Zuckerberg has a moral defect. Evil is not a medical problem.

I trust my city government a hell of a lot more than I trust the incoming federal administration.

If it’s unified under the federal government, then an asshole president can mess with it.

If it’s distributed, with states and major cities having their own instances, then it’s more asshole-resistant.

Then of course, the choice is yours…

Language arises out of social behavior, beginning with imitation and reinforcement in early childhood. Children who don’t learn language (by interacting with adults and older children) in the critical period of early childhood, suffer serious developmental problems. So language is fundamentally anti-solipsistic, even anti-individualistic: you only acquire it by being brought into a community of language-users.

And written language begins as an encoding for spoken (or signed) language: everyone learns to speak (or sign) before they learn to read, and learning to read starts with learning associations between written structures and spoken ones. (For English-speakers, that means phonics: the relationship between letters or groups of letters, and sounds.)

Meaning isn’t “assigned” solipsistically; rather it’s “acquired” from a community of use. A single user can’t decide for themselves that “dog” means squirrel. I suspect that if you look at the word “dog” and try to convince yourself that it refers to a bushy-tailed tree-climbing nut-munching rodent, you will be aware that you are doing something very silly, something deliberately contrary to your knowledge.

Anyone held in prison, jail, or other confinement shall be permitted to post up to one kilobyte (1024 characters) of text every day. These posts shall be published on a public web site operated by the imprisoning authority, and in print form in the imprisoning authority’s capital city or other central location. These posts shall be tagged with the prisoner’s name, geographic location, and any identification number the imprisoning authority uses.

This serves a few purposes:

• No government or other authority may hold a prisoner secretly.
• All prisoners may plead their innocence to anyone who cares to hear.
• No prisoner is to be held in such complete isolation that they can’t communicate to the public about the conditions of their imprisonment.
• Anyone interested in auditing the state of their government’s prisons may begin by inspecting the stated locations of prisoners.
• Any prisoner who is not literate shall be afforded literacy education to enable them to participate.