Kalium

I suspect you will find that in many cases, people whose brains have been hijacked by chemical dependency may experience some difficulty in behaving as a stakeholder in society. It will often not stack up favorably against feeding that dependency, no matter how much they might favor it in the abstract.

People espousing this theory usually point to rat park.

Unfortunately, rat park is in no sense good or useful science. It's more useful as a litmus test for how sincerely someone tests their beliefs.

Individual capacity enables community resilience. If you have resources that can be shared, they can be shared with your neighbors.

Otherwise, we're either asking local government to invest in resilience or reinventing local government to ask this new body to invest in resilience. In either capacity, we are not investing in individual capacity, we're just trusting that the resources we need will be made available in time of need and sufficient to the needs of all.

That works to the extent that a polity is willing and able to seize, care for, and sell off parcels. At scale, this is not guaranteed to be as easy as it sounds. Case in point: Detroit.

I agree. There's no moral or ethical difference in any way.

Unfortunately for us, the law routinely does see a substantial difference and treats them as such. Due to that, the SCOTUS sees them as different and judges that a law on one is not automatically a law on the other.

In other words, to ban a thing you actually need to specifically ban a thing and not just something that feels ethically like the thing you want to ban.

This article readily conflates niceness and kindness. It would be very easy to read this and take away the understanding that critical feedback that leaves a person feeling in any way negative is not kindness.

There's a great deal of nuance to how kindness is defined. It's very easy for one set of actions to be either very kind or very unkind, depending on definitions.

Listening, being respectful, and being empathetic may drive one person to bite their tongue and silence feedback that someone is performing poorly out of fear of hurting them or the morale of the team. Another may be driven by the very same things into giving candid feedback.

This article does not do a good job of exploring the difference. It just asserts "Being nice is the new punk".

We're building this because the ability to make narrow, specific predictions can be narrowly and specifically useful. This works if you have a good understanding of both the tools and the domain you're looking to make predictions in.

Unfortunately, from an outsider perspective, this looks like being widely and generically useful. If you don't understand your tools, you're going to misuse them, and this hype cycle is the result.

San Francisco is an instructive example. Prior to Uber, calling a taxi in SF gave you a 50% chance of one showing up in some functionally unknowable amount of time. 50% is not an exaggeration, it was sometimes below that, and you would have no idea if you should expect your cab in five minutes or fifty. Then you would be charged some amount of money you could in theory anticipate but in practice could not. Should the driver misbehave in some manner, there was theoretical but in practice missing accountability.

The drivers were then exploited ruthlessly by medallion-owners.

Uber became very popular very quickly because it addressed a number of those consumer pain points up front. You could know for sure if a car was going to come, have a quite good idea of how long it would be, and get a price in advance. Sure, your complaints would likely be ignored, but nothing new there.

Search systems aren't real people or real businesses either. Never mind details like how you define and enforce "real" in a decentralized way across N legal systems with wildly varying ideas of what it means to be a "legitimate" business. There is no system or ledger you can query to find out if a given person is real or a business is legitimate. This is exceptionally unlikely to change on a useful timescale.

The basic problem with email is that it assumed good-faith participation from the parties involved. It was assumed that only legitimate actors would have the resources to participate and they would always be well-behaved. This, it turns out, was flawed on several counts. For one, it assumed legitimacy could be assured. For another, it assumed legitimate users would be well-behaved and would never abuse services for gain. For a third, it assumed account takeovers or other impersonation attacks wouldn't happen.

Every de-centralized system that aspires to not have email's problems needs to take them seriously.

Ask an email administrator how well decentralization works at scale.

It should be concerning that email has re-centralized to deal with all the problems that come from federation and decentralization.