Jiro
19hr ago
If someone is intent to make a snuff video of them murdering ICE, they would spend 24h to acquire a GoPro or a barrel mounted camera for livestreaming from Amazon.
Protestors are not perfect efficient rartionalists.
Jiro
19hr ago
A problem with this idea is that this doesn't extend to a general responsibility to save all freezing homeless people. If it did, the reasons why it's unworkable would be obvious. And since it doesn't, it's imposing a responsibility to save the people in front of you which means that "out of sight, out of mind" is actually true and that poor people have more requirements to help the homeless (since they live in worse areas and have to use public transportation, so they run across more homeless).
Unless you're going to have a moral standard "everyone has to save X number of homeless. If you run across fewer than that, you need to save some extras outside your sight to reach X. If you run across more than that, you only need to save up to X of them."
to be precise only about 32% of eligible voters voted for Trump
By this reasoning, "the people voted for" doesn't matter for any issue and any president, since the number of voters for everyone is pretty much always going to be below 50%.
I smell an isolated demand for rigor here. This is not the standard used where Democrats are involved.
Jiro
2d ago
I don't agree. The experience machine is another version of the blissful ignorance problem for many versions of utilitarianism.
Do you have any desire to not have your spouse cheat on you, as long as you didn't know it (and assuming no disease, pregnancy, etc.)? Most people would say that yes, they have a desire for something to be true that they can't sense and that won't affect their life. And I don't think this is just because it's low social status to have your spouse cheat on you.
Jiro
4d ago
Why? I am not talking about a financial distinction, which your accountant would care about, but a policy distinction.
Jiro
4d ago
What makes you think the procedure was bad?
(And no, "obviously the technicians should care about 1/8 inch" is not enough to show that the procedure is bad. Especially since the problem had in fact been repeatedly reported! That's a management problem; the technicians were just being used as patsies for the management problem.)
Jiro
4d ago
If they followed the correct procedures, they should be held blameless. Although that should often mean the people who created the procedures should be blamed. (And if the situation could not reasonably be anticipated by even the people who created the procedures, nobody should be blamed, though the procedures should still be fixed.)
Jiro
4d ago
There are different kinds of not making a profit. If the expenses are reasonable, but the government wants to give it away at below expense, that's one kind. If the expenses are unreasonable, though, that's a "not making a profit" which should be unacceptable even for government services. Paying people to do nothing useful is in the latter category.
Jiro
4d ago
Non-compliance with law enforcement orders has to remain chargeable.
"Chargeable" and "punished by shooting" are different things.
Jiro
4d ago
But then, bafflingly, they sued and got their jobs back.
If you read your link it explains that measurements did not have to be updated if they were within 1/8 inch, so copying the old measurements is permissible.
Jiro
4d ago
For a while over the past 5 - 10 years, WMATA stations were notorious for often catching on fire.
That link technically doesn't claim anything was on fire even once (although the headline says a smoke scare) and certainly not twice (it says that an earlier "possible fire" was reported but that no fire was actually found.
Jiro
5d ago
"Youtube should exist without ads and also I'm never going to pay for a subscription"
Youtube videos should exist without ads. Youtube itself existing is not part of this.
Jiro
5d ago
I would rather that youtube die, but as long as it is alive, its network effects make competition hard, so I have no choice but to watch it if I want to watch amateur videos. I wouldn't call this "like watching Youtube". I like watching some things that are on Youtube, but the fact that they are on Youtube makes them worse and if Youtube didn't exist they would be better.
This is like the argument that Microsoft has brought computers to people by creating Windows. No, they don't get credit for doing X if they do X worse than other people would but I have to go through them because they have a stranglehold on the market.
Jiro
5d ago
Replace "ads" here with "pollute the commons" and notice that the argument doesn't really change. Yes, if you pollute the commons, some people will make expenditures to avoid being harmed by the polluted commons and some will not. That doesn't justify polluting the commons.
