BearGoesChirp

I think you confused a few points. You mention both men getting apartments so they can form families with their already existing relationships and men who don't have relationships turning to online resources to try to understand how to have them. These seem distinct phenomena. Especially since in many other cultures newly wed couples would live with one set of parents in a multi-generational household. This means while it would go contrary to current social expectations and there would be some stress from doing such, not having an independent home for a relationship should be considered separate from not having a relationship. The latter is what mimics polygamous societies, and if the theory about the disability they cause those societies is true, should give us cause for concern in our own.

That there is a correlation between the availability of housing and effects you mention might be driven by a third hidden factor.

I think the implications were about sex before marriage, not just actual cases of having another persons child.

Rates of births out of wedlock has been steadily increasing and is nearing 50% (may already be passed it).

What about a society that is polygamous without contract? Many of the issues of polygamy seem to happen not because of the actual marriage contracts, but because of the relationships formed. Even if you remove the contracts, if we allow those relationships, don't we still have an issue?

Does a society where polygamous relationships are allowed suffer some of the same core problems that a society which allows polygamy suffers?

>The level of unwarranted surveillance with Google Glass and Echo Dot is pretty much the same, but because one is less visible than the other it doesn't get the same level of backlash.

This is a bug in human programming. I think it stems from far too many people not caring about potential, regardless of likelihood, and instead only caring about what happens. Similar to a gamblers fallacy in bad statistical reasoning (if it hasn't happened yet, then it won't happen), combined with a few other cognitive biases that allow a person to ignore events they don't see the direct cause and effect of.

The end result is that as long as the privacy invasion doesn't appear to be a privacy invasion, people will be okay with it. And given their past choices, they'll be more willing to be okay with the privacy invasion when it does go bad, instead blaming it on some other factor (such as one particular company caught abusing it, instead of the overall trend).

Companies are learning how to exploit this, and with technology increasing faster than social ability to handle the technology (such as why video recording and audio recording treated different legally), this is going to put a damper on the future.

Unless something major changes, public domain will never happen again. Corporations such as Disney will continuously lobby to extend it to cover their older works.

Isn't that what we are doing? Not exactly shutting it down, but massive amounts of privacy destroying laws and related technologies are in place for this reason, but which are used more to enforce laws with far less agreement. We didn't shut the internet down, but we destroyed a part of it.

Can't speak for them, but for me the issue isn't all taxation, but it is the extent of taxation and what it is spent on. I mind being taxed when that money is going to corrupt government contracts, being used to kill innocent people, and a number of other positions which I would get varying levels of agreement with.

Taxes used for ensuring murderers aren't free on the street is a lot different than taxes used to put people in prison for pot.

This is especially true since we are at a point where most people are taxed without representation, because their vote buys so little in comparison to lobbying or other factors (such as us having first past the poll system of election in the US).

If we consider stating facts without context needed to truly understand them as being equal on level of wrongness with something like discrimination, I think we should consider exactly how many people use such poorly informed facts. Gun crime facts, wage gap facts, just about any psychology paper cited ignores the limitations of the study (which likely has very few if any replications with different populations). Even medical research if filled with poorly stated facts that drop a lot of the details needed to understand the actual study done.

Given that stating facts without full context is the norm, attributing one specific case to racism seems hard to justify.

For a red delicious apples to granny smith apples comparison, look at the treatment of, framing of, and treatment of framing of crime facts based on race verses crime stats based on sex.

As long as users don't care about security, the exchanges won't care as well. Once users care enough, then the exchanges will. I think crypto exchanges are demonstrating a flaw in our society's approach to security where people have been conditioned into seeing hacks as inevitable and being taught to expect to live with the outcome and have ways to dampen the impact (credit monitoring, credit cards that detect and auto block fake transactions, etc.). The problem is that, at least for now, there is no dampening impact with crytocurrency. One hack and you lose everything, with nothing to reduce damage.

>and he's giving away

Gates was born too early for immortality to be achievable. Could it be that he has come face to face with his mortality, and having enough money to get anything he wants in the word that is for sale, he is effectively buying a positive legacy to be remembered by, as that is the closest thing to immortality that is currently on the market?

As long as the rest of people are spending money, some part of the industry will still target them. In video games, for all the games that chase the whales, there are still many games that don't. As long as there is money to be made, someone will go chasing it. While I have concerns about chasing whales, this is not one of them.

