PurpleBoxDragon

Is a kid who studies and gets all A's in class privileged with getting the reward for all A's? Generally the idea of privilege is dealing with something you didn't work for. Having your parents pay for college? Privilege. Earning a scholarship anyone can earn? Not privilege.

The issue is with privilege that impacts what you can earn, but compared to someone born with a mental disability due to lack of nutrition while developing (or maternal drug abuse in pregnancy, etc.), everyone born healthy is privileged by a great deal.

How can expenses be explained by cuts? Increases can, but unless the government is actually taking money, you can't explain tuition costs in terms of decrease expenses.

I wonder how much of Tor usage is for illegal activities, including black markets, compared to legal activities? And doesn't it seem fickle that the same action may or may not be legal depending upon how many people use Tor for legal vs illegal activities? What happens if last year it was primarily for legal purposes but this year some new black market site took off and people are primary using it for that now?

In this particular case, he had all reason to believe his work was being used by some to do illegal things. But even then, is that any different than the people who work on TOR knowing full well it is used to abuse children, or who work on military weapons knowing that innocent people are targeted? Should a gun seller who has reason to believe the buyer might do something illegal with their be punished for making the sell anymore than any of the tech products used to circumvent laws (from minor laws dealing with content piracy to major laws dealing with child abuse)?

Can we draw a definite consistent lines on where helping criminals commit crimes is moral, where it is immoral, where it is legal, and where it is illegal?

>Because all those things are very, very different?

For a comparison, murdering someone is very very different than punching them, but we still making punching your toddler illegal even though we agree it isn't nearly as bad as murdering your toddler.

So things that are very very different can still be quite illegal if they are horrible enough, so why doesn't that apply to those cases? It all comes down to subjective and often illogical judgments made by a society.

>but that we can't morally judge what they did "through our Western colonial lens" by saying that it was horrific.

We can, but it is pointless (the culture is now dead and gone) and it does raise questions about objective and absolute morality, of which many people disagree.

It also can easily lead into very messy discussion about modern day actions which in some sub cultures (and other cultures that may one day exist) would look equally horrendous. For example, we often are fine with abortion because of our standard as to at what point a human counts as a human. How can one objectively say our standard is okay, but someone whose standard is to not start counting til a year old isn't?

Or to bring up another hot button issue, look at MGM and the differences in how it is treated compared to FGM. You can barely even mention these concepts without risking a flame war (that is still a term, isn't it... feels like I never hear anyone use it anymore).

>A lot of these services are not "a few days of development" worth of work. The value in these is that they have dedicated teams of people who's entire job is to run that specific targeted thing. Unless you're willing to also invest in major development, it's going to be difficult to match that functionality.

For the cases I was involved in, there were options of buying the service but hosting it internally with some update pipeline. So even if the updates were suddenly turned off, you have a far longer time to swap to a different system. Generally deploying these aren't to much time, but what is really the issue to me isn't that the options that were chosen were the ones which were chosen, but that the process of choosing them did not evaluate the risks of creating such a strong external dependency at all. Its one thing if it is a risk taken with full knowledge of the potential costs and benefits, it is another when people do it because they think there is no possible downside.

But what happens if I give without being asked? If I provide an API for them to pull any data they want, is it that they need a warrant to make a data pull? If I drop off a book with the data, they need a warrant before opening the book?

Own a generator, have a stock pile of food and water, have a well I can run with the generator. Have plenty of clothing that can last many years. It isn't about being able to be self sufficient for forever, but being able to be self sufficient for long enough to weather a disaster (last time hurricane took down power for a few weeks, I only had minor inconveniences and was able to focus on helping others who weren't nearly as well prepared). Yes, it costs money and not all people can afford it, but for businesses, it should be something they do plan for.

What about blaming the companies who decided to depend upon a service that they have no control over? I find arguing against using third party APIs to save a few days of development a constantly losing battle, with it being presented as a benefit with no costs or risks. Do those pushing/agreeing with such a view not share some blame?

So what happens when a company is acting on behalf of/as an extension of the government? And exactly how close can that relationship get?

If I'm a cell phone company and decide to just give the government access to all data I have pass through my systems, is that allowed? What if the government gives me some benefit in return for it?

>You'll have to start all over getting your John Wick skin...

But you can't. It would not only cost money to, but it is also time gated, and once that gate closes you can't open it back up. No new account can have a John Wick skin because it requires buying something no longer for sale and then completing challenges that are no longer part of the game.

It seems that Epic is partially to blame for this. If they just required PS4 accounts only for PS4 it would cause far less problem for people. Epic could also allow the transfer of all unlocked items and such between accounts, but chooses not to because they benefit from people being forced to buy it a second time as well. That Epic would have to implement this functionality is the fault of Sony, but that they implement it in the way they current do is the fault of Epic, and so consumers should be mad at both Epic and Sony.

Thus forcing the businesses to pay or be punished. The business likely has the option of not passing the cost along to the consumer, but in the end they are the one being forced to pay the state.

And this then allows for consequences to be enforced not as a result of breaking the rules but as the result of something that would never be tolerated being made into a rule. For example, being more likely to punish people of a certain gender who breaks some arbitrary rule that needs to be broken for work to be done (though not being so much more likely to do so that they could convince a judge). This is why I think the appropriate response in these cases is that everyone should seek permission, regardless of the extent work slows down, and that firing people for doing so should be see as a violation of discrimination at work (because while it is not directly discriminating against protected classes, it enables a rule enforcement system that makes it trivial to discriminate against protected classes).

