and now, at least, they can't use that argument anymore.
Oh you sweet summer child.
If knowledge were sufficient to remove idiocy, we'd have been rid of it centuries ago. The only thing more frustrating than arguing with a fool who makes bad arguments because they cannot use basic reason, is arguing with a fool who makes bad arguments because they ignore all evidence.
I think what they realized was that the only reason so many people in China were doing it was as a means of moving wealth outside of the country, which China wants to clamp down on since it limits their control. Like anything else, the Chinese government doesn't care too much as long as it doesn't challenge their authority.
I've never understood the desire for some people to get on the plane right away. You don't get to leave any sooner and you're just getting into a more cramped / crowded environment. That's why I don't mind getting stuck in Zone 5, Group 9, or whatever they call the last group of people getting on the plane.
The police generally don't care about shit like that. I've had my vehicle broken into and they basically told me to take it up with my insurance company. Unless you live in some kind of small town where nothing happens and something like that is the news for the next month, the police are probably massively behind on murder, rape, or other more pressing cases. Unless they happen to be there to arrest someone while they're committing a crime, the odds of getting anyone are slim. At best they catch the perpetrator on something else a while later and somehow manage to be able to tie them to your case and even that is unlikely.
The presence of stupidity doesn't mean that there's no malice though. Hanlon's razor only says you should start with the assumption of stupidity and doesn't imply that you can't have malicious stupidity.
Probably feeding a troll, but the ISPs served the data to people, the devices displayed that content, etc. Are they to be held similarly culpable for this?
This ultimately reduces to the argument that because books might contain "dangerous ideas" we really ought to just ban them. Authoritarians will always seek out ways to control others and they're scarcely above using tragedy in order to accomplish those goals.
The problem solves itself though. If you can make all of these widgets for extremely low costs, no one needs much money to purchase them. Increases in efficiency that lead to the production of greater amounts of wealth invariably leave everyone better off even if the distribution of newly created wealth is not equal. We wouldn't have reached this point in time with the world existing in its current state if that weren't true.
Legalizing marijuana will probably go a long way towards combating homelessness rather than adding to it. Many of the people who are becoming destitute are that way after becoming addicted to opioids prescribed as pain medication. In many cases, cannabis would not only be far more effective for managing their pain, but it also eliminates the knock-on effects from patients becoming addicted to opioids.
Additionally, once people start turning to illegal drugs, they tend to get impure product that's been cut without god knows what that can have more detrimental health effects than the drug itself. Once a product becomes legal, customers don't have to buy low-grade black market product. We saw the same with alcohol where during prohibition, and now that alcohol is legal again you almost never find anyone who dies from consuming something purchased in a store due to it being a badly prepared batch.
Yes and you shouldn’t get skull-smashing drunk either. But if you already have, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take a cab home because it’s too late to make any good choices.
Companies that receive subsidies or grants from tax payers should lose some of their freedoms they would otherwise enjoy. Don’t like the rules, don’t take the money.
It's not quite that simple though, and there's legal precedence that first amendment rights can apply to private property as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_v._Alabama. The argument really will come down to what extent Twitter is a public space. If it is viewed as one they will lose some ability to regulate what content can be posted there.
Looking at raw numbers is foolish anyway if your population isn't stable. You'd want to look at it as a matter of % of jobs lost at the very least, but even that doesn't matter if those people who were cut just get a job somewhere else. If some company goes out of business, it will layoff 100% of its employees, but it hardly matters if the industry overall is growing and those people will get new jobs at other companies who will see an increase in business due to a competitor exiting the market.
All of that aside, I'm not even certain that many people would be perturbed by the fact it's the financial markets that are suffering most.
You're missing the point. The economies of Luxembourg and Romania are different, which is why the prices will be different. This move by the EU attempts to ignore that economic reality and pretend that someone in Romania could afford to pay the prices charged in Luxembourg. While I'm certain that the person in Luxembourg would be greatly pleased if they could pay lower prices, the bistro owner would not be able to stay in business if they were forced to charge those lower prices. Just because a digital market doesn't face the physical distribution problems of an eatery does not mean that the other economic considerations that go into pricing goods have been similarly vanished.
