DPUGT

I'm not sure it's possible to capitalize on this. It's simply not an outrage-inducing development. There might be hundreds that notice, and dozens that care, but of those most will be too lazy and unfamiliarity-averse to do anything about it.

I'm not sure how it is a "good compromise" in any sense of that phrase. What is "safe" about this? What is "private" about it?

All it does is confirm that one person who signs up for reddit once signed up for an online email account somewhere. We are not stuck in 1998, where your one and only email account was created when you signed up for Comcast or Verizon DSL.

This makes the signup process for reddit slightly more convoluted, and maybe makes them spend an extra 6 minutes doing so. This is an insufficient amount of delay to expect them to have any life-changing epiphanies.

It does not prevent the harassment you are concerned about. It adds no safety.

It isn't private... as unimaginative as most people are, chances are that you can guess email addresses from usernames even if reddit does not reveal them. It actively reduces privacy, and much more so than you imply.

This is so far into the realm of security theater that if just stand there and wait 30 seconds, the costume department will come by and change you into your clown outfit.

My understanding is that the man is not a US citizen, and that he has never stepped foot on US soil. Considering those two facts, how can he be charged with espionage (at least within the US) at all? It was pretty clear from the beginning that the Swedish charges were horseshit and just fabricated to attempt to extradite him through a friendly government, and sure enough now that those have been thrown to the wayside they're just trying a more direct approach.

Is hiding it going to be enough to avoid karma farming? Back on Slashdot in the late 1990s (early 2000s? it's been so long I couldn't put an exact date on it), there were stupid games about the uid... and it was immutable and mostly hidden. There was a period of at least 8 months where it came up in every thread. Or hell, the shit that happened on kuro5hin and Digg... to only use reddit as an example of how this stuff can be screwed up is inviting the "those who don't know history are doomed to re-implement it" cliche.

Even when I try to justify voting as a concept, I fail to come up with any decent arguments. And it's not for any lack of trying... I don't know what it's supposed to accomplish except groupthink. If it's about letting users find something they like better, that seems a valid motivation, but the psychology of online voting seems at odds with the implementation.

On reddit, I've had people come in and downvote storm technical articles on a specialty subreddit. Nothing controversial, nothing offensive. Those vote counts would be a bad metric to decide what I like, and they would have been a bad metric for the people doing the downvoting (they'd never see anything like it on the front page without subscribing, and would never see anything in my subreddit because they downvoted everything). Comment voting is often similar (or, perhaps, becomes similar when anything grows to the scale of reddit). Such shenanigans are probably happening on other posts, but since they get their first few initial upvotes, they weather the storm without much trouble.

It's sort of like usenet-of-old's killfiles, except other random anonymous strangers are writing the killfiles for everyone and succeeding or failing (relatively) based on how clever they are in gaming all of it.

But it's just a little brain chip. The Terms of Service clearly assert that they won't use it to spy on you through your visual cortex when you're in approved bathroom facilities.

Indeed! But blockchain as we know it is a libertarian dream of commerce without regulation, i.e. a capitalist nightmare.

It is indeed nightmarish. To think that out there, somewhere, someone is selling something they own to someone who wants it for a price that both agree to and there's no government man standing there making sure that the transaction occurs in the ways that we want (namely, with blessed Divine Regulation, the magic that creates such utopias as we're all familiar with in the 20th century and early 21st).

It must be stopped. By any means necessary.

Why would requisitioning empty dwellings be complicated or require specialized infrastructure?

Because when you requisition those empty dwellings and the owners refuse, you will need a large mechanized infantry to tell them that their refusals are irrelevant. Within the United States, the police authorities might substitute as that infantry, but do you have much confidence on them obeying? Even if they work, they're hardly cheap. So instead, you go with some cannibalized portion of the US military, but they clock in at something like $0.8 trillion per year... does anyone think of that as inexpensive?

So, specialized? Dunno. But definitely non-cheap infrastructure.

But we’re talking housing which is both really necessary for basic survival, and a very tiny portion of rich people’s wealth,

Of true wealth, real estate comprises the bulk of it. Sure, Bezos (and most of the rest) have the vast portion of their wealth as stock/equity in various businesses... but that was never true wealth anyway. That's imbeciles speculating on the shares of companies that (for the most part) don't even pay dividends. It's a distraction.

Besides, we're not talking about Bezos. Whatever else you might say about him, he's not exactly a slumlord squeezing single mothers for rent money. We're talking about the guy who managed to squirrel away an extra $80,000 over his long career, and buys some flipper shack to rent out for passive income. He definitely has most of his surplus tied up in that home... assuming he has one of his own, and assuming that home is similar, something like half of his wealth exists in that building and the plot underneath it. If he's managed to do two or three of those, then even larger fractions of his wealth are invested in those properties.

For him it's life or death. For you, it's an academic discussion on some obscure internet forum as a gotcha against another guy who was offering a good faith, honest answer on how to effect positive changes with minor laws. But I guess it's simpler and cheaper to just mobilize an army and perpetrate unnecessary violence. That landlord, he's willing to reciprocate to keep it.

to be clear, as an anarchist i’m profoundly against central authorities,

Were that true, then you wouldn't be talking about expropriation which requires central authorities. Your solution would be for people to simply squat in those homes... which already happens. And which hasn't solved homelessness. This really isn't a problem that capitalism is directly culpable for... when the capitalists find someone squatting in an "empty" dwelling, more often than not, they don't resort to violence. They give those people a wad of cash to "move out".

Why this hasn't solved homelessness is that many of the homeless have severe sociological/psychological issues that prevent them from taking advantage. They need help beyond the "here's a roof and a door that closes". That help almost certainly requires a central authority, and those central authorities currently refuse to help. Not because they don't want to (some do), not because they don't have good ideas about how to help (some do), but because helping 10 homeless people quickly becomes helping 75,000 homeless people and that's just not in the budget. Other municipal governments cheat and don't bother to help if they see one helping... why bother when someone else is doing that? It's easier, cheaper, and the homeless soon become "far away".

It really is a game theory problem. And I told you how to create conditions to keep them from defecting so we can have the optimal outcome, and rather than appreciate the true solution, you'd rather do... well, what it is you're doing now. There's no hope for the human species. You're all getting everything you deserve.

That's getting harder to do. I read Stross's blog sometimes, and he talks about how publishing works. A few years back he started talking about how there were no more "paperbacks", and I didn't know what to think of that. But yeh, they don't really exist anymore at all, if you go into a bookstore. It's all hardback and "trade paperback" (itself an excuse to sell a slightly larger paperback for $22, apparently). Obscure stuff isn't even printed at all anymore. And only the most popular authors ever get hardback publishing... and the runs are small.

If he had a tip jar, I'd maybe Paypal him something, but there's even a blog post about why he doesn't have one.

Monkeytype's telling me I'm at 77wpm with 97% accuracy. I don't really believe that. I might be at 45wpm.

I have never heard of a company of any sort that thinks in a mindset which reasonable people would consider "long term". I have read numerous articles about this over the years, all whining and lamentations about how company X or corporation Y fail to think in the short term... their corporate structures tend to discourage that, as they are run by CEOs who only wish to cash out on the stock options they get as the larger part of their compensation.

If this translates to your scenario at all, then they might well ignore the long-term implications of layoffs.

I've been using Session lately. Not sure how it stands up on the technical merits.