I don't think you can frame the argument in terms of need vs convenience or degree of difficulty because there are going to be plenty of cases where moving platforms (or building your own) actually is more difficult than physically moving.
Is it harder for an American to move to Canada than it is for a Patreon user to get all of their contributors to switch to some alternate payment coordinator that nobody has ever heard of? How about if 90% of your income came through Patreon?
There's not really a huge difference when the government is giving license to those organizations to do so. Organizations currently are given big advantages over regular people when it comes to speech protection, for instance "safe harbor" from copyright infringement violations if they have a DMCA compliant take-down process. Why don't regular people have that? Then you can download whatever you want, share whatever you want, and when you get caught just delete that one specific file and carry on.
In the current situation, with the government allowing corporations to enforce rules against speech that the government itself would not be allowed to do, while at the same time protecting corporations from consequences of speech that regular individuals would be subject to, it's like the corporation is an extension of the government. The corporation essentially has sovereign immunity. To me that makes it either a 1st amendment issue (the corporation as an extension of government has to obey the same rules as government) or a 14th amendment issue (the corporation shouldn't be an extension of government, it should obey the same rules as we do). It's not fair to have this hybrid where it doesn't follow the rules for government NOR does it follow the rules for individual.
That's incorrect, the analog here would be that you blew a horse, but you're listed on a website called "blacklisted veterinarians" with an accurate accounting of what you had done and when you did it. But you are not actually banned from continuing your veterinary practice, so a judge decides that "blacklisted" is not a fair title.
So the question is, should people be able to find out that you blew a horse one time, and is the title of the website really what is dissuading people from seeing you or is it the fact that you blew a horse?
The above isn't intended to explain this individual cases merits; but if the information this site includes was judged to be inaccurate or misleading then this isn't as simple as European vs American free speech.
Well in fact in this case "The judge said that while the information on the website with reference to the failings of the doctor in 2014 was correct, the pejorative name of the blacklist site suggested she was unfit to treat people"
Try living in American jurisdiction and posting false information about medical products or service providers who are also in the US and see how long your right to free speech protects you from considerable fines or even criminal charges.
I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty sure opinion is protected in the US, so if you posted somewhere, "Doctor XYZ is horrible (subjective) because he did ABC (accurate) so nobody should see him (subjective)" you'd be fine, but if you posted "Doctor XYZ is horrible (subjective) because he did DEF (provably inaccurate) so nobody should see him (subjective)" it's the DEF part that would get you successfully sued.
Imagine if a credit reference agency had a massive black mark on your file that was a mistake. You would want it corrected, right?
I would agree with that, but according to the article:
The judge said that while the information on the website with reference to the failings of the doctor in 2014 was correct, the pejorative name of the blacklist site suggested she was unfit to treat people, and that was not supported by the disciplinary panel’s findings.
So it's not about an outright error, it's that the data was presented in a way that implied something that may or may not be accurate.
Rather than your straightforward example of an error on a credit report, it would be more like if someone had a website listing businessmen who had declared bankruptcy on some projects, and suggesting that they are bad at business. Now in reality occasionally bankruptcy is normal, that's why we have bankruptcy laws. So are you saying that such pages shouldn't exist, because pretty much any time you are privately drawing an implication from publicly available and accurate data you may be wrong or going too far?
I think GP has a pretty good point. A market economy has a kind of underlying social benefit goal, because by definition you are paid relative to how other people value your work. A command economy has rulers who decide the value of your work, and so you hope you have good rulers who will make wise allocations in the economy.
But UBI allows individuals to get an income no matter what, which means the work they produce is determined entirely by selfish goals. That's shifting the balance of benefit away from society and towards individuals. Why not look at ways to shift it back a little bit?
You think most jobs get 6 weeks of vacation/holidays?
$56k is a pretty good salary, actually, considering the median household income is about $50k in Kansas. A married pair of teachers would be significantly above the median.
