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Comment by sandov | Hacker News Reader

It may be legitimate when the regulated action causes direct physical harm to someone else. For example: I think it's reasonable to regulate particulate emissions.

It's not legitimate to regulate manufacture or commercialization of products when that manufacture or commercialization poses no direct threat to the physical well-being of other individuals.

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Why draw the line at physical well-being? Why should it be fine to waste someone's time, cost them money, even destroy them emotionally, so long as you don't directly physically harm them?

Your scope is absurdly narrow.

Because it's a clear delineation point. Physical harm is much easier to observe. Emotional harm is a definition that would lead to too many false positives.

Because physicality is what defines if people are free or not, and freedom is the only moral principle that a reasonable, moral society can be based upon. If you forsake freedom, you might as well forget about morality altogether.

Regulating emotions is arbitrary. Maybe it makes me sad that you post comments on HN. Should your comments be regulated?.

Physical harm is where you draw the line, because it's the only line that makes sense.

People starve, while they could have just photosynthesize physically all they want. smh!

/s ... but seriously, yes, somehow claiming physical stuff is clean got popular, probably because of our intuition about the world, but it wasn't the case since people stsrted engaging in politics, trade, rituals, shaming each other for various reasons, invented organized religion, and so on.

Though of course regulating emotions is a silly reductio ad absurdum, but there are a lot of steps between physical harm and woke feels. Such as monetary damages as determined by a court for things like discrimination, abuse of market position, libel/slander.

Because in this case the consumer is choosing to waste their own time and their own money. If the charging situation is so terrible people are free to buy other phones.

Because, as the Romans put it, de minimis non curat lex.

We are talking about law, not social expectation. It's not at all fine to waste someone's time, cost them money, destroy them emotionally, or insult their mother.

But it shouldn't be illegal.

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