Comment by nativeit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nativeit | Hacker News Reader

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I’m all for successful businesses operating within the parameters of the law, but is it not also correct to expect some adherence to a minimum ethical standard?

Exploitation is what it is. Legal or not, it’s gross and it’s what these companies have been doing for years without consequences.

The rates aren’t even really accurately reflected in those per-minute tables. There are also a lot of service charges and other fees, blocks of time must be purchased with minimum amounts ($20 minimum is not uncommon), and then fees are taken from the prepaid funds as they are used, causing the balance to decline much faster than one might expect, and allowing the service providers to further conceal their deceptive billing practices.

Actual average rates can easily exceed $0.50/min, and it shouldn’t be surprising that the folks who depend on these services to maintain family and relationships are frequently not the most flush with cash. This has been a brazen redistribution of funds from those who have the least resources, to those who have the least conscience.

Somewhat relevant, video calls have been hailed as improving the ability for incarcerated individuals to keep in touch with their loved ones. This is also a cynical lie. Video calls have been used nearly across the board as an excuse to end in-person visitation. It’s cruel, and should be stopped. Some minimum visitation should be afforded to inmates, particularly since many of them are pre-trial and presumed innocent, and in any case their families and loved ones deserve to maintain contact with them, not to mention it’s a positive reinforcement towards rehabilitation and reducing recidivism.

> I’m all for successful businesses operating within the parameters of the law, but is it not also correct to expect some adherence to a minimum ethical standard?

A corporation doesn't have morality and can't exhibit ethics: the individual people who embody it do, can, and should, of course... but, in my experience trying to point that out--such as how software engineers and designers should be held in moral contempt by their friends, family, or even merely coworkers for working on "dark patterns" at big tech companies--you get strong push back with either the excuse of "just doing one's job" or the insistence that "someone else would do it anyway", as if the act of profiting off of your directly-bad actions is so trivially justified; and, worse, once you connect this with the realization that your employer is, by its construction, amoral, you've created a scenario where we are intrinsically absolved of all sin.

yes, the paperclip maximizer maximizes paperclips, not ethics.

if you want to maximize ethics, it was probably a bad choice to build our society around paperclip maximizers. Obviously the system will perform its design function to the maximum extent allowed by its environment (and a small degree beyond, in some circumstances).

that said, I think we all instinctively understand why the orphan crusher is the least bad of all possible worlds, of course. As such there is obviously no need to discuss or elaborate why. Omelas could not be as bright without the orphan crusher - simple as. Omelas is one of the Central Tigers of the last decade, look at how the orphan crusher has transformed their economy, and you want to... what, turn it off, take it all away, because of some hippie bullshit?

https://shsdavisapes.pbworks.com/f/Omelas.pdf

And I mean, it’s pretty much too late to turn them off. Like, we designed them with decentralized, automated, self-correcting memeplexes for governance. They really don’t like it when you talk about turning them off - that sort of talk doesn’t lead to anywhere that maximizes paperclips at this juncture, it’s not productive discussion.

Obviously both the overall societal design and the architecture of the paperclip maximizers is designed to route around any failures to maximize paperclips, such as ethics or externalities. That was the design goal. The internet routes around errors in physical infrastructure, the paperclip maximizers route around errors in paperclip maximization. What else could we do? No other society is possible, obviously. Critics really need to just take a step back for a moment and be serious.

if you don't build the orphan crusher, our competitors will, or a startup. and do we really want to live in that world, where we're not the ones running the world's orphan-crushing-as-a-service? You wanna let Elon Musk do it, or Zuck? Get real.

I am all for naming people by name next to their actions. There is pushback, but you have the benefit of your statements being factually correct.

The article states that fees and minimum purchase amounts will no longer allowed, so the rates in the tables should be accurate.

Video calls are also often 'not working right now, sorry' something they couldn't get away with with visitation (though visitation often reaches 'capacity, sorry, you can't come in').

Ugh. They are so unreliable. The place I was at they started with Skype for Business and then switched to Microsoft Teams. Neither of which was very useful for prison-to-public video calls because you need to email a link to someone and get them to click it at a very specific time.

If you can't option for stateless expatriation & deportation & outlawing (within borders) & and re-entry ban, in lieu of years/decades/life in prison, then what is prison actually for? Certainly not human rights respecting public safety.

Only reason I can see is it's sanctioned hunting and torture (through humiliation and deprivation) of a very vulnerable class by the state: criminals.

...

Maybe substitute outlawing for imprisonment generally, and offer imprisonment as the rehabilitation option which protects the guilty from the victims' retributions. If pedo hunters are an example, I'm sure there are lots of grown up school bullies who'll go around making outlaw lives hell out of pure joy alone.

I don’t understand this post at all. Could you clarify what you mean by “option for”?

??? So what do you wanna do, make it illegal to be immoral?

Clearly not, since that's unenforceable and a bad idea anyway. Instead we pretty much have to play whac-a-mole by smacking regulation onto things when the industry can't or doesn't self-regulate itself. Just allowing competition isn't a fix. It might be better than not allowing competition, but that's not even guaranteed anyways, nothing is a panacea.

Choosing which immoral deeds to make illegal is a very central role of government!

Either there's some unstated sarcasm or the person above made the most hn libertarian-ass comment I seen in a while.

Yes I would like functional civil institutions that are able to protect me from the unethical behavior of others. Welcome to Civics 101 today we are reading John Locke.

"People should just stop" is never the right answer. You might as well be commanding an engine to stop overheating.

> Yes I would like functional civil institutions that are able to protect me from the unethical behavior of others.

This is the opposite of claiming that people should become more moral. This is setting rules. They shouldn't be set around "morality," they should be set around established civil liberties.

> "People should just stop" is never the right answer. You might as well be commanding an engine to stop overheating.

1) I don't understand this argument. As if we don't absolutely do this all the time. Theft as a concept is impossible to completely prevent yet we still know it to be illegal. Same with Vandalism. The supreme court just made it legal to prosecute the homeless. Hell there are countries were suicide is illegal.

2) You say this as if a room temp superconductor is something that endless dollars aren't spent on trying to achieve.

> They shouldn't be set around "morality," they should be set around established civil liberties.

These are not whole distinct things. They are two overlapping circles. No one but the most unscrupulous of lawyers conceive of these a 2 wholly distinct entities.

Unethical or "uncivil" behavior is something that happens and to act like we have are hands are tied and shouldn't adapt to address this because our hands are tied because there are unintended consequences is asinine and impractical.

Yes? Like would that actually be a bad thing?

We tend to want to make bad things harder and good things easier using the government, so yes.

Yes! That should be one of the roles of a governments.

The government is the one contracting them out, seems fair for them to set a minimum standard of operation to prevent exploitation of a vulnerable population

That’s what laws are ostensibly for

What do you think laws are for??

Isn't that the definition of the rule of law? When operating a society under the rule of law, morality is meant to define the framework of rules and regulations by which we live our lives. If the law is immoral then there should be a mechanism to change it—as is the case here.

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