Gormo

> The law doesn't matter, it was not made for this.

Not sure I'm following. This appears to be a conversation about how the law applies to the situation.

> If this is not unfair competition, then what is?

Again, "unfair competition" has a specific legal definition. If you don't care about the specifics of the law, and are just expressing your own normative opinions about how you'd prefer for certain things to play out, what is the purpose of attempting to express those opinions using specific, already existing legal terminology?

There seems to be a very serious ontological muddle-up at the core of your argument.

On the one hand, you're referring to "companies" in a way that rejects them as concrete entities that possess moral agency: excluding them from "everyone", calling them "amoral" etc.

On the other hand, you're referring to them in a way that attributes purposeful, intentional action to them, in a way that requires them to be concrete entities possessing moral agency: you're describing them as entities that do things in pursuit of desired goals, respond to incentives, etc.

These are contradictory concepts, yet you seem to be using the first as the rationale to formulate opinions about the second! How do you reconcile this?

I think the previous commenter is referring to the actual legally applicable definition, not his own definition or yours.

Imagine further that there's actually nothing unusually wrong with the cars at all, but the manufacturers are deliberately playing up perceptions of risk in order to encourage regulatory intervention that they know they can influence and/or work around, but which competing solutions can't.

> These are assertions, not arguments.

In fact, they are indeed arguments derived from applying well-understood economic principles to the specific -- and purely speculative -- claims posited by the preceding comment.

> Be sure you understand them first; your assertions do not hold in the case of LVT.

Indeed I have, and indeed they do. Rather, your own response attempting to dismiss rather than engage with counter-arguments betrays a likely ideological rather than pragmatic interest in the concept of LVT.

Now what happens if there are three houses for rent in the area, instead of two? Four houses? A thousand?

> I thought that algorithmic collusion had eliminated the need for landlords to compete on price.

What sustains 'algorithmic collusion' in a non-market-clearing situation when landlords ultimately just want to rent their property out?

To put it another way, why would a property owner who has a vacant house leave it unrented in order to benefit other property owners at his own expense?

> LVT would push up the supply of rental properties by ensuring that property owners who don't rent out their properties or who don't make efficient use of land lose money.

That doesn't follow. If LVT reduces the net return on rentals, it will disincentivize construction and maintenance of housing in the first place. If it creates a net negative or zero return on property ownership, it may lead to abandoned/undeveloped property instead of housing development, or more property being used for other purposes than housing.

It's also worth pointing out that the existing ad valorem tax system used for property taxes is functionally equivalent to LVT, and does have these influences on the housing market. LVT proposals are distinguished by their being rooted in (fundamentally flawed) Georgist theory, not by being unique as a form of taxation in practice.

> Taxes on land do not affect the supply of the land, this implies they are not passed on and the research literature largely agrees with this.

Taxes may not affect the amount of land that physically exists, but they absolutely can and do affect the amount of land available for rent as opposed to other income-generating use cases.

On top of that, a tax that applies equivalently to all of the land available to the rental market in a given area will simply push prices upwards across the board, which is likely to just be absorbed by renters given the usually low price elasticity of demand for housing.

Got any citations for that? The first time I personally ever encountered the term "sideload" was at a Microsoft developer demo for the upcoming Windows Phone around 2010, and another audience member raised his hand to ask what that term meant.

> F-Droid is not the answer. Regulation is.

> Regulate Google. Regulate Apple. Make our phones free.

Result: F-Droid regulated out of existence by government agencies captured by Google and Apple.

> What was wrong with calling periods proper names like Renaissance, Baroque and Romantic?

Eras only get these proper names long after they're over. To people living during those eras, they were just "now".

> The CIA liked the former in art because it was bold, challenging, abrasive, and individualistic.

And probably also due to it being a counterpoint to the constructivist styles that were being actively promoted by Soviet authorities at the time.