I'm curious how anybody would know? Where I vote (in NC) we have tables with privacy screens and nobody sees what you're doing. What's it like in Florida?
Right now, a husband and wife can easily cancel out each other's votes. If online voting is allowed, there's little to stop the spouse with more power in the relation ship (or who's less ambivalent about voting) from voting on the other's behalf after getting the spouse to log in.
That's a little far-fetched.. in some abusive relationship where the abusive partner cares a lot about voting, they would just not let the other person go vote. How is making it easier for *everyone* going to materially change that situation? And in the parenthetical you mention, campaigning is going to happen anyway. If someone is ambivalent, the other person will try to convince them.
There are other opportunities for coercion... say, an employer (or union, or any other group) who decides to "encourage voting" via the internet "right now" (in at least semi-public view, with at least some social pressure to vote the "right" way). Think: a politically-active church that, instead of marching its congregation off to early voting at a polling place nearby, passes around tablets after the second collection while encouraging people to vote the "right" way in front of their friends, neighbors, and family members.
Technology has already made that possible. You can take a picture of your ballot with your phone. If the employer/church/whatever were really paranoid they could get you to record yourself handing in the ballot, although that would be silly... people who belong to an organization like that are probably not too bent out of shape about going along with it anyway.
Let's not forget the possibility of rounding up a bunch of poor people and offering to pay them $20 apiece if they come "vote online" and cast verified ballots for the "right" candidates.
I mean.. you already mentioned absentee ballots, if it's such an issue why isn't this happening already? Probably the risk of being caught makes it not worthwhile. Why would online be different?
I'm not completely against making voting harder. I think the country was better off when only landowners could vote. I think some requirement of a minimum level of education would be great. But these reasons for making the actual *act* of voting more difficult don't make much sense to me, particularly since as you noted absentee ballots provide all the same opportunities for interference.
The choice isn't between A) give a child a smartphone and let him be on it every waking moment to the detriment of his health and social development or B) no smartphone.
I don't see anything wrong with some screentime. Putting on some Youtube Kids videos is good for car trips. My son is 4 now, learning to read, and is actually enjoying some of the reading-related apps like learning sight words.
It is really disappointing how some apps targeted at kids abuse ads so much. I don't think your solution of "don't like it? don't use it" is very practical though.. that's just not human nature. I mean there are regulations about kids TV ads (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ), so at some point I'm sure online/app ads will get bad enough that people will cry out for regulation. The industry has a chance to regulate itself before then, and hopefully they listen to these complaints from parents before we have to put it in the law.
The melting pot happened, but is it really what people were trying to do?
Yes, for many of them.
Nobody wants to get assimilated. ST:TNG had a whole villain civilization based on that!
Assimilation by the Borg meant giving up your literal identity, your consciousness, to become part of the hive mind. Assimilation in terms of immigration simply means learning the language and adopting the prevalent values of the host society.
I mean I can't say I'm surprised that someone on slashdot would make a Star Trek analogy, but good lord is it a bad analogy. If THAT actually plays a role in your thoughts about immigration, please reconsider and get a more accurate view of what people who favor assimilation are actually talking about.
No, this'll make us stronger too.
Sure it will make us stronger in some areas, like food as you mentioned. It will make us weaker in some areas that I think are far more important, like GDP per capita and quality of schools.
I like arepas and Peruvian chicken. Sure. But let me ask you, do you have kids? Do you have schools near you where you can see the decline in test scores over the past 20 or 30 years as the percent of FRL (free or reduced lunch, a measure of povert) and ESL (English as a second language) kids has increased? Now that I have kids, I want good schools, the same good schools that I had growing up that are being / have been destroyed by negative demographic change. This is happening all over the country.
I don't have any problem with immigration. I'm married to an immigrant. Immigration does have to be controlled though for the benefit of society.
Now if a company started a program to help men get out and vote, I would say that is pretty biased as well.
