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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I literally said at the start that authority isn’t just any inqeuality, and you didn’t address it.

    First of all that condition is as arbitrary as any other and you have no more authority to impose it than I do imposing mine. Secondly, I did address it: I limited the term authority specifically to social relations. Between people. Engels doesn’t.

    I would like to see you justify this incrsdibly broad definition.

    I already did:

    If you find yourself having it and are keen on proper praxis then you take on the responsibility to lift the other up as you are capable to do. I think for that reason alone I think it’s important to recognise it as authority, so that we are careful when using it, which, in the end, is unavoidable.

    In other words: It’s important to call bootmaker’s authority authority so that anarchists, bootmakers or apprentices or passers-by, are careful around that topic. Like a candle it’s not a thing that’s bad per se, but a thing which should not be left unattended. Eyes need to be on it.



  • Not really. They’ve been on the stabilising path for about two years now, removing stuff like dataframes from the default feature set to be able to focus on stabilising the whole core language, but 1.0 isn’t out yet and the minor version just went three digits.

    And it’s good that way. The POSIX CLI is a clusterfuck because it got standardised before it got stabilised. dd’s syntax is just the peak of the iceberg, there, you gotta take out the nail scissors and manicure the whole lawn before promising that things won’t change.

    Even in its current state it’s probably less work for many scripts, though. That is, updating things, especially if you version-lock (hello, nixos) will be less of a headache than writing sh could ever be. nushell is a really nice language, occasionally a bit verbose but never in the boilerplate for boilerplate’s sake way, but in the “In two weeks I’ll be glad it’s not perl” way. Things like command line parsing are ludicrously convenient (though please nushell people land collecting repeated arguments into lists).



  • In Germany the threshold is around 200 Euro, more precisely up to an import VAT of 10 Euros, where the state can’t even be bothered with the paperwork. 150 for import duties, though that doesn’t apply to alcohol, tobacco and perfume, unless everything is under 45 Euros and both sender and recipient are natural persons and no money has been exchanged.

    You don’t want to completely abolish thresholds as you don’t want to spend more money on collecting taxes and duties than you collect. The general strategy of the financial police seems to be to make paying duties as inconvenient for private citizens as possible, they’ll hold back the parcel and you have to go to them, probably a couple of towns over, and fetch it in person. The smart thing to do when buying from alibaba or such is to choose shipping from a EU warehouse as then all the import stuff has been dealt with by the seller.

    We still do have duties within the single market, btw, because different taxes on alcohol, tobacco, etc. Relevant mostly for ølvikingar.





  • Der IISS hat da ein dickes Ei gelegt und kaufkraftbereinigte mit nicht bereinigten Zahlen verglichen, Anders Puck Nielsen hat da ein Video

    Europa könnte Russland – gerade in seinem jetzigem Zustand – schon selbst schlagen aber bequem wäre das nicht. Wir wollen nicht in eine Situation rutschen wo wir uns zwischen Selbstverteidigung und unserer wirtschaftlichen Stellung in der Welt entscheiden müssen, Kriegswirtschaft ist allgemein nicht so dolle, deshalb ist es wichtig genügend auf Lager zu haben, und auch genügend Produktionskapazitäten, damit es im Ernstfall nicht eng wird weil erstmal nachgeholt werden muss. Merkt man ja jetzt auch ganz schön im Moment: Eigentlich müssten wir in der Lage sein der Ukraine mehrere Panzer am Tag zu schicken ohne auch nur in’s Schwitzen zu kommen.

    Viel Geld könnte man alleine schon durch gemeinsame Beschaffung sparen, denn bei Kriegsgerät kommt es gerne mal vor dass man für doppelt so viel Geld die zehnfache Menge kriegt, diese ganzen nationalen Kleinserien sind Geldverschwendung. Klar, wenn die Briten einen Panzer kaufen dann muss da ein Teekessel rein aber sowas kann man auch modular machen. Kannst auch weiterhin Deutschland auf Ketten und Frankreich auf Rädern haben aber die Türme sollten sich schon austauschen lassen.

