NaibofTabr

OK. How is this society organized?

Actually, centralization of management creates a lot of benefits in communication flow, resource allocation and operating efficiency. Lack of centralization results in confusion and task duplication.

the people who live in concert with the land

What does that even mean? It sounds an awful lot like noble savage mythology.

That sounds great… on paper. A very Disney ending to the long story of international resource conflict.

It also doesn’t really address my question, which is:

What happens when the extraction of a resource is necessary, but the local people object? What if they refuse to cooperate?

“Yes, we must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

Benjamin Franklin

After siding with the Bolsheviks during the Ukrainian–Soviet War, the Makhnovists were driven underground by the Austro-German invasion and waged guerrilla warfare against the Central Powers throughout 1918. After the insurgent victory at the Battle of Dibrivka, the Makhnovshchina came to control much of Katerynoslav province and set about constructing anarchist-communist institutions. […]

Surrounded on all sides by different enemies, the Makhnovist line in the battle for the Donbas eventually fell to the advancing White movement in June 1919. The Makhnovists were subsequently driven into a retreat to Kherson, where they reorganised their military and led a successful counteroffensive against the Whites at the Battle of Peregonovka. With the White advance defeated, the Makhnovists came to control most of southern and eastern Ukraine in late 1919, even taking over a number of large industrial cities, despite being a predominantly peasant movement.

Yeah, nobody who aligned with the Bolsheviks gets to claim nonviolence or peaceful takeover of the state.

But you are anti-authority?

OK.

What happens when particular resources become necessary for public good?

That is, does the world in general have the right to extract the resources necessary to manufacture solar panels and grid-scale batteries &etc even if the local people object, because replacing fossil fuel power is a necessity for the survival of the human race entire?

What happens when acquiring and using a resource becomes a requirement for treating human life with value?

Eliminating the state without that leading to anomie is possible trough a social revolution, that has been done before.

Er, for example?

Concrete has a lot of thermal mass. I could believe that it stays warm enough that ice can’t stay on the surface, especially with a reservoir of non-frozen water behind it.

The steel brackets and aluminum panel frames will get a lot colder, especially with wind blowing around them. Basically the same principle as a bridge forming ice before the road on either side of it. An exposed metal frame with a wind chill can develop ice even if the average temperature around it is above freezing.

Hmm… and that makes me wonder if the solar array bolted to the concrete surface acts like a heatsink? That would be an interesting unintended consequence.

Maintenance access looks like a pain in the ass, and I would wonder about possible issues with snow/ice buildup and load limits, but otherw8se this is a nice use of the space.

No one at Microsoft gives a shit about what you are doing

Maybe, but 834 of their business partners are very interested in what I’m doing, and how much they should bid for Copilot ad slots on my computer.

I wonder what you are securing against?

OK, you’re familiar with vulnerability scanners and port scanners right?

The threat model here isn’t really attackers specifically targeting your home network for any particular reason (unless you’re a LastPass engineer working remotely while running an exposed Plex server). They’re not looking for you, they’re looking for anything useful.

The threat model is attackers using scanning tools to discover vulnerable systems connected to the Internet. All they need from you is an active connection and a system that can store data, from which they can host malware files for distribution to other targets or conduct attacks or just run a cryptominer (if you’re lucky and they’re not very ambitious). They can find this by scanning for open ports and then running a vulernability scanner to figure out if there’s some exposed hardware that can be exploited.

An unsecured system is a hazard that could land you in jail when someone else starts using your device and network connection to commit crimes.

Now, as long as you’re behind a standard residential network service, and your ISP is in control of your gateway device, you’re relatively safe from this. Most ISPs will block any traffic like that very strictly. If your ISP is in control of your gateway device then they’re responsible for its behavior (demarcation matters).

But, most self-hosters run into limitations with their ISP blocking a lot of ports by default, because they want to access their personal server from outside their home, and so they take control by running their own gateway device or paying for a business connection which gives them complete control over which ports are open. This is where the risk comes in. You are assuming the responsibility for properly securing your connection to the public Internet, taking it off your ISP’s hands.

