csciuto.bsky.social
Systems Enjoyer
Medford, MA
201 posts
148 followers
291 following
Regular Contributor
Active Commenter
comment in response to
post
If you're not familiar with it, the Force case I mentioned is pretty much exactly the latter case.
And, to my broader point, the outcome of this case always struck me as gross but I can't decide what *law* could've prevented this without doing greater harm.
www.eff.org/document/eff...
comment in response to
post
Yes, 100%. Back during COVID when people were clamoring for censoring "misinformation" my head was on that was a wildly dangerous law. Fortunately and unfortunately, I was right.
But tobacco is harmful and not illegal and it's been highly regulated and found to have liability.
comment in response to
post
Ditto. The Race Realists coming into liberal spaces and watching them pull a few growing accounts rightward did it for me.
comment in response to
post
I'm a card-carrying member of @eff.org . They have great points about why the Take it Down act is bad. What the UK is doing to encryption. But I struggle with the have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too game of promoting harmful content and also denying knowledge it's there or ability to better control it.
comment in response to
post
I am a programmer and I'm fine we sell tools that can injure. So does Home Depot. I'm a lot iffier about when the product injures by design or is indifferent to it. But again, ethics or legality I'm not sure. Bookstore or tobacco company?
comment in response to
post
I mean, truth is I'm not sure myself if I'm making an ethical or legal argument. I'm no lawyer and don't know case law. I think if someone asks for a book on health and you give them garbage that's legal. If they ask for an art book and you give them CSAM that's not, and 230 knows that.
comment in response to
post
But at some point if a new mother comes in asking for books on sick babies and you decide the best thing to do is sell her a book on horse pills because it's the most profitable and then you go 🤷♂️ when she actually listens to it, well...
comment in response to
post
I spent the early 2000s on SomethingAwful. I have a lot of tolerance for letting people say bad and wrong things and for hosting such speech. First Amendment.
comment in response to
post
Now, if you're running a store where any random person can drop off their zine, you grab a keyword from every paragraph, decide what it's about, and recommend the things based on those keywords, pushing extra hard the ones with the best profit margins...I'm actually not sure what liability is there.
comment in response to
post
Yeah, that analogy is clear that if someone asks for legal content and you give them exactly what they ask for you have no liability for what they do with it.
1/
comment in response to
post
Also, I have zero desire to be blocked :-) I pushed this line of thinking too hard on Twitter years ago (I was pissed at Meta at the time during COVID for promoting bullshit and downplaying actual information) and that was the result. I enjoy reading you.
comment in response to
post
We can say that §230 doesn't protect illegal speech but both of those situations seem to hinge on a lack of actual knowledge or intent...but businesses profiting off the results.
It's clearer to me why a website shouldn't be responsible for simple misinformation even algorithmically promoted.
comment in response to
post
I just don't get how Meta can have a "more money / less money" engagement knob that their business model relies on, and yet they're completely immune from the impacts of turning it.
comment in response to
post
I'd love to read it. Force v. Facebook and the Kristof article on PornHub have always confused me: at what point does an algorithm go from automated moderation to something akin to arguing a ransom letter of magazine letters isn't original speech?
comment in response to
post
Although, I think it's pretty reasonable to say the world is kinder to immature women than it is to immature men.
comment in response to
post
They're common tropes about how women are childish.
The problem with this line of thinking is that it's very easy to forget how many man-childs are out there. You can't consider yourself a reasonable man and act like all women are a trope of the worst ones.
comment in response to
post
What's weirdest about this is it's an order from Lowes so I had assumed a national call center and then I remembered at 781 area code. The number could be spoofed, but there's a chance this guy just doesn't believe that intelligent life exists outside 128.
comment in response to
post
You say that but the Nazis came to power on a third of the vote by getting a center right party to ally with them against the Left.
I think here in the US we gotta acknowledge this wasn't some blow-in fluke vote: they've been building this infrastructure for at least a decade.
comment in response to
post
Says it is. Source fallout.fandom.com/wiki/United_...
I definitely remember the plot angle from the start of Fallout 1 including the executions in this screenshot but the Fallout 3 loading screen this says its from only vaguely rings a bell.
comment in response to
post
Another he shared:
www.americamagazine.org/faith/2025/0...
comment in response to
post
FWIW, GPO apparently was 1977!
comment in response to
post
I have a relative who has been super happy about Windfall Elimination being removed, having worked ten years private sector and 30+ public.
The Bend is the whole reason that and GPO existed and people don't seem to even get that it exists.
comment in response to
post
That has a logic to it for sure although today I think we're way over 15% on the high end. I've never looked into where the "bends" in the benefit formula came from but the interaction of the bends and tax seems politically toxic if we tried to do it today.
comment in response to
post
Heh. I didn't know that myself nor had I seen this rationale:
"Lawmakers chose the 85-percent figure because actuaries estimated that no Social Security beneficiary had paid (through withholding from his or her paychecks) for more than 15 percent of his or her own benefits."
comment in response to
post
(OK, maybe that's not a "backup of humanity" against extinction-level asteroids but I guarantee that's an easier problem to solve in the ocean than in space)
comment in response to
post
I have not! I just read the synopsis. Does it get into this?
I've long felt if we want more space to expand and grow more food, we have a whole continental shelf. It has sunlight, (water-bound) oxygen, and gravity.
But we stopped talking about Thiel wanting to go to an oil rig and now it's Mars.
comment in response to
post
Yeah, but then we'd have to admit Social Security is welfare instead of people thinking they've paid for their own retirement by saving 15% (less, for many old people as the rate has gone up) at inflation-level "interest" for 45 years and living off it for 25 more.
comment in response to
post
I figured they'd just target us prime-working-age Millennials to pay for this, but I guess we're going to outright gutting the government...but the reality is, it's not particularly the Boomers' fault this time we got Trump.
comment in response to
post
You seem to know a lot about this: is my understanding that in 1983, the Boomers--then entering their prime working years and not wanting to pay more income tax--started taxing their grandparents' SS benefits, and now that they're old, they want that tax removed?
comment in response to
post
Social Security's math is not that complicated at this level...but if you tell the average person it is not sustainable as-is and has constantly required higher funding, they refuse to hear it. It has to be some villain's fault.
And we wonder why tech bros no longer believe in Democracy.
comment in response to
post
Are we supposed to take this as some sort of snark about Musk's demand for five bullet points? Cute. Passive-aggressive sarcasm is for teenagers and others without real power.