It's written by Kyle Mitchell https://kemitchell.com/ who is a lawyer who has published many unusual licenses (like the Parity license) that are not approved by the FSF or the OSI. He uses simple language.
While freedom of association is fine on a personal level and maybe for small businesses, big corporation that are monopolies or oligopolies shouldn't have this freedom. They should be regulated and forced to serve everyone otherwise they have the power to exclude some people completely from such services with no alternative. Due to their power, their decisions affect people as if they are government decisions, yet we don't have a say on it like we do with the government so it's even worse than government censorship yet some people justify it because they are "private companies" as if that means something.
>big corporation that are monopolies or oligopolies
Monopolies and Duopolies suck even with regulation. If you want a state owned payment processor, pursue that goal. But you will end up in the same place, with reactionary leaders using the service to ban things that the voters disagree with, which sometimes will be porn in all likelihood.
>"private companies" as if that means something.
A private company can be competed with. You can legally pay these websites just not via those 2 most popular options. If something is actually censored, the state will use violence to prevent you accessing it. Theres a video kicking around the internet of NSW cops snatching a VHS tape from the hands of people trying to run a small banned film festival. Thats definitionally censorship. I know you want to take the anger people have at censorship, and transfer it away from the government to people you dont like, but its simply not censorship.
> Due to their power, their decisions affect people as if they are government decisions
The inertia of people who wont change their purchasing decisions to avoid those to options is the issue. Not their choice not to process payments.
Why do we have this idea that big corporations are these giant scary entities disconnected from real people? Majority shareholders for Visa are the retirement accounts of regular people and retail investors. We want the public to dictate the actions of what other regular people do with their money without taking on any financial risk for those policies.
Why do we have this idea that non-democratic centrally-planned governments are these giant scary entities disconnected from real people? Majority stakeholders for state insurance, state healthcare, state pensions, state police, etc. are regular people. People calling for "democracy" want the public collectively to dictate the actions of what other regular people do with their money etc., but when you ask people in democracies if the electorate should take the *blame* when they pick a stupid government, they always say no and look at you appalled as if you'd suggest eating doggie biscuits.
To put it another way, why should society collectively make our pensions 1% better when the trade-off that entire categories of legal work, that our democracies have decided should remain legal, are made impossible to perform by the choices of a handful of private businesses that are big enough to set rules without being accountable to the democracies they operate within?
> Why do we have this idea that big corporations are these giant scary entities disconnected from real people?
Because they are. The corporate structure as well as the internal and external systems in our political/legal/economic systems are designed specifically to make corporations work as economic engines where risk, responsibility, and liability are distributed and diluted to the point it they pretty much evaporate. This means that corporations can do things like commit full on crimes, without any real person going to jail. Why? Because they are disconnected from real people by design.
I think this is a core reason behind the amount of public elation seen when the United Healthcare CEO was killed: people were happy to see an example of the piercing of a corporate structure carefully constructed to shield leadership from personal responsibility for its decisions.
Although they gave birth to more children before the industrial revolution, most died, so the population was almost constant. If we define "birth rate" as the number of children that survive long enough to have their own children, then I believe birth rate was close to 2 back then. I believe long term the birth rate (according to my definition) always converges to 2 because anything else is not sustainable. Nothing can exponentially increase forever. Maybe the population can exponentially decrease to 0 but it's unlikely because there always be some group that will be willing to have more children for cultural or religious reasons.
Good idea. Random selection is interesting but I don't know if it can work today. A solutions for the issue you mentioned "Nobody knows anything about any of the candidates" is a system that allows people to vote only for people they know personally, and use some algorithm (maybe something like the PageRank algorithm that Google used) that rates each citizen according to the votes they get but also the votes are valued according to the rating of each citizen. That way the rating flows to the people who are really trusted by the people and not the best funded career politicians. Just an idea. maybe there are problems with that too if it can be gamed but it's worth trying.
A solution does exist? - micro democracy, delegate more decision making authority to the smallest geographic unit possible. Then people are voting for someone from their neighborhood.
This comes with a lot of trade-offs. The complexity of regulation explodes, because everything takes more hops and there's more context switching.
Even with just 50 states in the US currently, the complexity is very high. Operating in all 50 states or just a few is very difficult and costs a lot of money. Usually what happens is the "lowest common denominator" solution: whereby companies just follow the superset of laws that comply with the most stringent regions.
That's why California law is pretty much the most important state law. California has the biggest economy, and a lot of companies are headquartered there. In addition, their laws tends to be more restrictive for companies. So even if you're in Texas, there's a good chance you're just controlled by California law.
install rclone and run `rclone serve webdav .` to start a WebDAV server on the directory that contains your tiddlywiki file. easy and never had issues with saving that way.
I agree that "tribalism" exists. I'd add that sometimes political disagreements are actually differences in morality. And there is no way you can persuade someone to change their moral beliefs. Everyone accepts their moral beliefs as "axioms". But I still believe it's worth discussing politics in order to learn what kind of person someone is and their morality.
That article makes an interesting argument. If the code is for the purpose of interoperability, and the use does not prejudice the legitimate interest of the copyright holder, and it does not conflict with a normal exploitation of the program, and is independent software, then it may not be a derivative work.
It would take a very special situation when a company would rely on fulfilling all those conditions in order to use that as a legal defense.
The fact that there are companies that have the power to shift public policy is the problem. Because they use that power for their interests that don't align with our interests.
