The Collusion of Corporations and Government

The First Amendment is supposed to citizens from government censorship… unless those citizens are inciting a riot… or making a false statement of fact or saying obscene things or expressing themselves in any of the other prohibited manners. It turns out free speech in the United States is a fairy tale, but I digress.

Even though the First Amendment is a joke the idea it is supposed to enshrine, the freedom of expression, is one that seemed to enjoy majority support in the United States until Trump’s 2016 presidential victory. Those who didn’t believe Trump was able to win started looking for scapegoats as soon as his victory was announced. One of the most common scapegoats became social media. Trump’s opponents decided that misinformation spread by Russian bots on Facebook and Twitter was responsible for Clinton’s loss. It came as no surprise when they started demanding social media sites start censoring anything they deemed to be misinformation. It also came as no surprise when those social media sites, predominantly owned and operated by individuals who expressed a great deal of (deserved in my opinion) hatred towards Trump, complied. When sites like Facebook and Twitter started censoring pretty much any content expressing political beliefs slightly right of Mao, those who were being censored started screaming about free speech.

The response from those in support of social media censorship (those not being censored), like every other expressed political opinion following Trump’s election, was predictable. They purposely misconstrued the concept of free speech for the First Amendment and haughtily pointed out that the First Amendment only protects against government censorship.

Short of a revolution, which in the absolute best case is only temporary, nothing can stop the erosion of a freedom. Free expression is no exception. The concept of free expression has been eroding in the United States since the country’s founding, but accelerated significantly after Trump’s election. Now we have reached the inevitable point where the government is directly involving itself in censorship:

In terms of actions, Alex, that we have taken — or we’re working to take, I should say — from the federal government: We’ve increased disinformation research and tracking within the Surgeon General’s office. We’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.

Private companies are no longer the only ones involved in censorship. The federal government is admitting, openly no less, that it is flagging content it deems problematic for Facebook (with the implication that Facebook will remove the flagged content). There is a term for a political system where corporations and the government collude. Consider looking up that term your homework assignment.

As with any government grab for power this one comes with justification:

Asked what his message was to platforms like Facebook regarding Covid disinformation, Biden said “They’re killing people.”

“I mean they really, look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated, and that’s — they’re killing people,” Biden said on the South Lawn of the White House.

Biden was echoing earlier comments from White House press secretary Jen Psaki.

The justification is always safety (and always nonsensical). Air travelers must submit to sexual assault, either in being molested or virtually stripped naked by government agents, under the auspices of keeping air travelers safe from terrorists. Gun owners must fill out government forms and ask for government permission in order to buy a gun under the auspices of protecting the populace from gun violence. Every year representatives in Washington DC argue that effective encryption must be made illegal under the auspices of protecting children from rapists and human traffickers. Now the government has decided it needs to choose what is and isn’t appropriate to post on Facebook under the auspices of keeping the populace safe from a virus.

Defining Police

Those who identify themselves as left leaning are screaming about the need to defund the police and replace them with social workers. Those who identify themselves as right leaning are screaming about the rise in crime and blaming it squarely on the policies being advocated by the left. But neither side is stopping to consider the nature of policing. The policies being advocated by leftists assume police are peacekeepers. The policies being advocated by rightists assume police are law enforcers. The truth is police are tasked with both jobs, which creates a problem because the two jobs are mutually exclusive.

You cannot have law enforcers be peacekeepers or vice versa. This is because laws, with only a few exceptions, have nothing to do with peace. Consider the prohibition against cannabis. What tranquility is shattered by individuals growing, selling, buying, and smoking cannabis? None… until it’s made illegal. Once those activities are declared illegal, law enforcers are tasked with initiating violence against anybody growing, selling, buying, or smoking cannabis. Tax evasion is another example. How does avoiding paying taxes interfere with peace? It doesn’t… until law enforcers get involved.

The only way to fix policing is to separate the jobs of peacekeeping and law enforcement. However, this solution will never be achieved through politics because the State depends on one entity performing both jobs. It depends on law enforcers to enforce its will. Without law enforcers the State has no power. But a populace would not normally accept law enforcers with open arms because law enforcers necessarily prey upon the populace (laws exist, after all, to transfer wealth from the masses to the political class). So law enforcers are also assigned the job of peacekeeping. As peacekeepers police are legitimized and accepted by a populace.

