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As it were not enough to deal with "politic" governments... now they allow to create "corporated" governments...
Am I the only one seeing this as a possible "what could go wrong"[^]?
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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So while governments across the world are trying to take power away from these big techs this guy thinks it's a good idea to give them even more power!? 
It's not these companies that need tax breaks, they got plenty of those!
The article mentions Tesla, so one of the fastest growing companies in the world, world's most valuable car company, led by the now richest man in the world, needs tax breaks and a county of their own? 
It's the small businesses that need a break and small businesses are not interested in running a county.
I guess this is some next level capitalism (or maybe corruption and bribery) that I'm too communist to understand 
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It's kind of like in the US how the "small government" types are gung ho about "privatization" despite privatizing government responsibilities just extends government power to unelected private agencies (usually corporations) with no oversight on how they perform said responsibilities.
It just makes government by fiat at the behest of a cabal of folks who already have more than they will ever need.
I'm not a communist, but I married one. Considering what passes for "capitalism" these days I'm ready to find alternatives.
Real programmers use butterflies
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honey the codewitch wrote: It's kind of like in the US how the "small government" types are gung ho about "privatization" despite privatizing government responsibilities just extends government power to unelected private agencies (usually corporations) with no oversight on how they perform said responsibilities.
Surely the point of privatisation is to remove from the government those functions that no government should be involved in.
I'm ready to find alternatives.
Capitalism is the worst system there... except for all the others. They've been tried. They really were worse.
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markrlondon wrote: Surely the point of privatisation is to remove from the government those functions that no government should be involved in.
That's the official line. I hardly think it's the point. The point is to give unelected people with too much power and money already, even more control over us.
Either you believe your democratic government is best positioned to represent society collectively, or you believe that the wealthy powerful people are. If you think there's a third position, you wouldn't be wrong exactly - the third position is fooling yourself.
So who at the end of the day do I want handling the police? Who do I want deciding who can be licensed to drive a vehicle, and who can dump what into the water we share or pull what out of the water table we share?
An unelected rich {elephant} who has a vested interest in raiding our collective wealth for their own personal benefit or an elected rich {elephant} who along with the aforementioned greed, is at least in theory accountable to voters?
Neither option is great, and yet still the difference is clear.
So as far as this:
markrlondon wrote: Capitalism is the worst system there... except for all the others.
I'd offer you this: Democracy is the worst system out there, except for all of the others.
And I'd also argue they haven't all been tried. We aren't capable of achieving a post-scarcity economy today, but it doesn't mean we won't ever get there. We also haven't tried things like RBE.
Capitalism is easy because it's what we already do. Indeed it was not so much invented as it was articulated based on observing how societies dealt with wealth.
So it's robust, but not always healthy. Like most of what humans get up to individually and collectively.
To say it's as good as it gets is self defeating. At one point living in the trees and smearing ourselves with dung was as good as it got. At one point, 640kB of RAM was as good as it got.
I'd argue further that what you said about capitalism could have been argued about feudalism in its time and place. It was the "best" system because there wasn't anything better at the time and place. It was what people could conceive and maintain. It had that going for it. But so what?
Real programmers use butterflies
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honey the codewitch wrote: And I'd also argue they haven't all been tried. We aren't capable of achieving a post-scarcity economy today, but it doesn't mean we won't ever get there. We also haven't tried things like RBE.
Like Star Treck system?
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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The key to any possibility whatsoever of a post-capitalist society that was anything other than utterly totalitarian would be genuinely free energy (as in the Star Trek fictional universe). All depends on free energy. However, no current or projected technology (not renewables, not even nuclear fusion) have the capacity to provide this.
P.S. Oh, and if such a technology was developed (or looked like it could be developed) then access to it would inevitably be curtailed for most people as there are too many people with power within the current status quo who do not wish to lose it.
modified 9-Feb-21 14:41pm.
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honey the codewitch wrote: I hardly think it's the point. The point is to give unelected people with too much power and money already, even more control over us.
It is precisely the point, as far as I can see and in my experience. One of the key points to remember is that the other point of privatisation is to remove monopoly in favour of market competition. It is critical that it is real time competition (long term state-issued franchises are NOT genuine privatisation). Where there is real time competition, it is simply a matter of providers competing for customers. Do not confuse provision of commercial service with something that should have anything to do with government.
honey the codewitch wrote: Either you believe your democratic government is best positioned to represent society collectively
That is exactly what I believe. But that has nothing whatsoever to do with privatisation of commercial services. Commercial services are nothing to do with "society collectively". Why should the government own the gas company, or rail company, or bus company? That makes no sense.
honey the codewitch wrote: Who who at the end of the day do I want handling the police? Who do I want deciding who can be licensed to drive a vehicle, and who can dump what into the water we share or pull what out of the water table we share?