Anyway, your point about non-voters leaning Democrat (I'm not sure that's true unless you're excluding all white non-voters, or all male non-voters) is about inequality of outcome, which I'm fine with. If you help everybody across the board and that happens to help Democrats, that doesn't bother me. Inequality in opportunity is more serious. Things like "We're going to help underrepresented group X, screw everybody else" are morally problematic to me.
That's how virtually all codes of conduct work, because human behavior is subjective. GP's code of conduct is just more clearly subjective than most, due to its brevity.
Are you looking at "association" as a very loose concept? For example, say an international bank accepted deposits from Nazis, therefore they are associated with Nazis, but we can recognize that the bank isn't a Nazi organization?
To me that's much looser than "in the same camp." Your interpretation seems more like "in the same continent."
Would you agree that Linus is saying people "in the same camp" as the Nazis must think it's OK to be a white nationalist Nazi? Because I think that already shows he's using a closer scope of "association" than the international bank example. I don't think people assume that any business that engaged with the Nazis were morally approving of all of the Nazis behavior. (Though there are plenty of crazy people who do think exactly that.)
Google is allowed to be political, however making a corporate statement or donating to support various candidates is different from manipulating search results without telling them. It's dishonest. It's providing an inferior product to certain people. It would be like the difference between a fast food outlet that is homophobic in the sense that they support things like Proposition 8, and a fast food outlet that secretly overcooks burgers and uses cold fries for customers they suspect of being gay.
and in the interests of democracy fewer people should actually participate.
also you in this thread:
in fact the memo is careful to remind readers that Google made efforts to be non-partisan with the information it provided.
If you try to get specific groups with known voting patterns to vote more, and you're doing it to help one particular side, then you cannot say you are non-partisan, pretty simple. If Google really wanted to further the "interests of democracy" then they would ensure a broad segment was helped, not specific groups. When they start sending Google buses to bring evangelical Christians to the polls, while also getting Hispanics more access, THEN I would believe they are just trying to boost voting across the board. Until then, don't be so stupid sounding, I know you're not stupid but you are talking absolute nonsense trying to defend these actions.
I don't think there's any political solution. Even something like changing the electoral system.. the problems you're talking about are deeper than lack of voter choice. Some voters will vote for more entitlements no matter what, corporations will lobby whoever is elected.
I'm kind of at a crossroads when it comes to government intervention. I just think of the social power of corporations today because of the internet... Infowars was banned from Apple, Facebook, and Google (Youtube anyway) in one day. How is that different from if the government banned Infowars? I don't even know why they were banned (I don't follow Infowars, I've just heard of them) but it really turns me the wrong way. I thought if corporations started policing content proactively, they were giving up their safe harbor rights. They're no longer common carriers. But that's obviously an incorrect assumption, and it worried me, because I don't think corporations should get it both ways -- they get to introduce bias for their preferred social or political agendas, but they also say "Not my fault" for anything bad going on on their platforms. So this is a case where I think we need to tighten government regulations about what these social platforms can do.
or Credit Derivative Swaps. Period. This is not up for debate.
There are a dozen things that all had to happen for the financial crisis to take place, it doesn't make sense to blame just one of them over the others. Credit default swaps exacerbated the situation but did not cause it.
And CDSes were only possible because they hid toxic debt in them.
You're really talking about CDOs here, collateralized debt obligations. CDSs didn't hide toxic debt, they were the insurance program for purchasers (and speculators) of CDOs (and other instruments). CDOs "hid" the toxic debt, particularly as things got layered and you had CDOs of CDSs -- basically paying out money as "credit events" happened on some other underlying security -- but if you have any background knowledge of math and particularly statistics you'll understand the purpose of them in abstract. A simple way of thinking of a CDO is like RAID -- a package of mortgages (for instance) is less likely to default than any of the individual mortgages in the package. They do work, up to the limit of the accuracy of the assumptions underlying them -- if there's a 99% chance that fewer than 10% of mortgages will default, you can build a CDO that doesn't default on its own revenue stream 99% of the time, by having 10% overhead. But if there's a confluence of events that result in 11% of mortgages defaulting, maybe even in just one region, you have a tidal wave of defaults in what was supposed to be a very safe investment.
