It's often said that there is a trade-off between privacy and convenience - while that's often overstated, there are some ways in which it is inarguably true.
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For example, it would be convenient to give all your devices radio chips that constantly broadcasted a unique number, and whenever one of our mobile devices encountered a radio beacon, it could log the event and the location.
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Then, if we wanted to find something we'd lost, we'd have this great database of where-everything-is.
Likewise, if we wanted to do viral exposure notification, we could set our phones to broadcast a unique ID everywhere we went and log all the unique IDs it encountered.
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Inside: Copyleft lawsuit against Vizio will allow anyone to defend the commons; The monopoly strategy behind the Google/Microsoft mobile patent wars; and more!
Copyleft lawsuit against Vizio will allow anyone to defend the commons: Software Freedom Conservancy realizes the dream of "Community-Oriented GPL Enforcement."
#CapitalAsPower, a framework from @BichlerNitzan, holds that companies don't seek to be as profitable as possible - but rather to accumulate as much POWER as possible. A company doesn't seek to be as big as possible, but rather, as dominant.
If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
There are two strategies for accumulating power: one is "breadth": to grow the market as much as possible, thus accumulating profits faster than the average competitor, eventually taking a commanding lead over the rest of the field.
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When the free software movement started to make headway, proprietary software companies like Microsoft went to war against it, describing the licenses at its core (like the #GPL) as "viral licenses" to scare companies off from using free software.
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The GPL is a software license that coders add to their work that says, "You can do anything with this - change it, sell it, copy it, incorporate it into something else, BUT...you have to redistribute the new projects under the same terms."
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In other words, we are making a software commons - code that anyone can use and improve, but only if they agree to maintain the commons. Like any shared resource, commons need protection from freeloaders who take but do not replenish.
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The #DebtCeiling debate is genuinely absurd: Congress authorized the spending of new dollars, so the Treasury has to create them. For Congress to turn around and force the Treasury NOT to create the dollars it ordered the Treasury to create is an obvious political gimmick.
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If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Hence the #TrillionDollarCoin - a proposal to use a 2000 amendment to 31USC§5112k ("Denominations, specifications, and design of coins") that permits the Treasury Secretary to "mint and issue platinum bullion coins and proof platinum coin [at] the Secretary’s discretion."
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