>Yeah I never understood this either. Does that mean a bachelor US president can't date a US citizen?

Is the difference in power between a US president and the given citizen larger than the difference in power between a 18 and 15 year old? If so, and if relationships should be banned based on power differences, then it seems the only logical conclusion is such a relationship should be banned.

Then again, our laws and social morals are rarely so consistent.

Anarchy can only exist until someone does something bad enough that other people ban together to stop them. This tends to happen quite quickly under anarchy, thus forming governments (even if they are just local militia enforcing their will as despots).

Governments can only not exist when the population density is so low that people only interact when they want to and can cease interaction when they so desire. This is extremely low population density, and given the increased range technology gives us, there are very few places that have this low of a density, and even then it only lasts as long as the density doesn't increase due to some migration event.

For political reasons people have used far lighter language with incidents such as the Armenian genocide.

In which case you blame the programmer who wrote the code, not the employee following the software. Your idea of deferring to the rules over all common sense is the core of the problem. It doesn't matter if we are talking about government rules over which they'll enslave you if you break them or corporate rules over which they'll fire and blacklist you if you break them.

And yet don't many European countries deny other genocides (or refuse to call them genocides) for political reasons? At the very least the law should be fairly applied to genocides.

Any commitment is only until a better offer comes along. Better is a bit loosely defined as there is a cost of burning the bridge with you by jumping (be that a day after accepting or after 5 years of working there), but at the end of the day there this is a business relationship and the extent of our obligations are only spelled out based on any contract we have signed, and our social obligations only extend to the extent that the cost of violating the social obligation outweighs the benefit. Any employee who doesn't see the other side as doing the same is eventually going to get burned by it.

I would expect most developers to do the same thing if the offer was good enough, but I suspect they would be far less open to mention it. I'm assuming this is just a difference in cultural knowledge of how it looks. They might have been thinking of it as social proof of desirability where as more local developers are aware that culturally you are supposed to pretend to be loyal to the company.

>Is there some kind of magic that makes engineers better when you take them out of India?

Yes, and it's called selection bias. A given engineer leaving their country gets no better, but the selection bias that applies to engineers who do leave their country means they are better on average. The good engineers who don't leave for some reason (family or such) are just as good as if they had left, but the average engineer is weighed down by those who don't have the skill to leave.

>And some of the worst developers I've worked with are Americans in America.

I've encountered some horrible American developers as well. The difference, in my experience, is that they tend to cost the same as a good American developer and thus get replaced a lot faster.

...in any culture where you want trust and reliability.

If someone doesn't want to be reliable, that's their choice, but don't expect me to be willing to engage in business with them.

Even in this thread, much less in other discussions about this case, I've read a lot of people who believe the bakery refused to serve the couple at all, instead of refusing them a particular service but offering to sell them anything in the shop or to custom make cakes for any events other than a same sex wedding. If facts of the case are lost in the discussion, then what hope is there of minding the nuances of the ruling itself?

>So, what if one’s religion doesn’t let you sell cakes to Infidels, or Jews, or blacks?

They court will rule against you. In this case, the bakery didn't refuse to serve them, but refused a particular service it didn't offer to anyone, gay wedding cakes. The question was, given that they offered a straight version of that service, should they be forced to offer the gay version. But even then the ruling is narrow enough it likely won't be applicable to a similar case in the future.

But it doesn't because the courts made a limited ruling that doesn't set a strong standard either way. It also applies to the service provided, not to whom is served. A bakery that refuses to sell any cakes to a gay couple is going to have a much worse time in court than a bakery refusing to make a gay wedding cake, but even in the latter case, assuming a lower court doesn't repeat the same mistakes made in this case, the Supreme Court may still rule against the baker.

Isn't the issue not refusing the group, but refusing work related to the group? Say there was a bakery that refused to make a NAACP cake, but which served people of any race from their normal selection of cakes? Even if one was to say that is wrong, it seems less wrong than fully denying any service to a person.

>If it genuinely was a minority, infrequently held view it wouldn't be a big problem.

It's weird because height is something that is strongly discriminated based upon, but rarely explicitly other than dating. There is research showing its impacts on personal interactions, its impact on pay, its impact on elections, and more. But it is in no way protected and in many interactions I've personally seen it is treated as something that one shouldn't complain about.

Once you can point to scientific evidence that a non-controllable factor is being used to discriminate for things like income, shouldn't it be given protection, even if historically there wasn't the same level of discrimination as with things like race? Should it be the modern day discrimination based on something that should be irrelevant that matters (and if it is relevant, such as when hiring basketball players, such discrimination would be allowed, which is already the rule).

It definitely would be different because the focus would shift from the popular candidates who are clearly going to get in to the ones who are right at the cut off. Depending upon the spread, if a lot of candidates are at the 'barely enough' line, it would mean major swings in policy driven by a small population shift, as long as the general population doesn't shift as well.

I'm guessing the numbers won't be known until after the voting is done, meaning a lot of effort will be spent finding out where the line is at.

I kinda want to simulate it for a few elections to see what happens, but there isn't any sufficient simulation.