imagist

AirBnB poses a safety risk to homeowners. The fact that it's also a billion dollar business now doesn't change that. Additional problems have been discovered with AirBnB's business model, which are arguably even worse.

Sure, if all you care about is money, those criticisms don't matter. But personally, I care about if I might have a negative effect on the world.

So basically if you order by frequency, order correlates with frequency? Isn't that just two ways of saying the same thing? Isn't it obvious? I don't get why we would need a law for that so I feel like I'm missing some detail.

First of all, that's not how you make a Sazerac. You rinse the glass with absinthe and toss the absinthe, you don't add it to the mix. There's also an ordering dependence: the rye and bitters can be mixed in either order, but adding ice, shaking, and straining should happen in that order with nothing in between, because the longer the warm ingredients are in contact with the ice, the more you're watering down the drink. I'm not going to go so far as to say the lemon garnish is wrong, but an orange peel rubbed on the rim and then garnished is better IMHO.

Second, that's not functional programming, that's calling a library function.

What does "rank" mean in this context?

> Code is just code. Bad changes can be backed out. It's much better to move fast and iterate quickly than to create an illusion of care and add friction to every aspect of the development process. Up-front design of software just does not work. If it did, waterfall project planning would be successful.

Bad changes can be backed out, but in an infrastructure with any size, this isn't a trivial task. I've worked in a million-line codebase with multiple separate deployments, and in that case, design documents were much cheaper to create and maintain than a rollback or even writing working code and then discarding it. In an infrastructure of Google's age and size, the trade off is even more clearly in favor of up-front design.

You probably think the "move fast and break things" ideology you're espousing is agile, but it's not. It's just another plan, and agile is about responding to change over following a plan. I hope that if you ever work on a project of Google's size that you can adapt.

You're missing my point: I think that this could be studied cheaply enough that he wouldn't need outside funding.

I'll add that I think the reason he hasn't performed studies on the technique isn't lack of funding, but that validating his claims isn't a priority for him.

His background only makes me believe more firmly that evidence is not a priority for him.

But he's already performing the treatment on people. He's already skirting the regulations. Merely collecting data on what he's already doing doesn't make it worse.

Let's be clear here: I don't think outside funding is needed. As I described, this isn't expensive. The cost is small enough that it could be paid for out of his pocket and he'd easily recoup the investment if it proves that his technique works.

I think the reason he hasn't done studies isn't because of lack of funding, it's because scientifically validating his claims isn't a priority.

It's not about being taken seriously, it's about finding out whether what he's doing actually helps people.

You don't need institutions to prove your hypothesis, you need evidence.

Is it, though?

Science isn't always an expensive endeavor. Certainly checking in with clients a few years after and comparing outcomes with a control group could be done with volunteers. Setting up a blind can be done with basic survey tools which are available at low cost.

The expensive parts of this research are getting facilities and people willing to take an untested treatment. But he already has both those, so I really can only attribute the lack of scientific evaluation to a lack of will to do it.

I find it funny that the C code is in a larger font than the Go code.

Surely comfortable survival and providing for your family are valuable.

This is just semantics. Typically wages are valuable--I don't know anyone who is being paid in smiles. Ostensibly when work is done and paid for, value has been created.

That's not the question businesses are asking. They're asking, how can I solve this problem as cheaply/efficiently as possible? And the answer is increasingly not human labor.

There is work to be done in poor communities in the sense that there is need, but there isn't much work to be done in the sense that not many people are offering jobs (because not many can pay).

Anyone who has spent time in a rich community knows that there's plenty of surplus that could be shared. It's not a problem of lack of resources, it's a problem of distribution.

The problem with redistribution, we're told, is that the current distribution is based on merit: those who provide the most value are given the most value. Joe is a billionaire because he's provided billions of dollars of value to the world, while Bob is starving because he doesn't provide any value. If we take from Joe to feed Bob, then Joe won't have any incentive to provide value, so he'll stop, and society will collapse.

However, I don't think that's true. Joe doesn't provide more value than Bob necessarily--he just is better at manipulating the abstractions we've created around value. We don't live in a meritocracy.

But the lie of meritocracy isn't a complete lie. People do often provide more value if they receive more value. Honest actors do exist and provide value, and while most don't get to be Rich Joe, most don't become Homeless Bob either.

However, with technology, these honesty actors are no longer needed, and the lie of meritocracy becomes even more bald faced. In a future where robots do all the work, are we to believe that someone provides value simply because records show that they own the robots?

Transemployment is just an attempt to maintain the current distribution of resources: ostensibly the transemployed would work for someone, and that someone would determine how much they are paid. And of course that person would be paid more.

I think that a better solution is to drop the pretense that the distribution of resources is meritocratic, and as technology makes it even less meritocratic, we should look at ensuring that the benefits of technology are distributed more evenly. Creating fake jobs to maintain a tiered distribution of resources is only going to make things worse.

Wouldn't it be more productive if they titled their article with something that describes the content of the article?

1. It doesn't come from physical access to the device: the device is accessed wirelessly.

2. The water company collects all this data from everyone with the device.

3. As the Mirai botnet showed, it's not just the government who might have access to that data.

The idea of transemployment (work that is not needed, but is created to prevent unemployment) is a terrible idea. Have we really become so brainwashed that we have forgotten that the entire purpose of work is to create value?

Simply letting people not work doesn't remove incentives to perform: the incentives that we have are already broken. We don't live in a meritocratic economy: the Monsantos and Blackwaters of the world are rewarded for destructive behaviors, while advertising allows inferior products to drive superior products out of business. If we have enough surplus to support these massive inefficiencies, surely we can spare enough to support the unemployed.

Further, transemployment actually costs us. It requires infrastructure to create fake jobs.

