Hacker News Reader

Comment by edent | Hacker News Reader

Every sporting body that I know of has rules to keep people safe. Even dangerous sports like boxing and American Football pit some effort into keeping participants reasonably safe.

Similarly, every modern society has rules to keep people safe when roaming. That might be as simple as warning signs it as complex as a coastguard.

We've had decades of warning people about online scams and I don't see any slowdown in the volume of scammy emails that I receive. Education clearly isnt working - and that imposes a cost on all of us.

View on HN

We've had decades of 'simple warning signs' or measures as complex as coastguards and yet people are still periodically lost in the wilderness, badly injured, or even killed. Education clearly isn't working here either — what restrictions should we impose on people's right to roam to solve this?

You clearly know the answer here since you used the word “periodically”. There’s a massive difference between hundreds and millions. No one is stopping you from buying a non Google phone, no one is stopping you from running calyx or graphene. Mitigation for the things that affect the most number of people is how the world works.

> No one is stopping you from buying a non Google phone, no one is stopping you from running calyx or graphene.

Google and phone manufacturers have been actively moving in that direction and have a long history of being actively hostile to those things. This is just another move on the same board to restrict these freedoms.

> No one is stopping you from buying a non Google phone

You mean, the iPhone, which restricts everything even more?

> Mitigation for the things that affect the most number of people is how the world works.

Millions of people hurt themselves, physically hurt themselves, every day, doing things that we could easily restrict. Yet we still allow them to buy knives, glassware that can break, hammers, power tools, non automated vehicles of all kinds, the list goes on.

We also spend a lot of time educating them on the dangers, far more than is spent warning about online scams, and we do it at a far earlier age (age 0, for some of them).

Of course we still allow the sale of safe knives and plastic mugs, so people are free to choose; that point still stands. I'd argue that there is more competition in tableware, and less friction shifting between it, than there is in mobile operating systems.

Physical goods are much easier to regulate and legislate than digital worlds. You choose to take a specific level of transit when traveling places, guided by your risk aversion and other things you know. But some stuff you don’t know, like the things that go on behind the scenes to actually make those things safe. From road markings to the type of joints used in train tracks.

This is the exact same thing. We don’t spend time educating users of roads on how the road stripe width affects their safety, nor about how train tracks carry radioactive material through their communities every day. We let the companies and governments work to make things safer for everyone, even if it comes at the expense of some.

I honestly can’t believe I’m having this argument. Making things safer for the world should be a goal we all strive for, even if a very very incredibly small minority lose a tiny tiny bit of what they want.

Okay, how would you fix the scammy email problem? Only allow authorizing people to send emails after they applied for a government issued address?

Outlaw all non big corpo operating systems?

Perfect surveillance? All because some boomers can't into common sense?

It's also ironic that you bring up warning signs as a counterexample to my point, as it's exactly what I am saying. You can warn them, but you don't bar them from doing so.

They don't come into your own house and tell you what to do though. The police aren't going to arrest you for swimming in your own pool without a lifeguard. That's completely absurd.

I don't know where you live, but lots of places require you to secure your pool in such a way that people can't accidentally drown in it.

For example https://www.forbes.com/advisor/legal/personal-injury/attract...

Societies often place limits on individual freedoms.

Are you seriously comparing the self-serving decisions of a for-profit company with laws designed to protect people?

they are, and they're correct in that comparison. except that the laws for the pool don't require a branded fence or anything, it's just a height and gate-lock requirement.

Google is telling you to buy their particular brand of fence (which has inextricably an insane markup). And they disallow it for pool shapes they dont like and you dont have an appeals process for it.

And those laws are completely unjust. It is absurd to place an obligation on someone to protect people who are trespassing on the owner's property. If you are poking around someone else's home, it's on you if you get into something that hurts you.

Even the self-proclaimed bastion of libertarianism, the US, has laws against booby trapping, so that is obviously not true.

> it's on you if you get into something that hurts you.

So if you're a 3 year old child that wanders into a neighbor's yard and drowns, it's on you?

We know young children wander where they're not supposed to go, despite their parents' best efforts to supervise them.

So we do our best to legislate safety regulations when they can be low cost and high reward, like preventing children from falling into pools and drowning. We can't do everything, but when it comes to pool fencing the benefits seem to obviously and greatly outweigh the harms.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com