Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
from the say-it-loud dept
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Thad with a comment about calls for RFK Jr.’s resignation coming entirely from Democrats:
And that’s why trying to distill partisan politics down to just “team blue” vs. “team red” is reductive at best and false equivalence at worst. This and many other life-or-death issues break down on pretty clear partisan lines, and it’s entirely clear which party is right and which one is wrong.
Christ knows the Democrats aren’t perfect. But of the two major parties they’re the one that’s not a eugenicist death cult.
In second place, it’s an anonymous comment on our post about monitor makers hitting owners with annoying ads, and our characterization of how it happened:
No, that’s not how computers work. Microsoft Windows identifies the connected monitor, and then, on its own authority, checks whether the manufacturer has “recommended” any software to go with it; if so, Windows installs that without telling the user. The monitor isn’t installing anything.
Of course, we should also be criticizing monitor manufacturers for taking advantage of this misfeature. But the root problem is with Microsoft. More than 2 decades after the Sony rootkit, they haven’t learned their lesson (or maybe they have: people will put up with this shit, and the blame will mostly be misdirected).
For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we’ve got a pair of comments from. MrWilson. First, it’s one about giving Elon Musk credit when his products work:
Nope. Not at all. Screw that noise.
Teslas might function as a car some of the time, but that doesn’t mean you have to give Musk any credit whatsoever.
Starlink is a money pit from whence nothing can be recovered. Even the most corrupt broadband fiber deployment can be dug up or reused. Comcast could, in a just judicial system, be broken up as an illegal monopoly and their infrastructure that we paid for could be reused by other service providers.
And not every dollar was going to go to big monopolistic companies, whereas any money going to Starlink funds literal authoritarian, anti-democratic election interference.
Next, it’s one on our post about the “Darnella Test” for social media regulation:
Unfortunately, “kids won’t be able to post videos that make authorities look bad and fuel significant protests” is an appealing argument to the authoritarians who are already in favor of curbing social media access for kids which those authoritarians can’t directly control.
Over on the funny side, things are extremely quiet this week, so we’re going to truncate it and just feature the only comment that received enough votes to earn a funny badge. It’s Stephen T. Stone with a reply to a comment calling Mitch McConnell a vegetable:
How dare you insult vegetables like that. Unlike Mitch McConnell’s political career, vegetables are actually good for the average person.
That’s all for this week, folks!
Comments on “Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt”
An educational, generational problem.
Anonymous has a keen insight about Microsoft, which raises a question about people:
TL;DR: We needed to overhaul school curricula. We didn’t, because educators were not technologists—and excepting hacker kids who have no social power, technologists are typically fixated on the adult world. Instead, we did the opposite.
Why will people “put up with this shit”? To start with, they don’t understand it! For nowadays, children don’t use computers. Nowadays, I find it
easierless frustrating to talk about tech issues to a nontechnical 70-year-old Boomer than to a nontechnical 20-year-old Zoomer.The 70-year-old Boomer learned piecemeal to install and to use a word processor, a spreadsheet, an email client, and a web browser on 1980s–1990s PCs, probably on MS-DOS and/or on Windows 95. They have a fuzzy mental model of “installing software”; they can understand, and thus potentially care about my simplified, jargon-free explanation of the Sony rootkit. The 20-year-old doesn’t even have that.
So, too, as for the Net. In the 1990s, the Internet absorbed a mass-influx of new users. Many of them were clueless, a condition derided by greybeards as the “Eternal September”. Many made an effort to learn. All of them knew the bare rudiments of how to use a computer: A general-purpose PC. And excepting lusers of the walled-garden “online services” like AOhell, all of them were basically aware that “e-mail” is different than “WWW”; even if they didn’t know what a “protocol” is, they had a rudimentary mental model of protocols.
