debanqued

The local govs taking direct action. The state gov may be controlled by human rights hostile republicans at the state level, but there are many smaller governments within the state controlled by liberals.

And to be clear, the use of “state” in your quote was the generic sense of the word.

I mean, again, you’re claiming if Republicans get rid of minimum wage

Min wage is entirely different than what these bans are about. There are no wages in this context. This is about a flat periodic income for non-wage earners for the most part.

then they’ll have to come up with some state-sponsored plan to get Bob his shoes when the inevitable wage reduction makes shoes even more unaffordable.

You’re confused about how these bans work. If they don’t want to give Bob a flat living income from state funds at the state level, a ban is pointless because they can simply neglect to provide the money (as they already control the policy and money at the state level). The purpose of a ban is to prevent lower governments from acting. So if they implement a state-level statute banning Bob getting min income, city/county X can cannot give Bob a min income but they can still buy Bob a pair of shoes. Hence how it can backfire.

I’ve seen public libraries with sewing machines. So for example a librarian could theoretically use it to help Bob construct a pair of shoes using material that’s supplied by public money to the libraries. Such an outcome is a game of whack-a-mole.. The republicans would have to discover that’s happening and then legislate against it separately.

You say this like they have any decency or shame.

I”m not sure how you arrive at that. You seem to have missed my point. That is, if the republicans get what they want (a ban on min incomes), they could end up getting as a consequence something they want even less: the state getting involved in commerce in the course of upholding human rights legal obligations.

It makes little sense because they know full well the money will spent one way or another. So most likely this is a political tactic for something else. If there is a segment of unmotivated R voters somewhere but a strong likelihood that they would be more motivated to the polls if there were a proposition to ban any form of welfare, getting a proposition on the ballot would actually just be a trick to get more people turning out for Trump (because they will tick the Trump box while they are there).

What matters to republicans the most is not any kind of values or ideology; it’s simply nothing more than taking and holding power.

IIRC it was the Bush election where the republicans put a proposition on the ballot for gay marriage. Superficially you would think “sure, the republicans want to stop gay marriage”. But in reality the republican politicians did not care about gay marriage at all. They cared about a segment of elderly non-voting christian right conservatives. Those voters could not be motivated to get off their asses and travel to the polls to vote for Bush, but they would be damned if gays could get married, so they were highly motivated to vote in that election and of course while they are in the voting booth they ticked the Bush box. The gay marriage proposition was just a trick to get more votes for candidates.

This is why I’m so disgusted every time someone says “republicans and democrats are basically the same”, which I most often hear from Europeans.

Hence why we need a public option.

I would love to see this backfire. If they ban min. incomes whilst being a human rights signatory, it means the state must buy food, shelter, and clothes, which means that portion of commerce would be outside of their “capitalist utopia” as the state would decide where to buy Bob’s shoes, or perhaps even make Bob a pair of shoes. It can (and should) backfire spectacularly for them.

Sure, but then republicans are well into the territory of “I don’t like the facts”. They need to be told to work on trying to un-sign the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (from 1948?) before they can make what they consider “progress” in their minds.

from the article:

"I never thought we would be going down the socialist road," Gillette told BI. "I spent 35 years in the Army fighting communism, fighting terrorism. Now we're slipping. The left is pushing us toward the socialist program."

LOL.. I read that as: “help! We’re slipping past the 1940s because of the commies and socialists!”

Glad to get a response. I was starving for feedback.

I probed into a closed-source Android app that’s state-endorsed which collects sensitive personal info (and a touch of Art.9 data), and contains undisclosed trackers. Not only is it closed-source but the license prohibits reverse engineering, thus pro-actively blocking data subjects from understanding how their data is processed, consequently breaking a lot of transparency and fairness guidelines. I will expose this in greater detail eventually.

AFAICT, the GDPR just vaguely says be transparent and be fair. The EDPB published a couple lengthy guidelines covering what that means. CSS seems to quite starkly violate many of those guidelines. EDPB guidelines are not legally binding. But GDPR Art.5(2) places the burden on data controllers to prove fair and transparent processing:

The controller shall be responsible for, and be able to demonstrate compliance with, paragraph 1 (‘accountability’).

The EU and UK will change the law long before they ban closed source software.

Perhaps, but the discussion should happen because I’m sure they need to draw lines. IMO it’s inevitable. It would likely be argued that “software code is far from being a simple plain understandable language to most people”, but the sensible compromise that I can imagine being reasonably forced is: publish the code, or publish a detailed statement of everything that app does with personal data. And if the latter turns out to dominate that’s still a big stride from today’s reality. As it stands right now transparency and fairness is a complete joke as soon as user-executed closed source apps come into play. It’s a glaring loophole.

It is just not economically viable for them to interact with the rest of the world.

Worth noting that the GDPR does not imply the need for all 4 software freedoms.. just the code inspection freedom. I’m not convinced that would have any notable harm on the economy.

I also cannot imagine a ban on reverse-engineering prohibition clauses having a noteworthy negative impact on the economy. It would be an injustice to not have a rule or guideline that says effectively “data subjects have a right to reverse engineer apps that process their data”.

All the oil companies quite rotten slimeballs. But if you look closely enough there is still significant variation in the extent of the evil. Off the top of my head:

• Chevron - a right-wing ALEC member, thus contributes heavily to the politicians who are the most environmentally destructive, who neuters the EPA. ALEC also finances climate denial propaganda. Chevron was also caught financing the cloakroom project to arrange secret meetings between politicians and corps like Chevron.

• ExxonMobil - Notable for oil spills and also because Exxon discovered climate change in the 60s and kept it secret, thus enabling it to have a much more harmful impact.

Those are two worst. Chevron and Exxon are also both partnered with a quite evil tech giant: Microsoft, who uses AI to help those two shitty corps find places to drill for oil. Google partnered with Total, and Amazon partnered with BP and Shell for the same purposes. The greater evil to boycott is Microsoft, Chevron, and ExxonMobil. MS also has a quite long list of unethical conduct, such as helping Israel acquire facial recognition tech to weaponize against Palestinians. So if you boycott Israel you also boycott MS.

The irony is that your instance uses Cloudflare which forces people to execute non-free software in order to solve a CAPTCHA.

BTW, a lot of those links give me a 404 that says “Powered by NPMplus”.

I installed Bisq a few years ago the 1st hurdle was buying cc required having some cc escrowed to start with. I’ve also heard that some banks are so hostile toward cryptocurrency they freeze accounts of people suspected of trading it. I got the impression Bisq transactions would be detectable by the bank but my memory is fuzzy on that. I suppose I need to use a burner bank account I don’t care about, and use a bitcoin ATM to get the escrow money. It’s a shame the Bisq escrow money can’t be in fiat money.

I would love to be using cryptocurrency in cashless situations instead of just nixing those options. I’ve reached a point where if it’s not sold locally for cash I don’t buy it. Cryptocurrency has failed me because most exchangers are in Cloudflare’s giant walled garden and I will not patronize a Cloudflare user. There are cryptocurrency ATMs but the fees are extortionate.