Defletter

> You cannot will away an old debt without consequence because a current entity owns it, now, in the present.

You cannot do ANYTHING without consequence, why would that be a criterion for anything? And ownership is a legal fiction, hence why Russia was able to seize all those passenger planes, likewise with Western nations seizing the assets of Russian oligarchs. Ownership, particularly of intangible things like debt, is not some universal truth or force of nature like gravity: it's an emergent property of the system we have set up. One of the reasons why the UK is (or was) the centre of finance was because of its robust legal system that puts an extreme emphasis on property rights. And that's a deliberate decision. The idea that such a decision is amoral is ridiculous.

> There is not a real concept of trust like between individuals

Yes, there absolutely is? In fact, it is the currency of international relations. International law isn't even really a thing: international law is domestic law; it only exists to the extent that a country respects the Rule of Law. It's why certain countries that blatantly violate international law face no legal consequence. It's why the response to the violation of international law are sanctions, not a higher courts overruling them: there is no higher court. And even when there are hypothetical higher courts, like the ECJ, again it only works so far as the member state is willing to play along, which is partly why Hungary is in such hot water with the EU. I'd even go so far as to say that nations rely on trust more than people do. The fact that you don't think trust even a concept with nations is wild and makes me doubt whether you understand the concept of international relations at all. And all this is also true within a nation: if you cannot trust your state institutions, those institutions are worthless.

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I do not think it is worth conversing further since this is clearly unproductive.

Why are reparations considered "individual heroics", and why is a society fixing its past injustices not considered part of, if not integral to, long-term stability and trust in the reliably of the system? Don't you want a system where, if you were harmed, you will be remedied?

> To be able to enter into new long term agreements, we must respect existing agreements.

That is a matter of trust, it's not an obligation for the state. We are a society of people, and for us to perpetuate civil society, wrongs must be corrected, yes? Why is the respect for debt more important than the respect for humanity?

> There is no need for me to consider the actions of others I had no control over in order to act morally.

What does this have to do with anything? Slavery is not a matter of "if you don't like it, don't do it", it was a positive right protected and enforced through the state's monopoly on violence. That's what law is. Likewise with the legacies of slavery. It's not mere morality, it's existential to civil society.

If the state passes legislation to fund reparations based on past harm, that is no different to any other appropriations spending. And yes, the choice to pass such legislation is largely based on morality since there was no prior legal obligation to do so... but so was not absolving themselves of that slave-owner debt. The UK Parliament is sovereign, it could have willed away that debt with a simple majority, but it chose not to for 200 years. That too is a decision based on morality, and a telling one: that humanity is less important than debts being paid.

> Nations are not individuals.

Nations are not literally individuals, but state personhood is a thing, akin to corporate personhood. I'm not entirely sure what your point is here.

> Similarly, individuals do not inherit debt.

You're doing the whole "don't therefore can't" thing again. I have a vague recollection of debt inheritance in history's past. 'We don't do that because we don't do that' is not an argument.

> Is your plan to analyze all current wealth for morality based redistribution?

Don't threaten me with a good time! Jokes aside, I'm generally pro-redistribution to begin with (I'm somewhat of a dirty communist) and I think trying to finagle exactly how much someone's wealth should be redistributed based on the weaving and waning of economic activity over two centuries to be rather a waste of time. Better to just redistribute based on wealth. But if this were something that happened only thirty years ago, I'd absolutely be calling for "morality based redistribution", as you put it, because it is then something that can actually be achieved.

And the institution of slavery and its legacies were and are experienced by contemporary people. In fact, penal chattel slavery was an ongoing thing well into the 20th century in the US.

And I honestly fail to see the distinction you're making: you insist that financial obligations are different because, to paraphrase: "there's a paper trail and defaulting is bad". But slavery and its legacies also has a paper trail, likewise with human life and misery, and not resolving this is also bad. You have yet to provide an argument that fundamentally CANNOT also be applied to reparations: you've only given arguments over how we merely don't apply them to reparations. This kind of definition game, that 'reparations aren't considered that way because we don't consider them that way', reminds me of when there's outrage over police murdering someone and people insisting it's not murder because murder is an unlawful killing.

So, I ask you, without resorting to mere definition, what is the difference between "People make moral choices; you are trying to saddle people who didn't make those choices with some sort of culpability" (reparations) and "People make financial choices; you are trying to saddle people who didn't make those choices with some sort of culpability" (debt)?

