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Comment by mindcrime | Hacker News Reader

Evade local regulations that everyone else follows in the name of 'innovation' even though the reality is they are just taking a free pass on conducting background checks, and skipping safety guidelines.

When they replace all taxis, do they really think they can just permanently ignore all driving laws?

Since when do hackers bleat about obeying laws and regulations? What happened to having a "we can do better" mindset? Has everybody wigged out and flipped their "I want a nanny state to protect me 24/7" bit?

And as far as that goes... I guess no "certified" taxi driver has ever turned out to be a criminal or done anything to harm a passenger? Me personally, I prefer to exercise some personal discretion and simply decide whether or not I will ride with a particular Uber driver, or cabbie, or Lyft driver, or whatever, based on my own judgment in the moment, as opposed to abdicating responsibility to either the State or a corporation.

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> Since when do hackers bleat about obeying laws and regulations? ... Has everybody wigged out and flipped their "I want a nanny state to protect me 24/7" bit?

Please stop perpetuating this myth- started by Eric Raymond and happily encouraged by SV "thought leaders"- that hackers must, by definition, be laissez-faire capitalists who love Ayn Rand and treat breaking laws as a noble goal in and of itself. I do none of those things, because I recognize that many times regulations are vital for ensuring human health and happiness, and think that free-for-all capitalism leads mostly to misery for all but a few in the plutocracy. "We can do beter" implies not settling for a world like that.

Other people don't have to agree with my politics, but if they want to say I'm "not a hacker" because of that, they can take their very-politically-motivated prescriptivism and... well, I got told by dang the other day and I'm trying to cut down on the angry HN posts because of it, but you get the idea.

> regulations are vital for ensuring human health and happiness

I agree. The regulations created for the war on drugs has lifted millions of African Americans out of poverty and into group-oriented communities that promise shelter, free food, and at least one hour of happiness per day.

Please stop perpetuating this myth- started by Eric Raymond and happily encouraged by SV "thought leaders"- that hackers must, by definition, be laissez-faire capitalists who love Ayn Rand and treat breaking laws as a noble goal in and of itself.

Nice strawman. Luckily I didn't say anything about esr, laissez-faire, capitalism, or Ayn Rand in the post you replied to. Hell, I didn't even say that breaking the law is a "noble goal in and of itself".

All I'm saying is that it's disturbing to me how so many HN'ers have just completely sold out to the idea that the State is their proper master, and should regulate / control pretty much everything and anything. It seems to me that in the past, there was a more individualist / freedom oriented mindset around sites like this - whether it was from "American style libertarians" or socialist anarchists or whatever. Personally I find the change to be a bit depressing.

Somewhere in between "Since when do hackers bleat about obeying laws and regulations?" and "I want a nanny state to protect me 24/7" exists a middle ground where people realize that government regulation exists for a reason. You can't just throw away the law for the sake of your definition of progress...

You can't just throw away the law for the sake of your definition of progress...

Sure you can. Laws aren't magical and there's nothing about the State that gives it any actual innate authority.

No, you're right, there's no "law" molecule in nature.

What gives the state its authority is that me and three hundred million other people continue to give the state its authority. Break a severe enough law and we'll take away your freedom of movement for a while.

Behold, society!

Since when do hackers bleat about obeying laws and regulations? What happened to having a "we can do better" mindset?

Since when does hackerdom constitute blindly following dogma, whether it be libertarian or not?

Strange that you would respond with that, given that I'm arguing exactly against "following dogma". What I'm saying is that, as hackers, we have traditionally taken on a mindset that says "we can use our intellect, reason, science, etc. to figure out better solutions" without regard for dogma. And more and more people seem to be drifting away from that and just punting and saying "fuck it, the State will make everything OK". That's what gets me, is the way hackerdom seems to be losing that spirit of independence that it used to have.

The very fact that you treat this state as a separate entity from the people is a problem. In a republic, the state is the citizenry. Hackers are part of the state and can influence the state and should work with the state. No one here is agitating for delegating all responsibilities to the state. The point is that private businesses should work with the state and seek to change and reform regulation when necessary, not permanently act in defiance of the laws of the state. Hackers understand the use of a good tool, and if the state is one, then hackers should use that tool. To throw it away is blind libertarian dogma with empty rhetoric about "nanny states" and other bogeymen.

Furthermore, even supposed would-be laissez-faire capitalists know this- I doubt that startups pass up the chance to use government policies to their own advantage, or pursue rent-seeking behaviors that help their startups. The perfect libertarian society you envision exists next to the perfect communist society, as utopias that contravene human nature.

In a republic, the state is the citizenry.

In theory. I think we're pretty far removed from that in reality.

So...apparently for Apocryphon, the American citizenry is Trump? Interesting.

The citizenry may have severe differences of opinion with the leader in charge, but they have so far seen fit to endorse the system that brought him into power. So yes, the citizenry is Trump because Trump is a citizen, and he has won the electoral process that the citizenry did not work up the effort to reform or change to make it otherwise.

