Drupal has been around for a while, but I've never heard of "Drupal CMS" as a separate product until now.
It appears Drupal CMS is a customized version of Drupal that is easier for less tech-savvy folks to get up and running. At least, that's the impression I got reading through the marketing hype that "explains" it with nothing but buzzwords.
I think the question is whether employees of an advisory group that is not an actual department of the government are on the list of people to whom can he authorize access to this type of sensitive data.
Corporations are not actually persons. You should read the Citizens United opinion if that's what you think it meant.
Corporate owners are people engaging in voluntary transactions. Their freedom was essentially the question in Citizens United. "Corporations are people" emerged from the media as an oversimplified version.
Exactly this. But remember that "legal personhood" basically just means "able to enter contracts" and does not imply any sort of human rights or humanity. It does not mean anything like what "personhood" normally means.
This has also been the case for the entire history of corporations, which is longer than the history of the US.
It isn't. But as a society, we voted for providing clean, affordable water to everyone was a public good. That's why municipal water exists.
The issue arises when that water is fluoridated against the will of a significant portion of the population. It effectively forces dissenters to either accept it or go through the hassle and expense of sourcing their own water — which defeats the original purpose of providing low-cost, universally accessible water.
Today, the marginal benefits of fluoridation are questionable, especially with fluoride available in toothpaste. So forcing it on everyone, despite objection, becomes harder to justify — and that's why some places have stopped adding it.
Really? 'Why is the government providing potable water'? Because that's the point of governments: to provide a framework and the bare essentials of civilization.
And well, libertarian led governments are TERRIBLE.
I think they're saying that the logical conclusion of kebman's libertarian line of argument is that no-one is entitled to municipal water anyway, so it is moot whether or not municipal authorities decide to add a particular substance to the water or not. After all, if you trace things back far enough, the municipal water supply depends on the government 'forcing' lots of people to do things (such as paying taxes and following various regulations).
The whole argument gets weirdly metaphysical. Not many people have a problem with local authorities removing things from the water. That is, I don't see many Americans demanding that their local authority provide them with completely untreated water. But apparently modifying the water by adding something to it is importantly different. You'd think that a more interesting discussion would be a practical one (about the pros of cons of treating water in different ways). But a certain current of American discourse would rather return again and again to essentially theological arguments. We must locate the original sin against freedom in our local water infrastructure!
The opposite is true. If there was no municipal water supply, then you would in theory have a freer market where there would be multiple suppliers and consumers could theoretically make this decision themselves- assuming it doesn't result in a natural monopoly.
Because there is a government monopoly on water, you need these protections to prevent government overreach, because this is the only way for the consumer to express their preferences.
Some people would prefer there to be fluoride added to the water and some people would prefer there not to be. There's one set of pipes (in a given municipality), so you can't please everyone. You might as well complain that the government doesn't offer you a choice of voltage or frequency for your electrical supply.
Looking around the thread, the idea seems to be that there is some kind of important metaphysical distinction between the government "adding" something to the water that people could in principle add themselves or merely "filtering out" bad stuff like pathogens — and that this metaphysical distinction is somehow linked to the difference between positive and negative liberties. As an aside, I think this probably makes no sense on a chemical level, as you generally can't remove stuff without also adding something else. But in any case, this strikes me as a uniquely American perspective. I think a more common perspective is the following:
* Essentially no-one wants raw untreated water supplied to their homes.
* The local government therefore needs to decide in which ways the water is going to be treated.
* This has to involve some compromises (because there's one set of pipes).
* These compromises are boring practical issues of municipal infrastructure and have no interesting philosophical or political implications.
> I think they're saying that the logical conclusion of kebman's libertarian line of argument is that no-one is entitled to municipal water anyway
Oh, I very much understand the libertarian 'argument', and I dismiss it as childish anarcho-primativist horseshit.
Almost all (aside the rare Lefty libertarian types) libertarians utterly leave out the fact that helping each other and coming together collectively can fix problems in what amounts exponentiation, compared to the collective action problem of individualism.
If everyone generated their own power, then grids would be mismatched and slow everyone down.
If water grids were individual wells, we would tap out natural aquifers in short notice. By collectively coming together, desalination plants and mass water purification is doable.
Libertarian types will demand absolute indepenendence for everything, but also want the spoils of a framework of governance. But even when they get their own community, as I linked, they so overwhelmingly fucked it up.
Communism is a better idea than rugged right-wing libertarianism (the common one in the USA). Turns out, none of the richies want to pay for anything.
But adding fluoride WAS everybody coming together to solve a problem (poor dental health). We could have a reasonable argument about whether or not fluorine in the water continues to serve that goal. Instead we’ve got this weird quasi-debate about types of freedoms.