While the left screams about the need to defund the police and the right screams about the need to bolster the police know that the only solution is to abolish the State.

Social Media is Impossible

The toughest barrier for a new social media network to overcome is adoption. People will refrain from adopting the new service because not everybody is already on it. This is why keeps Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media networks remain in business. Since everybody is already using them, nobody wants to migrate no matter how terrible the services become. But this raises an important question, why do you want everybody to be on the same social media network?

A small number of people can become a tight knit community surprisingly fast. These tight knit communities form norms. If a new individual wants to join the group, they are expected to adopt these norms. Likewise, established members are expected to teach prospective members the norms. However, it’s easy for an influx to new members to overwhelm the established members. When that happens, the tight knit community often falls apart.

The Usenet term for this is Eternal September. Back in the day colleges often had their own Usenets. When freshmen arrived in September, they would log into the college Usenet for their first time. Because they didn’t know the norms of the group, they would often violate the Usenet norms. In time the established members would teach the freshmen the norms of the group and those freshmen would either adopt those norms or drop out of the Usenet. This changed in 1993 when AOL provided subscribers access to Usenets. Suddenly a never ending stream of new members were joining Usenet groups and it overwhelmed the established members. This changed the nature of Usenet entirely.

The same thing happened to Facebook when it went from a social media network exclusive to college students to one open to everybody. Suddenly everybody and (literally) their grandmother joined and the entire network changed.

When a group is overwhelmed by new members, the old norms are usually destroyed. What compounds this issue is that new norms are seldom established. I often bring up Dunbar’s number when talking about social media. Humans have a limited capacity for stable social relationships. When that number is exceeded, some social relationships become unstable. What happens when the number of unstable social relationships exceed the number of stable ones? Current mainstream social media networks.

Let’s once again look at Facebook. Facebook is suffering from a widespread breakdown of social cohesion. The site administrators are attempting to force new social norms by implementing an increasingly long list of unapproved behavior. Because Facebook is trying to appeal to the largest number of people, it is making the mistake of adopting what might be considered mainstream norms. However, mainstream norms don’t actually exist (it turns out that you can’t get hundreds of millions and especially billions of users to agree on anything). So rather than establishing new norms and creating stable social relationships, Facebook is angering more users and creating an even more unstable environment.

Facebook isn’t unique in this case. Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, and other large social media networks are suffering from the same problem.

I’ve increasingly become disillusioned with the idea of social media networks. Instead I’ve sought out small niche communities. I run several groups on Element and Signal and participate in several groups on both services run by other people. The groups are closed. In order to join you need to be invited. The invitation process ensures any prospective member has already been vetted. Vetting doesn’t guarantee a prospective member will fit in, but it greatly improves the odds. This is the opposite strategy used by mainstream social media networks, which try to interconnect everybody to everybody else. The difference between groups that follow one strategy or the other is stark. The groups in which I participate that are invite only, have remained stable for years. The social media networks in which I used to participate that were open to everybody, became so bad that I left.

So I return to my first question, why do you want everybody to be on the same social media network? Different people have different interests and personalities so it only makes sense that different groups exist.

Many people believed that the Internet would lead to a new era of peace because people all around the world would be able to talk out their differences. This hiccup in that theory is that people seem less inclined to invest time and energy seriously discussing their differences unless they already have a social relationship. This makes sense. Why invest the not insignificant time and energy discussing complex issues with people whom you have no preexisting relationship? That takes time away from your stable social relationships into which you’ve already invested greatly and are therefore more inclined to maintain.

In summary if you want a better online social experience, establish small groups. Social media as most people envision is impossible.

Losing Control of Your Data

There are many reasons why I advice against becoming reliant on third-party services. The most obvious one is privacy. Many service providers harvest personal information from users that can then be used by advertisers and government agencies alike. Another reason is resiliency. A service can disappear overnight. Google is especially notorious for killing of services. If you’re reliant on a service and the provider decides to stop providing it, there’s little you can do. A third reason is that providers can change the rules:

Financial services giant Intuit this week informed 1.4 million small businesses using its QuickBooks Online Payroll and Intuit Online Payroll products that their payroll information will be shared with big-three consumer credit bureau Equifax starting later this year unless customers opt out by the end of this month.

Intiut is giving customers until the end of the month to opt out… for now. Rule changes like this aren’t uncommon with online service providers. Oftentimes, as in this case, when a provider makes a significant change to the rules, it’ll give current users the option to opt out. However, as time goes by it’s common for the option to either be made harder to choose or taken away entirely.

