again: i slept all day. and, i wish i knew why i'm so physically exhausted recently.

it's cold in here and it's cold outside, and i think that's a big part of it. i felt better last week when the humidity briefly peaked, and i feel better wrapped up in a hot blanket where i can sweat. so, that's really what i've been doing all day - trying to escape the cold by hiding in a hot blanket. it's going to warm up tomorrow, finally.

but, whether it's the weather or something else, i feel tense and frustrated and depressed and angry, and it's been constant now for weeks and i don't really understand it. i have a lot of work to do, but i'm not able to do it because i'm not able to mentally focus.

the best way to describe the situation is that i feel like i'm on drugs, but i'm not doing any drugs, so i don't understand.

let's just hope it gets better.

i'm going to try to wake up, take a shower, get my hydration up and get to finishing this up.

ok, it's done, up to cross-reference, as i'm hacking through somebody smoking. fuck...

so, i'm going to need to hit the shower before i finalize this.

but, we've got:

travel blog - 15 pages
deathtokoalas - 90 pages
music journal - 175 pages
politics blog - 226 pages

expect it up before midnight.

it's mostly young & healthy people; if it speeds this thing up, it's probably good news.

although there's that diabetes issue to be concerned about with black americans with poor diets.

https://globalnews.ca/news/7008473/george-floyd-protests-coronavirus-outbreak/

i'd actually rather they brought back the cheaper rates overnight. previously, i could plan my hydro use for off peak hours. now, i'm stuck paying higher rates, whether i like it or not.

but, it's easy to see what the next step is - expect the rates to skyrocket, and for there to be no escape from it.

we probably just lost time of use pricing for good :(.

https://globalnews.ca/news/7007471/coronavirus-ontario-hydro-rates-2/

i stopped this morning to shower, and then to eat, and ended up sleeping, and got distracted.

i'm back on it now, and i am for real almost done - 29th, 30th, 31st. that's it. so, expect it up today.

i wish i knew why i'm so tired all of the time :(.

the difference in opinion here comes right out of engels, and i could understand it being confusing to somebody that doesn't have a basic understanding of marxist theory. i hinted at this previously. but, let's talk about the flip side of limited liability, which is corporate personhood.

unlike most of the faux-left, i don't have any particular opposition to the concept of corporate personhood. if anything, i'd like to take the issue to its logical conclusion, although i've been frustrated by that in canada, which separates "legal personhood" from "natural personhood" and allows for different rights protections based on it. so, we can't tax corporations like people, because they're not natural people. alas.

but, this really is right out of engels.

if you haven't read this, do it. i cite it all of the time. it's so very important:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ch03.htm

Before capitalist production — i.e., in the Middle Ages — the system of petty industry obtained generally, based upon the private property of the laborers in their means of production; in the country, the agriculture of the small peasant, freeman, or serf; in the towns, the handicrafts organized in guilds. The instruments of labor — land, agricultural implements, the workshop, the tool — were the instruments of labor of single individuals, adapted for the use of one worker, and, therefore, of necessity, small, dwarfish, circumscribed. But, for this very reason, they belonged as a rule to the producer himself. To concentrate these scattered, limited means of production, to enlarge them, to turn them into the powerful levers of production of the present day — this was precisely the historic role of capitalist production and of its upholder, the bourgeoisie. In the fourth section of Capital, Marx has explained in detail how since the 15th century this has been historically worked out through the three phases of simple co-operation, manufacture, and modern industry. But the bourgeoisie, as is shown there, could not transform these puny means of production into mighty productive forces without transforming them, at the same time, from means of production of the individual into social means of production only workable by a collectivity of men. The spinning wheel, the handloom, the blacksmith's hammer, were replaced by the spinning-machine, the power-loom, the steam-hammer; the individual workshop, by the factory implying the co-operation of hundreds and thousands of workmen. In like manner, production itself changed from a series of individual into a series of social acts, and the production from individual to social products. The yarn, the cloth, the metal articles that now come out of the factory were the joint product of many workers, through whose hands they had successively to pass before they were ready. No one person could say of them: "I made that; this is my product."

when we speak of corporate personhood, we need to put it into this context of the socialization of production eliminating the ability to separate the specific roles of individuals in a corporation. as nobody can claim that this is their product, nobody can assume liability for it; the product is owned only by the corporation, and only the corporation can be held liable for it's defects. this is corporate personhood, regardless of what else you've heard about it.

but, how does the internet work? am i more like the worker on the production line, engaging in but one of a series of social acts that is bringing a product to market? or am i in truth more like the medieval guildsperson, engaging in an act of individual production? i would argue the latter and, as such, would argue against the idea of sharing liability for the product. i can truly say these words in good faith: i made this; this is my product.