So we're already talking about three separate products (CDS, CDO, MBS), bought and sold by different people. That's already 6 combinations of someone to blame. It's easy to dig deeper and find other groups to blame. Was it the CDOs themselves, or the assumptions going into the CDOs? Was it the fault of the people making the assumptions or the people breaking historical precedent that led to those assumptions? Was it actually the MBSs that most CDOs were built on that caused the crisis? Was it the people who approved mortgages that were too risky, the people who took on mortgages that were too risky, the people who sold those mortgages to investors, the investors who were chasing yields and didn't care too much about the details, etc. Each of those points has many sub-points that you can go into as well.
Yes, because you don't have to accept welfare. If you do sign up for it, it's reasonable to sign away certain rights to a limited degree. Think about it, it makes sense, kind of like if you apply for a permit to buy a handgun you are agreeing to let the state investigate you to some degree. You can't apply for a handgun permit and then say "Hey wait you can't investigate me at all without probable cause that I've done something wrong" -- that just doesn't make sense.
I'm pretty sure the article is referring to the production of new magnesite, not the use of existing magnesite. So while current magnesite production (from mining) is 30 million tons per year, the point is we could start manufacturing our own magnesite and scale that up.
Holy smokes, I wonder how they're using the LPR to detect fraud.
It went from 500 confirmed cases in 2012, before LPR was used, to 13000 in 2 years after LPR. That's amazing. They also improved the rate significantly, from 6.25% of referred cases confirmed to 37%. And the stats for 2012 say "For every dollar spent, the Division saves an average of $3.74" -- I can only imagine that's gone up as well.
This is probably one of the most effective government initiatives I've ever heard of. Hopefully other states are taking note of this program.
Most likely part of the terms and conditions of participating in the welfare program allow some level of investigation into their finances and assets, so why would they need a warrant? Do you think they also need a warrant to do the initial check on their income tax records and property tax records? Not every action in society needs the stamp of a judge. People can do things themselves from time to time.
Yup there are some seriously dysfunctional pressures today. The people who get the most benefits are the ones who need it the most, but it also produces a pressure to become that type of person who needs it the most. That means, like you said, live with a boyfriend and don't get married. Have more children and don't list the father on the birth certificate. Obviously don't get a job, or if you must then get one that pays cash. Don't bother saving for a house because section 8 pays for rent, not a mortgage. Etc. It's all stuff that, if legitimately faced, *should* be helped. But looking at trends over the last few decades it's hard to argue that we aren't actually influencing society to become more like that.
If we put half the effort into finding Wallstreet cheats we do the occasional welfare cheat we'd never have another market crash again.
That's weird, you think market crashes are due to "Wallstreet cheats?" There's been so much misinformation since the financial crisis, it's really sad. It's a big part of the reason why millennials have less faith in the stock market than things like bitcoin.
By the way, there wasn't a single point of failure in the financial crisis. It was a culmination of failures at all levels. The part that Wall Street played was their bad risk calculations, which were based on historical data about default rates and the prevailing theory at the time that people would try to save their house above just about anything else. Well it turns out a lot of people need a car more than a house, because a car gets them to work. Especially when they live in the exurbs in a house that they can't afford and is losing value anyway and gas prices have doubled or tripled (a lot of people forget about the gas crisis that preceded the financial crisis). People are more economically selfish (or rational depending how you look at it) now than 75 years ago when social stigma prevented a lot of self-serving behavior, from defaulting on a mortgage to having children out of wedlock.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think you can frame the argument in terms of need vs convenience or degree of difficulty because there are going to be plenty of cases where moving platforms (or building your own) actually is more difficult than physically moving.
