Extortion. "Squeegy kids" use the implicit threat of violence against you or your car to extort payment from drivers. The "service" they provide is worse than worthless, they make your car filthy. They're an absolute menace.
I don't see why cities should have to resort to paying them off. They surely violate numerous laws with their scheme, anything from doing business without a license to jaywalking. But of course to enforce such laws you need cops to chase them down and arrest them in broad daylight, which risks bad optics for the city if the cops get too overzealous. Still, better policing is the correct answer.
I seriously doubt paying them off even could work. Why would they not take the payment then do it anyway? You'd still need cops to arrest them to know which didn't stay true to the agreement.
It’s just an example of spineless politicians pandering to a whiny people and unable to manage the police force.
In my city we’ve become inundated with sad sack beggars at intersections. Many of them are part of organized rings of hustlers. Our mayor wants to respect their feeling or whatever and police are not allowed to engage them. In one case, there was a full on brawl on an exit ramp between rival groups before the cops were cleared to break it up.
No it does not, bullies and criminals are not seeking to optimize their cash flow. I know this is just for squigees and other petty annoyances, but it's a slippery slope to paying people to just not commit crimes.
Have you lived in the ghetto or in extremely poor neighborhoods? I grew up in Oakland, Modesto, and Fresno, with gang banging friends and having to deal with these other gangsters not in your crew, who would like nothing more than to beat you up, steal your cash, and brag to their friends about commit their crimes. Those who commit crimes will commit crimes on the whim, jump you and cash, and never once have foresight on how their present actions have future consequences.
Empower bullies and lowlifes, and they'll continuously pick on you and bully you and others.
> Have you lived in the ghetto or in extremely poor neighborhoods?
Yes.
> Those who commit crimes will commit crimes on the whim
The vast majority of the time, that "whim" is "I need cash to buy dinner". This is especially true of people squeegeeing cars.
I would much rather see full-fledged safety nets like UBI, but paying people such that they are no longer dependent on nuisance or outright crime for survival is a start.
Yes, they would. Unless you're also proposing some enforcement mechanism where you detect defectors. But, if you could reliably detect them, why not just stop them?
Unless the police are out there chasing them down and establishing an arrest record to show they previously lied, why would they be denied payments in the future?
>I don't see why cities should have to resort to paying them off.
you're always paying someone. You can enact punitive and harsh measures and put kids and teenagers into the justice system where they'll cost 10x as much if not more including in their adulthood, or you can draw a baseline in and simply pay them enough money to not resort to this quasi-begging. Couple this with an attendance requirement to go to school and you're probably saving yourself countless of dollars so I don't really see the issue.
It's basically analogous to war on drugs type policies. Instead of just providing addicts with clean needles and drugs you spent ten times as much and wasting police resources on chasing harmless people around. It's moralizing instead of effective policy
That was a means to an end, not the end itself. That's the point. The goal of copyright has always been very clear. It was for encouraging the creation of new works.
Done through the means of ensuring that the original artist may profit off of their own hard work and no one else can steal the hard work and profit off it. The abuse you're talking about is the extension of the same mechanism that allows rights owners to profit for much longer periods of time, which actually discourages the creation of new works. This can all be true because there aren't binary solutions and things need nuance.
Copyright is abused in may ways that go far beyond perpetually extended copyright protections. The DMCA has enabled copyright to be used as a weapon to silence criticism. Companies have created a revenue stream out of sending DMCA notices demanding that people (innocent or otherwise) pay settlements now or else face long and expensive court battles. Creators are threatened with lawsuits or dragged through the courts on highly questionable copyright grounds just to bankrupt them and prevent them from being a competitor.
Recently, the media industry has taken to suing ISPs for billions if they refuse to permanently stop offering service to customers who have been repeatedly accused of violating copyright. Without any court finding you guilty or any actual proof that a violation took place, if you are accused multiple times and your ISP doesn't disconnect your service forever they could be fined out of existence. Most of the ISPs sued so far have settled out of court, but the media industry has been winning in the courts as well.
Copyright is regularly abused to do things that go far beyond what it was intended to, and often to the determent of the creation of new works. Most of the people hurt by such abuses have no ability to fight it, and very little hope of actually winning even if they try.
