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Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down

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Re: Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down

#271
post #54

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> It concerns me that AWS booted a site off their platform for speech issues I'm sorry for the caps but you and a host of others are forgetting something repeatedly and it's getting fairly annoying: AMAZON HAS FREE SPEECH RIGHTS TOO. Just as Parler does, and you do, and I do, and Twitter does, and the various owners and employees of these organizations do, and on and on. It's Free Speech all the way down. And a funda…

I feel like if some religious nut has to make a gay wedding cake then Amazon has to serve websites for their political enemies. This is a moral statement and not a legal one.

You don't think there is a moral difference in changing how we interact with someone based upon their behavior vs. changing how we interact with someone based upon an intrinsic property of who they are?

Those seem like fundamentally different moral scenarios.

Re: Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down

#272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The capitol stuff was organised on Facebook, not Parler: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25776225 What about the Summer violence from BLM? Dozens of people died, with Twitter being used as a communications hub to attack specific individuals.

Dozens is a bit disingenuous, and you are comparing a protest movement over the course of many months involving up to 20 million people. How does this have any relevance to anything?

I am not trying to be funny, but disparate treatment.

Re: Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down

#273
post #232

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Companies should do what their owners want per capitalism. If that's politics, the company should do politics.

Sure, but the political system should not be such that the owners of the companies have anything to gain by wanting their companies to do politics.

The only way that could ever be the case is if taxes ceased to exist. Until that point, there will always be lobbying for lower taxes.

Your objection really seems to be engagement in culture wars.

Re: Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down

#274
post #158

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"popular vote" has absolutely no bearing on anything in this discussion. The US is not a direct democracy, it is a representative republic. The 50 senators who represent semi-conservative states represent the same number of states as the 50 who represent more liberal states.

> The US is not a direct democracy, it is a representative republic. I'm aware of that. And that structure favors one side more than another. This is not a controversial statement - the numbers (y'know, facts and logic) back that up. States are lines on a map. In the current setup they have more influence than the actual people living in those states. Do you seriously not see how that can lead to disproportionate rep…

> States are lines on a map.

Saying this doesn't make them less important, it just shows a childish attitude. Local and State governments and representation are important parts of the Republic.

Dollars are just numbers in a database. Will you give me all your money? Or is it only certain "made-up" things that are important to you?

> Do you seriously not see how that can lead to disproportionate representation of some views?

Yes, and straight up popular vote leads to the same thing. That's why we have a system that is a combination of popular vote and state vote.

* The People are represented by the House.

* The States are represented by the Senate.

* Both are represented by the President.

Seems like a well-balanced system to me.

Re: Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down

#275
post #231

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Because the insurrection on capitol hill provides the cover of legitimacy for people to act in a manner that also may be very inconsistent and politicized. Jeff Bezos owns news publications, he has a worldview and likes to flaunt it to some extent, moreover, these systems are prone to the possibility of arbitrary, and often political decisions. Note that historically, rich dudes bought newspapers to attack their poli…

> Literally Emamnuel Macron and Angela Merkel have spoken out about the arbitrary 'banning' of groups and individuals, and because there is an 'imminent consideration over here in the US' doesn't abnegate our broader concerns about arbitrary banning. This is somewhat amusing to me, as Germany is a country that bans neo-Nazi political parties and makes Holocaust denial a federal crime, whereas both actions are seen as…

Well, starting with the fact that there was 80M dead in Europe and the entire country was flattened (it's real in Germany, not just something we see on documentaries). So 'that banned group' are not just some bumpkins.

But also, governments come and go but there is at least some degree of representation of the people.

I have absolutely zero trust in Jeff Bezos to do anything other than what he wants to think he can do or get away with.

I don't fully trust governments either, but at least there are degrees of transparency, courts, etc.

Re: Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down

#276
post #239

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Banning speech by half the population is not "soft power" anymore in the world we live in.

When did half the population have their speech banned?

The whole argument is so silly. Trump could snap a finger and have cameras ready to air on national TV whatever he wanted to say.

If Valve bans me from Steam for my language is that also violation of my free speech or is it their right to protect their platform?

Re: Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down

#277
post #71

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Can you explain?

Sure, I'll circle back with a longer form response in a few minutes. In the meantime, I find it interesting that people think down voting my comment will intimidate me into changing the analysis. That's not how legal judgment works. That's not how anything works...

I downvoted you not because I thought it would intimidate you, but because it lacked any content at all. You just asserted something without explanation. It was a low quality post. The way you respond to the downvotes now also makes me think you are not even arguing in good faith, but just doing performative victimization.

Re: Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down

#278
post #268
post #257

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> I worked for a very small hosting company and we had to automatically detect and remove bitcoin miners because they were so common, I can't even imagine what AWS deals with. Huh? Why shouldn't I be able to mine bitcoins on AWS? What's the point of paying to use people's computers if I can't use them for what I want? I pay AWS because I have money and they have servers and I want to pay them money in exchange for us…

Maybe you can on AWS, I don't know, but it's also not the point. The purpose of our service was primarily for web hosting, and it ran on VMs, so one person consuming all the CPU time would negatively impact other customers. It's not that we morally objected, it's that it wasn't the business we wanted to provide, and it was against the TOS. Which is the same conclusion the judge came to in this Parler case.

> so one person consuming all the CPU time would negatively impact other customers

So charge them more or limit their compute? If you are in the business of renting out compute resources then you need to spell out what the terms are. It's like renting out your car and then getting mad when someone drives it 2000 miles in one weekend. You need to spell out: "Yep, it's $50 a day, and you get 100 miles per day. Every mile after that is $1. If you want to drive the car further it's $100 per day" not "It's $50 per day unless we don't like what you are doing then we'll revoke the car arbitrarily"

> It's not that we morally objected, it's that it wasn't the business we wanted to provide, and it was against the TOS

Ok and what was the clause in the ToS they violated? I sure hope it was more specific than the vague arbitrary clause Amazon used to axe Parler.

Re: Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down

#279
post #264
post #253

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Those are... rather onerous HW requirements. Do you really need 20k cores to run a small-medium size social network? Asking because I have personal running a 40-50 million monthly users file sharing site on less than a tenth of that and most of it was done with Rails (itself not the most minimalist of frameworks).

Yeah, those requirements are quite steep for what Parler does. That being said, it is actually incredibly hard to scale any product that sees a sudden massive influx of users, media attention, and conflict like this. I mean this from a purely technical standpoint. If your customer base is doubling every few weeks, that's simply not enough time to hire more engineers, onboard them, and get their resources focused on o…

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Re: Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down

#280

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> The electoral college actually favored Biden this time I think we're operating on different definitions of "favored". The definition I'm using (and which most of the English-speaking world uses) is "have a fundamental advantage". He won the electoral college narrowly. He won the popular vote handsomely. That's a sign of a thumb on the scale in a pretty fundamental way.

> He won the electoral college narrowly. He won the popular vote handsomely. He didn't though. He won 57% of the electoral vote and 51% of the popular vote.

You're a pretty famous person, so we know you are smart enough to know that nothing above 50% matters.

"Favor" only matters to extent it helps a candidate get over 270 EV.

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