This is hardly a new problem or something that people haven't been aware of for decades. The EA Spouse blog is almost 15 years old at this point and its the same story.
With the rise of Steam and in a broader sense digital distribution itself, there's no reason you can't make your own game. Minecraft became one of the biggest and most successful games of all times. More recently, Stardew Valley has sold millions of copies, and it too was made by an independent developer. You can even make big 3D games thanks to things like Kickstarter. Kingdom Come Deliverance raised money through crowdfunding and produced a title that's similar in scope to an Elder Scrolls games, so you're hardly limited to just 2D sprite graphics. I think Star Citizen raised more than any other Kickstarter project ever.
So if you think working for the man sucks, then quit and start your own company, make your own game, and be the one to reap the rewards of your own effort.
It's news because, with the proper filtering and monitoring in place, such groups could be detected very easily.
That's doubtful. You might be able to detect the groups as they exist currently, but not as they will in order to circumvent the systems you put into place. Making something illegal doesn't make a thing go away as seen during probation or the failed war on drugs. Any time spent trying to stamp out the problem that way would be better spent in addressing the underlying problem.
Indeed. If you walked into a bistro in Luxembourg and demand that you should only have to pay the same prices as you would be charged if you were in Romania, you would be laughed at. If the EU wants to pretend that it's one big and equal market, it should start taxing the hell out of the wealthy members in order to redistribute that to those with weaker economies. Otherwise the reality is that it makes sense to charge different prices based on location, because some countries are better off than others.
I have a feeling that is exactly what they're going to end up doing. If it winds up driving people towards piracy, that's just one more thing for them to bang on about and then the government can enact even more draconian measures to try and solve a problem it created in the first place.
What does banning a useful predictor actually fix though? In one case, the lenders just find some new proxy that's strongly correlated with the fact you've banned them from using and you're nowhere. In another, they're now rejecting people who could have otherwise gotten a loan (or charging them higher rates to cover increased uncertainty) and now they're unable to buy a house because lenders don't want to deal with the risk. In the worst case they give out more loans that people can't manage because they can't hold down a job and now they've got even more problems in their life.
Would you tell doctors that they can't use how long a person has been smoking in any diagnoses that they make for patients? Of course not, because relevant data is relevant data. If it's not useful, then it isn't used. You don't need to ban lenders from considering shoe size when giving out loans, because it's not useful so they don't use it. If they think that it matters, it probably does.
I get the sentiment behind the remark, but the truth is that it takes surprisingly little to get a good (or perhaps just regular) person to do evil. Milgram showed that all you needed was someone in authority telling you that it was okay, and although it wasn't a methodologically sound study, the Stanford prison experiment suggests that people might be willing to assume that mantel of authority all by themselves and act out the evil they believe is expected of them.
I look at religion not as cosmic truth, but as early human attempts to keep people from evil. It's certainly as susceptible to corruption as much as any institution, and definitely a tool for controlling a population, but humans are downright savage. If we appear nice and moral today, it's thanks to progress and an abundance of resources. Remove that and we'd be at each other's throats in short order.
If you've got a completely controlled environment, herbicide and pesticide become unnecessary, which would be an immense change. If you're also using other techniques to maximize the yield, nutrition, or other properties while doing that you can probably cut down on waste as well. There are some crops where some of it's left unharvested or just tossed if it doesn't meet some quality characteristics. Being able to localize food production is also something that's fairly important and helps provide jobs in those communities as well. People are pretty disconnected from where their food comes from these days, hence the meme of city kids thinking that meat comes from the grocery store.
A company that does this once will do it again. They just need people to stop paying attention for a while and next time they'll be a little more crafty about it.
Slashdot Mirror
and now, at least, they can't use that argument anymore.
Oh you sweet summer child.
If knowledge were sufficient to remove idiocy, we'd have been rid of it centuries ago. The only thing more frustrating than arguing with a fool who makes bad arguments because they cannot use basic reason, is arguing with a fool who makes bad arguments because they ignore all evidence.
