PurpleBoxDragon

You need access to electricity, but there are alternatives such as solar panels or diesel generators. As for phone, more and more people are switching pure to cell phone, of which there are many different options.

By the same measure, depending upon what you are trying to do, it will not be an even playing field if you are removed from Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, etc.

And once it is officially known they'll have to act, so a lot of it is making it take a long time to be officially known. It isn't like they purposefully hunt for those who do things illegal, they just are aggressive enough in who they give their contracts to that there is a selective pressure for those who can cut costs by hiring undocumented workers. The big companies would be just as happy, maybe even slightly happier, hiring a company only employing legal workers if they could do so for the same price.

What counts as a need? Does one need land lines? Electricity? People live off the grid by generating these themselves and people live elsewhere without them at all.

Of course, one could bring a distinction between things that naturally grant a physical monopoly and things that don't, but I think one could make an argument that certain sites have effectively become the new public square and in doing so have a natural monopoly of our attention (or more pedantically a natural cartel).

There is also a natural monopoly of technology. If you have a patent for something, others can't use it unless you let them. Imagine if every major tech corporation aggressively pursued every possible patent claim against any companies trying to offer an alternate space for those banned from the mainstream, would the little company have any greater chance that a new electric company fighting against the entrenched players?

>There is a tremendous exposure to legal risk both for the contracting company and the company that hires the contracting company if they employ workers who do not have the right to work in the US.

That's why you layer it so the people taking the risk are little more than hourly employees themselves.

Big corp hire cleaning corp to clean. Cleaning corp hires local cleaner to clean. Local cleaner hires legal worker with plenty of contacts who aren't legal, gives them the cash to get the job done with what ever 'contractors' they want. While local cleaner could technically be found guilty, they'll always through the local legal employee under the bus and rarely ever get prosecuted. At worst they'll be shut down and then they'll just open up under another name. Cleaning corp is effectively immune and can always find a new local cleaner if the previous one is shut down. Big corp might not ever know what is going on, they are just paying someone who handles things for cheaper than directly employing the cleaners (at least cheaper on certain budget reports that they needed to make look better).

Such one sided contracts where there was never a possibility of negotiation need to be tossed out. This applies to the EULA of a smart lock to a lease agreement with some super corporation located in a different state. Such contracts can only be consensual when involving two entities of similar power.

If we adjusted for the period in which they were suicidal, and calculated how many days per suicide attempt existed, would women still have a higher number? That would seem a better measure given that the simple stats of total attempts in general means that a man who commits suicide counts for less than a woman who attempts many times but never commits.

I see this as on par with banning alcohol to drastically reduce drunk driving. People tend to not support that one because they see, though they would likely never formulate the thought in such a fashion, that having the freedom to buy and consume alcohol is worth the trade off of people drunk driving and the lives ruined by it. Of course, other actions are done to reduce the harm of drunk driving, but people are not willing to give up alcohol for it. Many people, especially in the USA, view guns in the same manner.

I do find it odd that some people who hold the first view concerning alcohol find the second view as being immoral.

Even if we were to agree with such a right, you would have a duty about how you do it to reduce trauma to others and society has a duty to make sure it is a rational choice. Also, even in a world where adults would have that right, but I doubt those under 18 would without special circumstances such as terminal illness.

>The share holders are free to take it or leave it.

And they tend to take the offers from founders that give them voting power to decide the reason for the company to exist. If a founder wants to raise money without trading away power in the company they can try to sell such shares, but they should expect far less interest in people wanting to buy them.

Also, should we really call them shareholders or investors at that point? They are more like backers, similar to people who spend money on kickstarter.

>I've never agreed with that. As a private company you can be in business for whatever reason you want.

If by 'you' you mean 'the owners' who are the share holders, then yes. What you'll find is that generally share holders do want economic returns at the cost of anything else, especially when so many of the owners each own only a tiny slice of many different businesses. Part of it is that it will be difficult for the owners to come to an agreement on anything else and so they'll go for economic returns.

There is also a selection effect concerning when executives at a company are replaced. Are owners choosing when to replace executives in such a way that selects for executives who put short term profitability over other concerns?

Because even if you accept the definition, you then have to deal with selective definitions of power.