I'm afraid it doesn't. To the contrary, treating effective security in terms of how it influences the attacker's cost-benefit tradeoffs, and evaluating proposed measures on whether the effort threshold they create is enough, is quite literally the opposite of black-and-white thinking.

And in this case we can clearly see that a solution that (a) does not substantially increase their costs -- and in fact, as I've pointed out above, only really filters by motivation, not by time, money or effort, and (b) doesn't target their potential benefits at all, is one that isn't likely to be effective.

> This feels like the right-wing equivalent of pronoun policing lol.

Nothing about it feels "right-wing" at all -- actual conservatism is all about maintaining continuity and avoiding forced changes to traditional conventions and established social norms.

Trump and his followers are a competing faction of the extreme left, as should be readily evidenced by his economic policies, and it's not at all surprising that he shares the same mentality of inserting political shibboleths into mundane aspects of everyday life.

Not sure it's really valid to call this "official". Trump can issue an executive order to the USGS to change names in the GNIS, but the use of USGS/GNIS data as the "official" name of things outside of the federal executive's own activities is itself just a matter of convention.

Attempts by political states to attempt to nationalize the vernacular should be ignored and rejected in all cases.

The examples you're citing are less ridiculous than these recent stunts, but still should be considered in terms of their intentions and effects.

What's the motivation for trying to detatch the name of something from its existing understanding and historical context?

Why should the attempts to "rebrand" an entire country or geographical feature made by a government -- a particular instituion within society, usually under the control of one narrow faction in opposition to others -- be respected by the whole of society within that country, let alone by people in foreign countries speaking a different language?

Why should, for example, the Turkish government -- which operates in the Turkish language, where "Türkiye" already was the standard name of their country -- be respected in its attempt to get English speakers to write the country's name in orthography that is not readily pronounceable by English speakers, and using characters that aren't standard on our keyboard layouts?

This "society" guy sure has a lot of opinions about other people's affairs.

> But those making the claim are not talking about that

Which is exactly the problem. If you're going to make an argument that depends on analyzing one very specific thing detached from its surrounding context, you have to actually address that context, and justify why you're ignoring it.

The claim that 1950s pop art was deliberately engineered by a CIA conspiracy for geopolitical purposes can't be sustained without explicitly arguing for why it isn't a natural evolution from the existing trends in art and design that were already prevalent at the time.

> So in the child porn case you're willing to concede that limits on power don't matter, shouldn't exist, or should be overridden, in order to reduce harm.

No, I'm not. I'm not certain as to whether I didn't explain my position well, or you misunderstood it, but I definitely was saying the exact opposite of this.

For the sake of clarity, I'll attempt to reiterate my point here: the child porn example demonstrates that even if the "gut feeling" motivation to restrict something comes from an underlying disgust at the thing itself, the legal mechanisms used to restrict it are still gated by limitations on the use of power.

In this case, the strength of the motivations pushed the restrictions further than they go in other cases, but not beyond the bounds of the strict limits, because those limits absolutely still hold, do matter, should exist, and should not be overridden.

> Why not also in the social media case?

The position you articulated here is valid in neither case.

I do, although in my particular case, I'm on an individual plan and not part of a group plan. But I acknowledge your point that this is one of the few cases where aggregations are a relevant unit of analysis, since the point of insurance is to average out risk within a large set of people.

I will say, though, that this perfectly elucidates my point that classification is a purpose-driven, subjective undertaking -- the classifications used for risk pooling in the insurance industry have nothing at all to do with the model of social class advanced by various polemicists here and elsewhere, due to being devised by different people for different purposes.

> Have you ever smelled the type of acids and toxic gases that need to be handled before you even get computer chips to build computers with?

Yes. These are waste products generated by chip manufacturing, not by using computers that include chips that have already been manufactured elsewhere.

> Where do people think the toxic wastes from these processes end up?

Hopefully, they end up neutralized at the site of their production. In the worst case, they may end up creating pollution around the locations where the chips are being manufactured, in which case the chip manufacturers should definitely be held responsible for the externalities they create.