I think what they realized was that the only reason so many people in China were doing it was as a means of moving wealth outside of the country, which China wants to clamp down on since it limits their control. Like anything else, the Chinese government doesn't care too much as long as it doesn't challenge their authority.
I've never understood the desire for some people to get on the plane right away. You don't get to leave any sooner and you're just getting into a more cramped / crowded environment. That's why I don't mind getting stuck in Zone 5, Group 9, or whatever they call the last group of people getting on the plane.
The police generally don't care about shit like that. I've had my vehicle broken into and they basically told me to take it up with my insurance company. Unless you live in some kind of small town where nothing happens and something like that is the news for the next month, the police are probably massively behind on murder, rape, or other more pressing cases. Unless they happen to be there to arrest someone while they're committing a crime, the odds of getting anyone are slim. At best they catch the perpetrator on something else a while later and somehow manage to be able to tie them to your case and even that is unlikely.
The presence of stupidity doesn't mean that there's no malice though. Hanlon's razor only says you should start with the assumption of stupidity and doesn't imply that you can't have malicious stupidity.
Probably feeding a troll, but the ISPs served the data to people, the devices displayed that content, etc. Are they to be held similarly culpable for this?
This ultimately reduces to the argument that because books might contain "dangerous ideas" we really ought to just ban them. Authoritarians will always seek out ways to control others and they're scarcely above using tragedy in order to accomplish those goals.
If you believe that there are terrible people in the world, trying to control them won't stop them, and really will only make them dig in further. If you want someone to change, you're better off talking to them and trying to convince them to change of their own volition.
The problem solves itself though. If you can make all of these widgets for extremely low costs, no one needs much money to purchase them. Increases in efficiency that lead to the production of greater amounts of wealth invariably leave everyone better off even if the distribution of newly created wealth is not equal. We wouldn't have reached this point in time with the world existing in its current state if that weren't true.
Legalizing marijuana will probably go a long way towards combating homelessness rather than adding to it. Many of the people who are becoming destitute are that way after becoming addicted to opioids prescribed as pain medication. In many cases, cannabis would not only be far more effective for managing their pain, but it also eliminates the knock-on effects from patients becoming addicted to opioids.
Additionally, once people start turning to illegal drugs, they tend to get impure product that's been cut without god knows what that can have more detrimental health effects than the drug itself. Once a product becomes legal, customers don't have to buy low-grade black market product. We saw the same with alcohol where during prohibition, and now that alcohol is legal again you almost never find anyone who dies from consuming something purchased in a store due to it being a badly prepared batch.
Who cares about that. What I really want to know how many of these things we could fit into the Library of Congress.
Could be using a phone and cellular data. The mobile carriers typically aren’t regarded as ISPs.
Yes and you shouldn’t get skull-smashing drunk either. But if you already have, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take a cab home because it’s too late to make any good choices.
Companies that receive subsidies or grants from tax payers should lose some of their freedoms they would otherwise enjoy. Don’t like the rules, don’t take the money.
It's not quite that simple though, and there's legal precedence that first amendment rights can apply to private property as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_v._Alabama. The argument really will come down to what extent Twitter is a public space. If it is viewed as one they will lose some ability to regulate what content can be posted there.
Looking at raw numbers is foolish anyway if your population isn't stable. You'd want to look at it as a matter of % of jobs lost at the very least, but even that doesn't matter if those people who were cut just get a job somewhere else. If some company goes out of business, it will layoff 100% of its employees, but it hardly matters if the industry overall is growing and those people will get new jobs at other companies who will see an increase in business due to a competitor exiting the market.
All of that aside, I'm not even certain that many people would be perturbed by the fact it's the financial markets that are suffering most.
You're missing the point. The economies of Luxembourg and Romania are different, which is why the prices will be different. This move by the EU attempts to ignore that economic reality and pretend that someone in Romania could afford to pay the prices charged in Luxembourg. While I'm certain that the person in Luxembourg would be greatly pleased if they could pay lower prices, the bistro owner would not be able to stay in business if they were forced to charge those lower prices. Just because a digital market doesn't face the physical distribution problems of an eatery does not mean that the other economic considerations that go into pricing goods have been similarly vanished.
