"Matt Mullenweg regrets an accidental moment of honesty that revealed that the entire WordPress 'community' is a sham."

This asshole wants all the benefits of foss and all the benefits of proprietary systems. He lied for years, telling the public that WordPress was controlled by a community-led foundation. He did that because it attracted developers and users (a shitload of them). All the while those developers and users weren't buying into a community-led project, they were helping Automattic create a crippleware platform.

That he accuses other companies of "free-riding" for taking advantage of a supposedly open platform just shows how clueless he is. He's a spoiled brat who thinks he's entitled to be a billionaire. The guy didn't even make WordPress, he just latched on to the guy who forked it from some other project and then took over as some perverse wannabe cross between Jobs and Torvalds (clearly a failure because unlike Jobs, he has no idea what an elegant product looks like, and unlike Torvalds, he has no idea what elegant code looks like). The only reason it worked is because of the big lie he accidentally spilled the beans on: the open source community propped him up because they took him at his word when he said it was a community-led project.

But it really is that simple. We've known about this for decades. The most developed countries during that time had some form of representative government, and we did what people often do when they receive a horrible diagnosis. We pretended it wasn't happening.

We could have shifted to more renewable forms of energy. We could have stopped all rural and suburban development and lived in cities that used public transportation as the primary means of getting around. We could have made a strong push for urban gardening, reduced our dependency on livestock, and fed our cows antacids. We could have done a lot of things, but they wouldn't have allowed boomers to maximize the pleasure they extracted out of life, so we didn't.

If there was a solution that didn't threaten the interests of the fossil fuel industries, then we would have done it. Nuclear power is certainly something we can do, but nuclear power alone will not save us. If the entire world went all in on nuclear power the same time France did, that certainly would have helped. But there's still steel, concrete, planes, cars, natural gas, and a shitload of other greenhouse gas producers.

Human history is full of examples of civilizations that collapsed because they failed to consider the long-term consequences of destroying their environment. Deforestation, water management, the tragedy of the commons, over harvesting game, etc. Now we're doing it at a global scale and risking the survival of all humanity.

Good luck with "geoengineering" and "high-tech approaches." If we were that advanced we would be doing it.

I'm certainly not going to argue that the war on drugs has been conducted ethically, logically, effectively, or efficiently. But I'll also never argue in favor of decriminalized or legalized meth.

One of the biggest problems with we have with meth is that we have been so undiplomatic with China and Mexico that the former has taken a page out of the opium wars and exports the chemicals required to produce meth and fentanyl to the latter. Our ability to take on the cartels has also been stymied by our horrible treatment of Mexico. As the Chinese found out during the opium wars, prohibition is tough when powerful external enemies want to use addiction to cause you pain.

The above is just one of many factors that must be considered, but I think it just reinforces my point that we can't look at drug prohibition as a binary problem. When it comes to regulating chemicals—any chemical—we need to be very specific. We need to regulate chemicals that are used and get unearthed during hard rock mining, like arsenic. We need to regulate greenhouse gasses that are causing the destruction of this planet. We need to regulate pharmaceutical drugs that are only safe when taken under specific conditions. We need to regulate chemicals that are used in the production of food or as foodstuffs themselves. Likewise, we need to regulate recreational drugs, and the regulation for each recreational drug ought to be specific to that drug. Marijuana prohibition, like alcohol prohibition, has proven to be more negative than legalization (with specific regulations). I cannot imagine a scenario where meth legalization causes less loss of life, less suffering, and less security than prohibition.

Meth is about as common as moonshine today, but it's not nearly as common as alcohol during prohibition.

The meth lab in your condo complex got busted for a reason.

Relevant to the story here:

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I'm not sure if you're seriously recommending a return to alcohol prohibition or if you're using it as a sarcastic counterexample to my point. However, in either case my answer would be that alcohol is still significantly different than meth and PCP in how dangerous it is, how much demand there is for it, and how easy it is to make.

1. As we learned from our first attempt at alcohol prohibition, it's just not worth it. The black market violence ended up being worse than the violence caused by drunks and so many people were willing to defy the law that it was unenforceable.

2. Some people who drink are more prone to violence. Some people who drink will disregard their impairment and drive anyway. All people who take meth and PCP suffer from paranoid delusions, will commit crimes to feed their addiction (or commit crimes due to their psychosis), and cannot function as normal members of society. An alcoholic can satiate their addiction without ever getting drunk. A meth addict cannot satiate their addiction without putting themselves in a multi-day state of psychosis.

3. One has to consider the practical consideration that we live in a (supposed) democracy and banning alcohol would be extremely unpopular while banning meth is extremely popular. This is one reason why federal marijuana prohibition is so galling—it's in direct opposition to what the people want. Demand is also an important factor when considering the practicality of prohibition. There's a much higher demand for alcohol than PCP, meaning there will always be a black market for alcohol whereas the modern black market for PCP is negligible precisely because demand isn't high enough to take the risk of production and selling even for most existing black market sellers.