If you’re going to do this, you should know exactly which ports you have open to the outside and why, and a general idea of what traffic you expect to see on them when and how much. Monitor that traffic at your firewall. Every other port should be closed and your firewall (on your router, gateway device, or better yet a dedicated OPNSense firewall) should be configured to drop packets received by closed ports (“stealth” mode). You don’t want it to respond that those ports are blocked, you want it to appear to not be there at all.

Every other security implementation is a secondary concern for a home network. Yes you should patch your software regularly and you should practice deny-by-default and least-privilege as a matter of course, but you’re going to mitigate 90% of your risk by just not accepting incoming connections for anything you don’t need. Most vulnerable systems are discovered by automated scanning, so the less your system responds to external connections the better. If you’re going to worry about configuring, securing and patching one device, make it that front line firewall. And be very selective about which internally hosted services you expose externally.

Hmm, and yet the US is not the only example of a capitalist nation with a health care system. The problem has more to do with regulatory capture. You can say that this is a consequence of capitalism, but then how do you explain other capitalist nations which do not have similar issues with their healthcare systems? There must be some aspect which is specific to the US, and personally I think it traces back to the degradation of antitrust enforcement under the Reagan administration, which allowed massive conglomerates to form.

Blaming this specifically on capitalism is too narrow, it ignores the broader sociocultural issues that lead to the current situation. Capitalism as it is realized in the US is more a symptom of underlying issues than it is the core of the problem. Attempting to replace capitalism with a different economic system will not resolve the problem.

Your one step away from reinventing communism and 2 from discovering decentralised anarchism as the real answer.

Please learn to be less condescending. Stop assuming that people who have different opinions from your own are necessarily ignorant.

With that out of the way, isn’t “decentralized anarchism” redundant? what would centralized anarchism even be, other than a contradiction?

But technology has evolved, anyone can interact with any group through digital means. Anyone can share knowledge or document and publish problematic events in their local area.

OK, for the sake of argument let’s assume that this works the way you believe, in a technical sense. Reality is more complicated than that, but we’ll overlook that for the moment.

1. Just because a person can share/publish doesn’t mean that anyone else will bother giving them any attention. It’s good that more voices are heard in the present, but there is also a lot more background noise. How much time do you spend reading comments on Facebook? Nextdoor? DeviantArt? Usenet? Webrings? There are 8 billion people on the planet, and ~8 billion active mobile phones. Ain’t nobody got time for that.
2. More importantly, you can’t solve social problems with technical means.

Building a network of decentralised neighbourhoods where all citizens are welcome to join the local political debates (and multi local joined sittings) is possible.

I would like to ask you to watch the Adam Curtis documentary All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace. Curtis is highly opinionated and his documentaries are built to drive specific conclusions. What he presents is true, but not necessarily the whole truth, so please keep that in mind. Even so this is particularly relevant, especially episode 2, which describes various attempts to analyze and manage biology, ecology and society with computer systems.

People have been trying such things since the 60s. They are misguided.

There is no need why a few chosen people have to have all the power.

All the power, no. However, it is also not possible to spread power out amongst every individual equally. For instance, where do you draw the age line of inclusion? Will 6-month-old infants be part of the discourse? 12-year-olds? What about 90-year-old dementia patients?

Even if we can make some practical exclusions, it is still not effective to get everyone’s opinion on everything. Task specialization and division of labor are more efficient in every context. In practice, if everyone is responsible for completing a particular task then no one is.

I approve of the optimism that we can do better, with effort. However, that optimism cannot be blind if it is to be successful. The historical record demonstrates an overwhelming tendency for power to concentrate in the hands of individuals and small groups. Even with the best of intentions, people in positions of authority inevitably work to protect their authority, at everyone else’s expense if necessary. They will convince themselves that they are right to do so, because no one else understands their work.

Hmm, the biggest problem I have with socialism is that you end up with government committees deciding who gets access to basic needs like food, water and medical care, when, where and how much. Attempts to plan out fair distribution for an entire country become brittle and inflexible, and result in scarcity and waste because human life is not static. Well-intentioned socialist governments become authoritarian out of the desire to control the behavior of the population in order to stabilize the plan, but the efforts to control inevitably create more instability.

There are marketing people watching this and thinking, “These are great ideas!”

You’re not neutral if you only support one side of a conflict.

The Hundred Years Special Military Operation