Ken's Weblog

People should not fear their governments; governments should fear their people.

Month: May 2018

  • The reality of land ownership

    A simplified taxless state (part 1 of 3). Thus, we can talk of tier-one and tier-two land owners, where tier-one owners are those land owners capable of defending their territory against state-level aggression (or capable of performing state-level aggression), and tier-two land owners are those who are somehow at the mercy of the tier-one owners retaining ownership of the land the tier-two owners think they own, but actually don’t when push comes to shove.

    In cleartext, a state-level actor is the only type of actor capable of owning land. Within a state, there is arbitration for when tier-two “owners” are in dispute over a piece of territory. But between states, there is no international arbitration of land ownership – brutal aggression decides who owns what (whether one approves of that fact or not). When tier-two “owners” are in dispute, it is not much different from when two children are fighting over who gets to use family property: at the end of the day, it’s still the adults’ property. [Falkvinge On Liberty]

    The proposal is just a pipe dream, but it’s noteworthy for being based on the fact that private ownership of land is a lie. This is something I noticed years ago, but almost nobody else has.

  • Google doesn’t understand bail reform

    Google to Purge Ads for Bail Bond Services.
    Google has thrown its support behind the growing movement to eliminate cash bail by purging bail bond advertisements from its platform.

    […]

    Beginning in July, Google will no longer accept advertisements from private bail bond services. David Graff, Google’s director of global product policy, explained the decision Monday: “We made this decision based on our commitment to protect our users from deceptive or harmful products…”

    […]

    Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, put out a statement Monday afternoon supporting Google’s decision: “No one should be incarcerated—before they’ve even been tried or convicted of a crime—simply because they can’t afford not to be.” [Hit & Run]

    So in order to help poor people who have trouble affording bail, they’re trying to make it harder for poor people to afford bail. It’s amazing how consistently rich liberals respond to problems affecting poor people by doing things that make those problems worse.

  • Another reason to like Uber

    What Do You Call a Tool to Help Uber Avoid Gov’t Stings? A Good Start. Uber uses a tool called “Greyball” to circumvent officials. It’s a tool that Uber says is designed to help it deny ride requests to people who violate their terms of service, disrupt the system, or threaten their drivers. They also have been using it to operate in places where government officials have been trying to shut them down.

    […]

    Uber used this tool to operate in Portland, Oregon, as regulators attempted to use sting operations to catch them and shut them down. As the story explains, this all bothered authorities because Uber was employing people and putting them to work outside of their purview… [Hit & Run]

    This is pretty old news now, but it’s another reason to prefer Uber over other ride sharing services: they were willing to do something to protect their drivers from corrupt and oppressive local governments who were paid off by the taxi cartels to attack them.