Could you elaborate on how this relates to data centers?

> Plus the emissions from the freight across different modalities which scales linearly with massiveness of the tonnage.

And scales not at all in relation to what categories of products are included in that tonnage. This seems to be another instance of cherry-picking a single use case to blame for the externalities of a services that's used by essentially everything else too -- the solution here is to find cleaner ways of fueling cargo ships, just as we need to find cleaner ways of fueling power plants, since it is not reasonable to expect any net reduction in demand for either cargo shipping or for electricity.

> And that's before you even consider the power needs of development when it exceeds the clean energy available at any one time.

This should be a strong impetus for expanding clean energy production. There's little point in complaining about any specific application of electricity if it's not meant to advocate for generating more power with less pollution.

Ah, an outlier edge case! I'll go ahead and address this one while taking note that using extreme outlier examples is not a good method for testing general-case principles.

In the case of child porn, the legal theory behind suppressing its distribution, not just its creation, is that distributing it reinforces the incentive structures that motivate its creation, which is where the actual harm inheres. So suppression is justified as a means of stopping assaults against children, not merely because the thing itself is regarded as harmful to the user.

This might be a rationalization for suppressing something that the vast majority of us find disgusting per se, but if so, then the motivation to rationalize it in relation to a more concrete harm means that we are rejecting the notion that most of us finding it disgusting is a sufficient justification in its own right to suppress things.

In other words, it's still something that, even if the motivation to suppress it originates from the "gut feeling" of a large number of people, acting on that gut feeling must still be gated by legal/constitutional norms that set the bounds for the assertion of power. So even as an outlier edge case, this one still conforms to the general principle, respecting boundaries even as it tries to go as far as possible within then.

I'm ignoring the entire chess board, in fact, because the stuff that's going out outside of the chess game is much more important -- to me, and to most other people who aren't involved in the chess game.

Specific workers may have had to fight for rights against specific employers, and this certainly happened quite a bit in the past. Conflicts of interest and adversarial games (in the game theory sense) can and do take place in many varied social contexts.

To abstract all of this into some generalized notion of "class struggle" that presumes that that "workers" as a category are at all times locked into a zero-sum struggle against all "bosses" is not just empirically false, but is actually a notion that has at times been calcified into a dogma used to justify incredibly destructive and oppressive behavior.

The prioritization of categories over human beings in the attribution of moral agency is a profound error.

> As such, a social class is, yes, a lossy abstraction taken from the point of view of any given individual, but it's not like it's failing at being a good category because this is so. That's just, like, how concepts in general work?

Sure. What I'm pointing out is that using the concept of social class as the lens through which you analyze all human social interaction, and draw conclusions about the entire fundamental organization of society, is a case of erroneously universalizing a lossy abstraction.

And when people obsess over social class to the point of characterizing every question, debate, or controversy in society as a manifestation of "class struggle", and criticize people for framing their relations with others in society through some lens other than social class, isn't that clearly what's happening? Isn't that what happened right here in this thread, and led to us having this very debate in the first place?

> I wonder what politics looks like following through with your argument? How do we conceive of things like the "public best interest" if any given classification is doomed to not capture people actually? What is the "public" here? Are there children? Seniors? Veterans?

Well, that's exactly the point. Maybe the answer is that the question doesn't pertain to "the public" as some unified aggregate, but is actually something that different subsets of the public need different approaches to. Maybe the best interest of "the public" aggregated into a singular entity is to to figure out how best to disaggregate the question.

> So you’re basically against the concept of classes and the act of classification.

No idea where you got that from. I think I was fairly clear in explaining that the concept of classes and the act of classification are value-laden and subjective things, that are applied for the sake of their utility in pursuing equally value-laden purposes. Very much within the "all models are wrong; some models are useful" understanding.

The point is that classes and classification are analytical tools we use for pursuing our own purposes within the world, not sources of empirical information about the world.

