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Cloudflare didn't say "give us money or we'll cause you harm"... so no extortion. Cloudflare infrastructure wasn't used for the attack, so no DoS attack.

They sold services to two customers, one of whom did a crime independent of cloudflare.

If a robber sees Bob buy a bunch of expensive electronics at WalMart, and then buys a crowbar and robs him, is WalMart somehow responsible for the robbery?


> If a robber sees Bob buy a bunch of expensive electronics at WalMart, and then buys a crowbar and robs him, is WalMart somehow responsible for the robbery

Yes, if Walmart somehow knew robber’s intentions, but sold anyway. That is the primary question actually. Was the intent or act known or not.


Should Walmart be responsible for performing background checks on people buying crowbars to ensure they don’t intend to do harm? What about lighter fluid? Rat poison? Baseball bats?

And what do those 10% of lawyers do? Every other industry also got reduced by 10+%, its not like they have a job elsewhere.

So.... they just starve in the streets?

Even if some other, arguably better job comes along, would they retrain for it? (You can say yes, but take a look at the long history of people choosing to join a cult and vote for an orange moron instead of learning a new skill).

Either you're convinced you won't be too badly affected and will gladly watch huge swaths of people suffer, or you're deluded enough to think that it will really, truly be different this time. In any case, I hope you get the worst results of what you preach.


Obviously we need to go after supermarkets and corner stores since criminals eat, so somewhere past that.

No you wouldn't. Unless you failed to comply with subpoenas/warrants/etc for it.

That assumes of course that like Cloudflare you were hosting a web page and not the actual illegal activity, and were following the laws around hosting things.


Yeah, I demand all my hosting providers be 100% vulnerable to DDoS for this reason.

Most ideologies are terrible in those regards. The various forms of democratic capitalism have been pretty big on genocide and oppression too. Most of them were were pretty unconcerned with Hitler until after the marxist-leninists were already fighting him.

Not sure what point you're trying to make.


>Most of them were were pretty unconcerned with Hitler until after the marxist-leninists were already fighting him.

Britain, France and allies were fighting Hitler in 1939. Russia was allied with Hitler until 1941, when Hitler attacked:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pac...


And outside of Europe, a huge number of capitalist democracies didn't join in or pick a side until late 1941 (6 months after the invasion of the USSR), at the same(ish) time as the US joined.

Just i know there were preferred trading partners and aide packages from countries to one side or the other, but if Perl Harbor hadn't happened, it was by no means certain the US and many other countries would have entered the war and instead just let it settle itself.

Of course Europe was involved in the European war. Turns out Europe is only a small part of the world tho.


I love this link about a treaty, which the Soviets broke quickly, that was the direct result of a different treaty between Nazi Germany, the UK, France, and Italy that was signed a year earlier.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich_Agreement

It seems like the signatories to that treaty had no issue with the Nazis annexing particular bits of Europe at the time ¯\_(ツ)_/¯


Britain and France's abandonment of Czechoslovakia was a pretty shameful episode all round.

I don't think anyone else with the name Obama has been president of anything that confers a library (let alone a presidential library), your answer seems a bit needlessly derisive. I suspect you're just insecure about your personal level of useful knowledge and are trying to lord over someone with your trivia fact.

And conversely you can't grow enough food local to a large population center to feed everyone.

Christopher Alexander figured this one out in A Pattern Language:

https://www.patternlanguageindex.com/patterns/city-country-f...


You'd have to either waste good soil by putting buildings on it, or use a lot of fertilizer.

Why didn’t we do this? Seems cool.

Because it's like 1000x more efficient to move stuff on water vs land, so industrial cities clustered around ports and rivers since it's way easier to move stuff around.

Because it trades most of the benefits of cities for the hassle of suburban life and less efficient food production.

Big cities aren't typically in such an ideal planar geological setup as that. I'm having a hard time imagining how something like that would work in the Bay area, NYC, Seattle, Miami etc

To be fair, Alexander was writing in the seventies, long after automobiles and the suburb had killed any hope of humane urban planning in the States.

Because of perverse incentives

Bullshit. Christopher Alexander didn't know much about farming.

I actually read his whole book. Most of his "patterns" are kind of quaint and twee, the sort of things that seem superficially attractive to people with no real domain knowledge. Highly overrated.


Do you see there being a realistic alternative?

I realize we can't really go backward in time, but I would prefer if the farmers that lived close to where I am sold to people who live local to me. That can happen to some degree (open yard stands), and I like to do that for some of the smaller farms, but it's really a kind of "nice to have" rather than a "The market stocks stuff that was grown a town or two over" type thing. I feel like something probably got lost when that kind of arrangement went away.

There's still one or two local businesses that manage to make it into the local market for me which is neat to see, but that's more so because they are for frozen pastries and stuff, and can prepare a metric ton in advance, and the market can mark it up for being a "local specialty" type thing. I like to buy them when I can afford it. It just sucks that essentially every other thing on a shelf probably wasn't even made in the same time zone or hemisphere.


The thing you imagine has never really been true. Rivers, seas and canals and later railroads and highways have always brought food to the city from as far as it could be transported before it spoiled.

Rome got its wheat from Egypt and its olive oil from around the Mediterranean.

Ancient egypt sent food up and down the nile to population centers in Cairo and Thebes.

And so on.


Eh, I suppose that that's fair.

Why do we need an alternative? Your preferences don't matter.

Well, they matter some. They matter to registeredcorn.

More widely, they matter in that farmers markets and roadside stands and such do exist. Why do they exist? Because there are enough people that want to buy from such places.

I mean, it's never going to be the way that food is sold. But those preferences matter enough for niche markets to exist.


Utopian optimism really has fallen out of style, I suppose.

Nonsense. Don't you know how bubbles work? Everyone does massive rushes for all the low hanging and medium hanging fruit. The the bubble pops and the randomized carnage of companies big and small being destroyed is sifted through by the next wave of companies actually intended to make money.

The good ideas and the bad ideas don't signal success in a bubble, nor does making money or not. Its random and any notion of "this was a good business model and that was bad" is post-hoc rationalization. The number of people who make fun of pets.com but order from chewy.com is a prime example of this.


Tens of millions of people have outdoor hobbies that puts them in direct or incidental contact with water. Hundreds of millions live in places where rain happens. Billions live in situations where a spill of drinking water (or water based liquids) are a real risk for thier phones.

I don't want to take extra care and caution just to have a life and a fone. Theoretically this thing makes my life easier and I want it to act like it damnit.


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