That is a distinction without a difference: my tax money went to paying off that loan. Whether it was a debt established 200 years ago that we we're still paying off, or assigned a new debt based on something that happened 200 years ago makes no difference: I still had to pay for it. It's a legal fiction, all of it. Quibbling over whether it's this category or that makes no difference to me having to pay for it.

Can't you understand why attempting to resolve past wrongs is good? Why are finance obligations so important that they MUST persist throughout the centuries, but attempting to fix the legacies of human suffering is just "vibes based moral justification"? Why are numbers more important than people?

> And expecting today's people to pay for what their great-great grandfather's did, isn't a thing that's often entertained.

From what I can tell, the argument is that: if your great-great grandfather became extremely wealthy off of slavery, and was then paid by the government to free their slaves, and then eventually you inherit that wealth... well... if the wealth from crimes against humanity can be inherited, why isn't the responsibility to undo the harm not also inherited?

I mean, they can renege, Parliamentary Sovereignty and all that jazz. The choice not to renege is indeed a choice.

Correct, the slave owners were already "compensated" for their crimes against humanity 200 years ago, so the debt being completed was the loan the UK took out to do so. But you are missing the point: the argument being made here (and in other comments) is that slavery was soooo loooonng aggoooo that considering reparations is at best virtue signalling, and at worst moronic. And yet you and others do not bat an eye at debt lasting that long. And let's be clear, I am fully supportive of OP's advocacy for funding black neighbourhoods and other such programmes. I am specifically aiming at this whining sophistry (which I'm not claiming OP made, but just in general) about slavery being ancient history so reparations are ridiculous, but debt lasting that long is totally fine and normal.

I agree, the fact that the UK government was still paying off slave-owner debt in 2015 (https://www.gov.uk/government/news/repayment-of-26-billion-h...) instead of freeing itself from that debt because the idea of giving the descendants of slave owners who were "harmed" in the loss of their "property", is completely bonkers.

You say that like governments, like the British government (since you brought them up), didn't finish paying off its debt to slave owners in 2015 (https://www.gov.uk/government/news/repayment-of-26-billion-h...) for debt created decades before the American civil war over slavery. Are you okay with this? And if so, why is paying off this debt okay when slavery is so far removed, but the concept of reparations isn't?

Happens a lot: if the more ethical choice isn't perfect, I might as well stick with the very unethical choices.

> Glad you're cool with it though, I guess?

Just to be clear, the advertisements that I'm referencing are ones like this (https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-signs-at-roadside-advertis...), where the goods being sold are sold on the property the sign is on, ie, they're basically shop signs. They are usually pretty small too, with larger ones needing the approval of the local authority. There does seem to be pretty good enforcement on this too. I'm definitely against advertisement billboards: those big slabs that are just there to distract you with any arbitrary advertisement that paid to be wallpapered onto it.

Steel-manning the argument, near where I live, it's not that uncommon to see small to moderately sized advertisements along the road, such as a sign outside/near the entrance of a farm that's selling eggs, meat, etc. I am wholly unopposed to this. In fact, I'm very supportive of this, and used them to find a farm to buy local honey from. Whereas the stereotypical massive slabs whose advertisements get wallpapered on, I think those are distracting menaces, particularly if the primary way you see them is by driving.

> Anything that involves the population at large can just be done by the population at large on their own accord.

This is where I'm going to exit this discussion: this statement (which is the fundamental assumption of every argument you've presented) is so exasperatingly naive that it would require disproportionate effort on my part to rebut it, and we're already very deep into a thread that I've feebly attempted twice now to get back on-track to the happiness question. And I'm honestly not that willing to put that much effort into an internet discussion just to teach someone why a democratic government would do something for the public good and why individuals / communities may not be able to achieve it "on their own accord". I don't have the patience, the expertise, the rhetoric, or the time. Have a nice day.

> The role of government is to clean up the outliers who act out against the wishes of the people, not to "do good"

The democratic state exists to represent, protect, and promote the welfare of the people. The idea that governments exist to "clean up the outliers" (side-stepping the worrying phrasing of that) is a 'small-c' conservative mindset, not a liberal one. No, the democratic government exists to do what the people elect it to do. The reason why ostensibly democratic governments so often disregard or even act against the wishes of their constituents is because that democracy is not really as democratic as it would like us to believe (eg: gerrymandering). Also corruption, which is arguably included in the previous point but best to make it explicit anyway.

> you start volunteering to build houses [...] as anyone who cares naturally would

I love the naive frivolity of the idea that people can just volunteer to build houses as if there's no training, zoning, insurance, regulations, etc, involved. Sure, I could make the teas and coffees, but like, you seem to think this is something people can do to fix the housing crisis by themselves. So how will people do the plumbing, wiring, structural analysis? Ensure the foundations are correctly laid? That walls are not out of plumb? You just hope that this effort that people make in their spare time will have all the planning permission and trained professionals enough to get this done? Are you for real?