Is it harder for an American to move to Canada than it is for a Patreon user to get all of their contributors to switch to some alternate payment coordinator that nobody has ever heard of? How about if 90% of your income came through Patreon?
There's not really a huge difference when the government is giving license to those organizations to do so. Organizations currently are given big advantages over regular people when it comes to speech protection, for instance "safe harbor" from copyright infringement violations if they have a DMCA compliant take-down process. Why don't regular people have that? Then you can download whatever you want, share whatever you want, and when you get caught just delete that one specific file and carry on.
In the current situation, with the government allowing corporations to enforce rules against speech that the government itself would not be allowed to do, while at the same time protecting corporations from consequences of speech that regular individuals would be subject to, it's like the corporation is an extension of the government. The corporation essentially has sovereign immunity. To me that makes it either a 1st amendment issue (the corporation as an extension of government has to obey the same rules as government) or a 14th amendment issue (the corporation shouldn't be an extension of government, it should obey the same rules as we do). It's not fair to have this hybrid where it doesn't follow the rules for government NOR does it follow the rules for individual.
That's incorrect, the analog here would be that you blew a horse, but you're listed on a website called "blacklisted veterinarians" with an accurate accounting of what you had done and when you did it. But you are not actually banned from continuing your veterinary practice, so a judge decides that "blacklisted" is not a fair title.
So the question is, should people be able to find out that you blew a horse one time, and is the title of the website really what is dissuading people from seeing you or is it the fact that you blew a horse?
The above isn't intended to explain this individual cases merits; but if the information this site includes was judged to be inaccurate or misleading then this isn't as simple as European vs American free speech.
Well in fact in this case "The judge said that while the information on the website with reference to the failings of the doctor in 2014 was correct, the pejorative name of the blacklist site suggested she was unfit to treat people"
Try living in American jurisdiction and posting false information about medical products or service providers who are also in the US and see how long your right to free speech protects you from considerable fines or even criminal charges.
I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty sure opinion is protected in the US, so if you posted somewhere, "Doctor XYZ is horrible (subjective) because he did ABC (accurate) so nobody should see him (subjective)" you'd be fine, but if you posted "Doctor XYZ is horrible (subjective) because he did DEF (provably inaccurate) so nobody should see him (subjective)" it's the DEF part that would get you successfully sued.
Imagine if a credit reference agency had a massive black mark on your file that was a mistake. You would want it corrected, right?
I would agree with that, but according to the article:
The judge said that while the information on the website with reference to the failings of the doctor in 2014 was correct, the pejorative name of the blacklist site suggested she was unfit to treat people, and that was not supported by the disciplinary panel’s findings.
So it's not about an outright error, it's that the data was presented in a way that implied something that may or may not be accurate.
Rather than your straightforward example of an error on a credit report, it would be more like if someone had a website listing businessmen who had declared bankruptcy on some projects, and suggesting that they are bad at business. Now in reality occasionally bankruptcy is normal, that's why we have bankruptcy laws. So are you saying that such pages shouldn't exist, because pretty much any time you are privately drawing an implication from publicly available and accurate data you may be wrong or going too far?
I think GP has a pretty good point. A market economy has a kind of underlying social benefit goal, because by definition you are paid relative to how other people value your work. A command economy has rulers who decide the value of your work, and so you hope you have good rulers who will make wise allocations in the economy.
But UBI allows individuals to get an income no matter what, which means the work they produce is determined entirely by selfish goals. That's shifting the balance of benefit away from society and towards individuals. Why not look at ways to shift it back a little bit?
You think most jobs get 6 weeks of vacation/holidays?
$56k is a pretty good salary, actually, considering the median household income is about $50k in Kansas. A married pair of teachers would be significantly above the median.