With bitcoins, it is easier to track the notes, but it is also easier to get rid of the association if you find someone willing to clean them for you.

Say I steal 10 bitcoins from you. I go to someone who cleans bitcoins for a cost of 10%. I send them 10 bitcoins, and they send 1 bitcoin to 9 different wallets (keeping the 10th as payment). That alone would allow you to still track it. But now add in thousands of other people sending them bitcoins on the same day, and some random pauses as to when they send the bitcoins to other wallets, and you are no longer able to tell which bitcoins in are associated with which bitcoins out.

Now, do you just get businesses to stop doing business with anyone (any wallet) that has ever received bit coins from the mixer? And there are many mixers out there.

And this is still simplified. You can be governments are monitoring and running statistical analysis on those mixers to try to find people laundering bitcoins associated with especially bad things. I'd even guess some of the bitcoin laundering operations are ran by governments in an attempt to better track the flow of bitcoins.

How about a somewhat updated law? Binding arbitration should only be legal when made between two entities who have a power difference no greater than that of an adult and a teenager. If the power difference is greater, say like that between a non-lawyer and a multinational corporation, then the agreement is illegal because consent cannot be given in such a power vacuum.

How does one determine should or shouldn't? If we are looking at the factors that Cook will actually be judged upon that he cares about, which is his ability to make money for Apple shareholders, then he is doing the right thing. He is lying, but in doing so is gaining positive PR which increases people's opinion of Apple and thus their willingness to buy it. This is what he should be doing.

It is simpler to think of anything said by a CEO as being a complete farce. They are doing what makes the share holders money, and if they aren't, they won't be a CEO for long. They'll be exceptions, but the accuracy rate may be at tolerable rates without accounting for them.

I'm pretty sure that would be an allowed reason to reject.

But what if you are a small business and don't want the person there because you don't want the reputation of having someone with that particular criminal past working for you? Say you are a construction company that specializes in large play areas. Technically a child should never be on site while building the play area, and your workers will be gone before it is open for kids to play on, but the mere reputation association being made could cost business.

Is merely the possibility of a bad reputation reason to reject? If so, the law is effectively pointless.

Isn't there an even bigger loophole, where a non-California recommendation company can recommend hire/not-hire and suggest a salary. The hiring company never looks it up, the non-California company does, but they never give the information to the company so the company never violates the law. Of course, you'll have to wrap it up a little better (have the verification company also check skill sets and such), but effectively all you have to do is outsource the vetting process to somewhere outside of California to get around this.

There is also possibility the existing laws take into account intent. Filming with a nanny cam that is visible (even if you don't call it out) to protect your kid is allowed. Filming with a hidden cam for prurient reasons is illegal. Proving intent would be case by case and up to a prosecutor/court.

How does the above scenario of limiting who can invest fall under these?

Where do we draw the limit at limiting adults for their own good?

Most intersectionality can be seen as simplistic statistical modeling that has flaws (such as male not being a benefit whenever the legal system is involved). I don't actually think the theory is wrong, but I do think the current models are way too simple and more often than not picked not for their correctness but their usefulness in achieving political goals.

I could see it being done generically enough that a person who was wronged sees something being done, a person who did something wrong sees an admonishment, but also someone who didn't actually do anything wrong sees it as a general 'don't be bad' message or thinks it is meant for someone else.

There are times when someone wants to cause pain to another, and chooses a response to inflict maximum harm. This could be a racial slur, but it could also refer to a death of a loved one or something else. Imagine someone telling another "I see why your son killed himself." It is meant to cause maximum damage, not meant to be racist/sexist/etc.

In these cases, I don't think there should be any difference in forgiveness between those who used discriminatory language and those who picked another means to attack. I'm not saying people should accept a sincere apology. I see such an attack as very bad regardless if it used discriminatory language. The intent, to cause maximum pain, is unjustifiable regardless of the tool used to carry it out.

What is the end result? You go up to someone who isn't a minority and tell them that even though they did everything right and were in the top 100, you choose a minority who was in the top 500 but not the top 100 over them due to their status as a minority? What will the impact of telling them that be?

