Short thread about my grandfather.

My grandfather played the fiddle. He learned from a family of Romani who camped at the periphery of his family's land in Czechoslovakia. He would trade cigarettes that he shoplifted from his uncle's store to pay for lessons /1

https://twitter.com/lifesafeast/status/1387117957550071813

He relocated to Budapest shortly before WWII, where he was eventually conscripted into the brutal "labour service" (munkaszolgálat). It was bad. Most died. Long story short, he was captured in the USSR and sent to a POW camp. /2

You know all they need to do is dub over the voices of the Gungans and Neimodians and it would improve Star Wars Episode I by 10 to 15%. They have interstellar travel but you still have to "sign" treaties meaning that you can discover entirely new physics faster than rolling out digital identity solutions.

I'm not. This is replacing one orthodoxy for another, and it lacks nuance. User centricity is not a north star for digital government.

Our job overall is to balance the rights and interests of individuals, communities, and the collective towards an overall greater good.

https://twitter.com/JohnRKenney/status/1095151315775250433

Not everything we do is a "service." Sometimes personal interests are sacrificed for others. Maintaining the commons, for example, may require excluding humans from a region altogether. Are the flora and fauna then our "users?" No. Our wards, maybe, but not users.