This behavior is the norm rather than the exception for service providers. Google and Facebook are probably two of the most notorious perpetrators, but certainly not the only ones.

If you are a small business that uses Intiut services for your payroll, I suggest developing a migration strategy now. It’s much better to have a plan while you still have the option of opting out than to develop a plan after the option to opt out is taken away.

Taking on the United States

Whenever politicians push for gun control, they like to act as though would-be revolutionaries are the only proponents of gun rights. In his latest obligatory push for gun control Biden had the following to say:

If you think you need to have weapons to take on the government, you need F-15s and maybe some nuclear weapons.

He’s talking about a military with submarines suffering chronic premature mechanical failures, seamen who can’t avoid playing bumper boats with commercial ships, fighter jets that can’t fly, and recruitment rates so abysmal that standards have to be lowered so overweight individuals can be taken.

Imperial Rome at the height of its power the United States is not.

Prison Cells are Dangerous for Controversial Figures

I continue to be amazed at how supposedly secure facilities are so dangerous to controversial figures:

Anti-virus software entrepreneur John McAfee has been found dead in a Barcelona prison cell hours after a Spanish court agreed to extradite him to the US to face tax evasion charges.

The Catalan Justice Department said prison medics tried to resuscitate him, but were not successful.

It said in a statement that “everything indicates” McAfee took his own life.

I wonder if he too was on suicide watch and the guard tasked with checking on him just happened to be sleeping on the job at the exact same time that the security cameras were malfunctioning.

Server Migration Complete

When I first started self-hosting my blog, I was using a 2010 MacMini running Mac OS X 10.6. When Apple released 10.7, it did away with the server edition and instead replaced it with an app that didn’t work. That forced me to migrate my blog to Linux. I used Ubuntu Server LTS and it worked very well. However, I didn’t utilize any automation so whenever I wanted to do maintenance on or rebuild my server, I had to do so manually. This meant that maintenance didn’t get done when life got too busy. Over the last year I’ve been slowly migrating my manually built infrastructure to fully automated builds using Ansible. While I have a number of grievances with Ansible (YAML is an awful automation language and whoever decided to use it should be crucified), it is the least awful automation system that I’ve tested.

As with any major project I started with the easy things. First I automated building my DHCP and DNS servers. Then I moved on to automating the building of my VPN, NAS, and so on. I finally got around to writing an Ansible playbook to build this blog.

Previously I followed conventional wisdom that servers should be run on long-term support distributions. But I started to question whether that wisdom was appropriate for what I do. Whenever I had to upgrade the server running this blog from one Ubuntu LTS to another, the upgrade itself went well. But I always ended up having to manually fix a number of things that broke due to the significance of the changes that occurred between the two LTS releases. Those breakages often weren’t trivial to fix. They would eat up a lot of my time. So I started to experiment with more bleeding edge distros. I settled on Fedora Server since I already run Fedora on my laptop and have become familiar with it. Major version upgrades haven’t resulted in major breakages. When something does break, it usually takes a minute or two for me to fix.

So this blog is now running on Fedora Server 34. And I can rebuild it by issuing a single command.

I’m guessing there will still be a few issues that need to be resolved. I changed quite a bit on the back end so I’m expecting a few breakages here and there and I’m sure I’ll have to make a few performance tweaks (not that you’ll likely notice issues regarding performance since my Internet connection sucks). But the site largely appears functional.

Clock Time and Solar Time

The widespread availability of synchronized clocks only occurred very recently in human history. Before the widespread availability of synchronized clocks but after the regional availability (when a town may have a single clock) of clocks it was common for regions to have different clock times. This meant that 12:00 could occur at different points during the day in neighboring towns. Before the regional availability of clocks it was common for people to use solar time, which in most parts of the world varies throughout the year.

If you had a time machine and traveled back to Ancient Rome and told somebody that future humans will develop a habit of starting reoccurring events at the exact same point in a 24-hour period throughout the year, they would likely think you were crazy. However, modern humans seem to be incapable of comprehending anything else.

The debate between keeping the current biannual clock adjustments or settling on a single clock time throughout the year is once again raging. I admit that I’m biased towards using a single clock time throughout the year, but not strongly. My main interest in this debate is the arguments. Why? Because the arguments don’t actually address the issue they claim to address.

