I tend to consider the two key characteristics of a state to be the claim to the right to demand tax, and the claim to the exclusive use of violence. The definition of statecraft as the act of managing capital is a formulation I have not heard before, and doesn’t strike me as persuasive. It seems to have strange implications, like that Goldman Sachs is a state.

Your arguments here seem more in support of institutions than states. Asking whether one can have capable municipal water service without a state is a different question than whether one can have capable municipal water service without institutions. The necessity of institutions in this case seems an easier argument.

The answers to these kinds of issues is never disclosures or ToS or admin vigilance. It’s always technical. Everything which is technically possible will become normal.

Lemmy is not popular because it is a well designed piece of technology. Frankly it’s a pretty naive implementation of activitypub. It’s popularity comes from being the biggest alternative around when Reddit pissed off a good chunk of its users.

The only way to control how data is used, is to make it technically or practically impossible to do so. Until then, expect all the data on the fediverse to be used in every way possible for any purpose, and act accordingly.

I guess if you wanna go off at people like that, I have to go through your links and point out that

1. Providing services to a cyber warfare organization does not make one a cyber warfare company. I bet they contract out their cafeteria services too. The article specifically states the contract is for data analysis.
2. Doing data analysis for target selection also does not make one a cyber warfare company.
3. Data analysis is not cryptography. Also, my personal computer is encrypted. Am I a cryptographer?
4. Receiving data from your customers does not make you a data collection company, and the article points out that the data is being collected by Oura. Compare that with the NSA who for example have internet backbone splitters installed at the major telcos, or put cell spoofers in cities.

Why is doing data analysis for unethical ends not enough?

Palantir is a data analysis company. Data analysis is just one part of what the NSA does. Other important functions of the NSA include cyber warfare, cryptography, and data collection. I have not read that Palantir does any of that.

If different people with similar visual characteristics have similar behavioral characteristics, doesn’t that imply that perhaps we can judge a book by its cover?

Haven’t read the book, but the title suggests things could have been different. That something happened to make things bad. If that’s the argument, it is completely wrong. Israel could have turned out no other way. Extermination is the only possible outcome of a colonial ethno-state.

Imagine explaining to a patient they have permanent neurological damage because they wanted to sniff their video games.

I have a hard time believing that Gore would have made a difference on preventing 9-11, but I’m sure the response would have been different. Maybe no Patriot Act, maybe no Afghanistan War, almost certainly no Iraq War. That’s a big enough difference for me.

Sounds like a play for protectionism.

I’m used to AP titles being pretty dry, but they have started putting some bite in them.

Sounds like the next year or two may be a good time to finally get a battery for my panels

I’m having a conversation with a family member. Somehow the topic of firefighters comes up. She pauses, looks very thoughtful for a moment, then asks, “Do you not like firefighters, either?”

“What? Why would I not like firefighters?”

“Like how you don’t like police.”

She knows me well. I boggle at how my distaste for cops could be this misunderstood.

I think it kinda doesn’t matter. If they can catch 95% of all users, that’s pretty close to total victory. Well more than enough to shut out access from Linux systems for most things without causing public backlash.

Apple, Microsoft, and Google account for roughly 95% of all human user systems.

Did any of these outfits actually produce quality tech journalism? In my mind CNET and the like were all marketing pieces about the next smart TV. I do use Tom’s Hardware when I’m shopping for PC parts because they seem to do a good job with their benchmarking. The all-time great hard tech news site was Anandtech, and that’s been gone for years.

Oh shit you got me talking political theory. Here we go…

One thing I’ve observed when people discuss anarchist theory or practice is that it is frequently imbued with a radical absolutism that isn’t applied to other political theories. It’s common to see people asking how the world could work without any rules, or punishments, or coercion? You almost never encounter honest questions of a similar type for, say, socialism, e.g. how will I ever get anything done if I need the state to plan everything I do? Or the capitalist case, how would the world work if everything is someone else’s property? No serious socialist believes the state should plan everything. No serious capitalist believes that all things should be private property for profit. No serious anarchist believes that the world can be free of all regulation.

So why is this? I have a two part theory. When the socialist revolutions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were unfolding, the socialist camp split between authoritarian and anarchist socialists. In the end the authoritarians (communists) won that conflict and expelled the anarchists. This left the world with two camps, the communists, championed by the Soviet Union, and the capitalists, championed by the United States. Both camps considered anarchists villainous enemies, and both camps spent the next 50+ years producing voluminous propaganda extolling their own virtues, and denigrating their enemies. This meant that anarchists were being dunked on by two super powers for most of the 20th century without anyone of even remotely similar influence to respond. As a result basically everyone’s understanding of anarchism is a caricature produced by anarchism’s opponents.

The second part of this theory is the fact that there really are a lot of self-described anarchists who adhere to this cartoon version of anarchism! I find this harder to explain. Perhaps it is that anarchism as an active political force was effectively destroyed during this period, and today’s anarchists are in some significant part the people who were exposed to the cartoon anarchism propaganda, and thought, hey I like that. It could be that political anarchism has no influence and thus no responsibility to achieve anything, so why not indulge in ideological purity contests. I don’t really know.

This bums me out, because I think practical anarchist theory has a lot to like. Not a theory that says I may do whatever I want whenever I want, and anything which impinges on that is oppression. Rather one that says that imbalanced power relations are necessary and sufficient for exploitation and oppression, and so we should build political structures that distribute power as broadly as possible. That we should minimize hierarchy and coercion to enable people to spontaneously organize to solve problems.

And when spontaneous organization isn’t sufficient for the problem, an anarchism that has the practical humility to apply different techniques. Utopia is a direction, not a destination.

Has anyone been able to find the list of persons included in the source? Vmfunc’s blog says that a list was published but later taken down.

EDIT: wayback machine of course

Swiss pikemen would become the last word in European warfare for some 200 years

Ahem… Marignano, Biccoca, Pavia

#team_landsknecht

Yes with one quirk. I don’t use the right shift, just the left. Not sure why I’ve ended up this way, or if it’s a common variation.

EDIT: looked it up. It’s very common

https://www.aza-pac.com/

Lmao that website.

Founded by Michael Rectenwald. Seems like quite a character.