> It wouldn't be the government's job to force you to start building houses

Okay, literally who? Who is being forced to build houses? Even in countries with public housing policies, who is being forced to build houses? The only thing I can think of that's remotely close to this is when development contracts include requirements for nearby affordable housing developments. I have no idea what you're talking about and I honestly think this argument is a complete strawman.

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You are obviously an authority on yourself, but are you really a liberal? You certainly not making liberal arguments, and not in a "hurr durr, that's because I actually want to get things done!" way, but in a wholesale rejection of systemic solutions to societal problems, the dismissal of the idea that the state has any responsibility to promote the welfare of the people, and the notion that public programmes that would promote the welfare of the people would force people to labour against their will? These are conservative talking points through and through, and I think you should reflect on that.

But again, we are just bickering in a side discussion: the real discussion is about why liberals are less happy compared to conservatives. I've made my claim, you've seemingly agreed with that claim. We needn't continue this gratuitous back and forth about whether the state can and should attempt to benefit the people outside of "clean up the outliers".

Honestly, reading through all that, it sounds like you yourself are just as defeatist as liberals, if not more so: every possible systemic solution which has been shown to work[1], is to you like wishing on a Monkey's Paw. And yes, there's some truth to that: there's a saying that there are no solutions, only trade offs. But good grief, this level of defeatism is insane... why even have a government if it can't do anything for the public good? So again, I must ask, am I arguing with an anarchist?

[1] "Hav[ing] been shown to work" meaning measurably solving the issue, not necessarily utter eradication of the issue. We needn't let the perfect get in the way of the good.

> [the housing crisis] What is the system going to do other than agree that people need...

There are a multitude of things that could be done: public housing; rent caps; better zoning; ignoring nimby-ism; subisiding new and denser construction; subsidising first-time buyers; etc.

> [homelessness] What is the system going to do other than agree that people need...

Pass laws preventing (and undoing) hostile architecture; repeal vagrancy laws; open facilities for the safe consumption of drugs; more shelters; allow them to register a place (eg: a post office) as a permanent address to receive mail; subsidise places that open their toilets/showers to the homeless; repeal laws criminalising feeding the homeless; etc.

> [wage theft] What is the system going to do other than...

Make wage theft a crime instead of a civil wrong? And yes, one of the best ways is to join a union, so while we're here: repeal all union-busting laws; laws that prevent unions from striking; and laws that let employers retaliate against union action; laws that let employers hire temporary replacement staff during a strike; etc.

> ["delay, deny, defend"] The Amish...

It's a little odd that you comparing liberals to a religious group that reject basically any technology from the industrial revolution and onward. Like, yes, the Amish generally have day-to-day better health outcomes due to the manual labour and better diet... but once you get cancer or need an x-ray or a blood transfusion or bone-marrow transplant or birth complications? The way to fix all this is universal healthcare, period.

> [abortion rights] but at the end of the day rights are only as meaningful as the enforcement...

It's kind of odd that you bring up cannabis here since this is in large part a liberal success of getting governments to listen to them and pass state-legislation to legalise cannabis. This is also an exceptionally odd take with regard to abortions: you are effectively saying that hospitals and medical professionals will be willing to risk their careers, licences, fines, and jail time, if not execution, if enough people want them to? What? Do you happen to be an anarchist?

> [school shootings...] What is the systemic (or otherwise) solution here?

This is tricky because solutions that have worked in other countries likely wouldn't in the US because of its obsession with guns. Some people say that it's not a gun crisis but a mental-health crisis... okay then, then let's fund mental health programmes like crazy? Ultimately, the best way to reduce gun crime is to reduce the amount of guns in circulation. That could mean gun buybacks; banning bump-stocks; making gun companies liable for crimes committed with their guns; force guns to require insurance; background checks; reverse the Supreme Court decision to separate federal gun rights from well-regulated militias; etc.

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There's a pattern here in your responses where you question the existence of systemic solutions to societal problems, and I have to ask: do you consider other countries at all? Obviously, like I've already mentioned, it's not always possible to simply adopt another country's policies 1:1 and have them work. But different countries have different rates of these issues: do you think that countries with less just have a more charitable populous or something? I mean, there may be some truth to that, but all your responses here are essentially rejecting the notion of systemic solutions at all in favour of just being charitable.

