Thomas Dickerson @elfprince13@mumak.app

My second favorite type of reply on Twitter in response to any criticism of the bird site is "You are angry. Therefor I, a random person from the internet, have won a great victory!"

My dear sir, you may not be aware of this, but my track record in destroying things that have made me angry is pretty solid. I have done fifteen years of privacy and security activism powered almost entirely by rage and I win a lot.

As an anarchist, I have previously argued with Marxists that absent the state it would be very difficult for capitalist corporations to reestablish private states with the help of mercenary security firms. The reason is that the whole point of the capitalist state is to externalize the operating costs of capital -- including the costs of enforcing absentee land title and other artificial property rights -- on the general pubic.
The response is usually some variation on "Nuh-uh -- look at the British East India Company!"
I've been doing a lot of reading on the rise of the British Empire, as part of the research for my next book. And one of the major reasons the East India Company was able to establish control over India so easily was that it took over the shell of the Bengali state, along with its preexisting taxing apparatus and soldiers, and was able to use it as a multiplier for its own endogenous resources.
So the East India Company, far from an example of corporations being able to create private states ex nihilo, is actually just another example of the typical pattern of corporations relying on territorial states to socialize costs and privatize profit.

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Do we all know about Markdeep yet? I benefitted from using it on a new site I am days away from dropping. Static content + built-in markdown + mathjax + decent stylesheets out of the box makes writing content easy.

https://casual-effects.com/markdeep/

Thanks @morgan3d!

You might have seen somebody using the proverb Vox Populi, Vox Dei. What was missing was the context in which it was used:

Nec audiendi qui solent dicere, Vox populi, vox Dei, quum tumultuositas vulgi semper insaniae proxima sit.

In case you do not speak Latin, it means in English:

And those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness.

A guy who is using TLA+ to model the protocol I wrote about in https://decomposition.al/blog/2022/08/11/an-example-run-of-a-matrix-based-causal-unicast-protocol/ just emailed me to let me know that he model-checked it for 30 seconds and didn't get any causality violations, but he didn't want to run it longer because "electricity is $$$$$ rn". 😂