I fucking hope the American prospect is correct.
FTA:
This doesn’t mean that the subsequent three years and eleven months will be a garden of earthly delights.
Probably a good thing. Traffic management is tricky at best in any Hieronymus Bosch scene.
We’re going to this:
https://www.loyaltybookstores.com/picksnshovels
On Tuesday in DC. Will report back!
https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/03/friedmanite/#oil-crisis-two-point-oh
It’s time for a global race to the top – for countries to compete with one another to see who will capture US Big Tech’s margins the fastest and most aggressively. Not only will this make things cheaper for everyone else in the world – it’ll also make things cheaper for Americans, because once there is a global, profitable trade in software that jailbreaks your Big Tech devices and services, it will surely leak across the US border. Canada doesn’t have to confine itself to selling reasonably priced pharmaceuticals to beleaguered Americans – it can also set up a brisk trade in the tools of technological self-determination and liberation from Big Tech bondage.
https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/04/object-permanence/
It’s time to delete those IP provisions and throw open domestic competition that attacks the margins that created the fortunes of oligarchs who sat behind Trump on the inauguration dais. It’s time to bring back the indomitable hacker spirit that the Bill Gateses of the world have been trying to extinguish since the days of the “open letter to hobbyists.” The tech sector built a 10 foot high wall around its business, then the US government convinced the rest of the world to ban four-metre ladders. Lift the ban, unleash the ladders, free the world!
He said all this and more at the Liberty Books event at Cleveland Park Library in DC this evening.
And he is as engaging and kind as people here have mentioned.
He sends his love to all us here at elsewhere.
About 13 English feet, or 13 1/2 Roman pedes.
How did the conversation lead to that?
Secret handshake.
I may have said too much…
Wait, why are you in DC? Hell of a time for a tourist visit!
I had asked a question during the discussion. Then when I went to get my book signed, he thanked me for my question. I thanked him for his response, and I mentioned that he was much loved and missed over at elsewhere, where a lot of the boing boing community had reconnected when boing boing…(Waved my hand, he visually commiserated annoyance) And he said, aww, thank you! Tell them I love them, too.
I hope I didn’t err by mentioning it to him. I didn’t say cafe.
@chgoliz - just passing through on my way home to Maine. We stayed a couple nights to visit friends and attend this event. Safely outside the beltway now.
If he came over, he’d be totes mcgotes welcome, I say!
Glad you got to say hi and got your booked signed! He seems like a righteous dude!
Sounds like a perfectly reasonable conversation to me, IMHO.
(It’s not impossible that he’d already heard of us somehow, through a web search in the days when we had “happy mutants” as part of the site name, or from someone also acquainted with both sites. No, not me.)
And I agree with @mindysan33 , if he wants to stop by and say “hi”, hang around for a while, it’s cool with me.
Of course not, I was just curious about the context. This place isn’t a secret, just obscure. Is this the IndieWeb? I’m not sure.
Definitely.
Seconded.
https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/06/privacy-last/#exceptionally-american
But plenty of the things that Big Tech gets up to are about the narrative of growth. That’s why Big Tech has pumped every tech bubble of this stupid decade: metaverse, cryptocurrency, AI. These technologies have each been at the forefront of Big Tech marketing and investor communications, but not solely because they represented a market opportunity. Rather, they represented a more-or-less plausible explanation for how these companies that were on the wrong side of the law of large numbers could continue to double in size, without breeding billions of new customers to sign up for their services.
I emailed with him a few times, and he always answered. I was working on a sermon about science fiction and used an excerpt from an article he’d written as a reading in the service.
Extremely supportive and thoughtful, in my opinion. A real hoopy frood!