owisd

6 ms·

61.
by owisd 1y ago
- people made bad choices despite a good faith, deliberative, representative process to make good choices - democracy - people made bad choices through deception or carelessness - populism.
62.
by owisd 1y ago
2007 seems a bit early to be looking for an effect. Smartphones were a luxury/tech-nerd/Apple-fanboy purchase in 2007, they didn’t start to see widespread adoption till the iPhone 4/4s (2010-2012) closer to when most of the g
63.
by owisd 1y ago
The exact same addictive feed on desktop isn’t quite as damaging because you’re forced to leave it behind when you go outside. You can’t carry your desktop round in your pocket everywhere you go, always available at a moment’s notice to fil
64.
by owisd 1y ago
The stats don’t agree that government jobs only ever increase. In 1990 there were 1 million more federal workers for a population 100 million smaller. I assume it’s a popular belief because the oligarchs gain power as the federal government
65.
by owisd 1y ago
The UK already blocks certain websites at the national level, e.g. you can’t access Pirate Bay from a UK ISP, so can’t imagine Ofcom blocking 4chan would cause much consternation among those who aren’t already against the OSA.
66.
by owisd 1y ago
In a legal sense probably, but in a statistical cost sense you’re estimating whether the same arson would have spread to the same extent in a pre-industrial climate.
67.
by owisd 1y ago
> obtainable by proxy So no different to the rules around buying an 18+ DVD.
68.
by owisd 1y ago
There's no value in making insults for the sake of being insulting protected speech, but in the UK if you're making ECHR Article 10 protected speech that someone happens to find insulting or offensive then that's not a cr
69.
by owisd 1y ago
When Google has the monopoly on marketing of cleaning companies in your area, from a consumer standpoint it’s effectively the same as if one cleaning company has the local monopoly. The way to win is to pay Google a bigger cut than your com
70.
by owisd 1y ago
> nobody in power has ever given the people what they want in this regard Net migration in the UK dropped by 400,000/yr in the last year and they’ve toughened the criteria further so seems unlikely it won’t drop further.
71.
by owisd 1y ago
Announcing it Steve Jobs quipped “We’re making it less random to make it feel more random.”
72.
by owisd 1y ago
Could try looking into MathsJam or Math Circles to see if there’s something in your area.
73.
by owisd 1y ago
Teflon itself is mostly harmless, it’s the byproducts from manufacturing people are more concerned with (PFOA, etc)
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by owisd 1y ago
People seem happy to get short-haul flights when driving is an option, so riding with strangers can’t be the issue.
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by owisd 1y ago
View count is used to guide to price embedded sponsors, so in the short term matters while things get recalibrated.
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by owisd 1y ago
Actually he successfully sued the tabloids for defamation on the grounds that while, yes he had a cosplaying dungeon, and yes the “attendees” were all in uniform, none of them were in Nazi uniform. To twist the knife he then went on to ba
77.
by owisd 1y ago
If a building collapses or a plane crashes that’s a singular case, but the ensuing investigation will be used to enact policy changes based on what went wrong to prevent it happening again. It only becomes ‘meme-driven’ when it deviates fro
78.
by owisd 1y ago
Free speech existed before social media, so banning social media can't be any less free speech than how things were then. Also the USA has for decades been an outlier in taking an extreme interpretation of free speech that considers, s
79.
by owisd 1y ago
I was reading The Shallows recently about how the Internet affects your brain, it's from 2009 so a bit out of date re: smartphones & a lot re: LLMs but makes the case that the Internet and hypertext generally as a tool is 'b
80.
by owisd 1y ago
The liberal democratic argument is that the websites themselves are the ones imposing these harmful effects on their users, therefore by a JS Mill 'harm principle' argument it's fine for the government to intervene and regula
81.
by owisd 1y ago
20+ years ago kids would play out on the street unsupervised with their friends from the neighbourhood from the age of 6-8 and all the adults would look out for each others' kids. It's only recently that everyone's retreated
82.
by owisd 1y ago
> If you don't like it change the law There is currently a bill going through Parliament to simplify this stuff - https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3946 - though not going so far as to remove all protections.
83.
by owisd 1y ago
The difference is the volume and the lack of friction to access, not that these things weren't possible. Physically getting into a strip club or having to look the newsagent in the eye as you purchase a porn mag are much higher barrier
84.
by owisd 1y ago
Having a device in your pocket that you take everywhere with no stigma to being seen with it yet it has unlimited access to any genre of porn you can think of is hardly comparable to finding a 90s porn mag in a bush from time to time, so yo
85.
by owisd 1y ago
We'd just go back to human curation, you'd whitelist a few curators you liked, people wanting to promote their content would email a link to a curator, if they thought their audience would like it they'd share it, you'd
86.
by owisd 1y ago
You're mixing your definitions of authoritarian, there's authoritarian in the 'Nolan chart' sense of the word, which just means 'not a Libertarian', which is like 98% of people, which is different to the Hitler
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by owisd 1y ago
Anyone suggesting a block doesn't actually want Wikipedia to pull out of the UK, it's a negotiating position to extort concessions.
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by owisd 1y ago
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/onli... Page 64 defines a Large Service as "A service which has more than 7 million monthly active United Kingdom users". The first two forums
89.
by owisd 1y ago
Problem with Wikipedia specifically going all-in on a UK block is, due to the licence, there's nothing to stop someone circumventing the block to make a OSA-compliant Britipedia mirror with minimal effort.
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by owisd 1y ago
The substack you linked is about political polarisation and doesn't mention children once.

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