Jiro
5d ago
How else does one model evidence based on consumer choice than by pointing to two options, understanding the tradeoffs between them, and charting what choices people make to see how highly people value those tradeoffs?
But that's not what you're doing. First you're claiming that if people don't avoid ads, that's evidence that we don't need to ban ads. Now you're claiming that if people do avoid ads, that's evidence that we don't need to ban ads. It is impossible for X and not-X to be evidence for the same thing.
Jiro
5d ago
People don't get that?
It doesn't apply in every single case.
What socialist powderpuff world do we live in where the profit a corporation makes has to be proportional to their costs rather than proportional to the value the customer puts on the service?
The profit doesn't "have to" be proportional to the company's costs, but in a working market where companies compete against each other, a company's profit will be proportional to its costs because if it tries to make too much profit, it will be undercut by a competing company that makes less profit but wins over all the customers. If this doesn't happen, that's a market failure. And of course a market failure is exactly what this is.
This is good price discrimination, every customer gets what they want at a price they can afford.
Price discrimination in general is a bad deal for the consumer, because in the limit you end up with everyone paying so much that they only benefit by a tiny fractional amount from the product compared to not buying it.
That's not the industry breaking down, just its entire revenue model.
This is like saying that every death is caused by heart failure. In a sense it's true, but it's described in a way which obfuscates what's going on. Yes, if the Times can't sell papers, it can't sell ads in papers. If the Times was hit by a meteor it would be able to sell even fewer papers, and thus gain even less from advertising, but describing that as "that's its revenue model breaking down" would be misleading, if technically true.
Jiro
6d ago
This reasoning violates conservation of expected evidence. You can't have "people avoid ads" and "people don't avoid ads" be evidence for the same thing.
Jiro
6d ago
If ads on twitter offended people, they could pay for whatever it is Elon is calling it now. They mostly don't. Why not?
- They are not technical people and don't understand this well.
- They don't trust the company to be honest with them when they claim "this will get rid of the ads". The company can take it back at any time.
- The company probably won't price the ad-free version in a way proportional to the difference in value. If they make 10 cents from you on ads, the price of the ad-free version may still be 20 dollars more, because they also like to do market segmentation and overcharge less price sensitive people.
- Sometimes people do buy the ad free version. Buying a non-Kindle is a better deal than buying an ad-free Kindle. Of course this is a catch-22--if the customers don't buy the ad-free version you will claim the customers don't mind ads, but if they do buy it you will say that the market is obviously working and therefore there is no need to get rid of ads. (Which violates conservation of expected evidence.)
Once the advertising model breaks down, you get the modern newspaper industry.
That's the newspaper industry breaking down, not the advertising model specifically. And a lot of woke depends on civil rights laws, government agencies, and similar non-market forces.
I'm pretty sure Disney still does a lot of advertising. It hasn't kept them nonpolitical.
Jiro
7d ago
So they thought: ‘let’s make the antagonist in the game an angry purple-haired e-thot; I mean surely she won’t generate any sympathy among dudes who listen to alt-right vtuber bros, right?’. It does sound like a reasonable assumption at first, if we want to be honest.
I'm not sure they were even thinking that far ahead. It could just have been "draw a girl" and there could have been no reason for even her gender, never mind the purple hair, except maybe a reflexive drive for representation by putting female characters in everything. They weren't trying to make her particularly unattractive (or attractive).
The main point against this theory is that the other characters have normal hair, so the purple hair can't just mean "they are in a bubble where purple hair is normal" or"the corporate art style includes weird hair". On the other hand, sometimes main characters get distinctive features where background characters are more generic, so that isn't a fatal point.
Jiro
7d ago
So why the focus of the cities which voted Harris?
Cities that voted Harris tend to be sanctuary cities. In sanctuary cities ICE has to do more work.
Where you're coming from doesn't seem to justify it.
You might be able to justify "a Culmore man is a man who lives in Culmore and accepts American culture", but surely black people can qualify for that.
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