But that age isn't 18, and this holds true of other groups yet we still allow them to vote. If we are going to be applying some rational test where only people who vote for the 'right' reasons vote, then we should do so uniformly and not discriminate based on a demographic that people have no control over.

>You should only do politics once you have done something in your life.

So a test to whom is allowed to be in government other than someone the voters choose? How is that different from me suggesting banning demographics from being allowed in government because I personally think they don't deserve it, despite what the voters actually say?

I say there should only be a single test for who can govern, that they are picked by the voters. If the voters pick a 14 year old over anyone else then someone saying they don't deserve the position because of some demographic they can't change is no different than saying a woman, someone poor, someone childless, or a Muslim doesn't deserve the position.

Why should someone who only has a decade or so of expected life have a vote if someone with numerous decades of life does not get a vote? Why should those who face the potential of being drafted by the next president get no say? It gets down to the question of who really deserves a vote and why don't minors get one, but I've found the arguments for minors not voting fall apart when examined.

So would it be impossible to make a system that would allow a person to lie if needed and also prove that their vote was wrongly assigned if needed? I've seen cryptographic solutions to things that seem as impossible initially (like having a system verify you know your password without ever telling the system your password and without the system ever knowing what your password is), so I wouldn't be so quick to write off a potential solution to this problem.

>Consider when evaluating these schemes whether there is any benefit or upside at all over good old fashioned unhackable paper.

Just because there is no immediate benefit doesn't mean there won't one day be benefit. Initial versions of many forms of technology were near useless and only became better after refinement. Just look at how useless the original electric cars were. But electronic voting, if someone could make it safe and secure, could have benefits we can't recognize.

The risk is implementing an incomplete system and the very likely possibility that any government attempt will be very lacking (and often filled with the standard amount of corrupt in similar large IT projects). I would not support removing the paper process currently, but I would support development going into electronic voting so that one day the technology will be mature enough for us to see benefits that current paper voting can't provide.

A few examples of what may one day be possible is massively lowering the cost to vote (for many poor people getting a few hours off of work to go vote ends up costing them far more than they value their vote being worth), making it possible to do voting a more regular event which would allow more direct democratic versions of government, the ability to have something we can trust more than slips of paper that have to be hand tallied (current systems are far less trustable, but future systems may be able to become more trustable than paper).

Any society wants some level of censorship, and tends to want it strongly enough to override any Constitution or similar document that says they should have it. Once the system is in place for the kinds of censorship that the majority of society wants, it becomes far easier for someone to expand it. Censorship is so nice when you are in power getting what you want censored that people don't consider what happens when the powers that be no longer represent their interest.

Except it isn't random. Some cops just look for the fastest cars while others will look for out of state license plates. And some will even go as far as basing it off of the demographics of the driver. We would never tolerate a speed limit that allows difference races to go different max speeds, but allowing selective enforcement by cops enables any cop to do this.

If they can then leverage this to be a secondary app store that they get a cut (smaller than Google's cut to encourage people to use it), then they can come out making far more money even if they lose more than 30% of installs by doing this.

Well you can host your own website on your own server.

Of course, I do wonder how far this goes. What happens if the DNS server refuses to host the IP lookup? Host your own DNS server? What if the browsers refuse to allow access to the site? Build your own browser? What if ISPs refuse to transfer the data over the wire? Make your own internet?

People have defended that this vs. Net Neutrality (at least the extent of the ability of an ISP to control what goes over its wires) as having a core difference, but it feels to me they are closer than people realize and the standards set by one can influence the other.

By choosing to not get a DNA test at all due to privacy concerns, didn't you also pollute the data, albeit in a different way? 23andme data will vastly under-represent people with strong privacy concerns which might have a future impact, especially if scientists using this data forget to take it into account.

>Find a service that actually respects you and your wishes if you want a test.

If they hold onto the data for any purpose at all, then their is always the risk that they go bankrupt and ownership of the data passes to someone who doesn't respect it.

You've probably heard of the phrase "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."

So, I think (though I will admit it was long ago last time I looked this up), that men have a lower accident rate per mile driven but have a higher accident rate per time period (not time period driving). The reason is that men drive more (or at least use to, back when I read these statistics).