Of course, no employer (that I have ever seen) is that open. We share a common expectation that the people who qualified but were passed over won't be told. Maybe an open ended promise of "next time". All this does is allow the same effects to be diluted to anyone who might have been impacted. So now even those outside the top 100, even those outside the top 500, consider there is a chance they were impacted by such an action. So while the impact is less than telling the person passed over, you now have more people feeling it.

And this does seem to be a damned if you do/damned if you don't, because even if you did create a top 100 ranking and used it to promote, that would be influenced by subconscious biases and other factors based on minority status and people aware of that who didn't get promoted would also be negatively impacted.

I doubt it. At least in the society I grew up in, there are gender differences in social expectations completely outside the job market that lead to different incentives in the job market. Any ranking system will have to deal with the results of two different demographics who have, on average, different incentives.

I think the relationship isn't linear. Too much equality and there is no reason to go above and beyond, to innovate or to take risks. To much inequality, and we find the same result. Enough inequality to reward those who do more (with some understanding that there is elements of luck), but not so much inequality that people have to be lucky to succeed, if it is possible at all.

>Yet the solution to income inequality is to increase government control of the means of production via confiscatory taxes and redistribution?

There does seem to be an issue where the government having more power results in things going even worse when the government gets corrupted.

Is it better to have the FDA/DEA approve what drugs are legal which allows them to be abused by outlawing competitors, or is it better to not have the FDA/DEA able to ban drugs, which let's meth be sold freely where ever a business chooses to do so? Most everyone I've seen discuss this issue gets caught up in the trap of wishing for a happy medium that won't last. They want a government that does good but won't be corrupted to do bad.

>So some advocate increasing government's ability to take money from you a gunpoint through taxes in order to prevent the government from being able to control people?

In the end, we will always threaten each other with violence. I've yet to see an alternative, as even extreme libertarian solutions just give way to fertile ground for governments to rise anew.

No matter what you do, a group of people which binds together will have more power than the strongest person who doesn't, and part of that power will be dedicated to keeping the group bound together (as groups that don't will eventually fall apart).

>worldwide absolute poverty has dramatically dropped

Looking world wide isn't really relevant when people make decisions based off of local ideals. Countries where poverty is going down will likely not have issues, and countries where wealth for the lower class stagnates or even reversed will.

>This whole "income inequality" cause is little more than Marxist class warfare rhetoric

And you have to fight class warfare with class warfare. Consider those who supported a culture where sharing one's salary is taboo, while businesses share the salaries of their employees quite openly (at least to other businesses on the inside).

>However, the industrial revolution started a low time before that. Apparently the climate change wasn't a catastrophic threat until someone wrote a book about it being a catastrophic threat? Were scientists simply sleeping for the past 100 years until some far-left journalist wrote a book about it?

Well look at how child abuse wasn't a significant problem up until the 1900s either. I wouldn't consider that evidence that child abuse isn't actually a significant problem.

>And there are 2 billion people living in extreme poverty, that gives each of them about $500. But that's it.

What is $500 in terms of their actual income? I'm not advocating seizing the wealth of the wealthiest, but to think that for the world's poorest $500 is the same as $500 is to even a poor American isn't quite right.

What I will say is that rights and morals and laws are all social constructs, and the true reality is we have never left the jungle. People will continue playing at society as long as certain conditions are met, and one of them is for things to be continually improving over the long term. If that doesn't happen, people will use what ever power they have to change the system, often to the detriment of those at the top. This isn't right or wrong, this isn't moral or immoral, this isn't legal or illegal.

>Suppose we waved a magic wand, and suddenly all of Disney's employees and shareholders were middle class people. Would that change Disney Inc's incentives around IP lobbying?

I'm not sure the shareholders are the actual issue, since it is Disney's concentration of wealth that allows it to change the laws (and gives it incentives to do so). It doesn't much matter who owns the wealth, since the chain from owner to actual employees carrying out the actions that change the laws ends up removing most impact of the share holders.

Part of the problem is that the inequality leads to behavior that protects the inequality. Disney passing lobbying for laws that will keep their work out of public domain despite how much they benefited from public domain. Drug companies lobbying to outlaw certain products that would help people but cut into profits.

Enough inequality allows information control. Enough information control allows government control.

Overall, if things were constantly getting better, I doubt people would care. But once things start stagnating for those at the bottom, they begin to consider not playing by the current set of rules.

Even if they consented to such conditions in the past, if they have since changed their mind and wish to remove consent, how is it ethical to not allow them to do so?