121–130 of 192 posts
I'd like to take this opportunity to remind everyone to read Cory Doctorow's novel Attack Surface and to think deeply about the message contained within. He has something significant to say, IMO, about the need for people like "us" (that is, people who care deeply about these issues) to use our knowledge, resources, skills, etc. to help effect changes in public policy through the legislative process as opposed to try…
Uh, that's not going to fly. We use a VPN to enable remote users to access our internal network for things we don't want exposed to the public at large. And we're not a tech company. This really sounds like someone who has no fucking clue trying to legislate away all the loopholes to their other shitty legislation.
How it works in Russia, if your corporate VPN is blocked by mistake, you can just submit the application to whitelist it, providing all the necessary documentation (we have pretty advanced e-government system so you can submit it online), and with high probability it would be accepted. If your VPN gets accidentally blocked again, all you need is to write to an on-duty officer and it will be unblocked.
What if the pretty advanced e-government system decides it will not be unblocked?
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>relatively little friction That word "relatively" is doing a lot of work in this phrase. 50 options sounds great until you think about the realities of it. As someone who's moved around a half dozen times, shared "values and beliefs" pales in comparison to the practical concerns of jobs, family, climate.
Still easier to move country inside the EU, as an example.
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Fair point, though I still think it's a pretty good backstop if the worst thing a tyrannical government can do to you is force you to move 100 miles.
For context, states within 100mi of Salt Lake City are: - Wyoming - Idaho 100mi doesn't get you into the population center of either state. the western US is BIG, really you're talking like 1k miles to get anywhere that's meaningfully different from utah. Depending on where you live in utah, that might not get you out of the state either.
It's true that both cases will get you to parts of the state that are probably more conservative than Salt Lake City, or in Nevada's case, have literally nothing there. But Boulder is about an 8 hour drive from Salt Lake City, and has a dramatically different culture and political climate. If you look at past instances of people fleeing political repression, most of them would be thrilled to be able to drive a day without crossing a national border and live in a completely different situation.
Text is protected by first amendment.
Best of luck with your unconstitutional ban on speech.
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You seem to forget that those states tend to have rural (red) populations that get affected by the laws the larger population in the cities pass at the state level.
I am trying to think of examples of blue state majorities oppressing rural populations. Allowing gays to marry if they want, does that count as oppressing rural Christians?
On the other hand, in addition to this draconian (and almost certainly unconstitutional, not that that's worth much these days) law, we also have a legislature that absolutely refuses to do anything the people want.
Back in 2018, Utah voters forced Prop. 2, an initiative to legalize medical cannabis, onto the ballot. The ballot initiative passed with 52% of the vote and polled with even higher support. Nevertheless, the Utah legislature, who somehow always knows better than the voters, replaced Prop 2 with their own, heavily modified and far more restrictive version, HB 3001.https://ballotpedia.org/Utah_Proposition_2,_Medical_Marijuan...
Also in 2018, voters passed Prop 4, which created an independent redistricting commission to create fair maps. The Utah legislature promptly gutted the commission, passing HB200 in an attempt to continue creating heavily gerrymandered maps. Fortunately, the Utah supreme court ruled that the legislature had overstepped their constitutional authority with HB200 and required the legislature to draw new maps or accept those proposed by the committee. When they refused, a judge put one of the committee's maps in place. Utah Republicans have been whining about this ever since. They tried to run a petition of their own, but could only gather signatures through fraud and deceit, with many signers reporting that signature gatherers told them they were signing in support of the judge's ruling when the opposite was true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Utah_Proposition_4
And then, on the other hand, driven by Utah's highly conservative Mormon mono-culture, there is a rich and thriving counter-culture ready and waiting to accept folks who don't fit the standard mold.
This is the next part of the national Orwellian surveillance system that is "age verification". The first part installs spyware in every operating system. The second part makes it illegal to work around it or find any alternative means of privacy. The final step is a government-mandated ID for logging into these devices with the OS controls, so the government can track everything you do on every device. This is the m…
We (in the tech industry) did this to ourselves. The internet my kids have is very different than the internet I had in the 90s. Algorithmically optimized short form video or other content in an infinite scroll is hurting children so much it borders on abuse. They have no brain capability to resist the micro-dopamine hits we are so scientifically delivering to them. The biggest tragedy is that it hits the lower incom…
I have no idea why tbh! But I think an age gated internet is far worse a solution than parents simply enabling device management on mobile phones and filtering on their home networks.
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You seem to forget that those states tend to have rural (red) populations that get affected by the laws the larger population in the cities pass at the state level.
I am trying to think of examples of blue state majorities oppressing rural populations. Allowing gays to marry if they want, does that count as oppressing rural Christians?
ADA regulations are good example, and also a common punching bag of the rural right in a blue state. Making sure everything is handicapped-accessible is important in a restaurant in San Francisco with a visitor pool of about 7 millions. It makes zero sense when it is the only restaurant in a town of 100, none of whom are disabled*. Nobody's available to build the necessary accommodations, and nobody's going to use them.
Gun regulations too. When you come in contact with thousands of people routinely and some of them might wish to kill you, limiting the ability to buy guns is important. When hunting and scaring off wild animals is a large part of your lifestyle, you can go a week without seeing another human, and the local police department takes 2 hours to get to you? Now you're just taking away essential tools for survival.