-world outcomes for your own values. Fact: that means lesser-evil voting is necessary in close, high-stakes races to minimize losses.

    Voting in a way that backfires has real-world consequences. Denying it is like denying the consequences of pulling the trigger when a loaded gun is aimed at your nuts. If you have to vote for the only viable candidate who will realistically refrain from pulling the trigger & don’t (in a cute little protest), then you’re still getting nuts blown off. Protest(-non)-voting to blast your nuts off every time doesn’t lead anywhere.

    There are viable ways to reform the system: lobby legislation with enough organization & support, elect your candidates to other offices (local, congressional, etc) to build popular support, get your candidate to run as a major party in national partisan races, vote lesser-evil in national partisan elections until your candidate is on the ballot as a major party.

    Anything else is blasting yourself in the nuts. Worse, it’s blasting off your neighbors’ nuts & ovaries, too. Your neighbors don’t want to vote lesser-evil either, but they’re not stupid enough to pretend that other moves won’t blast off their nuts.


    1. It’s straightforward mathematics: plurality voting violates independence of irrelevant alternatives, majority loser criterion, independence of clones.

      There is, therefore, a simple way to affect the outcome of a plurality election in your favour without having to convince anyone else to support you. If you introduce a clone of an opponent then the vote for your opponent may split between your opponent and their clone, meaning that you require fewer votes to win. In practice, this fact is well known and some people in British elections do not vote for their preferred candidate because they do not want to split the vote against the party they dislike.

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  • I think next step should be developing a test that can predict how someone will react to it.

    Unnecessary: foolish people always gonna fool. Anyone that far gone in the lacking judgement department demands far more help than anyone can reasonably be expected to provide, and attempting to “foolproof” for them will only drag everyone else down while doing nothing for them. Likewise, just because some people overeat junk food doesn’t mean we need to devise some test to decide who can safely get junk food: it’s a personal choice, the risks of bad judgement are reasonably understood, & that bullshit’s beyond paternalistic.


  • Does it help to frame it in a different light for you if you think of it as those companies exploiting vulnerable peoples’ disorders to extract money from them?

    Not at all: we don’t go winning lawsuits against any of those companies promoting themselves to appeal to the consumer because of how the dysfunctional among us may overconsume it. Liberty comes with accepting responsibility for reasonably foreseeable consequences/risks of our choices or no one will be able to realize liberty when someone makes their responsibility everyone else’s duty. Society can’t reasonably be expected to cater to everyone’s irrational/dysfunctional manifestations & whims. The legal standard is reasonable person, not dysfunctional ones. Moreover, the existence of children doesn’t imply we need to childproof all of society: people are still entitled liberty to their adult activity & vices.

    When risks are open & obvious, such as the overconsumption of certain foods & legal substances, that’s generally viewed as a matter of personal choice rather than unreasonably dangerous product defect. Even when kids grow obese from overeating junk food, blame primarily lies in whoever provides them that food rather than the product itself no matter how appealing the design of the food, the design on the container, or its advertisements. Especially with the latest wave of moral panic over social media, the risks & dysfunctions of obsessively overconsuming social media or any information service to the extent it impairs us are open & obvious. Parents giving their children these devices, observing excessive attachment, and not cutting them off bear considerable responsibility.

    Information & devices to view it are generally benign & noncoercive. People use these services, because some find them useful & engaging to their interests. Those features that effectively meet user demand for engaging information offer legitimate utility to a reasonable person without impairing them. Such features aren’t defects, and “fool-proofing” them would hamper utility to functional adults who can deal with the “dangers” of attention-grabbing information.

    However, even supposing such features defectively make the system unreasonably dangerous in a reasonably foreseeable manner, that only demands that service providers provide fair warning. Once duty to warn has been met, users are reasonably aware of risks and responsibility shifts to risk-takers or parents who give children access despite reasonably knowing the risk.

    Telling those people to just have self control is like telling someone with depression to just stop being sad.

    We can’t rearrange all of society just because some people have depression. Liberty means not imposing on others issues we should be dealing with ourselves or through appropriate services specifically for that.