dabbledash

I never found this a very useful analytical framework, especially once you define “the freedom to interfere with third parties” as a “freedom from.” It’s too easy to move things from category to category by describing them differently. And I just don’t see what you get out of it anyway. It doesn’t affect the importance of the relevant interests.

I guess enrollment in public schools will continue to drop after 2020, which will not be great for equity.

“People can use the platform without the liability that their contributions will be automatically saved as posts. This can embolden some users to make abusive or derogatory remarks, thinking they won't be recorded and won't face consequences.”

Incredibly disappointing to see Ars jumping on this bandwagon. People are having ephemeral conversations that censors can’t police after the fact. Truly, the horror!

I don’t know enough to say confidently.

Personally, I’d be suspicious of a rule like that. In the end, it has to be enforced by the executive and it sounds a lot like “all speech will be tolerated except speech that spreads widely enough to be a threat to existing power.”

I think a law preventing you from profiting from speech on the basis of the content would still be a constitutional issue. E.g., a law saying you can distribute pornography but can’t sell it for a profit would be unconstitutional.

“You don’t have a right to profit from speech” would be a convenient pretext to, for instance, shut down the New York Times.

I don’t think it’s a dark pattern, but it makes me much much less likely to buy.

And conversely that many people are willing to give up quality of life, perhaps indefinitely, to decrease risk. To state the obvious, there’s an inherent tension in the fact that some of the things that make life pleasurable increase the chances of cutting that life short. People reach different conclusions about how to strike the balance, and I don’t think there’s one right answer.

“How's that better?”

Because it doesn’t require invasive surveillance.

- You can have a website that takes payments without putting the infrastructure online. Take what you get from the human meter reader, put it in a database.

The real negative impact of meter reading isn’t the lack of the online billing, it’s that the water company might not be able to bill as often and might have to sometimes bill on estimates, so people can get saddled with surprise bills

- I don’t believe the two are actually related but if I believed that setting up a payment website required introducing huge security vulnerabilities, I’d rather mail a check. And I hate mailing checks.

- As for the sellers viewing the water companies as their customers: I agree; that makes sense. But the water companies are public utilities and if they’re putting their own convenience over the safety of residents, it should be addressed with regulation.

That, I believe. But don’t try to wrap that in some nonsense about customers wanting it. What we want from water is safety. Period.

> Consumer demand has changed a lot since SCADA was first thought up.

I find this hard to believe. In this modern world of connected convenience, I’d say what I want from the water company is 99.99999% safe water and 0.00001% real time billing. The idea that you would sacrifice the former for the latter is ridiculous.

Nothing in your comment makes me think SCADA is bad, it just makes me think connecting it to the internet is dumb.

What I think I hear you saying is: 1. Maybe if someone like Trump can lie all the time snd still be believed by ~30-40% of people, it doesn’t matter whether a public figure is honest, people will just believe them anyway. 2. It’s unfair to criticize Fauci for dishonesty when other people aren’t criticized for being worse.

To these I would say:

1. Public health officials start out more trusted than controversial politicians, but they don’t have many die-hards who will just believe no matter what either. So, someone like Fauci has more to lose from being dishonest. I don’t think we can conclude that because Trump “got away with it” that Fauci can too.

And even if he were as impervious to criticism on this front as Trump, 40% of people trusting someone in his position wouldn’t be nearly good enough.

2. I’m not sure about this one. I think Trump got a lot of (completely deserved) criticism for being mendacious. It’s true that some of the people who always gave him a pass criticize Fauci for dishonesty, but what are you donna do? People are hypocrites. I think more people would trust public health experts if they were more honest, and that’s all that matters to me.

So, the honest and direct answer at the outset would have been to state his actual belief: “70 - 90%, but we don’t know”

If you’re massaging your answers to questions based on what people want to hear, you better hope they don’t find out.

It isn’t fine. At a time when being able to trust public health officials is so important, to see officials blow their credibility with this kind of thing is incredibly frustrating.