so, we're back to the provider as publishing house again, except to point out that the great conflict that occurred in the medieval period was over the commons, and the question of whether there should be private property or not. there were wars and revolutions fought over this question, ending in the conversion of feudalism to capitalism. so, are we going to relive this conflict, as the technology hits a breaking point? should we have publishing houses that buy and sell copyrights or otherwise offer their services for a fee, or should we hold it all in common and provide free and unfettered access to all?

we will need to figure this out.

but, read the engels pamphlet. it's not esoteric; it's meant for workers. it gets the point across very clearly, as to why it is that i'm approaching these things so differently.

and, what about this issue of liability and s. 230?

well, i went through the long version of this previously - either the platform owns the content, or the user does, and this kind of in between reality is sort of muddling it up.

as a heavy user of these services, my primary concern with this discussion is the potential outcome that i may lose ownership over my content. i'm happy to take full responsibility for what i'm posting, for better or worse. just don't mess with my content.

i've argued against the concept of limited liability in investments rather heavily, but i actually don't see the parallel, here, and kind of take exception to the language as it was used in the executive order. limited liability allows shareholders to invest in unethical corporations without being liable for the crimes they commit, which could include genocide, rape and environmental desecration - the worst things that humans can do, and they're done all the time by resource & extraction companies. these are terrible rights abuses that need to be ended and i am quite confident that eliminating the shield that shareholders have from the actions of the companies they invest in would have a huge effect on their investment decisions.

are we going to compare posting a mean tweet to burning down a village in guatemala, or the deepwater horizon oil spill? it's a difference of scale that is so tremendous as to be bluntly comical to even consider.

so, do i think that we should make these companies liable for the content of their users in order to stop them from being so mean on the internet? would this eliminate the profit motive in hosting the content? well, broadly speaking, i'm not sure there'd be a lot of liability in most cases, anyways, so long as users own the content, but it would give the hosting companies a greater excuse to take down content they don't like, and more of a prerogative to be proactive in policing speech - which is a bad thing to anybody that believes in free speech, even if this creepy new breed of progressive/conservative seems to think it's so important for some reason. i actually don't think that the law as it exists is really making much of anybody much of any extra money (just about the only thing you could actually prosecute is libel), but it is allowing for a more open internet by preventing the companies from acting like actuaries.

that said, if people feel that laws against things like libel are not being strongly enough enforced, then steps should be taken to better focus actions against the specific actors being accused of breaking the law.

further, i would support a greater role for the courts in determining what kind of speech is acceptable and what kind of speech isn't. decisions should be subject to appeal and rooted in precedent, not made on the whim of some faceless corporate executive in an empty suit, based on opinions about ad revenue.

limited liability is a major problem in existing capitalism. we shouldn't be allowed to invest in companies that we know do bad things, and be shielded from the consequences of it. but, i just don't see the connection between the need to reign in investor rights and s. 230 of the communications decency act in the united states; the former is a pressing concern that should be at the front of the political agenda on the left, whereas the latter is largely a triviality, except in it's negative implications for the intellectual property rights of internet platform users.

go after the users, not the companies.

i mean, what twitter is essentially doing is providing a filtering service and then forcing it down on users, who may or may not appreciate it. that's kind of what's being lost, here. we're all arguing about first amendment rights and private property, but what about user choice?

if they feel this is important, that's their prerogative. fine.

but, users should be given the choice as to whether they want their feeds filtered or not, and maybe they could even open it up to different types of filtering that different users would have more interest in.

that's a workable compromise, isn't it?

what do i think twitter should do?

well, it needs to be able to allow the user to determine whether it's interested in it's opinions or not, to start. as a user, i don't care what twitter thinks. i didn't subscribe to twitter, and i'm not interested in having them interfere with the content i did subscribe to. so, to begin with, as user, i should have the ability to tell twitter that i don't care what it thinks, and i don't want it to interfere with my feed, ever, at all. that is to say that it's warnings and what not should be a user-configurable setting, rather than a site-wide decision.

that would mean that doing things like disabling comments and shares should never happen, ever.

second, any opinions that twitter wishes to express should be presented in parallel to those expressed by it's users, rather than on top of them. so, rather than put a disclaimer over top of a feed item, they should present a second item in the feed for people to interact with, if they decide to - or not interact with, if they don't want to. as mentioned previously, this should be user-configurable. and, maybe you could even granularize it; i might not be interested in twitter's opinions on what is true and what isn't, but i'd be happy to remove any posts from my feed that have to do with the proselytization of any type of religion.

something like this would be a proper balance that would allow twitter the ability to express it's views without stifling the views of it's users, and while allowing it's users to decide which views it feels are more worthwhile.