BearGoesChirp

There is a dead comment here that I think raises an interesting question (even if perhaps not in the most appropriate way).

When dealing with electronic goods, where do we draw the line with theft. Even in video games, electronic goods do have an effective market value (even if real money trading is banned), and there have been a few court cases surrounding items of great value. Often times the items stolen has a market value too small to be worth investigating, but what of the cases where there is a significant investment. Eve Online has some interesting cases where the market value being above a few thousand US dollars. Diablo 3 use to have a real money auction house with items worth up to $300, and with a gold market that allowed for items to be sold for even more than that.

Now, Diablo 3 bans scams and would take action against players engaging in them. But in Eve Online, it looks like some of the tactics used are allowed. In another game, Path of Exile, scamming people is allowed (and there even seems to be some protections for scammers). While Path of Exile bans real money trading, there is still a black market and certain items do have a market value, some worth noticeable amounts.

And while I can't think of any case yet, it would be possible for a video game to be created where the in game currency is a crypto currency that is usable outside the game as a crypto currency as well.

I'm not saying we should legalize all scamming, but I do think it is worth discussing further where we draw a life, if we draw a line, and what that line looks like.

Should be pretty easy to do in C# as well.

    private int _a;

    public int a { get { _a++; return _a;}}

People are going to goof at a certain rate. We need to design systems to withstand at least some rate of goofing. We wouldn't get rid of seat belts and just tell people to not goof. Sometimes the goofing is criminally negligent, sometimes it isn't. In this case, I'd say it wasn't.

>Unless you can tell at a glance that a firearm is not in a ready-to-fire state

Chance you are actually able to say that vs. chance you made a mistake in reasoning that conclusion? Still not a bet worth taking.

> In what world is this ethical?

How many people would be willing to let someone else do their job for them when the cost is adding a little extra bias, something that isn't even a big deal in a single case (but which adds up over time)? It feels like ethics will quickly take a back seat for some small boon.

Should I be ashamed of how quickly I considered this solution? It would be quite wasteful, but oh so lazy.

Why are we so certain it does? It has certain properties that give it some value. Maybe that value is much much less than the current price and maybe there will be competition that is better in every way, but is there not some small intrinsic value in owning something electronic that I can transfer which has scarcity enforced by algorithms instead of a centralized system?

Then again, if the intrinsic value is worth less than the effort to use it, is there a difference from having no intrinsic value at all?

>They can either accept the fees that are available or not.

Couldn't the same be said of a brick and mortar store? They either accept the offers they are given or they don't. That for some item they only accept offers of exactly 9.99 (plus tax), rejecting not only lower offers but higher offers, doesn't change that the interaction can be described in the same fashion.

All the rest also applies to normal supply and demand. When you do a production run of some item, the cost tends to be fixed per item. Doing another run at a different time may cost different, and it is possible for something extreme to happen (factory accident), but in general the cost of production of a single run is the same.

I see nothing about this that would void basic economic reasoning, where things like 'reducing fees' happens in certain conditions.

>If something is a rule then the majority decided it should be that way.

Few systems are direct democracies. Isn't it more likely the people decided the rule maker should be who the rule maker is (or makers are) and the rule maker(s) then decided what the law should be. And that is just some of the political systems you can model.

Think of like how congress like a <25% approval rating but most of them keep getting voted back in.

I was more just thinking about how political actions/will/impacts can be simulated as a second resource in an economy much like how we simulate money. Think simulation/exploration/explanation of the idea, not recommendation.

I've developer a few simplistic economic simulations in the past for fun, some of which included land ownership, but I never considered adding each agent having the ability to modify the law of land ownership as part of the simulation. The comment made me think of what would the impact of adding it be, and if there is less validity of models which don't include it.

>They're not "lowering their fee".

So a miner will never reduce the cost to include a transaction into their block, even when they aren't getting enough to fill up the block?

>They might stop mining altogether

Maybe, but any market can experience short term irrationality. Maybe it takes them a few hours to stop mining in which they lose money. Or maybe stopping operations costs enough money that the miner won't stop even at a small loss, at least for some amount of time.

And economics can easily account for that. Instead of saying the cost needed to product some number of blocks changes over time by 0, you instead say it changes over time by f(t). You then subtract f(t) (or add, depending upon how you treat the sign) from any actual decrease in cost to mine, and then apply the same logic.

