Notices by Different Than (guyjantic@infosec.exchange), page 2

@HauntedOwlbear Thank you for new music (to me)!

@HauntedOwlbear @MASTERBOOTRECORD For the ignorant among us, who don't even know who Hawkwind are, which song? I'm interested, now.

Insurance lobbyists have terrified us with visions of "welfare queens" wasting taxpayer money.

Thompson made $24M in 2022. I guarantee that came from the pockets of taxpayers.

That's $48K each to 500 welfare queens. Please give 500 welfare queens that money instead of a CEO. I don't care if those 500 people really are goldbricking leeches on the system. Those $24M would make 500 people's lives better and nobody's life any worse than the simple fact of paying a few bucks toward something that didn't benefit them personally. The CEO of a company like United makes tens of thousands of people's lives worse, and who knows how many people's lives infinitely worse by existing--his entire job is to funnel money to shareholders no matter who that hurts.

Waste money on 500 people committing small-scale fraud or one mega-rich person committing fraud and (arguably) bodily harm and murder on a much larger scale? No contest. Burning those $24M would be better for the world than giving it to the CEO of a health insurance company.

The "waste" in the system will always exist. If I get to choose where healthcare money is wasted, I want it wasted on 500 poor people a year who--at worst--simply make the money disappear into their lives, not on one rich sociopath who uses that money to hurt thousands of other people.

#brianthompson #healthcare #waste #fraud #incomeinequality

@cwebber @bnewbold I am absolutely not techy enough to understand most of what is going on here, but this paragraph smells fishy.

Note that I could be very, very wrong about this...

it feels like the message is "this is inevitable so we might as well do it." I know the person is implying "do it well" and "do it mindfully," but when these arguments are put forth in any domain I immediately wonder how inevitable the thing actually is.

Are huge public networks inevitable? And if they are, is the sorta-implication accurate that smaller networks are unable to do the "important" things the big public ones do? Is it inevitable that large, public, (centralized?) networks will do all the tasks better than smaller, decentralized ones?

I am probably not asking the right questions, and maybe the answer to these (and those I should be asking) is "yes." I just have a deep distrust of arguments in favor of some action when a major premise of that action is "it's inevitable, anyway." Maybe it's true sometimes? IDK, but there's a lot of very bad history with this kind of argument.

@bnewbold @cwebber OK, that metaphor I understand, at least. Is this not possible with a network-of-networks like the fediverse?

@shiri @bnewbold @cwebber Just a note: I was influenced by something @pluralistic (Cory Doctorow) wrote: I'm less concerned about power outages than capture. I've started to evaluate services by how easily they could be captured by someone I don't like. I think Bluesky can be captured easily, so it makes me uncomfortable. That isn't the same as saying it can't be useful or "good" (I'm not the one to evaluate that) but it's not what I want.

@icedquinn Or a 20something white Canadian guy I knew in the early 2000s. One night driving in the GTA he got pulled over by Mounties. He asked why he was pulled over and spent the next 10 minutes getting beaten to a pulp. After ER visits and a few days in hospital he decided that, yes, he would take his American gf up on her offer to go live in Virginia.

I absolutely don't think your cops have quite the same problems as our cops, but I do believe something I read years ago: police across the world tend to feel more kinship for other police than for citizens of their own countries.

@cwebber Or you could be like my students: getting a joke painfully explained to you because I'm annoyed that no one laughed at it.