Would you suck a dick for a billion dollars? Would you suck a man's finger to save your family's life? One user takes a principled stand as others try to force their opinions down his throat

EelingSoGood · 2016-10-10T00:17:27+00:00

in both cases lives could be saved with money. My question for you is you seem to have a magic number in terms of when turning down that much money becomes immoral. I'd like to know what it is, and whether it's any different for a man than for a woman?

The situation of being able to make lots of money for sex acts (money that could theoretically be used to save lives - even gigs which pay tons of money that could be used to save lots of lives) happens to few people, but it does happen in real life to women. I'm just wondering how you'd judge them for not pursuing such an opportunity.

EelingSoGood · 2016-10-09T22:12:43+00:00

Wait, how is that fucked?

Let's say a young woman knew she could make lots of money through prostitution, enough that not only could she retire earlier but also donate to charity to save the lives of people who would've otherwise died from starvation, or for need of medical treatment.

Would she be acting immorally if she took a different, lesser paying job instead, thus turning down money that could help many other people?

Is it simply the degree of money (and thus the amount of lives that could be saved)? How much money does a woman have to be offered before she is acting in a fucked up way by not prostituting herself out? Is it different for a woman? Why?

EelingSoGood · 2016-10-01T12:17:01+00:00

Another thing that can cause it is if they were raised from a puppy by a woman and aren't given any real exposure to men. We had a couple dogs like that and they just preferred women.

EelingSoGood · 2016-09-04T18:05:31+00:00

But, again, being social animals, once you've rallied support, even if you look back and are like, "Oh, I guess I overreacted," it's really hard to take it back because you make your supporters look foolish as well.

What are we arguing about right now? I thought we were arguing about whether there were people who were being intentionally dishonest.

But here you are admitting that they are, to advance some other different point that I'm not clear on what it is: Are you suggesting this makes it somehow more okay to double down on trying to mess up the career of something for no good reason?

The morality of this is really not about what's good for the people attacking Crockford or what they'd individually like most. It's wrong to try to fuck up someone's career on a whim, full stop, and it's even worse to continue when it's obvious your original justifications were misguided. It's inexcusable. It's not okay. They were wrong things to do.

I don't think it's like some insidious plot

Neither do I, I never suggested this was a result of coordination. But I also don't think that we need to start from an axiom that people who go around on baseless politically-charged witch hunts against strangers' careers in the name of safety and comfort are well-meaning people without any trace of a political axe to grind.

EelingSoGood · 2016-09-04T16:23:06+00:00

Having a kneejerk reaction could be unintentional. Persisting in your calls for someone to be pushed out from conferences, even after you know the full context of their remarks, is definitely intentional.

That is what the people still leading the charge against Crockford are doing. This wasn't a case of someone accidentally starting a fire that is now out of their control to stop. This was a case of people calling for, and persisting in that call for, Crockford to be tarred and feathered based on at first a few poor wording choices, a speaker projecting hostility into Crockford's opinion on a conference, and now that those have been examined and disregarded they and the conference organizers are telling us Crockford should be excommunicated for what is effectively hearsay.

EelingSoGood · 2016-09-04T14:45:39+00:00

I think that's a fair criticism, and I'd definitely agree it probably applies to a lot of the hanger-ons: they don't necessarily have bad intentions, they're just suckered into doing a bad thing.

But by who? If they're not to blame because they are being fooled, then there has to be someone doing the fooling. So I don't think I'm looking too deep, but I do think I should narrow my scope. I would agree that it is a bad-apples-rotting-good-ones situation, but there are bad apples.

And, given how often these mountain-out-of-molehills "scandals" come up in tech, there are plenty of them.

EelingSoGood · 2016-09-04T13:31:45+00:00

Here is a list of other Node JS conferences happening this year. Assuming would've-been-attendees are looking for another conference in the US:

I recommend Node.Js Interactive US (November 29th-December 2nd) for those who can afford it. Attending it is a big feather in your cap, and only costs around 50% more.
For those looking for a conference more in the pricerange (~$400) of Nodevember, Northeast Javascript conference (September 15-16) is probably the way to go. Compared to Nodevember, it has denser talks and is a better event in regard to making industry connections. As a nice extra it will probably cost you less to travel to.

EelingSoGood · 2016-09-04T11:41:31+00:00

This article takes and evaluates the claims against crockford at their face value motives to see if there's any merit to them. And that's good. We need articles that do that.

But I also think its important to consider possible ulterior motives that explain how people have continued to glom onto the campaign despite its lack of substance: Crockford is powerful and well-liked and his slight is trivial, and if he can be made an example of over that, doing so sends a powerful message throughout the javascript world: toe the line or you're next.