Ah, now you're changing the goalposts somewhat. Who is privatising the police? Note that it is entirely reasonable to outsource certain activities without actually privatising a particular service. Privatising is a different thing to outsourcing. Outsourcing in this context means that the government is still involved and still maintains a monopoly. but simply employs a contractor to do jobs more efficiently than the government is able to. (Yes, I know this can go wrong in practice but in my opinion that's because of continued government involvement, the government's self-claimed monopoly on power, and the lack of a real time competitive marketplace.)
honey the codewitch wrote: Capitalism is easy because it's what we already do.
Capitalism is not easy. It's hard work. But it does work. Note that it doesn't guarantee anything. That's not its point. It is a system in which you can succeed or fail. And that is its strength and success.
honey the codewitch wrote: Indeed it was not so much invented as it was articulated based on observing how societies dealt with wealth
Quite so. It is a description of evolution. That is to say, it works better than anything else.
It could be out-evolved one day but I strongly suspect that anything that out-competes it will only be able to do so by being predicated on the sicknesses of loss of opportunity, loss of liberty, and authoritarianism/totalitarianism. I.e. It will be (perhaps is being) out-competed by a kind of new-feudalism (or neo-socialism, as some call it), a new structure that is designed to benefit the few at the cost of the many. Those of us wishing for an end to capitalism may well come to regret their hate of the very thing that gave them liberty, opportunity, and a chance to prosper.
modified 9-Feb-21 14:39pm.
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As The Register reported in August 2020, Chromium-based browsers generate a lot of DNS traffic as they try to determine if input into their omnibox is a domain name or a search query. It's always DNS
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I know it is a bit more comfortable, but it is not a big deal to offer the "search" bar on the right side as FF does.
Let the address field to be an address field.
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Or at the very least, do a lot of caching to the local machine, especially of DNS results. That way if you search next week, you're not querying the DNS again unless your attempt to connect to the IP you got went bad.
Then again, I can already think of a way to exploit that to route people to my website instead of yours so the idea could use some shoring up. 
Real programmers use butterflies
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[^] Quote: In the Neu-ChiP project, the team will layer networks of stem cells resembling the human cortex onto microchips. They will then stimulate the cells by firing changing patterns of light beams at them. Sophisticated 3D computer modelling will allow them to observe any changes the cells undergo, to see how adaptable they are. This imitates the 'plasticity' of the human brain, which can rapidly adapt to new information.
The size of the fiction in "science fiction" just shrank a few parsecs ?
«One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams.» Salvador Dali
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Edible scrabble tiles. Different chocolate flavors.
Heated mouse pad. For those cold winter coding days and nights. Oops, already done. 10 Best Heated Mouse Pads on the market in 2021[^]
A physical widget that has real buttons like the old VCR style play, pause, stop, rewind, fast forward, eject. Maybe with a rotatable shuttle. Found this.[^]
[edit] oops. I thought I was in the lounge. Well, the heated mouse pads are cool.[/edit]
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Lounge Good one 
The odds are that if you thought of it, then it probably already exist somewhere or will soon. That is the nature of progress. Although it is irritating when a company advertises something as new tech., when in fact it is old tech in a new package.
INTP
"Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence." - Edsger Dijkstra
"I have never been lost, but I will admit to being confused for several weeks. " - Daniel Boone
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Marc Clifton wrote: A physical widget that has real buttons like the old VCR style play, pause, stop, rewind, fast forward, eject.
I can see that physical widgets with Braille writing would be useful for the blind, but why would the rest of us need them? Are there really so many cases where you need to use electronics without looking at the panel?
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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I'm into such discussions all the time: Why should we waste resources on braille marking of buttons in elevators when when no blind people are expected to enter the house? Why waste resources on wide doors when no wheelchair user is living in the apartment? Why should we abandon door sills when you can simply step over it? And so on.
So you reject visits from grandma, who with her walker will stumble over a door sill? Your old friend who ended up in a wheelchair at age 35 after a car accident cannot enter your apartment. Your child loosing her eyesight last new year after a fireworks accident will not have access to any of your entertainment systems.