> FOSS massively benefits nowadays the worst actors on the HW/SW markets possible. If you wait long enough you will see the heroes turn into the villains. (cf The Watchmen).

This is really only true of OSS, not Free (Libre) Software, which is why that distinction is so important.

Keeping the power of determining where the money goes is in itself selfish, so I don't buy the argument.

More to the point, why are we optimizing for altruism and forward thinking? Are those end goals, or merely means to an end goal?

You start off by claiming that people are notoriously selfish and short-sighted, but mysteriously the rest of your post only applies this to the receivers of aid. The givers are people too.

More fundamentally, you're only looking at material outcomes. What I'm saying is that freedom (a non-material ouycome) is a good in itself, one which is under-considered in aid.

> I think it's probably more condescending, and certainly more harmful, to assume that extreme poverty bestows upon the global poor some mystical ability to make optimal spending decisions that for some reason doesn't apply to comparatively wealthy people in developed countries entitled to access heavily-funded collective healthcare and social insurance systems.

That's not what I said.

Fundamentally, I'm saying that personal choice in itself is a value, a value which is being overlooked by most aid programs.

Low income males spend a disproportionate amount of their money on cigarettes, but that is different from a statement that low income people will spend aid money on cigarettes.

> I'm sorry, you do not get to blame me for the continued existence of capitalism. That's just ridiculous.

If you choose to participate in harmful systems, you are in fact partially to blame for the harm done by those systems, and simply staying that I don't get to blame you for our doesn't change that.

Incidentally, criticizing ads isn't a criticism of capitalism: capitalism could exist just fine without ads, and in fact I think removing ads would make capitalism drastically more likely to yield the positive results capitalism purportedly yields.

That's what I said.

> I don't buy the argument that deworming doesn't really help people because they weren't offered the choice of buying the equivalent value of cigarettes instead.

Do you understand how condescending it is to think that you know so much better than people what they need that you think they'll buy cigarettes I'd you give them money?

Putting aside the fact that this isn't what people given money do in studies, your viewpoint is an extraordinarily arrogant one.

Not to be pedantic, but ROI as a concept only makes sense when you're trying to achieve your own goals. If you're really empowering other people, then they are the ones who should be evaluating the ROI on their decisions, not you.

Ultimately, I do agree that a mix of giver-goal aid and receiver-goal aid is useful. I think it's a very laudable goal to i.e. end polio. But I think that western aid has very little concept of helping people achieve their own goals. As a result, we're very far unbalanced in favor of the goals of those giving aid rather than the goals of those receiving aid. Until that balance is fixed, I think there's far more need in receiver-goal programs.

Incidentally, besides GiveDirectly, I give to Planned Parenthood and the FSF. While they both have slightly more complex models, I think both of those organizations are geared toward empowering people to achieve their own goals.

I think GiveWell does a great job at determining where we get the best bang for our buck when it comes to aid, but at a more fundamental level, I don't think I'm in a position to tell someone else what they need. That's condescending and I'll never have the whole picture. That's why I give to GiveDirectly--I think people should be able to determine how they are helped.

Deworming programs might help kids the most, but then that money goes to a (likely American) pharmaceutical company and the benefit is over.

In contrast, give someone money and a lot of that money will stay in their community. Maybe the iron roof they buy provides them a smaller benefit than deworming, but the guy who makes and installs the iron roof can now buy a cow from his neighbor, who can now buy seed for next year's crops. Maybe eventually the money allows someone to get deworming medication for their kids, but now that money had benefited a bunch of people in the community first.

It's hard to collect data on this kind of stuff (although GiveDirectly is collecting a lot of data). But I think we need to recognize that the only reason we collect data is to control outcomes, and we're not really helping people if we don't allow them control over their own lives.

> Im sorry, but your position just sounds like uninformed radicalism.

Don't be sorry for labeling my position, just don't do it. If you had a defensible position you could defend it without name calling.

> Most corporations manage to act ethically;

Inasmuch as it is profitable to do so, sure. It rarely remains profitable to do so, however.

Could you point out some examples of successful corporations acting ethically when it was not profitable to do so?

> corporations (big and small) have non-profit motives

Examples?

> and limited liability is pretty much required to have a functional economy.

Is it? Iceland put their bankers in jail and recovered more quickly from the subprime mortgage crisis than anyone. Limited liability allows economies to function for the rich, but that's a rather narrow view of functioning. The stock market is not the economy.

You cannot support policing and limited liability--limited liability means that policing has no teeth.

> I like having the option to support sites I enjoy without massively inconveniencing myself.

So do I, which is why I use Patreon and subscriptions.

The side effects of viewing ads are that in addition to supporting the sites you enjoy, you're supporting malware distributors, and helping companies compete on ads rather than the quality of their products. Maybe you don't care about your own attention or data security, but your actions don't just affect you.

I think you're deeply misunderstanding my position.

I don't think we should accept and normalize this behavior from corporations, I think we should reject corporations as valid entities with a right to exist entirely.

Expecting corporations to behave ethically is not a reasonable expectation. Unlike individual humans, corporations only have incentives to make money.

I think policing is necessary, but it won't ever work as long as we treat corporations as capable of ethics. It should be assumed that corporations will do the wrong thing the instant it becomes profitable. Corporations should be considered guilty until proven innocent.

The modern American take on a corporation is the existent majority of successful corporations. That's certainly how casinos operate.

I'm not saying this is the kind of corporation I want--on the contrary, I despise that such organizations are allowed to exist.

But saying that corporations shouldn't act immorally when they can make more money by acting immorally is like saying termites shouldn't eat wood. It's the nature of corporations to seek profit at all cost and if you don't want that, you don't want a corporation, at least in the sense that corporations exist today.