4. Alcohol is extremely simple to make. Humans have been making alcoholic beverages since at least 10,000 B.C. It's so easy to make that prisoners make it in their toilets. Hillbillies still make moonshine even though they could just go to the liquor store. Beer brewing is a common hobby for middle aged men. The ease of production is a major reason why alcohol prohibition proved to be so ineffective. Meth and PCP both require knowledge of chemistry, special equipment, and obtaining other hard to acquire chemicals to produce. As with pharmaceutical drugs, the difficulty of production makes regulation easier.

Have you ever seen someone on meth? PCP? Consuming those drugs instantly makes a person a danger to society.

Do we need a major reform when it comes to drug legislation and enforcement? Absolutely. But that's much different from "legalize all drugs." Each substance needs to be judged separately and treated as such.

For marijuana, in many places legalization has meant that you can prop up a store and sell it. That appears to be working out okay. Should we allow stores to sell LSD over the counter? Probably not. People generally don't take LSD in massive doses and they don't get addicted to it, but it's such a powerful drug and it only takes a drop to make one fall into a full blown hallucinogenic state. You don't want LSD to be an over the counter drug not because you're worried that people will take it recreationally, but because it could so easily be used for horrible pranks (that could lead to real psychosis). It's dangerous! LSD probably shouldn't be legal, but it's also probably not worth law enforcement's time to worry about this niche drug.

Then there's cocaine and heroin and all that. The idea about the government giving it away is completely antithetical to the next idea about providing addiction services. If you give addicts everything they need to continue being addicts, they will have no motivation to ever stop.

There is probably no perfect solution when it comes to drugs. Extreme prohibition causes dangerous black markets and the violence associated with them. But to swing the complete opposite direction and just legalize everything is just crazy. There's a reason we have a distinction between prescription drugs and over the counter drugs. Even the most nuanced policies won't be perfect, but you can't just treat "drugs" as a single category enforced under a single policy.

I believe you, but that might be one of the saddest things I've ever heard.

I agree that the problem with wages are policies pushed by the billionaire class, but now that they have more political power than ever before nothing is getting fixed. Things are getting much, much worse.

Immigrants have not hurt the American middle and lower classes. Our regressive tax system that gets more regressive every time Republicans seize power is a problem. A complete lack of functional antitrust law is a problem. Private medicine is a problem. Private education is a problem. Urban sprawl is a problem.

All the problems that have contributed to massive wealth disparity are supported and magnified by the current administration.

I have met plenty of rude idiots who explain their own shortcomings as misunderstood genius.

I used to think I was really smart. I was young, dumb, and arrogant. As I grew older I met more and more fantastically talented people and that put my own abilities into perspective. We are all on this world for a very short amount of time and the truth of the matter is that you can only be an expert in so many things, and your worldview will always be limited because it is constrained by your own experiences.

In grad school, the one thing I noticed about the top tier students was a basic humility. They were never embarrassed to admit if they did not know something or if they were wrong. In fact, they were excited when they were presented with something they did not know because it was an opportunity for learning. That is real intelligence and IQ tests do not test for it.

The burning desire to correct someone when they are wrong has nothing to do with intelligence. Children do that to assert dominance over one another. It is an emotional response that has nothing to do with intellect.

Most IQ research is bogus. IQ researchers routinely confuse the ability to quantify something with the ability to draw meaningful conclusions. Just because you can make a chart out of something does not mean your chart actually conveys useful information.

Disable Snap by default and fully support apt again and I might consider installing Ubuntu again. Until then they're dead to me.

While what you said is true, I'm not sure it really applies in this case. In this case the rich and powerful are being forced to bend over due to a court order.

I might have a different perspective if this were a peer to peer chat app and the logs are private conversations between people (and especially if it were a peer to peer encryption solution and the judge stupidly said, "you have to intercept that!"). But just because people pretend they're having a conversation with a chat bot doesn't make it so. It's like how boomers fill in complete sentences in the Google search box. They probably think that's private information. They're crazy if they think any Google search is private in any way, though. Many a stupid criminal has been caught because they thought they could Google their way to the perfect crime.

I am not a lawyer, but as a layman I don't see how a court order for documents is functionally any different than a warrant. That's what discovery is, no?

If you share any sensitive information with ANY entity, you should assume that at some point a judge or law enforcement officer might be able to look at that information should the entity become the target of a criminal investigation or a litigant.

That's probably the better choice regardless of this court case.

Email is an interesting counterexample of how terrible things can get when things are too open. Operating your own email server is prohibitively difficult not because the core technologies are hard to implement, but because bad actors have forced us to stack all these ad-hoc filters and trust systems on top of email. Setting up an smtp server is easy. Sending an email that will actually show up in an inbox is not.