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Amused Cynicism
Personal blog · cabalamat.wordpress.compoliticsphilosophy
Amused Cynicism is a personal blog at cabalamat.wordpress.com about politics and philosophy. Since 2008, 3 different Hacker News readers have linked it 28 times. The last post was in 2020, but the archive is still widely read.
28mentions?
3HN people?
2008–2022first – last linked?
Too few sampled comments (7) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog for its argument for a broadband tax and a content syndication/payment system as an alternative to advertising-funded content, cited in micropayment and ad-model threads.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 7 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Humans are self-serving and group-serving hypocrites. Democracy is the worst system of government, except for all the others. Not responsible for Brexit.
Most-linked posts?
- /2009/01/27/a-broadband-tax-for-the-uk/2 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2009-03-03
What Hacker News says?
Richard Stallman: The Internet Sharing Licence (2012) https://stallman.org/articles/internet-sharing-license.en.ht... Phil Hunt (Pirate Party UK): A Broadband Tax for the UK (2009) https://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/a-broadband-tax-f... Myself: Universal Payment Syndication (2014) https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modes... Joseph Stiglitz: "Knowledge as a Global Public Good" http://s1.do…
Comment linking /2009/01/27/a-broadband-tax-for-the-uk/
on “The Great Cannon has been deployed again”Submitted Twitter gets message order wrong as a story · 5 points
HN discussionMicropayments have been busted down many times, though I find Nick Szabo's arguments the most convincing: http://szabo.best.vwh.net/micropayments.html Clay Shirky's got some good additions. http://www.shirky.com/writings/fame_vs_fortune.html http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2000/12/19/micropayments.ht... The solution I'm leaning strongly toward is a large-scale, preferably universal, content syndication / payment sy…
Comment linking /2009/01/27/a-broadband-tax-for-the-uk/
on “Brave: Brendan Eich's clean-ads browser startup”Submitted What sort of people support the Pirate Party? as a story · 2 points
HN discussion99% of online advertisers give the rest a bad name. Not only is this why online advertising is ultimately doomed, but it's why we hugely and desperately and badly need to find another way of paying for content. The alternatives for the moment are gratis, patronage, "native advertising", and subscriptions. Few of these strike me as ultimately scalable. I've been a fan of Phil Hunt, of Pirate Party UK, and his broadba…
Comment linking /2009/01/27/a-broadband-tax-for-the-uk/
on “Yahoo Homepage – Now Featuring Extra-Scammy Scams”One of my motives for building meowcat2[1] is that Twitter doesn't do threading very well[2]. (Another motive is I don't want the web to be controlled by a few big corporations). [1]: https://github.com/cabalamat/meowcat2 [2]: https://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2018/03/04/twitter-gets-mess...
Comment linking /2018/03/04/twitter-gets-message-order-wrong/
on “How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t”Multiple reasons, though many boil down to Gresham's Law or similar: it's difficult to assess the quality of information, particularly when disaggregated. Most media advances have occurred through bundling rather than unbundling options: magazines, books (collected parchments, monthly serials), subscriptions. Even advertising-supported broadcast and Web models work by aggregating product, though in this case, eyebal…
Comment linking /2009/01/27/a-broadband-tax-for-the-uk/
on “Locking the Web Open: A Call for a Distributed Web”Very much this. If you're not familiar with Adam Curtis's BBC documentary, The Century of the Self , on Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud (whom Bernays effectively made), and Anna Freud, as well as the influence of advertising, "public relations" (a term coined by Bernays), and propaganda (the term he coined PR to avoid) on the public, corporations, and govenrment. Also Jerry Mander's Four Arguments for the Elimination…
Comment linking /2009/01/27/a-broadband-tax-for-the-uk/
on “Is Advertising Morally Justifiable? The Importance of Protecting Our Attention”I can't speak for them; my viewpoint is that since information goods are non rivalrous and non excludable, they are likely to be underproduced, and therefore it makes sense to fund them from public subsidy. But how to channel taxes to produce the information goods people want? My proposal is to set up a series of "Content Compensation Funds" and taxpayers get to choose which fund their taxes go to -- http://cabalama…
Comment linking /2009/01/27/a-broadband-tax-for-the-uk/
on “70% of the Public Finds Piracy Socially Acceptable”> The goal of this experiment is to take away lofty ideals and ask practical questions: just what are we supposed to do that is going to help? Just what really helps and does not hurt poor people? So pick a strategy and pay for it. I can think of two things the government could do that would help poor people, while not costing anything (this is in the UK, but most probably applies to other countries): 1. Housing. Ho…
Comment linking /2009/05/13/reforming-the-benefit-system/
on “Why it's expensive to be poor”> How could that ever be distributed fairly? One possibility: http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/a-broadband-tax-fo...
Comment linking /2009/01/27/a-broadband-tax-for-the-uk/
on “Germany Increases 'You Are All Pirates' Tax On Solid State Media By 2000%”Let's motivate for a content syndication alternative. https://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/a-broadband-tax-f... Advertising is a net negative on far too many fronts.
