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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   3089 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 3, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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(a bit less small scale than I intended...)

Prisons notoriously suck. Inmates have nothing to do, violence and abuse is rampant. Even worse, the only peers inmates have are other criminals, entrenching whatever culture leads people to crime. Solution: give them all the cheapest possible phone/tablets with internet internet access. Instead of fighting over cigarettes, they can watch the latest MrBeast. To avoid problems, maybe give them something really locked-down - read-only access to a small number of approved sites (but those sites have almost all of the content on the net anyway), harsh term filters for anything violence / crime related. Probably include some porn. The disciplinary society's time has come and gone, give the prisoners their Soma, it can't be worse.

Mandatory information preservation. We've lost hundreds of millions of words and images to link rot since the dawn of the internet - image hosts and social media sites dying, accounts deleted or suspended and taking their posts with them, etc. Last copies of books forgotten, paperwork shredded. Archive.org and friends do great work here, but the web's just too vast, and copyright law is painful. Why let this happen? There are policy solutions. Some are realistic and even prudent. Every time you sell a copyrighted work online, send a copy of it to the Library of Congress, encrypted with this year's public key, and they host the blob. The private key is in a HSM in Fort Knox, and when your work's copyright expires, the key is released and it's free for everyone. Books, substacks, movies, etc. More out there - If you run a public social media site with >10k users, same obligation - all public posts that haven't been deleted after a year get sent to LoC (they'll help you out, but you're required to whitelist their scrapers) and remain public forever. But you can take it farther, and here we enter the fantastical - how about preservation of all internal corporate and government documents? They'll be kept private for 50-100 years. And at that point ... why not private communication? Who needs privacy after you're dead? Imagine what today's historians (or openai) would give to get access to that for the past few hundred years.

edit: coming back to this a day later, I think the prison tablet idea might make prison too comfortable. Especially if you don't make it read-only, I wonder how many people would give up freedom and physical comfort to not have any obligations and watch youtube all day.

Is there a way to make prisoners use their tablets to somehow manually work on archiving that internet content? Maybe they could earn their fun time on the internet by putting in work time on the internet that benefits the rest of society.

I thought that what prison already is like, at least in the UK.

https://news.sky.com/story/prisons-criticised-over-inmates-doing-little-but-watching-daytime-tv-and-sleeping-12629039

Probably the worst thing about prison is the company.

Prisons notoriously suck. Inmates have nothing to do, violence and abuse is rampant. Even worse, the only peers inmates have are other criminals, entrenching whatever culture leads people to crime. Solution: give them all the cheapest possible phone/tablets with internet internet access. Instead of fighting over cigarettes, they can watch the latest MrBeast. To avoid problems, maybe give them something really locked-down - read-only access to a small number of approved sites (but those sites have almost all of the content on the net anyway), harsh term filters for anything violence / crime related. Probably include some porn. The disciplinary society's time has come and gone, give the prisoners their Soma, it can't be worse.

And you can charge them 500 bucks a gig!

I like the data archive idea, I had this similar thought for a universal, freely accessible digital archive of all the content anyone's ever produced, replacing copyright entirely. You produce your work, you upload it and get paid by govt for a combination of viewtime, likes and superlikes (which would be finite, perhaps you get 5 per year), comments and so on. Like youtube but with no ads and for more things.

Of course it doesn't really work that well since people would try to game the algorithm and I'm not sure how much this would cost. Seems unfair, taxwise as well. It'd probably hurt cinemas and book sellers. A significant quality of life increase though IMO, perhaps more appropriate for post-scarcity civilizations.

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