I'm curious how anybody would know? Where I vote (in NC) we have tables with privacy screens and nobody sees what you're doing. What's it like in Florida?
Right now, a husband and wife can easily cancel out each other's votes. If online voting is allowed, there's little to stop the spouse with more power in the relation ship (or who's less ambivalent about voting) from voting on the other's behalf after getting the spouse to log in.
That's a little far-fetched.. in some abusive relationship where the abusive partner cares a lot about voting, they would just not let the other person go vote. How is making it easier for *everyone* going to materially change that situation? And in the parenthetical you mention, campaigning is going to happen anyway. If someone is ambivalent, the other person will try to convince them.
There are other opportunities for coercion... say, an employer (or union, or any other group) who decides to "encourage voting" via the internet "right now" (in at least semi-public view, with at least some social pressure to vote the "right" way). Think: a politically-active church that, instead of marching its congregation off to early voting at a polling place nearby, passes around tablets after the second collection while encouraging people to vote the "right" way in front of their friends, neighbors, and family members.
Technology has already made that possible. You can take a picture of your ballot with your phone. If the employer/church/whatever were really paranoid they could get you to record yourself handing in the ballot, although that would be silly... people who belong to an organization like that are probably not too bent out of shape about going along with it anyway.
Let's not forget the possibility of rounding up a bunch of poor people and offering to pay them $20 apiece if they come "vote online" and cast verified ballots for the "right" candidates.
I mean.. you already mentioned absentee ballots, if it's such an issue why isn't this happening already? Probably the risk of being caught makes it not worthwhile. Why would online be different?
I'm not completely against making voting harder. I think the country was better off when only landowners could vote. I think some requirement of a minimum level of education would be great. But these reasons for making the actual *act* of voting more difficult don't make much sense to me, particularly since as you noted absentee ballots provide all the same opportunities for interference.
The choice isn't between A) give a child a smartphone and let him be on it every waking moment to the detriment of his health and social development or B) no smartphone.
I don't see anything wrong with some screentime. Putting on some Youtube Kids videos is good for car trips. My son is 4 now, learning to read, and is actually enjoying some of the reading-related apps like learning sight words.
It is really disappointing how some apps targeted at kids abuse ads so much. I don't think your solution of "don't like it? don't use it" is very practical though.. that's just not human nature. I mean there are regulations about kids TV ads (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ), so at some point I'm sure online/app ads will get bad enough that people will cry out for regulation. The industry has a chance to regulate itself before then, and hopefully they listen to these complaints from parents before we have to put it in the law.
The melting pot happened, but is it really what people were trying to do?
Yes, for many of them.
Nobody wants to get assimilated. ST:TNG had a whole villain civilization based on that!
Assimilation by the Borg meant giving up your literal identity, your consciousness, to become part of the hive mind. Assimilation in terms of immigration simply means learning the language and adopting the prevalent values of the host society.
I mean I can't say I'm surprised that someone on slashdot would make a Star Trek analogy, but good lord is it a bad analogy. If THAT actually plays a role in your thoughts about immigration, please reconsider and get a more accurate view of what people who favor assimilation are actually talking about.
No, this'll make us stronger too.
Sure it will make us stronger in some areas, like food as you mentioned. It will make us weaker in some areas that I think are far more important, like GDP per capita and quality of schools.
I like arepas and Peruvian chicken. Sure. But let me ask you, do you have kids? Do you have schools near you where you can see the decline in test scores over the past 20 or 30 years as the percent of FRL (free or reduced lunch, a measure of povert) and ESL (English as a second language) kids has increased? Now that I have kids, I want good schools, the same good schools that I had growing up that are being / have been destroyed by negative demographic change. This is happening all over the country.
I don't have any problem with immigration. I'm married to an immigrant. Immigration does have to be controlled though for the benefit of society.
Haha, good one!
That's not true. Actually the largest underrepresented voter group is men, since 1980. http://www.cawp.rutgers.edu/si...