Comment linking /2009/01/27/a-broadband-tax-for-the-uk/
on “Twitter Reports Weak Earnings and the Stock Is Crashing”> Other savvy people realize that the way things are going, making any kind of living at creating information goods is going to be increasingly difficult, so they go do other things. That's true. When goods are both non-rivalrous and non-excludable, they tend to be underproduced in a market economy. One solution would be for the state to produce such goods (e.g. in the UK, the BBC). Another possible solution would b…
Comment linking /2009/01/27/a-broadband-tax-for-the-uk/
on “Megaupload Founder Goes From Arrest to Cult Hero”Sarcasm is almost certainly AI-complete. Consider this post: https://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2018/01/31/royal-mail-announ... which is pretty easy for a human to tell is sarcastic, but would be difficult for an AI unless it actually understood it.
Comment linking /2018/01/31/royal-mail-announces-commemorative-brexit-stamps/
on “Like an AI Could Ever Spot Sarcasm”While Tumblr have every right to have whatever terms of service they like, this feels like a bait-and-switch to me. People and communities have become accustomed to allowing NSFW stuff on Tumblr, and if Tumblr had forbidden this from the get go these people who have set up somewhere else and not on Tumblr. What we need[1] is for social networks to be interoperable, with open data and protocols, so that a user can up…
Comment linking /2018/08/30/dont-nationalise-facebook-mandate-open-data-and-protocols/
on “Tumblr’s anti-porn algorithm is flagging basically everything as NSFW”> This is not just a CS issue, it's universal and the real damage is being done in the second tier establishments where grade inflation and dumbed-down courses are endemic. It's worse that that, because the dumbing down doesn't just effect universities. Secondary school science education has also been badly hit. The links that follow contain actual questions from GCSE science exams (note for non-British people: a GC…
Comment linking /2007/08/31/gcses-are-dumbed-down-and-getting-worse/
on “Why I am Not a Professor, or The Decline and Fall of the British University”A response by democracies could be to have a "freedom computing" initiative that ensures that freedom-enhancing technologies (anonymity and secure communications) are supported out-of-the-box in the protocols the internet runs, internet-based services and computing hardware. (I've written about this here: http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/07/07/using-computers-to... ) Then, authoritarian regimes would either have…
Comment linking /2009/07/07/using-computers-to-promote-freedom/
on “The Dictator's practical Internet guide to power retention”> What usually happens is that low performing teachers (or school systems) lobby to have the standardized exam watered down. In Britain, where the exams have been dumbed down significantly -- see http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2007/08/31/gcses-are-dumbed-d... or http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/03/30/do-you-see-with-yo... -- the main driver has been the ministry of education AFAICT, & their motive seems to be to…
Comment linking /2009/03/30/do-you-see-with-you-eyes-ears-nose-or-mouth/
on “Students Ace Textbook Physics While Struggling With Basic Understanding (video)”I blogged about a proposal like this some while ago: http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/07/07/using-computers-to... In the long term I'd like to see that every computer sold in the western world came configured as standard as freedom-enabled: this would mean mesh networking, encryption, a steganographic filing system, etc, out of the box. This would have two advantages. One is that western governments would find it…
Comment linking /2009/07/07/using-computers-to-promote-freedom/
on “Rushkoff proposes we abandon the Internet, and create something better”Given that both the government and the main opposition party broadly support these measures, it's probable that something along these lines will become law, unless there is widespread public opposition. There will be a general election in Britain within the next 8 months, so it may well happen after then. Incidently, I've recently started a Facebook group where anyone can pledge that they won't vote for any MP or ca…
Comment linking /2009/11/20/wont-vote-for-any-mp-who-supports-mandelsons-digital-economy-bill/
on “Britain's new Internet Law: Death of the Startup in Britain?”> The smartest members of the music industry (but not, alas, the influential ones) have said for years that the realistic way forward is a blanket licensing scheme: Each of us gets the right to download and play whatever we want, and in return we're legally obligated to pay an annual fee to some ASCAP-like organization that divides the money up among music publishers. Now, I like this idea, but the obvious downside…
Comment linking /2009/01/27/a-broadband-tax-for-the-uk/
on “Is AP Run By Idiots?”> if everyone is leeching and nobody is paying how will we get movies like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings or a game like Halo (they cost millions of $ to produce)? Whoever wins this trial, P2P filesharing is unlikely to go away. So I think filesharing will have a number of effects: Movies and games will get cheaper to produce People will make less financially ambitious movies and games Some movies and games will be fu…
Comment linking /2009/01/27/a-broadband-tax-for-the-uk/
on “The Pirate Bay Trial Day 10: Calls for Jail Time”The auto industry spends "a shitload of money" on lobbyists -- http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2008/12/10/if-car-adverts-wer...
Comment linking /2008/12/10/if-car-adverts-were-honest/
on “U.S. House passes $14 billion auto bailout bill”> What evidence is there for this supposition? To develop evidence, you would need to generate examples of vague, intangible but fundamentally valuable work. Since that is difficult, research on this subject is going to proceed slowly. Since it takes effort, on the part of the leadership, to define vague, intangible but fundamentally valuable work, doing so clearly has a cost associated with it. This extra cost is t…
Comment linking /2018/02/03/coase-carillion-and-the-perils-of-outsourcing/
on ““Signify forces people to work in the office””Celebrate Newtonmas instead... http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2008/11/26/on-december-25-a-s...
Comment linking /2008/11/26/on-december-25-a-saviour-was-born/
on “What do you buy a programmer for Xmas?”