> Freedom applies to individuals, not collectives.
In the US, it most certainly does. We have freedom to associate, and associations also have freedoms. Were it not so, we wouldn't have even been able to arrive at the conclusion we have with regard to corporate money in politics.
Yes, in the US associations are granted certain legal rights, including the right to political expression and collective action. That's a matter of legal precedent.
But law doesn't define philosophy — philosophy defines law. And from a philosophical standpoint, freedom is a property of individuals, not collectives. Only individuals possess consciousness, agency, and moral responsibility. Associations, corporations, and groups are abstractions — tools created by individuals, composed of individuals, and led by individuals. They cannot make free choices; they can only be directed.
Freedom of association means individuals are free to join or leave groups as they see fit. But the moment something is mandated, such as being forced to participate in a fluoridated water system, or coerced into accepting the political will of a corporate “person,” the individual's freedom is compromised in favor of an artificial entity.
Philosophically speaking, rights flow from individuals to associations, not the other way around. The association has no legitimacy that exceeds or contradicts the will of its participants, especially when it undermines individual liberty.
So yes, associations may have freedoms under law, but only because individuals granted them those freedoms. The moment those freedoms infringe on individual rights, they lose their moral legitimacy, regardless of legal precedent.
> I use LLMs. They're somewhat useful if you're on a non niche problem. They're also useful instead of search engines...
The problem for me is that I could use that type of assistance precisely when I hit that "niche problem" zone. Non-niche problems are usually already solved.
Like search. Popular search engines like Google and Bing are mostly garbage because they keep trying to shove gen AI in my face with made up answers. I have no such problems with my SearxNG instance.
> I could use that type of assistance precisely when I hit that "niche problem" zone
Tough luck. On the other hand, we're still justified in asking for money to do the niche problems with our fleshy brains, right? In spite of the likes of Altman saying every week that we'll be obsoleted in 5 years by his products. Like ... cold fusion? Always 5 years away?
[I have more hope for cold fusion than these "AIs" though.]
> Popular search engines like Google and Bing are mostly garbage because they keep trying to shove gen AI in my face with made up answers.
No they became garbage significantly before "AI". Google at least has gradually reduced the number of results returned and expanded the search scope to the point that you want a reminder of the i2c api syntax on a raspberry pi and they return 20 beginner tutorial results that show you how to unpack the damn thing and do the first login instead.
Though part of my gripe is just not having this in general. I can want to work on a certain machine I don't open and if I'm on an internal network but if external I want to do a proxy jump. The ssid is the most obvious and consistent way to determine this, at least to me. Anyone got another idea?
At the bottom, under related coverage, I found a link to a subsequent article mentioning his return to the tribe. There is a video at the top of that article.
I would go a step further: NPS is a garbage metric.
First, you start by assuming your customers can even reasonably ascertain their likelihood to recommend. They can't; there are people who answer 10 but will never recommend, and there are people who answer 0 but already have and will again.
Next, you assume your customers are idiots and don't know how an 11-point scale works by adjusting the midpoint: Instead of 5, the middle is now 7 and 8.
Then you realize there are two many numbers, so you throw several out by reducing your 11-point scale to a 3-point scale, after which you re-interpret "unlikely to recommend" as "likely to snag some other customers on my way out the door."
Finally you calculate your 'net promoters' by subtracting the percentage of low scores from the percentage of high scores to give you a nice round number that doesn't correlate with what's actually happening in the real world.
And this is just what happens when you do it 'the right way.'
NPS is said to measure growth using loyalty as a proxy. But then, what does that have to do with recommendations? Nothing.
Bahaha oh man this brings back memories. I worked for a startup where the CEO spent weeks working on determining our NPS and talking our ears off about it. At the end of the process, he was so happy - our NPS was higher than Apple! I didn’t really know what that meant but I figured he had an MBA and knew what he was doing.
The startup never became profitable and ran out of investor money 18 months later.
There were many things wrong with the company but this was one of the things that made me most feel like I was in Office Space.
Based on practical experience, NPS is garbage because:
1) Even with stable mean and median, NPS tends to vary month over month, at least for my B2B settings where samples are probably much smaller than for B2C. Then, management goes nuts because of very subtle shifts in the distribution caused by NPS' arbitrary aggregation into promoters, neutrals, detractors. Of course, often investors are married to NPS, so educating management does not solve the problem.
2) NPS varies unreasonably across cultures. We used to say, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, that NPS is a US-centric metric, where things are either amazing or awful (with little space in between). E.g., in northern/central Europe, an 8 can be pretty amazing.
