squaresinger

But what if someone doesn't comply?

When someone who owns the path to your house decides they won't let you use that path anymore.

Or when the guy who owns the water works doesn't like you and decides that your house won't get any water any more?

Or even more simple: what if you and your neighbour have a conflict that escalates further and further? Should you just duel? Or maybe shoot the neighbour in their sleep before they do it with you?

And lastly: To get to this state, you need to coerce the current coercive institutions out of said power. Is that not being coercive yourself?

I wanna see you helping yourself if five armed home invaders silently broke into your house and shoot you before you wake up.

The analogy with mommy and daddy doesn't really make sense.

Unless your parents are filthy rich or very powerful, they usually can't provide you anything you can't do yourself once you reach a certain age.

The same is very much not true with a stateless society vs the mafia.

If you are part of the mafia, even just as a lowest level thug, you will have an advantage over being the person who gets blackmailed by the mafia.

I know, many Americans and also people from other countries have very traumatic experiences with the local police and thus a very bad opinion about them. That's understandable, especially if you have never seen what good policework looks like. But that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

In most Central European countries, for example, the policework is really positive. Sure, there are negative examples there too, nothing is perfect, but most of these countries are in the very top of the safest countries (discounting micronations that are too small for statistically relevant data).

Of course, power corrupts. And because of that, modern democracies have a lot of safety nets that stop hostile legislation. And since these safety nets are staffed by people voted in by very different groups of people than the legislators, these are actual checks and balances compared to the farce that happens in the USA.

That's another issue: The political system in the USA is not a democracy, but a presidential two-party-system in which the votes of most people don't count. They basically vote in a dictator (ok, not fully, but if the party holds senate, house and surpreme court, it is a dictatorship, and in a two-party-system that happens pretty easily) every few years and Government just does whatever they want, because nobody can hold them accountable, and in the worst case they'll get voted back into office two legislatory periods later.

And if you don't live in a swing state, your vote just doesn't count.

The USA has had their system for far too long and never had a chance to overhaul the whole system. So politicians are using centuries old loopholes, wide enough to drive a cargo ship through them, and nothing is stopping them, because the people in power got to power in this system and changing anything is just a risk for them to lose that power.

Hellbinders (2009). It's a movie in which a soulless Action hero, a ninja warrior priest and Cain, the biblical son of Adam team up to battle a horde of demon-possessed ninjas.

It's a low-budget movie where the script was written by three stuntmen, that was directed by three stuntmen and the whole cast is also stuntmen. The VFX look like the people responsible for effects and cutting where also stuntmen.

The film was made to prove that stuntmen can do everything the other people in the crew usually do, and all it does is proving that there's a reason stuntmen usually only do stunts.

It's so bad that it's involuntarily funny.

During lunch time

Titles are a bit inflated in small companies, so "head of software development" meant I was the team leader of a team of 7 developers including myself. But yeah, they really thought they knew so much more about open source and open source developers than me.

I did tell them. Multiple times and in very direct words. They told me I don't understand nerds or open source.

Both marketing and CEO are jobs where Dunning-Kruger is considered an asset, not a problem.

I had an encounter pretty similar to the one in the article at a former job.

I was the head of software development at a 10 year old "startup" with ~50 employees.

The CEO and the marketing lady walk into my office and tell me about this great new hardware (basically an underpowered server with 15 SFP+ ports for network traffic manipulation) they found somewhere in China. They don't have an use case for that yet, but they have a solution: They will sell it really cheap (€5000) so that, I quote, "some nerds will buy it like the Raspberry Pi and they will make software for free for us".

I ask them why they would be doing that, to which the marketing lady says "Because they are nerds. They do stuff like that."

Needless to say, not a single "nerd" bought that dirt cheap €5000 networking device with a huge amount of SFP+ network ports as a hobby device, let alone produce free software for it.

That device was a total flop.

But it also goes to show what they must be earning if they think that anyone would spend €5000 as an impulse buy with no further reason.

I did maintain an opensource project for a while and that taught me how to do it correctly:

• Don't. Just don't.
• If you really, really want to, just do what you need to fulfill your needs, never do something for someone else.
• If someone is really insistent, say you'll do it if that person pays for the implementation of the feature, and use your day job's hourly rate for it.
• Then don't implement anything you don't want to, because nobody is going to pay for it anyway.

Or to put it differently: Never see your project or contribution as anything more than a hobby. You will never see an return on investment.

They kinda look like John Oliver and his wife.

Yeah, true. Grandpa Guinness on the right is just 63 in that picture.

Lets see how we look like in our 60's with all the microplastics inside us ;)

But it shouldn't be worse than smoking, lead, smog and missing sunscreen

OP, do you know where the books of Moses in the old testament come from?

Exactly, it's a copy of the Jewish Torah which Netanyahu quoted.