what is a modern corporation but a legal spell for turning reasoning beings into temporarily vacant machines?
Just one of a dozen clarifying lines. Masnick's Impossibility Theorem gets trotted out a lot, disingenuously I think by a lot of people who aren't Mike Masnick. Kissing is essentially saying "Yes, but" in this piece. Both should be read together.
I was just reading a blog post an hour ago about how no, your phone is not spying on you. And then...
Today everyone is all het up because famous bullshit artist Donald Trump responded to a press conference question saying that he could not rule out using military force to annex the Panama Canal. From Panama. Which you would have to imagine would be something easily militarily defended and not all all prone to insurgent action, but anyways.
The fact that a journalist even asked the question is a real "paper bag labeled 'Dead Dove'" moment. Aside from the court case (https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-companies-accused-tax-evasion-panama) I'm curious what else Trump might have going on that he'd see this as useful leverage.
If only we had some sort of self-mythologising group of people with access to a kind of broad medium of communication who could question motivations and so forth and shine a light on them.
An ebook length screed from Joan Westenberg (not a blog post, SBF would be so disappointed but fuck him) basically calling for radically rethinking of what it means to be responsible for something. Not a full blown "Take the means of production" call to action, but definitely pushing for the devolution of ownership and responsibility to workers and away from middle managers.
As a middle manager I cannot help but fist pump and mutter "fuck yeah!"
I'd propose a framework: * The stakes must be high (in this case, literal life and death) * The intervention must be low-cost and low-risk * The evidence must be clear and immediately observable * The delay caused by seeking permission would result in significant harm
I appreciate how often Joan lays out where she thinks the guardrails on something like this should be. Also:
But - and this is crucial - they did this within carefully designed constraints. Workers can't make changes that would affect other processes without coordination. They can't violate safety protocols. They have to document their changes. But within these constraints, they don't need permission to optimize (sic) their own work.
Kris created an Apple shortcuts flow for posting images to her Wordpress blog. I had something similar at one stage but grew unresaobly angry that Shortcuts couldn't access the secure Passwords app so I had to hardcode the bearer token into the shortcut. Like a barbarian! You know, maybe I could just..you know...do that anyway.
The Slow Zones from Vernor Vinge’s books stuck very firmly in my brain. Striking how similar in concept to this Timescape Cosmology.
(Also happens to me favourite answer to the Fermi Paradox)