> However you can’t simply dismiss a whole literature of class struggle by simply rejecting the notion of class fundamentally.

How do you figure? Surely rejecting a fundamental axiom on which an entire ideological system is based would entail dismissing all subsequent literature predicated on that axiom. If you rejected the premise that the position of celestial objects determined the outcomes of events in human society, would you not dismiss the entire field of astrology on that basis?

> Sure, every human being is unique and individual. But if you take a few million of them, patterns arise. Marketing people know and abuse this.

And they make good use of it in trying to sell narrowly-tailored markets to narrowly-tailored market segments. If they tried to use it as a way of making normative judgments applicable to society as a whole, they'd be neck-deep in error to the same extent as the "class struggle" folks.

> If you actually look at what people are doing, you can observe similar patterns too.

If you actually look at what people are doing, you will almost invariably witness them pursuing their own particular individual interests according to their own particular values and assumptions, and not making their decisions in line with someone else's theoretical constructs.

> Yes some groups fail to act for their best interests because they are oppressed.

Groups do not act at all: first, categories and groups are two different things; second, only individuals act, often in relation to other individuals, and the categorization of those individuals together is itself a post-hoc analysis.

People generally do act in pursuit of their best interests: even if people are being oppressed, oppression itself is an external phenomenon -- it may constrain the range of feasible choices available to an individual, but it cannot usurp the agency of individuals in making choice between the options that remain available.

Naturally, these "acting against their own interests" claims are made by external observers looking at people actually making choices from whatever options are available, and concluding that of those available choices, they chose the one less compatible with their own interests.

In almost every such case, the observer drawing that conclusion has projected their own notion of what the other party's interest ought to be onto them, rather than attempted to ascertain what their interests actually are. No one is actually obligated to determine their own interests in compliance with someone else's taxonomies or values hierarchies -- everyone can and does do so according to their own.

See point (2) above.

Basically, yeah. Classification in general is a subjective, value-laden activity. At the most granular resolution, everything is fundamentally sui generis -- putting things into classes requires making subjective judgments about what qualities and characteristics you're going to ignore in order to focus on the ones you care about.

Put simply, when you come up with a class/category taxonomy, you're drawing your own boundaries inside a continuum of variation, and where you draw them is something you're choosing based on the purposes you are pursuing and the assumptions you have made, not mapping out something that's intrinsic to the external world independently of you. "Category X includes object Y" is a property inherent to the definition of category X; it is not a quality inherent to object Y.

And when the things you're classifying are other people, and you're trying to develop a taxonomy that models their behavior, you have a situation where the entities you're analyzing are self-aware beings whose behavior is driven by the analytical models and taxonomies in their minds, not the ones in yours.

People who propose class theories as a usable model for understanding human intentions and behavior lump other people together according to their own criteria, even though those people can -- and often do -- make their own decisions according to completely different criteria. People do not see strangers as having common interests or values simply because a third set of strangers have reduced them to data points that fall into the same bar on a narrowly tailored histogram.

When put to the test, these class theories consistently fail to predict actual human behavior, and people with normative attachements to the theories then to hand-wave away these discrepancies: "false consciousness", "voting against their interests", etc.; these notions are layers of epicycles meant to sustain a speculative theory in the face of falsifying evidence.

Much better to do away with a priori class theories, and just analyze what actual people are actually saying and doing.

The concept of "class struggle" epitomizes the "group vs. group war" mentality. It's a mental framework that combines ingroup/outgroup dynamics with a Manichean moral narrative, leading to literally every question being interpreted as a move in relation to an all-encompassing macro-level conflict.

This in turn leads to every problem being abstracted out of its context, and attributed to malice instead of error. Thinking this way completely hampers the ability of human beings to make incremental progress on anything at all via net-positive social engagement with each other.

The "class struggle" idea is of the most debilitating memetic diseases that's ever come about in human history.