Most of the copyrights nowadays are held by large conglomerates anyways and not artists, sure that's not a nuanced point of view but copyright isn't nuanced either
The nuance is with respect to the above conversation. I don't think anyone here is disagreeing that the system is being abused and that the copyright holders are abused by large conglomerates. I don't think anyone is arguing against the points you're bringing up.
Too old, fat, physically disabled people, etc. can have a job and turn that job into petrol to feed their cars. OTOH they can't drive a bicycle. That's not very egalitarian.
2. See 1, up to a point. For morbidly obese people, see 1. so you don't become morbidly obese.
> physically disabled people
See 1. For serious disability, most of those people can't drive, either. More than that, cars still have their uses, so I agree. Let's promote cars PRIMARILY for seriously disabled people. Abled bodied people, public transit, bikes, foot/electric scooters.
> OTOH they can't drive a bicycle. That's not very egalitarian.
Entire countries can.
China was initially built on bikes. As was Vietnam. As is the Netherlands.
Countries which are some of the most egalitarian in the world.
Let's not pretend cars are not the middle and upper class comfortable transportation devices. Cars are very, very convenient. Convenience is amazing, but it's also a slow poison.
You can't really be morbidly obese, for example, if you don't have access to a car. I mean, you probably can, but the odds of that happening are so low it's not worth taking about that scenario.
There are also people who can't drive a car for medical reasons, and I guess there are more of those. You'd have to come with actual numbers to convince me.
There's less traffic on the road for those who _need_ to drive. Plus, in places like the Netherlands you see a lot of elderly/disabled people riding around on the bike lanes on mobility scooters [1].
If the policy is defined then I don't see a problem with that. The issue with Twitter is that Musk openly tweeted that he's a free speech absolutist and even said the things he now started to ban, were allowed.
I think Musk and his followers must realize that free speech is a marketing campaign, and Elon's hypocrisy on going back on free speech is embracing the reality of things.
Musk said the ElonJet account was allowed even though he thought it was a "direct personal safety risk".
He went completely against that and journalists that reported on it when he banned the account and the journalists.
Keep in mind that none of this was "doxxing". It's publicly available information what Elon's plane is and where it's flying. He just woke up on the wrong side of bed and decided to ban, perhaps to see how far he could push things and whether his "fans" would support him.
He then starts a Twitter poll to democratise the decision to unban the journalists. The result is to unban them now. He didn't like that result and did another poll, except with the news that he was doing it again, the poll was even more in favour of unbanning them now.
He's a hypocrite deciding what to do based on what some brown nosing fan tweets him or what he dreamt of that night.
>Keep in mind that none of this was "doxxing". It's publicly available information what Elon's plane is and where it's flying
99% of a dox is taking public information from obscure sources and making it easily accessible in one place. Doxxing can be sharing public information about someone without their permission. Being public doesn't make it not doxxing.
So if I used publicly available information (property tax records, court records, vehicle registration records, whatever) to post Brian K. White's home address, it "wouldn't be doxxing"?
(For the bystanders: There is no other included letter or note, just this unsolicited package containing a bare, although apparently new and unused, surgical mask with no explaination and no known-to-me sender. The string was cut unwittingly while cutting open the envelope.)
So you have uncovered some never-was-covered public data from my full-real-name-middle-initial-and-all handle, and proved that some people out there are willing to mis-use public data, and that you are one of them, and I am not.
Strange point to want to make.
I wonder if HN has any sort of official stance on that sort of action @dang ?
Do you really agree that making the public location of Elon's plane more public and easily accessible is doxxing though? I get it if it was the real time location of Elon within 100 meters, or his personal house in a forum with the intention to do harm or something, but the location of a plane that narrows your location down to a city and requires government grade anti air missiles to realistically expect to take down while in flight? The increased security risk of the latter seems like a rounding error to me, which makes the justification for removal very suspect because the thing it does dramatically increase is the public knowledge of how much of a climate hypocrite the guy is flying as much as he does.
Yes, I definitely consider it doxxing. Whether doxxing someone should be allowed is another question and twitter for years has decided that doxxing is against the rules and doxxers typically get shadow banned.
The information shared was not from an obscure source nor was it from a site that wasn’t easily accessible. It was the mirroring of 1 piece of information from 1 location to another location.