There is also the difference between different kinds of accidents. While per mile driven men have less accidents than women, they tend to, as you mentioned, be worse accidents. I forget if this actually made them cost more per mile driven or not, but once you also add in that they drive more, in a given year men do cost more and are charged more. (There is also the impact of younger men who have more thrill seeking behavior, so if you compared men and women within a specific age group you might find the statistics don't match the statistics across all age groups.)

So, thanks to the beauty of statistics, we can say that men are better drivers than women and men are worse drivers than women by using slightly different definitions of better or worse that, in layman English, are glossed over.

Replace 'academic kudos' with 'the metric which we measure to check if you are improving society' and the issue becomes more apparent.

>A PHD should be about improving society, not chasing the metric which we measure to check if you are improving society.

It seems to be Campbell's law in action. Of course you can determine a different metric to use, or just tune the current metric some, but you'll eventually see the same problems emerge, maybe worse, maybe better.

I also think this issue shouldn't be viewed in isolation of other related issues, such as how the current system discourages reproducing the research of others and of publishing trivial results (we tested to see if we found this unexpected thing and we didn't).

Figuring how who is a good scientist, given that some theoretical good scientist could spend a decade chasing down an issue that ended up being nothing, is not an easy problem to solve. Tenure is one attempt to fix it, but it largely just re-frames the problem into deciding which scientists deserve tenure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law

>Take my example. I research how to mitigate the social impact of hydropower dams. My core paper on this topic has been cited three times so far. I read in the promotions guidelines at my university that if I want to be promoted from assistant to associate professor I need to accumulate significant citations. As a result, I have now published a paper in which I reviewed 114 definitions of a current academic buzzword, circular economy, to propose the 115th definition of this term.

>In academic terms, this paper is a hit: it’s been cited 39 times since its publication. It is in the top 3% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric, a tool measuring a paper’s influence among academics on social media. People I’ve never met before come up to me at conferences to congratulate me. But I’m not celebrating: this paper symbolises everything that’s broken in the academy. Academics love definitions, not solutions.

This feels like the pure distilled essence of Campbell's law.

There is a well established correlation between education in girls increasing and child birth rates decreasing. Unless you think that funding could be cut without decreasing education rates, in which case shouldn't we cut funding?

>A more important difference is that affirmative action is generally used to favor under-represented demographics

That may be the intent, but in practice it also hurts certain underrepresented groups. For example, among all Asians, if you break down the demographic further by nationality, you'll find some groups strongly over represented and other groups strongly underrepresented. Affirmative actions applied to Asians as a whole hurts the groups which are already underrepresented, and while it hurts Asians in general compared to all other demographics, it helps over represented Asians compared to underrepresented Asians.

Does going to daycare over have a stay at home parent lead to an increase in the money made? And if we were considering just the number of children and how having more children will lead to more tax payers, then cutting funding for education in ways that result in more children being had is even better because you save money now and have more tax payers later.

If you begin to optimize social and political decisions on the basis of having more tax payers, you'll get weird results. For a second example, cutting reproductive education funding in schools will lead to more tax payers (though arguably tax payers who pay less, so then the question becomes are you optimizing for tax payers or for future taxable income in total).

What matters in 1 is how they came up with it.

If they decided to lengthen times to better fit real world conditions, it is fair. If they went searching for 'fair' changes that could be made that would statistically boost one group over another, it isn't a fair change.

And most people will optimize for all those factors as well. We aren't saying that you have to pick the doctor with the absolute highest scores, only that there is another factor to rationally consider which shouldn't be there.

Freedom of speech is a much larger broader concept than the First Amendment.

Consider for a second if some political position was banned by all privately owned mediums in the US. Say for example it was reported on the violence is Bangladesh. Every internet provider would stop transferring data if it detected any mention of it, every server hosting data in any format would immediately remove any mention of it, Microsoft, Google, and Apple pushed updates to their OS's that would terminate what you were doing if they detected it.

Would freedom of speech (not the First Amendment) have been attacked in such a far-fetched scenario? Yes, despite it only being private companies doing things they have the right to do. As such, we can conclude that in such a scenario, freedom of speech includes requiring private entities to support a message they wish to not support. Now, would that not also apply in a less far-fetched scenario? I see no reason it would not.