Now if a company started a program to help men get out and vote, I would say that is pretty biased as well.
Anyway, your point about non-voters leaning Democrat (I'm not sure that's true unless you're excluding all white non-voters, or all male non-voters) is about inequality of outcome, which I'm fine with. If you help everybody across the board and that happens to help Democrats, that doesn't bother me. Inequality in opportunity is more serious. Things like "We're going to help underrepresented group X, screw everybody else" are morally problematic to me.
That's how virtually all codes of conduct work, because human behavior is subjective. GP's code of conduct is just more clearly subjective than most, due to its brevity.
Are you looking at "association" as a very loose concept? For example, say an international bank accepted deposits from Nazis, therefore they are associated with Nazis, but we can recognize that the bank isn't a Nazi organization?
To me that's much looser than "in the same camp." Your interpretation seems more like "in the same continent."
Would you agree that Linus is saying people "in the same camp" as the Nazis must think it's OK to be a white nationalist Nazi? Because I think that already shows he's using a closer scope of "association" than the international bank example. I don't think people assume that any business that engaged with the Nazis were morally approving of all of the Nazis behavior. (Though there are plenty of crazy people who do think exactly that.)
Google is allowed to be political, however making a corporate statement or donating to support various candidates is different from manipulating search results without telling them. It's dishonest. It's providing an inferior product to certain people. It would be like the difference between a fast food outlet that is homophobic in the sense that they support things like Proposition 8, and a fast food outlet that secretly overcooks burgers and uses cold fries for customers they suspect of being gay.
and in the interests of democracy fewer people should actually participate.
also you in this thread:
in fact the memo is careful to remind readers that Google made efforts to be non-partisan with the information it provided.
If you try to get specific groups with known voting patterns to vote more, and you're doing it to help one particular side, then you cannot say you are non-partisan, pretty simple. If Google really wanted to further the "interests of democracy" then they would ensure a broad segment was helped, not specific groups. When they start sending Google buses to bring evangelical Christians to the polls, while also getting Hispanics more access, THEN I would believe they are just trying to boost voting across the board. Until then, don't be so stupid sounding, I know you're not stupid but you are talking absolute nonsense trying to defend these actions.
I don't think there's any political solution. Even something like changing the electoral system.. the problems you're talking about are deeper than lack of voter choice. Some voters will vote for more entitlements no matter what, corporations will lobby whoever is elected.
I'm kind of at a crossroads when it comes to government intervention. I just think of the social power of corporations today because of the internet... Infowars was banned from Apple, Facebook, and Google (Youtube anyway) in one day. How is that different from if the government banned Infowars? I don't even know why they were banned (I don't follow Infowars, I've just heard of them) but it really turns me the wrong way. I thought if corporations started policing content proactively, they were giving up their safe harbor rights. They're no longer common carriers. But that's obviously an incorrect assumption, and it worried me, because I don't think corporations should get it both ways -- they get to introduce bias for their preferred social or political agendas, but they also say "Not my fault" for anything bad going on on their platforms. So this is a case where I think we need to tighten government regulations about what these social platforms can do.
or Credit Derivative Swaps. Period. This is not up for debate.
There are a dozen things that all had to happen for the financial crisis to take place, it doesn't make sense to blame just one of them over the others. Credit default swaps exacerbated the situation but did not cause it.
And CDSes were only possible because they hid toxic debt in them.
You're really talking about CDOs here, collateralized debt obligations. CDSs didn't hide toxic debt, they were the insurance program for purchasers (and speculators) of CDOs (and other instruments). CDOs "hid" the toxic debt, particularly as things got layered and you had CDOs of CDSs -- basically paying out money as "credit events" happened on some other underlying security -- but if you have any background knowledge of math and particularly statistics you'll understand the purpose of them in abstract. A simple way of thinking of a CDO is like RAID -- a package of mortgages (for instance) is less likely to default than any of the individual mortgages in the package. They do work, up to the limit of the accuracy of the assumptions underlying them -- if there's a 99% chance that fewer than 10% of mortgages will default, you can build a CDO that doesn't default on its own revenue stream 99% of the time, by having 10% overhead. But if there's a confluence of events that result in 11% of mortgages defaulting, maybe even in just one region, you have a tidal wave of defaults in what was supposed to be a very safe investment.