If was stupid anyway. “Masks don’t work and also we need them for healthcare workers.” Did anyone actually believe this?

I’m fine with them having non-dairy beverages, but they aren’t “substitutes” nutritionally just because they have milk in the name. If your 1 year old is drinking almond milk (30cal and 1g protein per 8oz) instead of whole milk (150 cal and 8 gr protein per 8 oz), you need to adjust what you’re feeding, just like you would if you were giving any other drink.

The issue is some people seem to assume liquids that are labeled milks are actually like each other in some way that goes beyond flavor and texture.

I don’t know about the meat issue, but I’ve seen women in mother’s groups ask “what kind of milk” people were going to be giving their babies after they were done giving breast milk or formula. Some people seemed to genuinely think that something called almond milk is actually a type of milk in some meaningful sense just because of the name.

Yeah, if there’s one impression I get from Twitter, it’s that people on the left try too hard to be nice.

I’m far from an expert in these things, but to me the benefits of bitcoin are: 1) giving individuals a way to exchange money digitally without it being tied to their offline identity directly (cash) and 2) providing a currency that can’t be manipulated directly by government monetary policy. I assume banning it and replacing it with something from the government is intended to avoid those things intentionally, and isn’t some accident they stumbled into.

I think it’s likely that defeating those main selling points is not accidental

10 years from now: “I never thought a leopard would eat MY face!”

“Perhaps there is a situation where a society says "no further" and is correct to actively shun a political stance.”

Just remember that we live in a world where a subset of people genuinely believed Obama is a Stalinist. Once you define whatever is beyond the pale, people will just shove everything they don’t like into that bucket.

I can definitely see that being a factor, but to my eye the NYT in particular seems worse, and I think I’ve heard they made tons of money during the last few years. You definitely do see some great pieces that couldn’t be done without the resources of an institution like the Times, but it seems to be surrounded by a lot of schlock.

My perception, as a child of the 90s, is that the quality of mainstream news has dropped a lot since then, especially in the last ten years or so. I wonder if that’s really true though, or if its just the product of my own age and the availability of other sources of information.

“Similarly for advocacy, our model should perhaps be that seemingly extreme proposals serve to stretch the Overton window before the middle-ground wins out.”

This seems like an argument in favor of openly advocating positions that are good but too far from the current consensus to be adopted. Dragging the Overton window toward stupid policies or bad behavior is a different issue.

If you are a member of a species with 3 females to every 1 male, that means the average male of your species has 3 times as many offspring as the average female.

Under those circumstances, if you have a mutation that causes you to produce all male offspring, you will have many more grandchildren than average.

This pressure will always favor producing whatever sex is in short supply, pushing sex ratios to 50%.

People should be able to opt in to what they want, but as far as I’m concerned if a company can only exist by subjecting me to constant surveillance it doesn’t need to exist.

But I think one of the things we see with technology and privacy is that there’s a real difference between things that you can do, but they require manual human action and are therefor costly, and things that are done effortlessly and constantly. We’ve always had license plates, but we haven’t always had a government record of where every car has travelled. We will soon, I’m sure.

And right now it’s true you can mostly walk or bike around in public without being tracked, but that’s just until we get the facial recognition really going. Then the argument will be that you were always showing your face in public and it was always possible that someone would recognize you so this is no different. But of course it will be different.

And now it’s possible, if you have a conversation in a cafe, that someone will overhear you. But if every conversation were being recorded, transcribed, and transmitted to the authorities, that wouldn’t be the same thing at all.

>Beyond that, if you don’t want to get a fine, don’t speed

My concern with this kind of thing is less about the speed limit and more that I believe people should be able to move around in public without being identified and tracked by the police. It’s one thing if the police have to observe something suspicious and then take the time to stop you for ID to find out who you are. It’s another if they can track and identify everyone all the time passively.

“If someone gave me the key to their front door so I could drop off amazon packages but I actually used it to come in and destroy all their valuables would it really be MY fault?”

Yes.

Should have included the “/s”