Jiro
14hr ago
Non-compliance with law enforcement orders has to remain chargeable.
"Chargeable" and "punished by shooting" are different things.
Jiro
14hr 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
14hr 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
19hr 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
20hr 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
2d 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
3d 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.
Jiro
3d ago
His administration seems to be on the anti-gun side of United States v. Hemani, though it's on the pro-gun side for Wolford v. Lopez.
Jiro
6d ago
The problem with the idea generalizes though--the problem is that you make ethical behavior dependent on what you can see. So you have fewer ethical requirements if you have unrelated reasons to not see so much.
There are of course situations where a market failure is more likely. If our KKK member has leased the only cafeteria at a workplace, or is the only decent ISP in an area, they might deserve more regulation. (Things get messier if there is a prevailing sentiment of customers distorting the market, like "places willing to serve Blacks are low-class".
Okay, now backport this to your original idea, which is that it's fine to blacklist ICE employees, and to reveal their identities so they are easier to blacklist. What if this makes it hard for the ICE employee to participate in large swaths of society, just like it does in the "KKK members lease everything" scenario or the "customer sentiment" scenario? How exactly is "places willing to serve blacks are low-class" different from "places willing to serve ICE employees are fascist collaborators"?
(Except that you can probably tell who is black without having to reveal their identity first.)
The point of the anecdote is not "never walk past a homeless person" but "never walk past a homeless person just because you screen out their existence as a neutral fact of the universe".
That means that if you never walk past a homeless person anyway, you're exempt from the requirement. All you need is a dual-purpose homeless avoidance so that you can truthfully say you have a reason to do it aside from just avoiding the homeless.
There should not be greater moral requirements on people who walk instead of drive and as such inherently pass more homeless. Or to put it another way, it's a double whammy: the poorer someone is, the more they have to walk and use busses and live where there are homeless around, so the more they have to help the homeless. Being rich doesn't just mean you have more money, it means you have fewer moral obligations.
Jiro
7d ago
If someone wanted to refuse to serve blacks at their lunch counter, would it be okay with you as long as this was not legally required?
Jiro
7d ago
The question "how many candles do I have to buy before I can stop" is not an issue because the answer is zero. Is the answer to "how much do I have to give to the poor and unfortunate to be considered not selfishly evil" also zero?
Jiro
8d ago
But any passing knowledge of America's founders, it's elder statesman, our civic religion more broadly and the virtues embodied therein puts lie to the notion Donald Trump could possible be some avatar of it.
I don't see an argument in this post.
Jiro
8d ago
one third our intentional homicide rate?
How does it compare to the US's homicide rate when broken down by race?
Jiro
8d ago
If they actually grab a knife out of the block and lunge at the officer, then even under strict standards the officer would have good reason to shoot. So the police could shoot.
If the police said "I thought I saw him go for the knife" and shot him while he might have been reaching for the knife or might have been doing nothing at all, I'd be much less inclined to trust the police. But even then, the comparison doesn't work well because there's little reason for the suspect to reach for the knife except to attack the officer, so going for the knife is probably an attack, while in the car the suspect has a pretty plausible reason to drive other than to attack ther officer.
(If he has a knife handcuffed to him, such that any movement looks like he's reaching for the knife, he does of course have a plausible reason to move other than to attack.)
Jiro
8d ago
I think the standards for the officer using the vehicle accelerating into him as a defense to shooting him should be stricter than normal. There is a need for officers to be permitted to make split second decisions, but there's also a need to not let that get out of hand, and officers are known to game confrontations a lot like "honestly I smelled marijuana" or "you looked like you were speeding" or making it unclear whether you are free to go.
It's possible that in this particular case the threat was clear enough that even under stricter standards he had reason to shoot (despite the initial reporting).
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.
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