    An einigen Ecken und Enden wird Rüstung allein deshalb jetzt etwas mehr kosten weil US-Systeme ersetzt werden müssen und dazu bei den Herstellern komplett neue Kompetenzen erschaffen werden müssen. SeaHawks z.B, gibt keinen anständigen europäischen Marineschrauber. Die deutschen fliegen schön halten aber leider keine salzige Luft aus, wo gibt’s die denn auch schon auf hoher See.


  • Authority is a power imbalance in a social relationship. It does not, in itself, imply domination or monopoly or expertise it happens each time two people are not on eye level regarding something, cannot, for whatever reason, relate to each other as complete equals. If you find yourself having it and are keen on proper praxis then you take on the responsibility to lift the other up as you are capable to do. I think for that reason alone I think it’s important to recognise it as authority, so that we are careful when using it, which, in the end, is unavoidable.

    We don’t need to be dominated in order to clean up our garbage. And the state is often really bad at collecting garbage, so just teach people that.

    Garbage collection is a non-issue over here, it just works. Couple of neighbouring municipalities own the company and it’s run on an at-cost basis with decent wages. If, suddenly, an anarchist revolution were to happen I’m quite sure the general arrangement would carry over.

    …and I took that as an example precisely because (over here) it just works, it’s a baby you wouldn’t want to throw out with the bathwater. I’m reasonably sure that wherever you’re living, you can think of such an example.


  • Knowledge is power, thus with a knowledge gap we have a power gap. As a bootmaker’s apprentice, my capacity to judge whether or not I’m getting taught proper technique is limited, I can alleviate that disparity by consulting more than one bootmaker, but ultimately that gap won’t vanish until I, myself, have mastered the craft.

    Authority is the socially-recognised power to dominate.

    …unnatural authority. Natural authority aka the bootmaker’s does not require social recognition. The bootmaker knows more than the apprentice no matter what society thinks, the imbalance is not socially caused.


    If you don’t want to call it authority, fine, but saying “as bad as Engels” is going too far IMO. While bootmaker’s authority does not rely on (wider) social recognition it is still a thing that happens in a social relationship, and not in the relationship of a worker to their alarm clock or whatnot. Though arguably in the modern world that line is also blurring, see technological paternalism, OTOH it’s just a reification of the relationship between the producer and consumer of a technology. It’s an unavoidable (unless you’re a primitivist) side-effect of increased division of labour in a technologically advancing society.

    Heck I’m myself on the page of “the state is a people, a territory, and organisation”, simply because the classical anarchist definition drifted miles and miles from the dictionary and the lived experience of people in liberal democracies, when you say “abolish the state” they hear “abolish garbage collection”. We can re-do terminology once in a while, it’s a good idea.


  • We actually did. Trouble being you need experts to feed and update the thing, which works when you’re watching dams (that doesn’t need to be updated) but fails in e.g. medicine. But during the brief time where those systems were up to date they did some astonishing stuff, they were plugged into the diagnosis loop and would suggest additional tests to doctors, countering organisational blindness. Law is an even more complex matter though because applying it requires an unbounded amount of real-world and not just expert knowledge, so forget it.


  • In Germany, if 14-18yolds make nude selfies then nothing happens, if they share it with their intimate partner(s) then neither, if someone distributes (that’s the key word) the pictures on the schoolyard then the law is getting involved. Under 14yolds technically works out similar just that the criminal law won’t get involved because under 14yolds can’t commit crimes, that’s all child protective services jurisdiction which will intervene as necessary. The general advise to kids given by schools is “just don’t, it’s not worth the possible headache”. It’s a bullet point in biology (sex ed) and/or social studies (media competency), you’d have to dig into state curricula.

    Not sure where that “majority of cases” thing comes from. It might very well be true because when nudes leak on the schoolyard you suddenly have a whole school’s worth of suspects many of which (people who deleted) will not be followed up on and another significant portion (didn’t send on) might have to write an essay in exchange for terminating proceedings. Yet another reason why you should never rely on police statistics. Ten people in an elevator, one farts, ten suspects.