Liberals are more likely to think in terms of systems, and I may concede that many liberals are stuck in systemic thinking. But all this is ultimately missing this point of my original comment: we're quibbling here over how to solve societal problems... conservatives don't do this, they just accept these issues as facts of life and don't spend time worrying about them at all.

While there are certainly nuggets of truth in what you say, your "the liberal approach to fixing a problem is not to fix it, but to plead to other people to fix it for them" is nonetheless an exceptionally uncharitable way to re-frame people trying to get their government to enact change. It reminds me of that infamous Pride and Prejudice review: "Just a bunch of people going to each other's houses."

There are a multitude of issues that can only be solved systemically, like abortion rights, or the housing crisis, or homelessness, or wage theft, or "delay, deny, defend", school shootings and other rampant forms of gun violence, etc. Like, believe it or not, but there are many issues that are not fixable by just fixing it like it's a squeaky door hinge or a neighbour's overgrown lawn. And even with issues like homelessness, if you wanted to do your bit by providing food, you can get arrested and fined for that, depending on the jurisdiction.

Like, yes, liberals tend to have certain amount of defeatism where they wont attempt to help anyone if they can't help everyone. And yes, there are issues with "liberal" intellectualism, particularly within the middle class. But some of the charges you make are misattributed: there is literally a meme ("Who Wants Change? Who Wants To Change?") which my game-dev community has a version of ("Who wants to make a game? Who wants to code that game?"). You could make a similar one about story-ideas and actual authors. This is in no way something exclusive to liberals or even predominant to liberals. It's just kind of human nature. But I feel like this accusation, for many, comes from a Fox-and-the-Grapes style resentment towards the middle class, which tends to lean more liberal. And like... this is just bog-standard class warfare, not actual ideological difference.

I think the issue ultimately comes down to what Ian Danskin described, paraphrased: that liberals see the faults in society as things that can be fixed, whereas conservatives see those faults as facts of life (reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yts2F44RqFw). Wouldn't you also be less happy if you viewed society's faults as fixable, where you rally, vote, and protest for them to be fixed, and yet they almost never are?

You are presuming that they're only talking about abortion. Conservatives also get huffy when women are promiscuous, even if it's entirely safe.

Just jumping in to say that while I absolutely agree that app developers engage in hostile dark patterns, the end-users are nonetheless NOT infinitely blameless. We often forget, those of us here on Hacker News, that we are not the average end-user.

jeroenhd is absolutely correct that people, generally speaking, do not care about fine-grained permissions. We try telling them to use different usernames and passwords, to use pseudonyms, to only give the minimum required access, etc, and yet it just keeps happening. This isn't an access to education issue, it's a stubbornness issue: they don't care to learn it. And in fact, they will look at us weirdly for caring about it so much: I've seen people say that anyone with a protonmail email should get their harddrives checked because only paedos would want that kind of service.

This doesn't AT ALL absolve the app developers for engaging in hostile dark patterns. But I do have to agree that even if the permission system was fixed to be perfect, it wouldn't matter for the vast majority of people because they'll allow everything anyway.

> It feels like permission models are stuck in engineering for low-level programs and nobody thinks about how actual people will use it

Not to be a perpetual curmudgeon, but I feel like a portion of the blame for this could the developers XY'ing each other into the broadest use-case possible. Allowing users to select photos to embed into their messages gets "but what are you really trying to do?"-d into just putting access to the filesystem behind a flag.

Just checked and Android has this permission too: I can select "Allow limited access", but this requires manual configuring where you select specific photos/videos/albums to be accessible. It's so bizarre.

If I may just take this opportunity to moan about particular sandboxes: I use the flatpak version of Discord because of the promise of sandboxing in part because I hope it'll mitigate some of the telemetry happening but I doubt it does, but I digress. It is so annoying that anytime I want to drag a file into Discord, I first need to copy it to ~/Downloads. I'M GIVING YOU TO THE FILE, TAKE IT.

I feel this same way about Android permissions too. I don't feel like "this button opens the camera and gives me the photo you take with it" and "I can access whatever the camera is seeing at this moment" should be the same permission. Hell, the former wouldn't even need to be a permission. Ditto with photos. Why do I need to give WhatsApp access to my photos to include a picture in my message? Just allow the button to open an Android OS element that it has no access to, then I can select a photo/photos through it, and then Android gives WhatsApp those photos. And if you take a photo from WhatsApp and want to save it, that should be just as easy, like downloading a file from a browser.

I get the sense that most sandboxing/permission systems are just flags on specific API calls: you want to access a folder? well you need an fs permission for that! But don't worry, once you have permission, it's carte blanche! The only pipe-based sandboxing system I've encountered thus far is the share feature, but this is often so limited.