I think the fundamental problem, if we ignore Musk's hypocrisy is that Musk appears to be using his newfound moderator abilities capriciously to silence people he dislikes, without any sort of standard for behavior. With the plane thing it seems like he invented a rule to justify his behavior, and it gives the impression he will continue inventing rules whenever it suits him, not because these rules are good, but because he needs a rule to justify banning someone who annoyed him. And eventually he'll be in the classic corrupt regulator situation where he has a rule to ban pretty much anyone who annoys him, and they will be selectively applied only to people who annoys him.
He needs to show he's a trustworthy moderator who won't behave like this, and his behavior makes it pretty hard to believe he will be.
People did in fact have a problem with Twitter too.
It's just more obvious for Musk since 1) he prioritized himself over doing a more general sweep including more than what affects him alone and 2) he has been obnoxiously vocal for multiple years now, painting a massive target and begging the public to troll him.
At this point, this formulation of "free speech" complaint is nothing but a dog-whistle, "they're not interested in platforming my racist trolling, wah! So much for the tolerant left."
Which is true, but also, I don't care, and I'm happy with it, because we're better off and other speech flourishes.
Realistically, each Mastodon instance sets its own policies. Most publish lists of the instances they've banned. When I looked at those lists a month ago, it seemed like the median instance banned 6-10 other instances. Typically, the banned instances included a particular instance which publishes a lot of Nazi symbols, which are illegal in many European countries. Other frequently-banned instances included ones with lots of NSFW content, including a now-extinct instance used by sex workers. Also, spammy instances got banned a lot.
However, a handful of Mastodon instances, mostly ones used by frequently harassed groups, banned dozens of other instances. This was one of their major selling points to their users: "Join here, and we'll provide a curated experience with fewer harassers."
No instance that I saw banned linking to Twitter, and I can't think of any instance that banned journalists from major mainstream papers.
But the thing about Mastodon is that if you really want to talk to Nazi wannabes, you can always set up your own instance. However, many people may choose not to talk with you, because many people dislike wannabe Nazis and their buddies and don't invite them to the cool parties. Almost every worthwhile social space has always had rules about who's not invited.
Elon Musk has every right to shout loudly about freedom of speech, and then ban journalists and links to competitors. And his critics have every right to mock him for this.
It seems reasonable to define the "main Fediverse" as the set of servers that most other servers federate with. There are distributed blacklists of servers like https://joinfediverse.wiki/FediBlock, and I would not consider the servers listed there to be on the "main Fediverse" since they cannot communicate with many of the larger Fediverse servers.
The fediverse to which the most popular instances, such as mastodon.social, belong.
All the instances in the main fediverse have practically the same moderation rules and if you don't apply them to your instance they ban you and stop federating with you.
I think those ideas are not as contradictory as you assert.
small private forums also had some draconian moderation (well, some of them did for sure), but the key point was that they were small, targeted and competitive with each other.
Too draconian, and people leave; too loose and people abuse.
The thing is, you kinda know what you're in for with small forums (or in this case mastadon instances), the servers themselves do more to say what they're targeting and what niche they have; they do not pretend to be an apolitical platform or to not have opinions.
That's the major difference, you can go to other Mastadon instances and find people you enjoy being around. With Twitter there are some hidden "rules" (which used to align with the US west coast ideals, and now seem to align more with the trumpy right-wing thing), with Mastadon it's more likely that you know what the rules are.
Yes, but the main difference is that twitter (and all the centralised social media players) are trying to have their cake and eat it.
> You can't prosecute us for things that are published as we are a platform for communication, we're not responsible for what's communicated!
> We can moderate and ban you for saying things we disagree with based on what we interpret our "rules" to be (in social media's case: whatever the West-Coast likes and Copyright violations)
With Mastodon (or phpbb forums of yore) the former is false, so it's at least internally consistent, and of course you have the choice to move away, it's not 1 moderation style for the whole planet across all cultures.
Completely agree! A world with lots of private property that people can enter and exit freely is one compatible with liberalism. A giant privately owned public square is a terrible idea.
Mastodon used to appeal mostly to the fringes that Twitter never served properly. That means queer people, but it also means Nazis, including the self-described ones. So having good moderation is quite essential to a good experience.
Users flagged your comment. They were correct to do so, because it's not the sort of discussion this site is supposed to be for.
Joking isn't the problem; the problem is lazy internet snark/trope/flamebait style comments. Users here are generally quick to flag those because we all know from experience what sort of low-quality threads they lead to.