So we're already talking about three separate products (CDS, CDO, MBS), bought and sold by different people. That's already 6 combinations of someone to blame. It's easy to dig deeper and find other groups to blame. Was it the CDOs themselves, or the assumptions going into the CDOs? Was it the fault of the people making the assumptions or the people breaking historical precedent that led to those assumptions? Was it actually the MBSs that most CDOs were built on that caused the crisis? Was it the people who approved mortgages that were too risky, the people who took on mortgages that were too risky, the people who sold those mortgages to investors, the investors who were chasing yields and didn't care too much about the details, etc. Each of those points has many sub-points that you can go into as well.
Yes, because you don't have to accept welfare. If you do sign up for it, it's reasonable to sign away certain rights to a limited degree. Think about it, it makes sense, kind of like if you apply for a permit to buy a handgun you are agreeing to let the state investigate you to some degree. You can't apply for a handgun permit and then say "Hey wait you can't investigate me at all without probable cause that I've done something wrong" -- that just doesn't make sense.
I'm pretty sure the article is referring to the production of new magnesite, not the use of existing magnesite. So while current magnesite production (from mining) is 30 million tons per year, the point is we could start manufacturing our own magnesite and scale that up.
Holy smokes, I wonder how they're using the LPR to detect fraud.
It went from 500 confirmed cases in 2012, before LPR was used, to 13000 in 2 years after LPR. That's amazing. They also improved the rate significantly, from 6.25% of referred cases confirmed to 37%. And the stats for 2012 say "For every dollar spent, the Division saves an average of $3.74" -- I can only imagine that's gone up as well.
This is probably one of the most effective government initiatives I've ever heard of. Hopefully other states are taking note of this program.
Most likely part of the terms and conditions of participating in the welfare program allow some level of investigation into their finances and assets, so why would they need a warrant? Do you think they also need a warrant to do the initial check on their income tax records and property tax records? Not every action in society needs the stamp of a judge. People can do things themselves from time to time.
Yup there are some seriously dysfunctional pressures today. The people who get the most benefits are the ones who need it the most, but it also produces a pressure to become that type of person who needs it the most. That means, like you said, live with a boyfriend and don't get married. Have more children and don't list the father on the birth certificate. Obviously don't get a job, or if you must then get one that pays cash. Don't bother saving for a house because section 8 pays for rent, not a mortgage. Etc. It's all stuff that, if legitimately faced, *should* be helped. But looking at trends over the last few decades it's hard to argue that we aren't actually influencing society to become more like that.
If we put half the effort into finding Wallstreet cheats we do the occasional welfare cheat we'd never have another market crash again.
That's weird, you think market crashes are due to "Wallstreet cheats?" There's been so much misinformation since the financial crisis, it's really sad. It's a big part of the reason why millennials have less faith in the stock market than things like bitcoin.
By the way, there wasn't a single point of failure in the financial crisis. It was a culmination of failures at all levels. The part that Wall Street played was their bad risk calculations, which were based on historical data about default rates and the prevailing theory at the time that people would try to save their house above just about anything else. Well it turns out a lot of people need a car more than a house, because a car gets them to work. Especially when they live in the exurbs in a house that they can't afford and is losing value anyway and gas prices have doubled or tripled (a lot of people forget about the gas crisis that preceded the financial crisis). People are more economically selfish (or rational depending how you look at it) now than 75 years ago when social stigma prevented a lot of self-serving behavior, from defaulting on a mortgage to having children out of wedlock.