Frondo

One note: I didn't say anything about the language they speak, and what language other people speak is none of my business.

> I don't think it's crazy to expect assimilation.

What's that mean to you? In my city, immigrants work, run businesses, pay taxes, have kids and send them to local schools, ride the bus, complain about the weather, practice their religion. I guess the only thing they don't do is complain as loudly about the government as (many of) the rest of us. What more could they be doing to assimilate?

This should be the top comment.

Encryption will not keep you hidden from an authoritarian government for long, and certainly not for long if you're trying to build a movement with any sort of wide-spread support.

Sunlight only works reasonably well for waterborne pathogens, and only when you've got time.

As with disinfecting anything, and especially for societal issues, we need more than sunlight alone.

Life in an authoritarian hellhole almost by definition means technology won't save you. If they can haul you off when you're walking down the street, who cares whether your stuff is encrypted? They'll make something up.

Even if you're innocent, they'll make something up. I lived for a year in one of those authoritarian hellholes and in that time knew two people who were arrested and hauled from station to station til someone paid a bribe- these weren't the dissidents either, just some guys. The dissident was stabbed to death on his doorstep.

Encryption is good to save us from marketing, from megacorps making our lives hell. Laws and norms constrain the rest.

> Most users don't care about the alignment and spacing and so on in isolation, but they do get a sense of quality from the overall impact. This stuff really matters in aggregate.

Red Letter Media has a great phrase that rolls around in my head to describe situations like this (they use it for media analysis), "You might not recognize it, but your brain did."

Where you might not be able to point to a problem, but you instinctively know something is off.

Organizing and demanding pay collectively seems to help in negotiations, so good for them for taking this approach. It's not like Stanford can move its grad programs to Mexico like a US car maker and its factories.

Democracy isn't perfect, but checking out is the quickest route to ensuring your interests are only minimally represented. True at all levels of democratic organization.

I don't think you'd find a single woodworker anywhere who, if they could afford it, wouldn't prefer a table saw with Sawstop. How much are your fingers worth to you?

Or as the great Stafford Beer put it, the purpose of a system is what it does.

I would rather businesses take a hit on efficiency and have our 15-hour work weeks. Maybe that'd provide an incentive for businesses to pursue making project management and hand-off among staff more efficient.

I'm not being snarky--in the context of people wanting a place to make jokes and have fun with their friends, how is that a problem?