Richard Stallman's Political Notes' Journal
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Friday, September 13th, 2024
| Time |
Event |
| 12:29p |
Privatized "dictatorships", US
*Conservatives think giving children [gratis]
lunch
at school is socialism, but vast, powerful private monopolies are freedom.*
The more power a person has, the more society needs to regulate the use of that power to protect
everyone else in it. Most of you, like me, don't have much power — though we may be able to
influence others by convincing them — so we should have a lot of freedom, outside of actions
that directly endanger others.
By contrast, a billionaire's power is very dangerous, so dangerous that we should regulate many
things they could do. Even better, we should tax high income and high wealth enough that nobody
can become or remain a billionaire.
There are other interesting points in the article.
| | 12:29p |
An example of ecosystem fragility
A
discarded bag of Cheetos messed up the ecosystem in Carlsbad Caverns. The balance in a cave is
so sensitive that a small amount of food that does not belong there is enough to endanger it.
| | 12:29p |
Social-media blocking, FRA, US, UK, AUS
Australia is considering requiring social media platforms to
check
the age of each user. This article describes the mechanisms that might be used. It seems that
each one will either require you to identify yourself to some other service that could keep track of
everything, or require some sort of unalterable unique number from your computer. I expect they
will demand something that users can't alter, which implies rejection of free operating systems (on
a free operating systems, you could always set it to whatever value you like).
So I think this represents a plan to require that users either identify themselves, or run nonfree
software (which will probably snoop on them), or both.
But I can't be completely sure of that — I have to make guesses about what some of these
things mean.
There is a system that can verify your age to a web site while refusing to identify you to that web
site: GNU Taler can be adapted to let you get tokens that you can use to
prove you are over N years old, but that would not enable the site to identify you, and that won't
allow the Taler site to know which sites you gave them to.
But that is not in the list of what Australia is considering.
| | 12:29p |
UN Polio-aid workers terrorized, ISR
Israeli soldiers blocked a vaccination aid convoy in Gaza for 8 hours and questioned some of the
people working in it. The convoy was
unable
to carry out its aid mission. Fortunately, nobody in it was killed or wounded.
| | 12:29p |
Tyrannical, violent no-voter tactics, TX
Greg Palast:
Texas Republicans are threatening
to jail Houston's election officials for facilitating voter registration.
They fear that the Democrats will win Texas if
disprivileged groups find it easy to vote.
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