Question, who maintains NTFS support for Linux? Microsoft? The kernel? The distros? Genuinely asking.

It was already getting tiresome responding to you, but now that you're comparing harmful speech with the "but what was she wearing", I've about had enough. Let me know when a woman's short skirt leads to the systematic extermination of millions. It seems you have no comprehension that speech can be harmful, until suddenly it is (assault and harassment). Such a binary worldview is catastrophic to civil society (again, see America). Have a nice day.

In our case, it's not so much being forced to use Bun, but rather that Bun is in real terms infinitely more convenient than lower-level languages. Firstly, even the most novice of novices tend to have a passing familiarity with JS/TS, whereas this is not true for C/Zig/Rust/etc, so it's easier for people to contribute to our projects. Bun also provides so many things for free, statically, and cross platform. You want a TCP server? A websocket server? SQLite database? You want to include static assets? You want to generate static assets at compile time? Etc? Bun provides it.

Attempting to replicate even a modicum of this in lower-level languages can be a real struggle. Rust is definitively the least-worst in this respect because there's been a concerted effort by the community to provide stable packages that do most things. But Rust is a complicated and unapproachable language. Using other low-level languages like C/Zig, and you immediately run into issues of libraries and static linking. And even if you find a library, its documentation is either lacklustre or outright missing (looking at you libuv and libxev respectively).

The amount of manual setup and third-party builds-system finagling just to: 1) run a TCP server; 2) fetch data over HTTP; 3) do both of these using a single event loop (no separate threads); 4) use SQLite for storage; and 5) have all this produce a single self-contained executable. Yet I cannot understate how trivial this is with Bun.

> Assault is a very old law with a lot of case law behind it (that is the answer to the who decides) that is very easy to understand

As too with hate speech, or rather, speech that is considered harmful to society. Blasphemy used to be amongst that list but we have since moved on from the state protecting the majority from religious affront to instead protecting vulnerable minorities from attack and dehumanisation. How hate speech in defined in law very much mirrors the definitions of harassment and assault (which you appear to have no issue with): it is not mere offence and intent is necessary.

> you have no such presumption

Don't I? Freeze peach purists tend to have very similar beliefs. Speak to one and you've effectively spoken to them all.

> Rhetoric doesn't kill people, people kill people

This seems rather incongruous with your earlier quote of how words can incite violence. It's also an extremely American phrase used there to dismiss calls for gun control. I have yet to see an instance where adding proverbial fuel to a flame successfully tames it.

> Have you considered allowing the speech and punishing those who act violently because of their supposed hurt feelings?

Who precisely are you talking about here? Don't hide behind implication, name them.

> as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion

It's interesting that you would quote this because I very much agree: for as long as rational argument is able to counter intolerance, that's all we need, and anything further is not just unnecessary but detrimental. But when rational argument becomes ineffective, as we've seen, then rational argument cannot be solely relied upon. In an age of misinformation and disinformation, the notion of 'just add more speech, that'll solve everything' is not only exceptionally naive but demonstrably ignorant. One need only look at America to see what being the freeze peachiest country gets you. The UK and the rest of Europe have speech restrictions like hate-speech laws because we have intimate knowledge of the devastation of unrestrained hate. Hate cannot be reliably restrained by speech. You may find a case here and there, but it cannot stop a mob.

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If I may make a comparison here, the murder of the CEO of United Healthcare has seemingly opened many people's eyes to society's tolerance of state-sanction death through delays, denials, and deposals, compared to society's extreme horror at a rich person getting gunned down. And yes, them being rich matters: I'm reminded of the sheer difference in effort there was between finding the doomed Titan submersible and finding the lost workers from the Francis Scott Key Bridge collision and collapse. Notice also Mangione's perp walk: you don't get that kind of display when the gunned-down victim is poor.

What I'm getting at here is that many people in society turn a blind eye to the death and misery caused by the system. He's not able to afford his medicine and died? He should've picked a better healthcare package or changed providers. The system is given infinite grace. But when [allegedly] Mangione shot that CEO, the notion that there may have been any justification for it is out of the question. He is infinitely wrong. It was odd watching news coverage of the shooting and how they tip-toed around trying to talk about this, compared to the typical US brazenness with every other topic.

This is circling back to your "punishing those who act violently because of their supposed hurt feelings?" comment. I have my suspicions on who you're referring to, and I'm probably right, but I very much feel like you're doing what I described above, here. It's giving "milkshakes are cement".