A big reason for the about-face? Whatever benefits might have been gleaned by giving people more sunlight in the evening during the winter, it also meant longer, darker mornings. Parents were suddenly sending their kids to school in the cold and the dark for months on end. As the Capital Weather Gang noted, such a change means the sun wouldn’t rise before 8 a.m. in Washington for more than two and a half months, between late November and mid-February. The morning darkness would linger even longer farther north.

This seems to be the predominant argument made by those in favor of keeping the biannual adjustment. My first observation is that having two annual one hour adjustments doesn’t fix this problem. I live in the Upper Midwest so I’m used to noticeably shorter days during the winter and longer days during the summer. Right before daylight savings time kicks in I’m beginning to wake up while the sun is rising. Just as I begin to adjust to seeing daylight when I wake up, I’m back to waking up before sunrise because of the adjustment to daylight savings time. It’s a minor annoyance, but school children in this area experience the same annoyance. Even though we adjust clock time twice a year children are still made to wake up and go to school in the cold and the dark.

There are solutions to this problem, but people seem largely unable to even comprehend them. One solution would be to implement more frequent smaller clock time adjustments throughout the year. For example, clock time could be adjusted by half hour increments four times a year or fifteen minute increments eight times a year. With enough granularity school children could always go to school after sunrise. Another solution is to adjust starting times to take sunrise into consideration. Instead of starting school at 08:00 every day, the starting time could be adjusted throughout the year. During one period school could start at 08:00, during another period it could start at 08:15, etc. Because sunrise doesn’t occur at the same time in every region, starting times would need to be region specific.

Let’s look at some other arguments in favor of maintaining the biannual clock time adjustments mentioned in this article and consider whether they actually solve the problem the claim to:

It puts clocks out of sync with Europe, which has standard time between late October and late March, creating problems in the trade and travel sectors.

Doing away with the biannual adjustments would put the United States out of sync with all of Europe. Except for Iceland, Belarus, Turkey, Georgia and Russia. Those European countries don’t observe daylight savings time (known as summer time in Europe). Moreover, no country in East Asia observes daylight savings time so when the United States changes its clocks, it’s out of sync with major trade partners and travel destinations such as China, South Korea, Japan, and Vietnam.

It makes it more difficult for various religions to practice rituals at home, such as sunrise prayers for Jews.

The mere act of living in areas where days shorten and lengthen throughout the year complicates observing such rituals. Jews living in the Barrow, Alaska would have to deal with 67 days of darkness between November 18 and January 23. Daylight savings time isn’t making the lives of Jews throughout the United States easier because daylight savings time doesn’t make sunrise uniform throughout the entire country.

It might actually increase gasoline consumption, given that people will have more time in the evening to go outside.

Quoting the same article:

A Department of Transportation study at the time concluded that the change actually had minimal impact on saving energy and might have actually increased gasoline consumption. As Michael Downing, the author of a book on daylight saving time, wrote in the New York Times in 2005:

This decision did not soften the blow of the OPEC oil embargo, but it did put schoolchildren on pitch-black streets every morning until the plan was scaled back. A Department of Transportation study concluded that Nixon’s experiment yielded no definitive fuel saving. It optimistically speculated, however, that daylight saving might one day help us conserve as many as 100,000 barrels of oil a day.

The same Michael Downing mentioned in the immediately above quote apparently also made the argument that abolishing daylight savings time might (which is the keyboard here because its inclusion ensures Downing doesn’t need to provide evidence in support of his argument) increase gasoline consumption. If he knows something that the Department of Transportation doesn’t about daylight savings time and its impact or lack thereof on gasoline consumption, it wasn’t provided in this article.

Despite the widespread belief that it’s meant to benefit farmers, they actually really dislike it and have consistently lobbied against it since World War I.

Just as “might” was the keyboard in the previous argument, “farmers” is the keyword in this argument because it’s used in such a nebulous way. Which specific farmers? My gut tells me that a farmer in Northern Minnesota may have a different opinion on the matter than a farmer in Southern Texas. I would also like to know the reasons given by “farmers” opposing the abolition of biannual clock time adjustments. Without those arguments it’s impossible to address whether biannual clock time adjustments address them.