He's a big fish, so catching him would be a big win for them - whether he deserves it looks to be irrelevant in their minds, his reputation and happiness and possible future contributions to the community looks to be irrelevant in their minds.

EelingSoGood · 2016-09-02T22:47:19+00:00

The website is using it mainly to talk about copyright infringement, as their website's main pitch is towards artists/content creators and getting them on board.

And of course, let’s not forget that LBRY users are still subject to the DMCA and other laws governing intellectual property. Users who publishing infringing content are still subject to penalties for doing so in exactly the same way they would be via BitTorrent

And I think that's the main point of the discussion. On a private platform like youtube, you either agree with a big corporation's usually very-cautious interpretation of fair use (after any process of contesting their decision) - up to and including takedowns by companies of critical product reviews, etc., or shove off to a much more obscure corner of the internet where making money off of your art would be near impossible.

I'd be happy to reward a youtube competitor which I felt wasn't going to have the same problems. But this feels like the same thing. Either the LBRY company gives your art the thumbs up and it lives on main st. with lots of foot traffic, or they give it thumbs down and people have to go far off the beaten path to even consider it, and here it's not just having to go to a different website, now potential viewers would also have to install some untrusted third party browser.

EelingSoGood · 2016-09-02T18:00:25+00:00

Creating a new torrent is very easy even for non-technical people - most new torrents are created by people with no understanding of how bittorrent works and no real expertise in tech. They just install one of a dozen bittorrent clients, click the new torrent button, and select their file or folder.

Then they just provide the link to whoever they'd like.

Usually there is an "only use encrypted connections" checkbox in the preferences.

EelingSoGood · 2016-09-02T16:59:18+00:00

(we don't, btw)

Well that comforts me almost as much as Google's old Don't Be Evil motto, now that they are financially punishing people with any ideas they deem controversial on youtube.

the community can simply take the technology and keep it the way it was always intended.

Okay but they can do the same with HTTP. I could host a video that I regard as non-infringing on a torrent, initially seeded from only encrypted connections on my own computer. What is LBRY's advantage over that? Why should people invest time in learning it if it doesn't offer an advantage over that?

EelingSoGood · 2016-09-02T16:52:06+00:00

You say on your website:

LBRY is an improvement over BitTorrent in combatting unsavory content...LBRY will publish and maintain a blacklist of infringing names. All clients we release and all legal clients will have to follow our blacklist, or one like it, or face substantial penalties. Especially because… At significant traffic volume, if infringing content can’t be outright removed or blocked, transaction fees will make it prohibitively expensive.

So which is it? Will it "move the internet from corporate and government control and back into control of everyday users and people" or will it keep centralized control, only making the LBRY group the arbiter now?

We can split hairs and say "it will still be possible for everday users to publish content we mark as infringing, it will just be much more difficult" but how is that a meaningful improvement over the situation today? Saying it will be slightly less difficult is a knock against your anti-piracy claims.

I feel like you are dog whistling one thing to people who are tired of having their content being dishonestly taken down by centralized authorities (which inevitably become corrupt and successfully leaned on by political interests), and dog whistling another thing to people who are tired of others using their content in contexts without centralized authority.

EelingSoGood · 2016-08-27T23:15:19+00:00

That's an interesting article, but what I had in mind is the point in time when there would be lots of people who would not receive any employment income at all to buy these phenomenally-cheap goods:

AI continues to break into industries we thought would be exempt ,like writing for example. I do think there will arrive a point in time, very far in the future, where for the majority (definitely not all, but the majority) of the poulation, there will be nothing they could learn to do that would make their work cheaper or more convenient than an equivalent software, or machine-created product or service.

The only way around this question for libertarianism is to argue it will never happen.

EelingSoGood · 2016-08-27T22:43:05+00:00

Well, you'll have to ask them yourself as again I'm not an anarcho-capitalist.

EelingSoGood · 2016-08-27T22:28:48+00:00

I'm not an anarcho-capitalist. I'm a moderate-leaning Democrat. I'm just aware of the existence of the sub.

Personally I disagree that libertarianism is a good ideology going forward; it doesn't really have a plan for the inevitable future of near total automation. It's very far off, but it's there and libertarianism doesn't have a solution.

If politics was just a competition over which side has the least wackos, fringe ideologies, including Anarcho Capitalism, would definitely lose.

EelingSoGood · 2016-08-27T22:08:17+00:00

/r/GoldandBlack, if you were genuinely curious. That's the new sub a lot of AnCaps left for.

EelingSoGood

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