Say the cost to mine falls by x (cheaper energy or some others amount), and x < f(t). x - f(t) < 0. The decrease in cost is less than 0, meaning the cost effectively increased since it didn't decrease by the amount needed due to the built in difficulty increase.

Normal economics works this same way due to scarcity, though the default change in cost into the future is far less sure of a thing. Take mining gold. Given that gold is mined from the cheapest to mine spots first, the more gold you mined, the more the cost of mining the same amount of gold. Maybe a new mine filled with easier to mine gold is found, maybe a current mine runs out of gold much sooner than expected, but it works in a similar manner.

When energy becomes cheaper, miners can do more mining, leading to an increase in blocks. Given that people are only willing to pay so much for a transaction to complete, there is only so much demand at a certain price point. Once the supply of blocks increases, you eventually have price points where the demand no longer matches the supply. At this point a miner would lower their fee until the demand increases back to supply.

Supply and demand drives prices, but it does so through individual actors setting prices they are willing to pay/accept (or by algorithms that have been setup by some human who set up the rules by which it will set prices).

I wonder, if you count agents in a market economy as having not just money to spend making rational purchases, but also political power as a sort of alternate currency (represented by a vote each), is NIMBY really a rational market reaction. If you start in a fully free market state, and enough actors combine their political power to limit the market, then that results seems just as important, if not more important, than one where there is a limit placed on the system to prevent such actions. Even the US Constitution, which could be considered a very strong limiter in what combined political power can do on a city, state, or even federal level, can be modified by enough people combining their political power.

Then allow me to fill in the gaps.

>What masses of historical evidence?

This is a question in response to the GPs post that:

>>masses of historical evidence

>The ones that show that being a male has long been a major disadvantage in a legal system?

This is a purposed answer to the previous question, making the claim that there is plenty of historical evidence that males have been strongly discriminated against by the legal system, even if we went back in time. Need I source a claim showing that men were more likely than women to be charged, convicted, and receive longer sentences? This has been the case for at as far back as I've looked.

The reason for this is because GP acted as if I was ignoring some evidence that would justify the argument that the legal system is biased against women because it goes easier on them and make it somehow compatible with the second argument that the legal system is biased against racial minorities because it treats them harsher. It shouldn't be hard to see that these things still appear to be in contradiction.

>Yes, going back into the past being a minority was even worse than it is today, to a point where there was absolutely no justice at all

This is to preempt a response that if you went back in time, the legal system was even more biased against minorities than it is today. Instead of waiting for that response to be potentially made, I made it myself. I preempt this based on past experiences of seeing the point made in counter to my point.

> but that doesn't have an impact on the line of reasoning used to try to say the legal system discriminates against women.

I then follow up saying that I don't see this as a counter, because it doesn't impact the half of the two statements I have a problem with. One can try to explain why racial minorities being treated worse in the past by the legal system supports the statement that the legal system going easier on women is discriminating against women, only that the claim that I made in the first half of this sentence is not enough.

>This type of response only further reinforces the notion that the underlying reasoning and terminology is created ad-hoc to justify existing notions.

I then finish by saying the type of response from GP, which does not explain their argument to any degree other than a claim of forgetting to take historical evidence into account, makes people more dismissive of the original line of reasoning and the terminology associated with it, that of systematic discrimination, because the historical evidence appears to support my claim, not theirs. In short, an unsatisfactory defense strengthens the opposition's argument.

Would you like me to further clarify any point?

We seem to be making distinctions based on some concept of free will. What happens if we view ill people as having no free will? Is it really any more wrong to deny the alcoholic high priority on the liver transplant list than to deny someone who isn't taking well to established treatments and keeps relapsing further access to treatments?

I feel like bringing up the notion of choice and free will is opening a can of black holes, but when dealing with mental illness you have to.

I find the best way to explain it is to apply the concepts to something other than classical wealth. Do it to something like relationships, and people insist that for anything that isn't classical wealth the market should be strongly libertarian (often accompanied by a suggestion that no such market even exists).

Oh, I thought it was something depending upon getting a certain rep and I hadn't hit it yet. Thanks.

Grandparent has been deleted and I can't see it, so I'm not sure what their post was, so I'm aiming this response in more at the terms being used and their underlying meaning.