NPS is the electronic version of a poorly run focus group. People will assume all sorts of things and bring in all manner of bias. You may get some data, but you have no idea how accurate it is. Even worse, you have no idea why they answered what they did, or how to fix things to make your customers happier.
Not defending NPS here - I don't use it - but some of your assumptions are wrong.
> They can't; there are people who answer 10 but will never recommend, and there are people who answer 0 but already have and will again.
What matters with NPS is trend over time, and getting the numbers at a scale. Yes, there are people who randomly click on one end of the scale or the other, but the assumption is that on average the portion of these people is stable.
> Next, you assume your customers are idiots and don't know how an 11-point scale works by adjusting the midpoint: Instead of 5, the middle is now 7 and 8.
This does not come from the assumption customers are idiots, it comes from the idea to treat people who vote "in the middle" not as neutral, but as detractors. Which makes sense: If someone tells me "hey I know Product X and it's meh", then I'm less a promoter but more a detractor.
> Then you realize there are two many numbers, so you throw several out by reducing your 11-point scale to a 3-point scale
The 3 point scale was the goal all along though, it's the idea of an asymmetric scale that leads to the 11-scale to 13-scale reduction.
> after which you re-interpret "unlikely to recommend" as "likely to snag some other customers on my way out the door."
If your assumption is that promoters drive positive growth, it's fair to assume that detractors drive negative growth by recommending an alternative.
If you believe in that core assumption that NPS measures word of mouth, then this interpretation of "likely to snag some other customers on my way out the door" is a sensible one.
> NPS is said to measure growth using loyalty as a proxy. But then, what does that have to do with recommendations? Nothing.
I don't think the underlying assumption is bad. That's how influencers work: people are more likely to buy something that is being recommended to them by someone they trust and someone who is passionate about the product.
Does NPS work? I don't know - I'm not using it as I said above. But at least the assumptions under which NPS are designed on top of the idea of word-of-mouth as a growth diver seem solid to me.
> Yes, there are people who randomly click on one end of the scale or the other, but the assumption is that on average the portion of these people is stable.
That assumption is predicated first on the idea that people can and will tell you their likelihood to recommend within a reasonable degree of accuracy. I don't think they do.
> If you believe in that core assumption that NPS measures word of mouth, then this interpretation of "likely to snag some other customers on my way out the door" is a sensible one.
But that's not the scale given to the respondent. The scale is given as going from "not at all likely" to "very likely" to recommend. There isn't an option for likely to recommend against. The low end of the scale probably captures some, but to assume it is near 100% is a mistake.
Re. your first point:
When working with NPS, you would not actually assume that 1.000 people who voted with the highest possible value actually translate to 1.000 actual recommendations. I think not even the most vocal proponents of NPS would claim this.
What matters is the _trend over time_, and that trend allows drawing conclusions regardless of actual individual customer behaviour, unless you have reason to believe that what customers actually do is completely independent of the score they give.
If today 50% of respondents rate positively, and tomorrow 25% do, for large enough pools of respondents, something has gotten worse and it's not a stretch to assume that the total number of recommendations that go around for your product will go down.
Re. your second point:
You are right that it is not explicitly asked for, but that does not imply that the core assumption would be faulty.
So much depends on the actual product being sold, and many other aspects, but being an imperfect metric or only a rough approximation would not imply that the metric itself is garbage, as the comment I replied to stated.
Here's a simplified example: Let's say I own a web shop, where growth implies a growth in sales. Someone on the positive end of the scale is more likely to shop again (contributing to keeping the current growth rate stable), and more likely to recommend my shop to others (contributing to positive growth).
Someone in the middle or on the negative side is less likely to shop again (contributing to negative growth) or even actively recommend against my product (counteracting any positive growth the promoters would cause).
Does the NPS tell me anything about _actual additional sales_ I can expect? No. Does it tell me anything about _actual customers I will lose_? Also no.
But it is one predictor of future growth, and as such useful.
Does my speedometer tell me if I'm driving in the right direction? No. Does it show how many traffic jams are ahead? Also no.
But it is one predictor of when I will arrive at my destination, and as such useful.
Thank you for taking time to explain this to people who are think NPS should be interpreted literally.
No, it’s really just a decent enough proxy for how your product is trending over time among your users.
Individual responses are uninterpetable. Single NPS survey is also not very interpretable. But with enough people and over enough time, it is a useful signal
It appears Drupal CMS is a customized version of Drupal that is easier for less tech-savvy folks to get up and running. At least, that's the impression I got reading through the marketing hype that "explains" it with nothing but buzzwords.
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