"We'll take care of that when it happens". Sure. When you make friends with a wheelchair user, you will widen your doors. I might believe it. When your MIL begins stumbling in anything that is not flat, you will remove the door sills. I might believe it. When your daughter goes blind, you will replace all sorts of controls with braille marked ones. Well, that one I am more tempted to believe that you might actually do. (Besides, visually handicapped people have an impressing ability to adapt to lack of adaptations!) If your son ends up in a wheelchair, the risk of you having to break up from your local neighborhood to find another suitable house is significant.
This concept of 'Universal Access', that the physical environment at the outset should be accessible to everyone regardless of physical disabilities, has been gradually accepted, at least in some cultures. Including UA concept from the very beginning usually has a small fraction of the cost of later remodeling. Often, it will also improve the quality for users who are not absolutely 'dependent' on them. Say, signs that can be read without straining the eyes of a seventy year old won't hurt a thirty year old, even if he doesn't 'need' that readability. Removing the door sills that make your MIL stumble also makes it easier for you to pull the vacuum cleaner from one door to another. And so on.
Currently, I am not in need of no special adaptations of my house. With the planned remodeling, I want to ensure that I can continue living here, in my own home, even if I end up as physically handicapped. Repeatedly, I have to defend it: Lots of people see no value of preparing for eventualities. I do. Even if my friends say things like "why would the rest of us need them?"
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A new survey of over 9,500 developers, of whom 4,400 actively participate in open source, finds that 54 percent of respondents feel that individuals should be paid for their open source work. How does 50 cents a bug sound to start?
Creating or removing, it doesn't matter, does it?
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Let me preface my comments by saying that 87.6% of statistics you see on the Internet are made up...
Surely the majority of open source projects have no money, since they have no monetisation plan (or ability to generate one as an independent entity). So no one is going to get paid for contributing to such a project.
The comparatively few projects that are big, growing, successful and who do have money (or whose contributing companies have money), already have employed contributors. E.g. As an extreme example, most Linux Kernel contributors are being paid for it by their employers and are in fact doing it as their day job. (If volunteer coders wish to contribute, is there any discretionary fund to compensate them? I don't know, I'm curious.)
This leaves the probably relatively small proportion of OSS projects that are important but still have little or no funding. An example of this category would have been OpenSSL. We only realise that these under-funded, largely volunteer-contribution projects are in such a vulnerable state when one of them is compromised.
In summary, open source development is riches for the successful few (employees of major contributing companies or superstar devs) and hope and hard work for the majority. Like most areas of endeavour in life, I guess.
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Isn't that called "having a real job?"
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I am waiting for my CP points to get translated into real money 
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Sure - one point is worth approximately one dollar.
A Zimbabwean dollar.
Circa 2015. 
The Zimbabwean government stated that it would ... exchange Zimbabwean dollars for US dollars at a rate of US$1 to 35 quadrillion Zimbabwean dollars ....
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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That can work : Dilbert Comic Strip on 1995-11-13[^]
"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"
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Oeh; I wouldn't stop them. Last few bosses refused to include the name of the 'ware we used, even if that in breach of the TOC.
If half of the people using my code pay me, I go fulltime Rimworld.
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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I see two main classes of OSS:
Either, commercial companies making good money and pay their developers well, and will try to improve their image in the market by opening the source code but not really expecting (maybe not even wanting) any significant contribution to the software base. A subclass is hardware manufacturers publishing their drivers for someone to port to the other OS, to increase the hardware sales - that is another way of improving their image.
(Note: I know a lot of developers making contributions to OSS code bases maintained by others: Their companies make heavy use of free OSS, and their contributions to extend/modify the OSS is what they would have developed as proprietary software if the OSS was not available. So these developers are well paid by their own company, and act as an extension of the first OSS class.)
Or, someone developer not much above the amateur level (or maybe not even above), doing software development in his/her spare time, publishing the code to boost their image as great developers.
There sure are other classes of open software, but these I see as the major ones. The first group needs no payment. The second group ... Well, some of it doesn't deserve any payment. I can see that a clever amateur (/dilettante) might hope to earn some money on his hobby, the way some other hobbyists do.
But I don't see who should pay them. End users of the software? Making mandatory some sort of begging routine in all OSS, activated at every run? Or a begging mechanisms for other developers that they have to get through before they get access to the open source software?
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