    We do have a general criminal register but it’s not public. Employers generally are not allowed to demand certificates of good conduct unless there’s very good reason (say, kindergarten teachers) and your neighbours definitely can’t.



  • “gridlock” happens in non-grid layouts too, the english name is just taken from american road patterns.

    I said something about road hierarchies, you ignored it.

    “show me…” no. YOU made a claim (that local information suffices, which is a VERY bold claim), so it’s on you to prove that local information suffices.

    These systems are in operation. You claimed they lead to gridlock. What I get from the Chinese experiment here is that they collected data, threw an optimisation algo on it, and then adjusted local parameters, “err towards giving more green time in this direction” type of deal. They’re still going to use the same type of adaptive, local-control system that’s becoming increasingly common in the last decade.

    roads are absolutely NOT “like wires”; they are like pipes. which is why civil engineers commonly use fluid dynamics to simulate traffic.

    Vehicles travelling on roads constitute information travelling over roads. Are you trying to deliberately misunderstand what I’m saying. You do not need to look at the app of the parcel carrier to know that your parcel arrived, it’s right there on your doorstep. That’s information. Metaphorically, thus, package delivery trucks are wires.

    “all the information is there” is not enough information to verify the claim; it’s a wild guess without evidence to back it up.

    if shit where THAT simple, we’d have it figured out 50 years ago… it’s almost like this isn’t the simple problem you desperately want it to be…

    50 years ago we neither had the sensors we have now, nor did we have the processing power to use it. Traffic light control was often still done electromechanically. “Adaptive” means a lot more than “pedestrians have a button and there’s an induction coil to detect a car”. Those systems actually solve the local problem optimally which, in the case of traffic management, means that the global problem is solved optimally because the problem has optimal substructure. Don’t ask me for a proof of optimal substructure I just sat on a municipal traffic committee, I don’t actually design those systems. Got annoyed at stupid NIMBY questions so I drowned them with smart ones. When you observe those kinds of lights in low traffic situations they’re green for everyone because they switch as soon as they see someone arriving and noone else needs to be let through. In higher traffic situations they prioritise throughput, but make sure to not let waiting time for others get exceedingly long, or allow large backups.



  • this completely ignores larger traffic patterns like arterial roads.

    with your idea you are guaranteed to get massive gridlock all along the major roads.

    How. Seriously. Show me an adaptive traffic light dumb enough to cause gridlock. Not to mention that gridlock and having arterials, road hierarchies in general, are kinda incompatible with each other and most of the world doesn’t use grids in the first place.

    And it’s not like we don’t have central control over here – it’s that all the information necessary to make decisions for a single traffic light is available right there, at the traffic light, because it is impossible to have traffic (or the absence thereof) and that not carrying the necessary information. Roads are wires, so to speak. Central control could make those decisions, but as local information suffices, why would it, regarding traffic lights it’s generally only monitoring. Central control can override things, things like ambulances influence traffic lights in a non-local manner (which is a luxury problem because they are allowed to cross on red anyway), but for basic operation central control could vanish and you wouldn’t see a difference, when a light loses connection but not power it just keeps on operating. Things like information systems telling people where to park need non-local control because they need non-local information.


  • one intersection influences others down the line,

    And gets data from them, in the form of how and when cars arrive, and that’s all you need, at that point it’s a simple problem: When an individual traffic light regulates local traffic optimally based on that local information, then it does not cause undue problems for other traffic lights. Evolution does decentralised factory shop-floor planning just fine with just local information (have a look of how the genome assembles itself into bodies), and traffic flow is vastly less complex. “Acting on local information” does not mean “blind to global concerns”, that local information includes what’s necessary to know about the global situation. You can have every traffic light talk to the one down/upstream ("I’m seeing this many cars from you, I send you this many cars) but that’s just another way to do the local sensors.

    Traffic routing can make use of global information, but we were talking about deciding the length of light phases, not figuring out where to build a metro line, narrow a street, whatnot.