>When people try to explain why you're coming to broken conclusions due to broken reasoning, they get attacked as radical leftists for using the straightforward terminology we have for describing the phenomenon we're discussing.

How much of this is caused by people have past experience with selective application of different lines of reasoning.

For example, use the legal's systems racial and sex based discrimination. If we look at racial discrimination, it should be pretty clear that minorities have it much worse than whites. And there is a lot of research on this. If you then look at it based on gender, it appears there is even stronger discrimination based on gender than on race, with males much worse off than females (and a minority male receiving the worst of each). But the treatment of this online seems quite different. While it is a personal anecdote, on multiple occasions I've been told the racial discrimination is caused by structural racism against minorities that treats them worse than whites at every step on the system (from being more likely to be stopped and searched, to being more likely to be convicted given equal evidence, to receiving harsher sentences), and then being told that the gender discrimination is caused by sexism against women, resulting from the legal system treating women as children every step of the way (meaning they are less likely to be stopped and searched, less likely to be convicted, and receive less time). These seem like polar opposite lines of reasoning, yet I've seen both used as the same time.

I think it is at this point you get people who become opposed to the underlying reasoning because it appears that the group using the reasoning is starting with an assumption and then picking the logic that best fits their assumption. And I think many of the people you encounter online who use this reasoning are doing just that. People of every political and other leaning like to manipulate data to fit their world view. Combined with a lack of exposure to the actual scientists who work on this it can paint people's view of the language. To say nothing of scientist being humans and thus there being examples of scientist being very non-scientific about some issue (while I don't know of any examples on this particular issue, I did read through case of correspondences published in a scientific journal dealing with classification of certain behaviors as mental illnesses where some scientist were making some very indefensible arguments concerning evolution of which numerous counter examples were available that basically boiled down to "there is no way trait X evolved because it isn't reproductively advantageous in our environment").

And to be clear on my own stance, I do think that systematic racism exists in our current system, including in sub-systems where there are no racist members. There are agent models that show with even a small in-group bias, completely devoid of any out-group bias, you can have a system where out-group bias is apparent. For example, a system of entities of type A and B where A's has a certain preference for grouping with other A's, but no preference for not grouping with B's, ends up behaving similar to a system where A's have a preference for not grouping with B's.

>The same problem exists with children.

I feel like the problem is worse with children due to them having a developing brain, where the impacts of medication can have impacts into changing the very person taking them. I am especially concerned with medication for mental illnesses that are prescribed to children, often times off label, but the risk exists for most any medication.

>You can’t keep them around and feed them fake intel on drug deals so they waste their time.

Any relevant case law on this? Lying to the police isn't allowed, but lying to some new guy at the bar is legal, regardless of your suspicions of who the new guy is.

>how much morality versus how much immorality

Morality and legality are both very subjective, either to the person or to the legal system.

When a lawyer tells someone to not talk to the cops, are they doing anything wrong? Because the lawyer is basically asking 'what can I do to stop a lawful interrogation'.

Does this change if the person is suspected of having pot or of killing children?

>choosing to avoid adding people to your team who have expressed opinions that make the workplace hostile to other employees

But are you adding other people making other statements which make the workplace hostile to other individuals? Also, what happens if the misrepresentation of something causes the hostility while the original message does not? Often it life, it isn't what you say, but how you say it or who says it.

>I've heard smart people say bitcoin will plummet because it has no intrinsic value. Well of course it doesn't! It's a currency. Currencies are an abstraction for value.

Currencies have certain values as currency. This includes factors like limited supply, having some level of enforcement of its use as a currency, ease of use, and also factors such as if it has other applications.

Take a gold coin. Low ease of use, but high limited supply and gold has numerous other uses. Depending upon the actual coin, and the ability to authenticate, it could be worth only its weight as gold, or it could be worth more because of rarity.

Take a dollar. High ease of use, mostly limit supply, has the US government backing it, has almost no other use.

Crypto has value as well. Harder to use in many situations, but easier in some. It has greater ability to remove the identity of the user and their funds, which is something most other electronic payment systems don't have. It doesn't have much backing it except the crypto algorithms (which most don't understand), but it does appear to have a limited supply.

I think crypto currencies do have intrinsic value.

But there is a problem. Years ago this intrinsic value wasn't known. As we slowly worked out what value crypto provides, its price has gone up. This has attracted some people who place value in it not as a currency, but as an asset that rises in price. As more people see it as an asset to invest in instead of a currency, it further drives up the price. At the same time, the intrinsic value of crypto is still being discovered.