If these argument don’t address the issues they claim to address, are the people making them stupid? No. If they’re guilty of anything, it’s being ignorant of the actual problem. Those arguing in favor of abolishing the biannual clock time adjustments also seem to be ignorant of the actual problem since they seldom mention it. The actual problem is that there is no connection between clock and solar time. Establishing such a connection would require either changing our habit of starting reoccurring events at the same point in a 24-hour period or making more frequent finer grained adjustments to clock time.

A Glimmer of Hope for a Decentralized Internet

If you don’t own your online services, you’re at the mercy of whoever does. This rule has always been true, but hasn’t been obvious until recently. Service providers have become increasingly tyrannical and arbitrary with the exercise of their control. More and more people are finding themselves banned from services like Facebook and YouTube. Compounding the issue is that the reasons given for the bans are often absurd and that’s assuming any any reasons is given at all.

This type of abusive relationship isn’t good for anybody, but is especially dangerous to individuals with money on the table. Imagine investing years of your life in building up a profitable business on a service like YouTube only to have Google take it away without providing so much as a reason. Some content creators on YouTube are beginning to acknowledge that risk and are taking actions to gain control over their fate:

Whether he’s showing off astronomically expensive computer gaming hardware or dumpster-diving for the cheapest PC builds possible, Linus Sebastian’s videos always strike a chord, and have made him one of the most popular tech personalities on YouTube.

But Google-owned YouTube gets most episodes of Linus Tech Tips a week late.

Now, they debut on his own site called Floatplane, which attracts a much smaller crowd.

A handful of content creators are mentioned in the article. Most of them are too nice or perhaps timid to state the real reasons they’re seeking alternatives to YouTube: YouTube has become a liability. Google; like Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, and other large online service providers; has been hard at work destroying all of the goodwill it built up over its lifetime. There’s no way to know whether a video you upload to YouTube today will be available tomorrow. There isn’t even a guarantee that your account will be around tomorrow. If you post something that irritates the wrong person, or more accurately the wrong machine learning algorithm, it will be removed and your account may be suspended for a few days if you’re lucky or deleted altogether if you’re unlucky. And when your content and account are removed, you have little recourse. There’s nobody you can call. The most you can do is send an e-mail and hope that either a person or machine learning algorithm sees it and have a bit of pity on you.

I’m ecstatic that this recent uptick in censorship is happening. In my opinion centralization of the Internet is dangerous. Large service providers like Google are proving my point. They are also forcing people to decentralize, which advances my goals. So less anybody think I’m ungrateful I want to close this post by giving a sincere thank you to companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon for being such complete bastards. Their actions are doing wonders for my cause of decentralizing the Internet.

It’s Crises All the Way Down

I assume that the people who watch and believe what passes for news today feel hopeless. Why? Because all news is bad news and crises never end, they merely turn into new crises.

Take the overpopulation crisis as an example. For most of my life I have been hearing about it. Even when I was in elementary school, teachers were warning us kids that too many people were consuming too many resources and we faced a bleak future because of it. The narrative continued throughout my high school and college careers. Today the news is reporting about the worldwide drop in fertility rates. This must mean that the population crisis has been averted and the future is looking brighter than it was, right? Wrong! The overpopulation crisis has turned into the baby bust crisis:

The U.S. is already below the so-called “replacement level” by some measures, meaning fewer young people to support the country’s otherwise aging population.

Myers said of the decline, “That’s a crisis.”

“We need to have enough working-age people to carry the load of these seniors, who deserve their retirement, they deserve all their entitlements, and they’re gonna live out another 30 years,” he said. “Nobody in the history of the globe has had so many older people to deal with.”

What the fuck? How did we snatch defeat from the jaws of victory? We did exactly what the experts told us to do! We had fewer babies! How did we end up facing yet another crisis? To answer that I will turn to George Orwell:

The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. Hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. This new version is the past and no different past can ever have existed. In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or East Asia, but to keep the very structure of society intact.

The crises you hear about in the news are not meant to be solved. They’re meant to be continuous. They exist to keep the masses in a constant state of fear because so long as the masses are afraid, they will seek a savior. When they find somebody who promises to be their savior, they will give him anything he demands. If he demands soldiers to fight a war against the enemy, they will gladly surrender their sons to him. If he demands broader surveillance powers, they will gladly surrender their privacy. If he demands wealth so he can fund the fight against the enemy, they will gladly surrender their income and assets. And his demands won’t stop even when the crisis abates. Instead he’ll come to them with new demands to fight a new crisis.