So if "the citizens", or some subset thereof, are unable to change the system, then they're assume, as a group, to be endorsing the system and its actions? And to be genuinely represented, indeed manifested, by its officials, even when those officials are aggressively at odds with each other?

Remarkable.

There's different degrees of endorsement. There's "agreeing with every jot and thistle of the system's actions" and there's "not trying to violently overthrow the system as bullshit." Most people live somewhere in between, closer to the former position than the latter. Most people want to change the system, but do not dispute the necessity of the system. As such, that means "the state is made of the people" is truer in the consent of the governed sense, and not the dystopian Soylent Green sense. That isn't to say there is no need for large-scale reform and changes; of course there is.

Of course there's degrees of endorsement, there always is. I'm just responding to the notion of yours that "in a republic, the state is the citizenry." Well, no, it's not, and it doesn't need to be - and indeed, there's no real way for it, in fact, to be so. Certainly, it can represent certain preferences of the citizenry, through various mechanisms and political tools, but the state isn't the citizenry, it's an institution with particular powers and structures. That's not objecting to the concept of endorsement, it's just pointing out the distinction.

It's fair to point out the distinction between the elected representatives (and the unelected appointed civil servants, bureaucrats, etc.) and the citizens who elected them. My original statement was to remind minarchists that ultimately, though, the state is still made up of the people it rules. The libertarian inclination to view the state as an alien, nefarious entity, doesn't lead to much room to improve it. Certainly your distinction is correct.

Okay, fair enough.

"ultimately, though, the state is still made up of the people it rules."

Well, that's one reason why it can be so dangerous. It's made of humans! :)

> Since when do hackers bleat about obeying laws and regulations?

Bleat? People would give Uber a pass if they actually created new and innovative technology.

Right now they're much more of a financial services (attracting VC funds) and DC lobbying firm than a technologically innovative company. They have a few (albeit NP complete) interesting technological problems. The rest is mostly legal and finance.

Why wouldn't people complain about companies who try to muscle in with money and lobbying featuring products that are not noticeably superior at all?

Hacker News is fairly progressive/authoritarian. The kind of attitude you describe can still be found on slashdot.

It looks like they're pretty much on the side of government/against Uber in the story about Uber flouting DMV regulations:

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/16/12/15/1559226/uber-we-don...

Hacker News is fairly progressive/authoritarian.

It has become more so over the past few years for sure. It was a lot more balanced in the past, as I recall.

And as a leftist, Hacker News is very, very libertarian-leaning most of the time by nature of its general support for startup companies no matter what laws they break and its general dislike of laws and systems designed to protect people from the sociopathic entities we call companies. There's some dissent, but it's certainly not a progressive haven.

This is one of those places where people will happily sit around and argue that breaking laws is moral and necessary, no matter what the law.

The sociopathic entities we call governments are far more powerful and do far more damage than those we call companies. MacDonalds has yet to bomb anyone that I am aware of, and I can't recall Google using force to prevent someone leaving a country, or Amazon water-boarding people it has captured through overseas kidnapping.

You're proving his point.

Corporations generally don't do their own bombing and waterboarding, but they sure hire OTHERS to do their bombing and waterboarding for them. Cf Pepsi's role in the Chilean coup https://www.theguardian.com/business/1998/nov/08/observerbus... or the United Fruit company's role in Colombia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_massacre or Guatemala https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobo_Árbenz

And of course, in their regular operation, many companies routinely pollute the environment: http://www.prwatch.org/news/2011/05/10722/koch-industries-to...

Funny how libertarians never seem to consider dumping millions of lbs of poison into the environment an "initiation of force", but god forbid government raise taxes by one cent.

If you want to play the game of "find the worst things corporations have done to prove they are worse than states", then you will surely lose. How does the actions of those corporations compare to say the bombing of Hiroshima, or the Great Leap Forward, or the Holocaust?

It's also worth noting - both of your examples involved the state actually doing the dirty work.

Funny how libertarians never seem to consider dumping millions of lbs of poison into the environment an "initiation of force"

Citation needed - AFAIK there is no such consensus.

HN is very far from being "libertarian leaning". It might have been so in the past, but that time is long gone.

This is one of those places where people will happily sit around and argue that breaking laws is moral and necessary, no matter what the law.

It looks like there are about two of us in that camp, in this discussion, versus pretty much everybody else. It's pretty clear the pendulum has swung and this site is largely oriented towards big government interventionism.

You should go back and look at some of the Uber posts from when they were still spreading across the US - HN broadly agreed that it was moral to, instead of fighting taxi regulations at the relevant levels (politics or court), just violate them. That HN has stopped being pro-Uber is mostly the result of people realising that Uber is not trustworthy, not a radical change in belief, combined with the fact that Uber apparently gets to do things we as people don't (and believe we shouldn't).

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