Then came company-town “app store” locked-down, quasi-magical “devices” with tiny screens, no keyboard, and a UI that’s maximally dumbed-down—as a nigh VT-100 tier dumb terminal of “the cloud”. It is now the mental model of “computing” for every nontechnical user, generationally starting with some of the late Millennials.
This should have been fixed in the schools. It’s what I’ve thought about in response, as I’ve spent years watching the Internet become a wasteland and Big Tech kill off mass general-purpose computing. I could, and probably should write a book on what K-12 curricula would educate nontechnical students in ways that would be conducive to a free Internet, where everyone uses unrestricted general-purpose computers. Among other benefits, my greatest goal is that this education would empower people against Big Tech’s chronic misbehavior…
Oh. Now, I see the bug.
Re:
To me, the word “nontechnical” is also indicative of a problem: the implicit idea that “technology” is somehow separate from the rest of life. School is a technology, as is everything learned there: reading, writing, mathematics, science, art; and of course talking, upon which classroom education depends.
So what is a “tech issue”? Your comment suggests maybe something related to electronic computers (in all their forms), but my mother worked as a “laboratory technologist” and, in the 1970s, it didn’t involve those at all. “Tech issues” there would’ve related to stuff like microtomes, wax, chemical stains, and optics. She learned at a “technical school”, and those pre-date electronic computers by centuries.
Even if we are talking about electronic computers, what about them? What do we need or want people to know about them and be able to do, and why? Computers were initially put inside schools without any real idea of that, so of course the lessons were often ad-hoc—maybe just using them as glorified typewriters because that’s what businesses were doing, and thus it might help kids get jobs. My school also taught programming, but I’m not sure if there was a good justification or if it was just “another thing we can do with our computers”. In retrospect, it was odd how the “computer classes” were so separate from the rest of the curriculum. Like, why didn’t we first learn how to create and specify algorithms in math class? Certainly we learned how to use many, such as for multi-digit multiplication. And shouldn’t we have learned logic in English class?—how are we gonna write our mandatory “persuasive” essays without knowing that?
And as far as third parties go: Duverger’s law is a thing. I support ranked-choice voting and other electoral reforms that would help us get out of this two-party system, but while we’re working on those reforms we still have to work within the system we’ve got; crossing our arms and stomping our feet and refusing to participate isn’t going to stop the fascists.
You want a more progressive party that’s less friendly to billionaires and cops? So do I. And over the past few decades I’ve come to see that the only viable path toward that goal is to reform the Democratic Party from within. People like AOC and Mamdani have done more to move the Overton window to the left than people like Nader or Stein. If you don’t like your Democratic representation, believe me, I get that; I was represented by Sinema for three terms in the House and one in the Senate. And now she’s out of office and we got somebody better. You want to get rid of shitty congressional Democrats? Vote them out in the primaries. In the meantime, the worst Democrat is still better than the best Republican.
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Except when the worst Democrat is indistinguishable from any given Republican. [coughfettermancough]
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He’s distinguishable from a Republican because if there are 51 people caucusing with Democrats then that keeps a Republican from being the Senate majority leader.
Again, represented by Sinema for 12 years. You don’t need to explain shitty Democrats to me.
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(Which isn’t to say anyone should vote for Fetterman. If he can’t read the room and insists on running for another term, primary his ass. It shouldn’t be hard.)
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I get the feeling he won’t be running for another term, seeing as how Fox News already has a job lined up for him when he gets out of office.
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It’ll be just another Fox News hiring of an out-person who will represent all of their out-group and confirms all the prejudices and biases against said out-group with confessions and changes of heart. “Look, I’m a blue haired liberal like the rest, but I have to agree with Donald Trump on this topic…” Winston had to confess to being a spy and corrupt degenerate for Emmanuel Goldstein before his visit to the cafe.
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Fetterman won’t have much of that to do, since he already seems to be Republican enough that Democrats wouldn’t miss him if he switched parties. And he might do that after the midterms if he thinks it’ll fuck up the plans of any incoming left-leaning/progressive Democrats.