They're kids. Kick them outside and they'll make their own games as long as their imagination hasn't been completely eroded.
This is hardly a new problem or something that people haven't been aware of for decades. The EA Spouse blog is almost 15 years old at this point and its the same story.
With the rise of Steam and in a broader sense digital distribution itself, there's no reason you can't make your own game. Minecraft became one of the biggest and most successful games of all times. More recently, Stardew Valley has sold millions of copies, and it too was made by an independent developer. You can even make big 3D games thanks to things like Kickstarter. Kingdom Come Deliverance raised money through crowdfunding and produced a title that's similar in scope to an Elder Scrolls games, so you're hardly limited to just 2D sprite graphics. I think Star Citizen raised more than any other Kickstarter project ever.
So if you think working for the man sucks, then quit and start your own company, make your own game, and be the one to reap the rewards of your own effort.
It's news because, with the proper filtering and monitoring in place, such groups could be detected very easily.
That's doubtful. You might be able to detect the groups as they exist currently, but not as they will in order to circumvent the systems you put into place. Making something illegal doesn't make a thing go away as seen during probation or the failed war on drugs. Any time spent trying to stamp out the problem that way would be better spent in addressing the underlying problem.
Indeed. If you walked into a bistro in Luxembourg and demand that you should only have to pay the same prices as you would be charged if you were in Romania, you would be laughed at. If the EU wants to pretend that it's one big and equal market, it should start taxing the hell out of the wealthy members in order to redistribute that to those with weaker economies. Otherwise the reality is that it makes sense to charge different prices based on location, because some countries are better off than others.
I have a feeling that is exactly what they're going to end up doing. If it winds up driving people towards piracy, that's just one more thing for them to bang on about and then the government can enact even more draconian measures to try and solve a problem it created in the first place.
a new statutory duty of care, to be policed by an independent regulator and likely to be funded through a levy on media companies
Unfortunately the modern educational system couldn't completely strip you of your humanity and free thought, so it's come to this now.
Really, it's for your own good though. That's why we insist you pay for it.
What does banning a useful predictor actually fix though? In one case, the lenders just find some new proxy that's strongly correlated with the fact you've banned them from using and you're nowhere. In another, they're now rejecting people who could have otherwise gotten a loan (or charging them higher rates to cover increased uncertainty) and now they're unable to buy a house because lenders don't want to deal with the risk. In the worst case they give out more loans that people can't manage because they can't hold down a job and now they've got even more problems in their life.
Would you tell doctors that they can't use how long a person has been smoking in any diagnoses that they make for patients? Of course not, because relevant data is relevant data. If it's not useful, then it isn't used. You don't need to ban lenders from considering shoe size when giving out loans, because it's not useful so they don't use it. If they think that it matters, it probably does.
I get the sentiment behind the remark, but the truth is that it takes surprisingly little to get a good (or perhaps just regular) person to do evil. Milgram showed that all you needed was someone in authority telling you that it was okay, and although it wasn't a methodologically sound study, the Stanford prison experiment suggests that people might be willing to assume that mantel of authority all by themselves and act out the evil they believe is expected of them.
I look at religion not as cosmic truth, but as early human attempts to keep people from evil. It's certainly as susceptible to corruption as much as any institution, and definitely a tool for controlling a population, but humans are downright savage. If we appear nice and moral today, it's thanks to progress and an abundance of resources. Remove that and we'd be at each other's throats in short order.
If you've got a completely controlled environment, herbicide and pesticide become unnecessary, which would be an immense change. If you're also using other techniques to maximize the yield, nutrition, or other properties while doing that you can probably cut down on waste as well. There are some crops where some of it's left unharvested or just tossed if it doesn't meet some quality characteristics. Being able to localize food production is also something that's fairly important and helps provide jobs in those communities as well. People are pretty disconnected from where their food comes from these days, hence the meme of city kids thinking that meat comes from the grocery store.
I'm sure that this will work out perfectly fine and absolutely no unintended consequences will arise as a result.
A company that does this once will do it again. They just need people to stop paying attention for a while and next time they'll be a little more crafty about it.