So the question becomes, for any given crypto-currency, is the discovered intrinsic value + increase in value from being used as an investment greater than, less than, or roughly equal to the future intrinsic value.

If the intrinsic value that will be discovered ends up being far less than the current price inflation driven by using it as an investment asset, we will eventually see a correct/crash. When, and how far it goes before then, is something I'm not at all comfortable predicting, even if that was the case.

But I will say, when people with no tech interests are coming to me asking about bitcoin and investing in it, it makes me think it is over-hyped.

There is also the possibility of value in just possessing it, but I personally think this is near 0 for crypto (unlike foreign currency where some people pay a little just to have a framed collection of bills on our wall even if those bills have no value).

>people whom fate is much worse, IMHO

This is such a hard call to make, because the more severe the autism, the harder it is to know how happy they are. Perhaps the person who is totally into trains who spends their entire day playing with trains and train simulators and watching videos of trains is really happy. But maybe they are still lonely, but don't really know how to let others know? The higher functioning individual is able to let others know how lonely they are, and they are often attacked for it, but is that really worse than being lonely without the ability to even communicate that?

I feel like autistic adults are never given similar attention to autistic children. My person (and poorly informed) opinion is that the main driving factor is that autistic adults don't have advocates for themselves like autistic children do. A parent can do far more to bring attention to their autistic children than an autistic adult can do to bring attention to themselves. Add in society's favoring of children over adults and the complexities of adulthood (adults who physically act out are much harder to restrain, and there is the whole issue of sexuality that isn't nearly as present in autistic kids) and we have a system that focuses attention almost exclusively on kids. I wonder what happens to autistic adults. Do they end up in mental institutions, prisons, living independently, or dead?

>When has this ever not been true?

In the past before child abuse became seen as a big deal. Granted, if you hurt the child of some wealthy/powerful individual it was considered bad, but children of the poor, and especially children of single mothers were offered no where near the status they are given today.

Just look at societies where infanticide was common place to see that harming a defenseless child wasn't considered that bad an action (especially in cases where the child was showing signs of having developmental issues, I've read about there even being mythology that developmentally delayed children were treated as if the real child had been replaced by some demonic like figure who was being left to die/killed).

Or consider societies where children were effectively property of their parents (namely their father) and he could do as he liked to them?

Look at cultures where children were forced into marriages, something that would not be accepted today. Yes, people vastly overestimate how often such marriages happened (especially when at least one was young), but it was still far more tolerated when it did compared to today. Even in the last few years we have a few countries who still have laws on the book that reduced/removed punishment for a rapist if they married the victim. This historically applied even when the victim was a child (the Bible even has two passages that require such a punishment, one for when the child hasn't hit puberty (where the father can void the marriage) and one where the child has (where the father cannot void the marriage).

Or just look at a society that sacrificed children.

65 years ago is after the change happened. Part of the problem is I'm talking so long ago that everyone who only knew that reality. Maybe we could look at some place overall isolated from the rest of the world where child mortality throughout the society is similar to centuries ago, but with globalization I'm not sure that is possible because even in places where it is extremely high now, the local wealthy would have access to ways to lower it and in many places the child mortality rate hasn't been sustained at that level (if you look at the child mortality rates in Yemen, the levels is something new caused by the war).

All the people talking about being unable to handle/comprehend the death of their child, and especially the one line of conversations about the impact of losing one child when you have many more, made me think about something. For most of human history, losing some children was expected. Child mortality rates for most of our history have been abysmal.

As species, what impact did that have on us? Child abuse has a long history of being accepted, with child sacrifices in some cultures to forced marriages of children (not to say any of these events were super common, but there were cultures in which they were accepted even if not common). Look at 16th to 18th century and what happened to orphans of single mothers and it is horrible by modern standards. In some cases orphans were treated as child slave labor or worse (granted, they would grow out of it if they survived, while with actual slavery it was for life). Even into the 19th and 20th century we had children working in factories where dismemberment was all too common.

But around the start of the 20th century, that started changing, and today harming a child is one of the worse things that a person can do. Many would quicker forgive an ex convict that killed a rival gang member than someone who intentionally seriously injured a child.

I wonder if this is at all tied to drops in child mortality rates.